reflections

Research Accomplishments So Far

I work with Dr. Jeanne Stachowiak, who studies lipids membranes. For the first month or so, my research was solely devoted to helping their research on clathrin’s effect on vesicle budding. I spent a lot of time making small unilamellar vesicles and preparing SUPER Templates for fission experiments. Recently, I have come up with a project of my own, under Dr. Stachowiak and my graduate student mentor’s guidance, to investigate and reduce the interactions between amyloid-β protein, which plays a role in the onset of Alzheimer’s, and rafts GM1, a glycolipid found in the cell membranes of neurons. I am currently finishing the stage of gathering the necessary materials and planning the project. In the meantime, I am learning how to make giant unilamellar vesicles.

Reflection on The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddharta Mukherjee

As someone who loves history significantly more than your average engineer, something that struck me was how for the past two centuries, the disease which would make the top of medicine’s Most Wanted list fit the personality of the century so well. The nineteenth century was a doom-and-gloom time characterized by Victorian literature, in which people let their emotions consume them and even kill them if it’s negative enough. Lots of books come to mind, but one is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), three quarters of which is just Dr. Frankenstein’s (or, when Shelley decides to mix it up, the monster himself) incessant whining and overreacting about how ugly his creation is. Wuthering Heights (1847) also features a whole lot of sulking. Art in the 1800s tended to be about consuming emotions which is fitting, because tuberculosis–the most notorious killer of the day–was called consumption in the 1800s and killed you slowly.

In the 1900’s, cancer became the next frontier in medicine in the developed world. The West went from a world of consumption to consumers, with excesses everywhere, from the production line to the home. Just consider the clothes you have in your closet compared to the clothing you need. The second half of the 20th century played host to a global war that was won not by violence but merely by determining whose factories could churn out more weapons faster.

Similarly, cancer is a disease that, put simply, is the overproduction of cells. A person’s cancer cells are their own cells whose cell division controls have broken, so they reproduce out of control. The cancerous cells proliferate to the thousands and millions, and then they kill the organism by diverting resources from healthy tissue and over consuming those resources. Put differently, they take time for leisure, another hallmark of the twentieth century.

Reflection on Mindset by Carol Dweck

Mindset outlines the two possible ways one can respond to failure: rejection, or setback. Those with the fixed mindset are the ones who give up after failure because there’s no point in trying; they make excuses, define themselves by a single test score, and coast on natural talent and avoid practice.

Those with the growth mindset do the opposite:
they recognize their weaknesses, they try to learn from their mistakes, they know failure is a prerequisite to success more often than not, and they recognize that there is always room for improvement.

I am glad that we read this book as a group. Dweck makes a convincing argument, but as scientists we all started out a little skeptical. Because it was an early shared experience, we in the REU made jokes about the growth mindset. If someone failed or was bad at something, or if we wanted to try something new, we’d say, “growth mindset!” We still make those jokes, but these jokes changed our minds subconsciously, so we played the biggest role in creating our own growth mindset in the REU group.

Sean Thomas, University of South Carolina