Oh GATTACA

(A Late Sarcastic Wednesday)

As I navigated the highways on my way to work this morning I heard a story on the radio about the "Bad Driver Gene". Apparently our colleagues at the University of California Irvine have identified a protein called brain-derived neurotropic factor (BDNF) which is secreted in the area of the brain associated with with a task at hand, like driving. According to this very limited study about thirty percent of Americans have a gene variant which they have associated with bad driving, due to limited secretion of BDNF.

According to the researcher, Dr. Steve Cramer of UCI,

"These people make more errors from the get-go, and they forget more of what they learned after time away."

Now, I will leave it to others to warn of the consequences of this discovery on insurance rates and to opine about banning certain people from behind the wheel for the sake of public safety. We in academia will need to get ahead of the curve on this one. People who make errors from the get-go and who forget more of what they learned after time away sit before us in every class. I see two potential directions this story could go for us.

Option one is that in the future Low BDNF will become a recognized learning disability. The consequences for faculty will be requirements to adjust curricula accordingly. With thirty percent of Americans suffering we will need to stop expecting students to know material which they have spent some time away from. No more prerequisite courses!

Option two is that we genetically pre-test potential students and limit public support for those, that owing to genetic predisposition, are less likely to succeed in education or careers that require BDNF.

On the plus side, Biochemists with friends in Education, there's a couple of grants in this. Let's correlate BDNF genetic mutation to major and alternately to grade received in courses or to graduation rate.

T.S. Hall

Whose fault is that?

I am going to try to avoid making this a rant.

I was talking to one of my colleagues, who also teaches at a public comprehensive university program, as so often happens we were discussing organic chemistry students. The experts in medical education are calling for us to move away from rote memorization and toward demonstration of competency. We were lamenting the problems that students have when required to go beyond memorization and show that they can think their way around or through a problem.

To underscore his point that memorization rules the land, my colleague indicated that one of his fellow organicers publicly stated that their B grade organic students were generally better scientists than their A grade students. This is because, lacking memorization skills, the B students must think their way though the course, but the A students just memorize.

Thus, the title of this epistle. If we value the ability to go beyond memorization the course grades should reflect this!

Whew! I better stop before the ranting escapes and my head explodes. What's that I hear? Tis the siren call of the Dalwhinnie.

T.S. Hall

P.S. The distillers of Dalwhinnie Single Malt Scotch in no way supported a plug for their product. (Although if a couple of bottles of 15 year double maturation found their way to my door I would provide them a good home.)

Lab Stabbing At UCLA

It has been a bad year at UCLA. First there was the tragedy if a death in an organic research lab due to a t-BuLi fire, which drew international attention, and then yesterday there was a stabbing in an organic teaching lab. The facts of the latter case are not yet clear, so I will reserve commentary on the case.

In the last few years I have had a handful of students whose behavior in lab made me wonder about their stability. We faculty walk a fine line when we encounter a student whose behavior is troubling. Is the student just a bit strange or is what we are seeing a warning sign of future danger.

In one case the student had gone off his medication. After he verbally attacked and threatened with physical harm one of my colleagues in a class and the university became involved in the case the parents expressed upset that we had not alerted them to the situation. Explaining to them that we were not able to violate the students rights by contacting them until something happened that we could use to justify an emergency contact did not help. Faculty get trapped between the rights of the student as an independent adult and our en loco parentis (in the place of the parents) responsibility.

In another case, the student's only came alive when explosions or fires were discussed and placed his folding knife on the lab bench at the start of every lab in spite of my telling him every meeting to put it away. He never turned in a lab report all semester and was very hard to engage in conversation. After the end of that semester he did not come back to school and I often wonder what happened to him.

Every time there is an incident on a college campus right after I say a prayer for the victims and the faculty who will wonder if they could or should have done something to avoid the event, I think "There but for the grace of God go I".

T.S. Hall

Unblocking Pubs

I have always been bad about publishing. Partially because I never feel I have enough to make the paper worth reading. Being at a PUI, I don't get asked to frequently to give talks on other campuses, so I toil away always feeling that I short of publishing by a semester's worth of results.

One of the requirements of being on sabbatical is that upon returning to my home campus I am required to report out to my colleagues on what I accomplished. With this in mind I am preparing a seminar.

Going into the writing process I was lamenting how unfinished the sabbatical work was and how I was not sure if there was enough to talk about. After I prepared the first forty slides by stream-of-thought without getting to the end of what I had done I realized that the seminar might approach three hours in length. It was not just a matter of being more concise. There is just too much to say. At this point I recognized that I have two or three talks depending on the point of focus taken.

Perhaps those of us who are research active but not research productive (in the sense of publications) should get out more. Lacking that, in spite of the flashbacks of ritual torture, departments wishing to advance their research profile might require that all research active faculty who have not published in the last year should file a Research Report. It might help us get unblocked on publications.

T.S. Hall

Tomorrow's steep decline in majors

In my current class of organic students I conducted a poll asking about their career plans. Interestingly 50% of the chemistry and biochemistry majors plan to go to pharmacy school. I have been watching the numbers of would-be pharmacy students over the last decade as high school guidance counselors have sold the career to every student who got a C or better in Algebra I, and their parents.

In my opinion, guidance counselors commonly come in late when there is a shortage and stay too long when the supply is filled. Ask any nurse about this. On the point of pharmacy, has anyone looked at the pharmacy pipeline? When the current crop of students graduate will there be jobs for them.

How much longer should we push large numbers of students into pharmacy? When the pharmacy career door shuts, in what I suspect is the not to distant future, the guidance counselors will discourage students from the career and the numbers of chemistry and biochemistry majors will nosedive. We will do what we always do and panic.

This is a normal market cycle, but we should be preparing for it, since in the current funding climate declining enrollment could also mean that shrinking C&B programs get closed.

T.S. Hall