Classes Mostly

So I've nearly been here two weeks and it actually feels like I have been here for ages. I think that means I've settled in and am feeling comfortable. It's nice.

So I am taking the following classes:
Molecular Cell Biology 3: Tuesday and Friday morning
Biotechnology 3: Tuesday and Friday afternoon
Genetics, Nature and Society: Thursday afternoon

This means I get a three day weekend as well as a random day off in the middle of my week. Also I only have to wake up early two days a week. This has never happened to me before.

Molecular Cell Biology starts at 10:00 a.m. (most days, there will be about 5 times during the semester where class will begin at 9:00) on a different campus 30 minutes away. Luckily, there is a free shuttle that will take me to this different campus (the King's Buildings, where most of Edinburgh's science-y stuff occurs), however, the bus leaves at 9:20 and gets me there at 9:35 so I have to treat the 10:00 class like a 9:00 class and then when I get to campus I have to bum around for 25 minutes. This is one of the many times where I can read anything I please. Currently I am enjoying "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by Joyce. Oh pleasure reading! How I've missed you! Anyway, Molecular Cell Biology thus far has been boring. We are talking about the cytoskeleton. It's a structure within the cytoplasm that is made out of proteins and is basically the cell's skeleton. It is involved in motility. That is about the most exciting thing I've learned about the cytoskeleton. Hopefully, things will get more interesting when we start talking about cell innards. Also, we are only doing one practical in this class (they call labs practicals here) because apparently molecular cell biology techniques are too advanced for undergraduates. Instead we will be doing computer simulations of actual practicals. While I am a bit peeved, the subject matter is something I feel I need to know in order to be hired by a lab in the future. Also, like I said, hopefully it will get more interesting.

Biotechnology starts at 1:30 at the King's Buildings and lasts until 5:00 (this includes practical). Not all praticals take up the whole of the allotted time. On Tuesday we got out at 3:00. That was because the lab was absurdly ridiculous. We did the following: serial dilutions (for you non-science people this involves pipetting a specific amount of one solution into another solution and then taking from the second solution and pipetting the same amount into a third solution and so on), then we pipetted these different dilutions onto agar plates that had been made for us (!!!), then we spread out the solution, then we did this on a special plate with special agar, then we added 5 mL of one solution to 10 mL of another solution, then we looped colonies of salmonella off a plate given to us by the instructor and inoculated a tube. THE END. It took me and my partner longer to finish then other groups only because we didn't know where all the materials were located and some of the directions were horribly written. Not only was our lab completely prepped for us, but at the end our plates were taken to the incubator for us and clean up involved putting things in a basket for someone else to clean. This was all very absurd to me. Unheard of in the Lynn Miller laboratory. Tomorrow we are suppose to be doing a PCR and I hope that less hand holding occurs because I haven't done a PCR in, like, FOREVER and I am really excited. As far as lectures go the first lecture was interesting and the last two were boring so it is still up in the air. The problem is the professor went into so much unnecessary detail. Not to mention the slide show was poorly organized. Wow, I originally typed organized with an "s". How Scottish of me.

Genetics, Nature and Society is a perfect match for me, and it is so unfortunate that we only meet once a week. Today we discussed the history of Eugenics as well as the ethics of genetic screening and reproductive genetics. I was assigned an article called "Reproductive Genetics, Gender and the Body: 'Please Doctor, may I have a Normal Baby?'" by Elizabeth Ettorre and it was about how aborting foetuses with impairments will reduce the number of people in society with impairments and thus threaten those people's rights. It also talked about how society makes people disabled because society views people with impairments in certain lights, i.e. dependent on others, not able to work and contribute to society, etc. Really interesting stuff. I love this course. It was so easy to get into too. Originally I was told that I couldn't get into the course because I didn't meet the pre-requisites, but I just met with my Director of Studies, told him I wanted to be in the course, he said "That sounds interesting, sure!", and enrolled me. When I went to the class and told the professor I was studying biological sciences there was no fuss about pre-requisites at all.

Well, tonight I am going to a pub crawl hosted by the Literary Society of which I hope to become a member so I am off! Stories of chip shops and fried Mars Bars to come!