Med School Meanderings
when the path of your destiny involves walking headfirst into a dumpster fire
In case you’re just tuning in, in November, I made a deal with myself. If I could successfully complete phlebotomy training and not pass out or die or quit (from the needles and the poking and the poking and the needles), I would rejoin the path to medical school. Even though I am 42 (and a half). Even though it’s really hard and unnecessary and expensive. Even though the world is complex and the US healthcare system is a dumpster fire.
I jumped into the UNE post bacc pre health program and started with anatomy, which is my most favorite and easiest subject, and earned an A in both semesters only because I invested obscene amounts of effort. For the summer, I pivoted to a fully asynchronous version of genetics, which is entirely new to me as well as baffling and often confronting. Just today I extracted DNA from peas and berries. My midterm contained no questions I had ever seen before, and most of them were the ‘select all that are false’ variety which means you have to know five things in order to earn one point. My coursework feels like 80% MCAT prep, 20% 6th grade science, as my laboratory experiments are conducted at home and involve stringing beads to represent mitosis, or cut or paper doll chromosomes and match-y match them up to ‘diagnose’ chromosomal anomalies, or make salty soapy strawberry smoothies in service of visualizing threads of white globbiness. The science is simple, but the rationale often takes me into an existential rabbit hole contemplating the human involvement in curating strawberries, which were the subject of my most recent experiments because they contain 8x the DNA of their naturally occurring noncultivars.
You see what I mean?
(Also in case you flew right by that, the strawberries we eat have eight times more DNA than necessary to make a strawberry, and this isn’t post-modern biohacking, this is years of humans picking and planting the big ones).
Humans have been accidentally genetically modifying plants through human-mediated selection, as have other animals, since forever. And what we’re doing now is literally 100% different than what we were doing 20 years ago, when I graduated from college. It’s CRISPR-cas, leveraging the toolkit bacteria evolved to defend themselves from viruses in order to make crops resistant to drought, or produce more cotton fluff per acre, or animals with deactivated disease genes.
Mutants.
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