Seeing the world with the eyes of....

I don't know about you, but when I study a particular subject in depth, my view of the world changes... literally!!! It has happened to me before, but now that I am studying medicine, it is happening again.

During my first degree in chemistry, I spent four years looking at chemical formulas learning about the molecular make-up of the world. Since then, without intending to, my brain has tried to identify chemistry everywhere, most commonly on car license plates:

During my PhD in Biochemistry, I spent day and night analysing NMR data, i.e. looking at spectra with different constellations of dots, in order to identify amino acids and their close neighbours in a protein sequence (for more detail on how this works, see here). After doing this for a while, my brain automatically tried finding protein sequences everywhere. I could no longer look at the night-sky without seeing amino acid side-chains:

 

This year I have been studying anatomy. My colleagues and I have spent more than 50 hours in the dissection room, cutting into cadavers to explore the human body. I have seen a lot of organs, nerves, muscles and tendons. The other day I was in a place where they did some building works, and my brain identified the cables hanging out of the wall as the flexor compartment of the forearm:

 

With this little presentation, I acknowledge the presence of this development, but hope it won't extend too far. Some things are better appreciated as they are... ;-)

Einzug mit Narrhalla-Marsch!!!! (Carnival in the Rhine valley... and every week in Oxford?)

Today is "Rosenmontag", the most important day of the carnival season in the Rhine valley. Inspite of that, I had to go to work today, and even worse, I had to wear my normal clothes!! Not a single "Helau" was to be heard in the streets of Cambridge ("Helau" is the carnival-outcry of my region, it usually comes in threes) and not a single shot of Schnaps was offered to me in the streets. I pity myself!!!!! ;-)


I have been living abroad for almost ten years now, but it's the carnival week-end that brings with it the highest waves of home-sickness (so does the wine-week, which I describe here, but that's not until August). You would expect Christmas to be worse, but it's not. I should have booked a flight home!

Maybe it's because I was born on the 11th of November, which marks the beginning of the carnival season every year. It starts exactly at 11.11am (I was born at 11.51am) and lasts until Ash Wednesday (as you may have gathered, eleven is the official number of the carnival). Of course we used to celebrate the carnival every year for longer than I can remember. In my teens, I even danced in the show-ballet of a carnival club for a few years. No wonder I am so attached to it!

Every year it's strange for me to spend this week-end calm and quietly, rather than out in the streets dressed in a costume at one of the many carnival parades in my region. The only carnivalesque thing I managed to do this week-end was to have a doughnut, which represents the closest substitute available in the UK to a carnival cake (in my region, we call them "Kreppel", see blow). The crappy doughnut I managed to find did not taste good, but it felt good!

There is one more essential element of the carnival to mention here, and it's just as ridiculous as the rest of the carneval: the Narrhalla-Marsch. It's a piece of music you hear all the time in the Mainzer carnival (Mainz is one of the most important carnival towns, just on the other side of the Rhine from my hometown Wiesbaden). During the carnival shows (evenings where people dress up and watch a show with funny speeches and dances and stuff), the Narrhalla-Marsch accompanies the entrance and exit of every show act:

During my time in Oxford, when I had high-table dining rights at Somerville College, I was reminded of the Narrhalla-Marsch during every formal dinner. When the members of the Senior Common Room entered to walk up to the high table, all the students stood up until we had taken our seats in silence. With all the fellows marching in like this, I always felt it was a Narrhalla-Marsch moment. It made me laugh, and once I had thought of it, the Narrhalla-Marsch would play in my head whenever I'd enter hall during formals. Now you know why I was smiling then.

My current college does not have a high table, and even if it did I would not be allowed to sit on it... So bad doughnuts are all I have to remind me of the carnival, until I buy a ticket home next year to join in the celebrations once more!

Exit with Narrhalla-Marsch.

Helau!

"WAS WOLLEN SIE" or the experiment "stick in hand"

during my undergraduate degree, my professor of organic chemistry was quite the character. he was an expert in the synthesis of squaric acids and also convinced that his discipline was the only true chemistry (hence he called any other chemistry "pressing buttons"). he was very old school, meaning that he was not very approachable and would normally greet you with the phrase "WAS WOLLEN SIE???" or "GEHEN SIE!!!" (i.e. "what do you want?" or "go away!"). if you wrote something in an exam that he did not like (for example superfluous explanations about reaction mechanisms), he'd take a thick marker pen and write "prose" across the page or even cross out the entire answer. he was famous for drawing "chaos-snakes" too, highlighting the point at which your answer had become too complicated and he would not read on any further. admittedly, his many quirks could be quite entertaining, but if you were on the receiving end of it, then it could become quite difficult.
one of his favourite stories was to tell us about the experiment "stick in hand", that every chemist has to perform at some point in his life. to say it more clearly, every lab chemist one day accidentally sticks some kind of glass item into their hand or other body parts, resulting in injury. in his eyes, this was essential chemistry.
i have to say that he certainly wasn't one of my favourite lecturers, so i never really think about him much any more. except from today, when for the first time, i performed the experiment "stick in hand"! i was simply putting a pipette aid onto the top of a glass pipette (those 30cm long ones for NMR tubes), and somehow it ended up jammed in between two fingers of my left hand. there wasn't much harm done, so the experiment was a full success... somewhere in chemistry-heaven where my professor is synthesising squaric acids for all eternity, someone is laughing in confidence that he is always right!!! ;-)

persian saying

the one who lives virtuously is honored, not envied.