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Agreed.



Newtonian physics is the fundamental. Einstein and others had to have a starting place after all.



What does that have to do with the Bohr model vs the quantum mechanical model? Your analogy is absurd.

Reply to -Frycek: Very cool. I used to be able to identify cell types, (healthy or not) and their organ location but the years have taken away that skill. Your job sounds fascinating. Are you in research or diagnosis?

One of the college senior chemistry majors where I work remarked to me that after taking quantum mechanics in his senior year, a lot of the chemistry that he had been taught in the previous three years finally made much more sense to him. I went through the same program 25 years ago and feel the same way (although since taking this university job, I realize on a daily basis how much I have forgotten since college and graduate school, yikes!).

Yeah, It's ALIVE!!! I felt just like Dr Frankenstein when I saw the first root.

Is this prescreening done primarily by morphological analysis, of stained cells under a microscope? Do you (the cytotechs) also do additional tests, such as PCR? Just curious as to how things have evolved...

PCR isn't a test. It's a process for amplifying DNA - yes?

I can say that nowadays quantum mechanics is integrated into gen chem textbooks, and it has really helped me make better sense of things.

Speaking of alive, did you know that the average gram of soil contains more than 10,000 distinct species of bacteria? In fact, its the bacteria that give soil the smell we think of when we think 'dirt'. The bacteria that do this are streptomycetes - we grow them in the lab all the time. It's completely bizarre to open up a petri dish with little colonies growing on agar and suddenly get the feeling you're out for a walk in the forest.

As it happens, most of the antibiotics in clinical use are made by these particular bugs. No one knows why they do it but they do. Also chemotherapeutic drugs, immune suppressants, anti-fungals etc...etc....

Yes PCR is a way to amplify DNA but it's being increasingly incorporated into diagnosis - can be used to test all kinds of things....

Does this mean you're going to teach it to sing "Puttin' on the Ritz"?...

Really? How? I seem to remember something about using restriction enzymes to cut the DNA to test it for presence or absence of certain nucleotide sequences and using the PCR to make enough DNA to check it out. Am I on the right track?

One of these days I'll sit in on some of these chemistry classes like quantum mechanics. The professor who teaches it these days is excellent I hear. In the mean time I am sitting in on a music theory class in which I have learned a lot and had fun too.

What a great thread. I didn't even realise that the Newtonian physics I studied at shcool is now outdated. My day job doesn't require much of this knowledge.

I do feel that my interests are peculiar to a small segment of the population. It takes time to find those people - but in absolute terms - there are enough out there to have enough friends ! And when you meet such a person - it's like meeting a long lost friend.

And it's particularly interesting to have this long lost friend feeling with a person from a different culture, different land and practising a different religion.

Yes - I too feel at times that I'm weird. And it's of great comfort to read the thoughts of other weirdos (albeit similarly weird) in this thread.

I see the youths dressed up in goth, those with body piercings, men with 14 mistresses and counting, politicians who serve their own self interests, religious leaders who dress in a gown and wear a peculiar hat, those who drive around in circles on a karting track as a hobby, a wine lover who only drinks pinot noir and those who play the piano but only the digital, those who play the piano but only the acoustic, those who play the piano but only classical, those who play the piano but only non-classical . . . So I know I'm surrounded my many different weird people pursuing their weird hobbies !!!!

The world is full of weirdos. But in some respects - long may it stay that way !!

Sure that's all accurate. But there are newer procedures that allow you to monitor PCR reactions by, for example, the incorporation of a fluorescently labled nucleotide into ds DNA. There's a gizmo called a 'light cycler' that is used routinely for this kind of thing. Imagine if you had a set of primer pairs each of which recognizes a unique stretch of DNA in a particular pathogenic bacterium. If you have a sick patient and want to know what kind of infection they have, you can use this approach to find out: just to a bunch of PCR reactions on whatever fluid sample is most important: blood, sputum etc... Much faster than growing the bugs out in culture which takes days. Expensive to set up though.

we're a long way from Beethoven here eh?

Yes, and as jnod said- it can be diagnostic in certain settings. It is a highly sensitive method of detecting the presence of viral DNA in specimens, specifically the DNA of the strains of viruses that cause cervical cancer.

Hm, seems we have strayed far from piano- but it's kind of fun.

Do! I love chemistry (as if you can't tell! ), and I'm having more fun with it now than ever before. Lab is probably my favorite, though lecture isn't bad if the prof is good.

Great book for chemistry weirdos" "Uncle Tungten" by Oliver Sacks.

To Jnod: I'm drooling. We high school teachers find it hard to keep up with the new stuff because they burden us with all the pedogological nonsense. I'd love to see this.

Hehe, I'll check that out. Thanks!

Just to show you how geeky I am, my favorite lab involved dissolving copper turnings in concentrated nitric acid. The enormous clouds of nitrogen dioxide were lovely, just lovely!*

*As long as they remain in the fumehood of course!

I like science too, in particularly biology. How I would like to work with a microscope!
And I love astronomy too.