English
During winter quarter of junior year, we read George Eliot’s Middlemarch. In this novel Eliot illustrates the interactions among various middle class residents in the small, pre-Victorian community of Middlemarch. In the story, Tertius Lydgate, a young medical doctor, comes to Middlemarch. He particularly comes there with the hope of pushing through several dramatic social and scientific reforms in medicine, a field that has already been strongly established. Although Lydgate faces many hardships, he eventually settles into a good practice, even though he never achieves his reforms.
Honors Biochemistry Presentation
As part of the spring quarter honors biochemistry quiz section, each student had to present a current topic in cellular or molecular biology. I presented a paper that examined the role of a certain protein (CPEB1) in regulating differential gene expression. The latter term refers to how a single gene can code for more than one different gene product. The mechanisms looked into were alternative splicing and alternative polyadenylation, which are processes that illustrate how one gene can have multiple endpoints.