Hey, political bloggers! » « Patterning the nervous system with Bmp

Developmental Biology 4181: Week 2

This week, my students are thinking about SIDS,
aging,
Christiane Nusslein-Volhard,
oncogenes,
hunger,
individuality,
worm movies,
obesity,
sunscreen, and whether to
divide or die. A fairly typical set of undergraduate concerns, right?

They’ve all also been reading chapters 3 and 4 of Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful, and their summaries are here: α,
β,
γ,
δ,
ε, and
ζ.

If you missed it, here’s Last week’s digest and a brief explanation of what it’s all about.

Hey, political bloggers! » « Patterning the nervous system with Bmp

Comments

  2. says

    My DevBio class just covered inducers, responders, paracrine/juxtaposed/autocrine pathways (wnt, notch, hedgehog, etc.), and differential gene expression. It’s our 2nd week, too. Interesting how profs differ in topic and what the assignments are; my class will be forming groups and doing paper research and class presentations/debates on stem cells.

  6. Ian Menzies says

    To be a scientist in this day & age is to know how to type greek letters into a computer.

    ιτ’σ νοτ θατ ηαρδ

    Perhaps a little tedious.

  7. Caledonian says

    I was very disappointed to read the following:

    He missed the point. In mathematics and science, there is no difference in the intelligence of men and women. The difference in genes between men and women is simply the Y chromosome, which has nothing to do with intelligence.

    What troubles me is that some might think: “Well, if the president of Harvard says this, it must be true. He’s just being attacked because he said something politically incorrect.” What Summers said was scientifically incorrect.

    This statement is not only incorrect, it misses the point. Shame upon Nusslein-Volhard.

  8. says

    Greek letters are easy generally (any good symbol font, or a font that supports unicode, has them). Greek letters with all the ancient-style diacritical marks and accents is often extremely annoying.

    PZ: Speaking of entering things, do your students have facilities to submit drawings to the course web page? All the bioscience courses I’ve done have been big on drawings …