Yeah, I know I said in my last post that I would get up to date on this year's Halloween costume stuff in this post. But I haven't made any more progress on it, and furthermore, I just don't feel like talking about it. So there.
For the last week or so in my cell biology class, we've been assaulted with signal transduction crap. The instructor for this module or whatever is Dr. Jerkbag (name changed to protect my own ass). He's British. He's not terribly fun to look at. Didn't get a real good line on how bad his teeth were, but I was able to see at least one crooked incisor. And today my assessment of his overall disposition has plucked him from the "mildly arrogant" bin and dropped him squarely onto the "jerkism spectrum". In plain English, he's a passive-aggressive dick. The man couldn't put together a coherent PowerPoint slide if his life depended on it. Thankfully for him at least, it doesn't seem to. Most of his slides are just words. Lots of big fancy words. And some of the words are purple. It still isn't really clear to me if purple words are supposed to be important somehow or if he just likes the way certain words look in purple typeface. The thing he did that changed my opinion of him for the worse was what he said at the end of lecture today. He'd been talking about MAP kinase pathways and came to the last slide, which had a figure listing all the different signal transduction pathways. It showed the Toll receptor signaling family directly beneath MAP kinases. He pointed to the Toll signaling pathway and asked what big headline news story had just come out about it. I'm usually really good about keeping up with the news, science news in particular, but I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about. He asked, "doesn't anyone listen to NPR in the morning on their way in?" and I literally had to bite my tongue to keep from blurting out, "I prefer to stay awake for my commute, so I avoid NPR in the morning at all costs." He was clearly exasperated that no one said anything, and I really think he mistook our silence for ignorance rather than anything else (if you don't have anything nice to say, then don't say anything at all). Then he explains, with the most condescending tone possible, that the discovery of this signaling pathway won a Nobel Prize. Oh gee, sorry, I was more interested in the story of Dr. Ralph Steinman, who died of pancreatic cancer three days before it was announced that he had won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. This guy used his Nobel Prize-winning science to help extend his life enough to win the award, but not long enough to be told that he won it. The Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously, but the decision to award it to him had been made in good faith that he was still alive at the time, so he was allowed to keep it. I'm so sorry, Mr. jerkbag professor, that I found THAT story slightly more compelling than Toll receptor signaling, especially since it was the story that vastly overshadowed any mention of the other two scientists sharing the award. It was these other two guys that discovered Toll signaling. Steinman worked on dendritic cells. To top it off, since it was the last lecture of his module, he said to the class, "Well, it's been fun..." then muttered under his breath, "sort of." He really made me wistful for Winning's cell biology class.
Tomorrow, we get to be lulled into somnolence by a new professor with fantastical tales of nuclear receptor signaling. Just shoot me.
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