You've got to love heme, and kiss heme, and squeeze heme

Short review of the first mini-med lecture: Loved it, learned a bunch, came away excited and thinky and, oh yes, grateful for my little hemoglobin molecules for working the way they're supposed to. Smooches, you guys! Keep up the oxygen binding and releasing!

Longer version: The first IQ test was finding the classroom, which I managed eventually. Reward for being such a good mouse? Free cookies. We all settled in, flipped our arm desks into place (agh, college flashback, agh), and looked attentive while the chair of the program introduced the series. He explained that the course is part of the medical school's initiative to reach out to the community, described the program's structure—four sessions on the science behind various disorders and four on clinical applications—mildly upsold us by pointing out that the autumn series includes lectures on gross anatomy ("That's when we can get the cadavers"; you know, we never think about the seasonal variation in available corpses, my dear Dr. Maturin), and introduced the first speaker. Meanwhile I was flipping through the presentation booklet and suppressing a little apprehension; page after page of molecular chains, diagrams of protein structures, and incomprehensible graphs full of actual Greek, oh dear. I limbered up my pennin' hand and hoped for the best.

Which best is actually pretty much what we all got. After we weathered the inevitable shrieky mike probs, it was on to the equally unavoidable PowerPoints, the hallmark of modern science. The speaker spent 45 minutes whipping us through slides on the basic molecular biochemistry of a functional hemoglobin molecule, from amino acid chain to the actual mechanics of action, with brief discussions of how altitude affects the molecule's ability to pick up and release oxygen, how carbon monoxide binds to hemoglobin's receptors, and how the proton/oxygen exchange works. After a short break, he dove into how a single amino acid change affects Hb's function in sickle cell disease (Hb! yeah, we're such good friends, I use the nickname), how sickling occurs, how SCD affects tissues other than red blood cells, what the positive side of the mutation is for carriers who do not express the disease, what DNA tests are used to diagnose SCD in a fetus, what the current treatment protocols are, and what's currently in development.

It was both awesome and a little boggling that the guy got us through so much information, some quite technical, so quickly, and that, based on the follow-up questions, people appeared to have followed almost all of it. Kudos to him for being so clear and for so effectively taking my mind off the primaries, to the uni for hosting such an interesting event for so little baksheesh, and to the local buses for getting me home before I turned into a squash. Backpats for all (except Texas).