Hilights of the 4th of July weekend:

1. Fireworks! With smiley faces!
2. Adler Planetarium. It turns out that planetariums are WONDERFUL places for me to nap. The chairs are comfortable and reclined. Good scenery. There's soothing music playing in the background. It's darker in there than my room gets at night. Those were the best afternoon naps I've had in a long time. We watched four shows and I slept blissfully through at least half of two of them.
3. German ham pizza with Granny apple chunks and sundried tomatoes at Medeci. It would have been better with less cheese, sharper cheese, more apples, and sliced apples instead of diced apples, but it's a good idea. I'll have to try making a variant of it myself sometime. I also discovered that pizza goes surprisingly well with dijon mustard. But maybe that's just me.
4. I acquired pins, so now I can block the lace scarf that I finally finished knitting!

In other news, we have finished the neurology section (I don't think I'm going to be a neurologist when I grow up) and started the surgery section. We had two great talks today, one about virotherapy for cancer and the second about Pseudomonas host-pathogen interactions in the gut.

The virotherapy guy is engineering viruses to treat brain tumors which would be able to replicate specifically in tumor cells and thus kill only the tumors, leaving healthy tissue untouched. His strategy is to implement two levels of control. The first is receptor based and involves engineering ligands on the virus which are specific to receptors on tumor cells. The second is based on engineering the viral genome such that a gene necessary for replication is under the control of a promoter turned on by a transcription factor present only in tumor cells. By some stroke of luck, this promoter is also radioinducible. (!) It reminds me of Onyx's oncolytic viruses. He also has some very cool work on specific delivery of toxic nanoparticles to tumors.

The Pseudomonas guy described a system whereby Pseudomonas can tell how stressed out their host is and decide whether or not they should start expressing virulence factors to get the hell out of there. The idea is that if the host (a person) is healthy and fine, then the Pseudomonas are perfectly happy right where they are. They're actually a normal part of the microflora. But if the person is dying, then the Pseudomonas don't want to die with the person and so they express these virulence factors which the person doesn't like. Stresses like high immune system activity, low blood flow, and low levels of nutrients can actually trigger quorum sensing (bacteria secrete a small molecule so that they can collectively determine their population density), then biofilm formation, then secretion of virulence factors which hasten the host's decline. Based on this, you can think about treatment of a patient not by killing off the bacteria but just by tricking the bacteria into thinking that everything is a-okay. Clever, no?

I wonder, though, whether I judge too much based on how good the speaker is. Is there some part of me that subconsciously likes certain topics just because they're well presented or is there something inherent to their work which appeals to me? It's kind of worrying because I don't want to make a decision about the type of research I do based on the charismatically it's presented.