01Aug/20

Five Techniques to Make Learning A Foreign Language Less Impressive

“What did you eat for breakfast as a child?” asked a wide-eyed woman from across the conference table. My friend had just introduced me to her clinical research group as “Kelley from Korea who

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17Aug/18

The Growing Garden of Death

  I This story starts with cockroaches. The American Cockroach, to be more precise. Periplaneta americana. Water bugs. Coffee-colored, segmented vermin of various proportions, some as long as a grown woman’s ring

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28Apr/13

Our Stupid Brains

A small restaurant I pass every day on the way to my lab has a dog. It’s a medium-sized stocky yellowish fuzzy dog, with a face and build approximating something between a

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22Apr/13

How to Care for Your Skin Like a Korean

Note that this post is not titled “How to Have Skin Like A Korean.” Misplaced modifiers and ambiguous grammar notwithstanding (news flash: Koreans have skin, and so can you!), I avoided this

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08Apr/13

My Mice Hate Me, Part II: Other Mice Hate Me Too

Driven blindly by that regrettable desire for ever-richer experience, today I decided to practice mouse handling and dosing at one of my P.I.’s auxiliary laboratories. I met Park Taehee* at the other

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26Mar/13

Science is Hard

No, I’m not talking about science classes (though those can sometimes be hard too). I’m talking about IRB-forms-signed-in-blood, strap-on-your-goggles-and-get-ready-to-kick-ass, thrown-out-to-sea-sucking-down-methanol laboratory science (and often its friendly cousin let’s-sit-behind-a-computer-and-spit-out-all-our-thoughts-into-SPSS dry lab science, but

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22Mar/13

And Some Scientists Are Loopy. So What?

  During a break in my immunology course on Thursday, our professor suddenly expressed her opinion that Ph.D. holders who choose to stay in a university setting and become science professors are

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20Mar/13

My Mice Hate Me

My mice hate me. Of course, I would hate, as well, anyone who belonged to a giant hand that picked me up by the tail two to three times a day only

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