So here is my progress report. Should I take a pre-med course on my own? I see the two prerequisites for any medical jobs are biology and chemistry. Arbitrarily, I chose biology first and I am still looking at the options rather than commencing study. I won’t bore you with any technical points except where something is socially interesting, since I can already see the whole field of biology is impenetrable to most.Mind you, I get lots of medical trivia, which I have been shy writing about for obvious reasons. (So obvious, I forgot what I meant by that. But probably something to do with all the information they want to let anyone enroll in courses in this state. You cannot go to school anonymously in Florida, even if you pay cash. This is so ingrained into the Florida mentality they have gone insane over it.) Did you know Aristotle said animals evolved in certain latitudes? That is why Columbus thought he would find elephants in Haiti. How about I breeze through the eight pages of notes I took after work today and tell you anything I found interesting. Deal?
An American catfish farm produces 4,500 pounds of food per acre per year, while a Japanese mussel farm cranks out 268,000 pounds in the same statistic.
There is a field called “bioinformatics” which is to gather, store, retrieve and manipulate medical data on computers, with a web site www.nbii.gov.
Biocommunications is writing for medical papers and magazines, including a community college program called “technical writer” for producing instruction manuals, quoting freelance rates of $50-$60 per hour.
There are 13 vitamins required for proper health.
Bioterrorism is the weaponizing of disease-causing agents.
There are two types of viruses, lytic and lysogenic. Lytic kills the host cell, lysogenic keeps the cell host alive and producing more virus.
Most scientists never invent anything of practical value.
The strongest opponents to the theory of evolution believe they inherited superior qualities from their ancestors.
A gene has been identified which makes some people more likely to be religious fanatics. I think it is called the Syrian virus. Just kidding. Or am I?
There is no way I know what, if any, of this new information is worth learning. But I can already deduce biology is a lot like beginner’s computer, where they take five cents of schooling and stretch it into a $1,000 semester. The first half of most computer degrees is junk for passing exams that does you no good in the field. A good example is how every exam asks the name of the first practical computer (ENIAC). Who friggin cares?
So as to not waste the day, I will memorize the four nitrogen bases that make up all genes. They are A for adenine, C for cytosine, G for guanine and T for thymine. A typical combination of these bases would be AGTATTGATGC. I’m confused already, since I heard humans had 23 genes, but roughly 3.5 billion of these heredity molecules. But if getting such ideas straight is all there is, I would not be discouraged.
Now, I did delve into some actual biology to see what made sense to me. I’ll leave things like fungi alone for now. The association I make with biology is, I learned today, called physiology, which is to study functions of cells, tissues and organs. I managed to cover the basics of DNA and cellular compartmentalization.
Despite reading second year college texts, there was nothing there I didn’t learn in grade seven science class. No, I am not exaggerating. That year, myself, Mike Zimmerman, Graham Smith and Gerald Swichenuik built a model animal cell for the science fair. I was already 12 years old, playing in a band, and totally aware the facts of life. My motive was to meet women at the science far, that is, women from out of town as, you see, I had already done some biology experiments of my own.
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