Biology

I got my biology test back today, and I'm not thrilled.  I got an 80%.  Which isn't terrible.  But, seriously.  I knew the material.  I knew it front and back and inside out.  I spent HOURS studying.  I did tons of practice questions, read every summary of the chapter, and actually read the chapters themselves.  And still, a B-?  So I am at the point now where I think that this test grade reflects more on my professor's abilities than my own.  The truth is, she is a crappy teacher and an even crappier test writer.  Almost every test she has had to throw out 2-3 questions because every single person got them wrong.  What does that tell you?  It tells me that her questions are poorly written or she isn't teaching us the things she tests us on.  Or both.  Regardless, we have a new professor now and he is great so far.

We are learning all about DNA and how it replicates and a lot of the history of how it was investigated and discovered in the 1950s.  I guess Watson and Crick used some rather underhanded methods to discover the structure of DNA.  Anyways, today he explained all about how our body replicates it in reproduction.  At the end of the lecture he told us about this method that was developed to use in forensics.  When police find a tiny little deposit of DNA left at a crime scene, they can use this method to amplify the DNA and look at it.  It turns out, this is the exact method that I did this summer in my internship.  When he was describing it, I got so excited because now I understand what I was doing.  

Before, I just followed directions kind of like a recipe.  Add 3 microliters of 3' primer, put it in the water bath at 95 degrees, put it in the PCR machine for 23 cycles....  at the time it meant nothing to me.  Just a procedure to follow.  But now, I know what each step did and why it was important.  I wish so much that I had learned all this before my internship!  But it was so exciting to learn how we have been able to learn about how DNA works and use it to our advantage to amplify the DNA to study it.  This is why I love science.  Where other people are bored and falling asleep in class, I am just fascinated at how these complicated intricate processes are happening inside our body every day.  It's amazing.  And though in general science is kind of atheistic, I find that the more I learn about our bodies, the more I feel like there had to be an intelligent creator.  A really REALLY intelligent creator.   I could never come up with this stuff.

End of week 8...  2 weeks to go.  Actually, for me, a week and a half because I'm going to miss the last few days of class for the wedding!!  A week from today I will be at a spring training game.  Then the bachelorette party... wooo!!