Meeting

Hey folks

Today was the Annual General Meeting of the British Youth Council, which aims to represent and promote young people in the UK. I attended as a delegate member. The day reviewed the BYC’s activities of the past year and determined the direction the charity would go in over the following twelve months. The council was made up of members of charities, faith groups, youth councils and political groups, many of whom I didn’t even know existed.

In the morning we also elected the new chair and the rest of the team, after which fireworks ensued. Within half an hour of the chair being elected a guy declared no confidence in him, seemingly because of a personal vendetta. All of us for whom this was the first BYC meeting watched in stunned silence as people started screaming at each other in every regional dialect and shouting others down without actually making any sense. In the end, the motion was sensibly withdrawn and we carried on.

In the afternoon there was a review on progress made and media exposure given to the BYC, before another controversial half-hour. The National Union of Students proposed that the charity have a policy not to share a platform with people holding extreme prejudiced or bigoted views. We weren’t sure that this was within the Council’s constitution, and people argued that by refusing to engage with bigots we wouldn’t be able to counteract their attitudes. In the end the motion was rejected by just two votes and there were many abstentions. That prompted the NUS delegation to walk out.

Anyway, I think the idea of a national group which can represent the views of young people to the decision-makers in the country is a really good idea, which is why I decided to be a candidate for the Participation and Development sub-committee.

The SJA posse


















Outside Council headquarters near London Bridge

Salute Google?

Hey all

Try Google Earth! Here are some satellite pictures of my road and the University of Delaware main campus. What do you think of this new Google innovation? Excited? Scared? Indifferent?


Where I live: Kilburn, North-West London. Inner city rules.






















Part of the University of Delaware campus. Such good resolution!

College fun, part I of III

With the new school year about to start up again, lots of you will be having new roommates. How about some fun? Carry out the following for guaranteed entertainment. I’ve tried two of them already.

For more sensible advice though, check out these tips from MSN Encarta.

1. Twitch a lot.
2. Talk while pretending to be asleep.
3. Move your roommate's personal effects around. Start subtly. Gradually work up to big things, and eventually glue everything s/he owns to the ceiling.
4. Recite entire movie scripts (e.g. "The Road Warrior," "Repo Man," "Casablanca") almost inaudibly.
5. Ask your roommate if your family can move in "just for a couple of weeks."
6. Smile. All the time.
7. Burn all your waste paper while eyeing your roommate suspiciously.
8. Leave a declaration of war on your roommate's desk. Include a list of grievances.
9. Hide your underwear and socks in your roommate's closet. Accuse him/her of stealing it.
10. Whenever your roommate walks in, wait one minute and then stand up. Announce that you are going to take a shower. Do so. Keep this up for three weeks.
11. Paint your half of the room black. Or paisley.
12. Whenever s/he is about to fall asleep, ask questions that start with "Did you ever wonder why...." Be creative.
13. Shelve all your books with the spines facing the wall. Complain loudly that you can never find the book that you want.
14. Listen to radio static.
15. Cry a lot.
16. Send secret admirer notes on your roommate's e-mail.
17. Whenever your roommate comes in from the shower, lower your eyes and giggle to yourself.
18. Whenever his/her parents call and ask for your roommate, breathe into the phone for 5 seconds then hang up.
19. Call safety & security whenever your roommate turns up his/her music.
20. Follow him/her around on weekends.
21. Whenever your roommate is walking through the room, bump into him/her.
22. Stare at your roommate for five minutes out of every hour. Don't say anything, just stare.
23. Skip to the bathroom.
24. Whenever you're on the phone and s/he walks in, hang up immediately without saying anything and crawl under your desk. Sit there for two minutes, then call whoever it was back.
25. Insist on writing the entire lyrics to American Pie on your ceiling above your bed. Sing them every night before you go to bed.
26. Burn incense.
27. Don't ever flush.
28. Buy potato crisps with all your money. Stack the bags in the middle of the room in a pyramid. Eat them whenever your roommate is in the room. For every one you eat, offer your roommate one, each time telling him, "No one can eat just one."
29. Give your roommate's clothes to the Salvation Army.

My brain

Here are some images of my brain. During my first week in the lab, I helped a friend doing functional MRI research. I was asked to play a number memory game whilst physiological changes in my brain were explored. We’re always looking for volunteers in the lab, so if you would like a free MRI brain scan which would then be reviewed by an experienced radiologist, just drop me a line. Remember, MRI has no proven adverse health affects, and is a non-invasive, non-ionising imaging modality with excellent soft-tissue contrast.

Yours,
Moc

This is a T1-weighted mid-sagittal image. It's very good for imaging the corpus callosum (which connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain), the brainstem and the cerebellum.











Here's a T2-weighted axial image. The third ventricles are seen in white. You can also see the caudate and putamen, separated by the anterior limb of the internal capsule.












For comparison to the T2-weighted image, here's a proton density axial slice.

Duchenne muscular dystrophy

There was a very interesting talk today on new advances in the treatment of a genetic disease called Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. DMD is an x-linked progressive muscular dystrophy which affects around one boy in every 3,000. The disease is caused by a defect in a muscle protein called dystrophin, which is important in maintaining the structural integrity of muscle fibres. Without functional dystrophin, muscles are unable to contract properly, and suffer progressive damage. By the age of twelve, boys with DMD are wheelchair bound. They usually die in their twenties from respiratory or cardiac failure.

One way to treat DMD is to try and inject DNA encoding for normal (i.e. functional) dystrophin into muscles. This can be done by giving modified plasmids. However, the problem then remains is how do you deliver dystrophin to all the muscles in the body? There’s no way you could inject the plasmids into each muscle individually. What the speaker was investigating was the use of microbubble technology to aid uptake. Plasmids were injected along with microbubbles, and then ultrasound was applied to pop all the bubbles. This would have the effect of transiently disrupting muscle cell membranes to facilitate entry of the plasmid into the muscle. Preliminary studies on a murine model seem promising, and show significant expression of functional dystrophin for up to three months following the procedure. There’s still a long long way to go before we can think of applying this to humans though. How, for example, would we apply the ultrasound to the whole body? Is that even safe? What about tissue heating?

Do let me know what you think.

Moc

Lonely

I wish the library at Hammersmith Hospital hadn't reverted to the shorter summer opening hours. When I started here I made a resolution to get in to work earlier and stay later than the other two PhD students in the office because:

1. They have a head start on me, having begun their PhDs last October.
2. They're smarter than me.

I'm determined to rectify both points. It's quite lonely staying alone in the office past 7pm though. I miss the study groups we used to have in med school. Even though I would still be studying alone, if the library were open as least I'd still feel like I was part of a learning community in the evenings.

What about you? How has the start of the new year been for you?

The conference, day two

Yesterday afternoon there was a diffusion tensor imaging workshop as part of the conference, which was really useful for me, as that is the MRI modality I will be using throughout the PhD. It was valuable to know what’s going on in the world of MRI, and to speak to some of the people whose research papers I’m reading every day. I’m lucky in that respect because the postdoc we’re with is a bit of an imaging legend who has done important work and seems to know almost everyone. He was quite blunt during today’s parallel imaging session though, questioning the usefulness of the research done by a speaker and calling his signal-to-noise ratio “cr*p”!

What was your first conference/public speaking experience like?