Episode 041: The M1s Are All Right

One week of the semester gone, and M1s Aline Sandouk, Ethan Craig, and Nathan Miller report in on their experiences.  Who's their favorite lecturer?  They won't say, but they seem to be alive, well, and moving right along. Also, the FDA thinks we should regulate the use of feces as a drug. How an extreme athlete who isn't a scientist did what she always does--pushes through the pain--to discover her genetic flaw when no-one else could. A company founded by a medical student with a bioengineering background comes up with a smart, simple, easy way to treat a scourge of childbirth in developing countries--postpartum hemorrhage. And a quick plug for The Discover Fit & Health channel which continues its fine tradition of infotainment programming with "Untold Stories of the ER," featuring a story of a woman who fed her daughter tapeworms to get her ready for that all-important beauty pageant.

Listen to Episode 041: The M1s Are All Right.


Listen to more great shows for medical students on The Vocalis Podcast Network.

• Should We Regulate Poop As A Drug?
• DIY Diagnosis: How An Extreme Athlete Uncovered Her Genetic Flaw
• Touro Med Student Secures $250K Grant for Lifesaving Technology
• Woman Feeds Tapeworms to Daughter on Untold Stories of the ER

Episode 035: Freestyling in Bean!

Lisa Wehr and Dave are free styling in Bean Learning Community! 

Our own Lisa Wehr, in a grain bin.

We talk about her recent class on the public health aspects of farming.  How a 3-year-old in a Batman suit and 43 seniors in an IHOP helped create a tool (launching soon) that promises to help seniors understand and talk to their doctors about the costs of care. We discuss social media health information, and how it’s the worst.  An ER doc asks herself whether docs need to get hit by cars to understand what their patients are trying to tell them.  A geneticist sequences his unborn child’s genome “because it’s cool.” How the British Cycling team’s efforts to win the Tour de France suggests that the ‘aggregation of marginal gains’ might be better and easier than big, sexy fixes, even in healthcare and studying medicine.  And Cleveland Clinic is forced to graduate a student who just…well, he didn’t meet their professionalism goals for their students.

• Power To The Health Data Geeks
• ‘Nothing Is Broken’: For An Injured Doctor, Quality-Focused Care Misses The Mark
• For One Baby, Life Begins with Genome Revealed
• This Person Improved Every Tiny Thing by 1 Percent and Here's What Happened
• Judge Orders Case Western to Grant Diploma to Medical Student

Listen to Episode 035: Freestyling in Bean.

Listen to more great shows for medical students on The Vocalis Podcast Network.

Episode 025: Henrietta Lacks vs. HeLa, and the People Behind the Specimens

The efficacy of any biomedical researcher is based on his or her foundation of scientific knowledge.  Few would have any problem grasping that idea.  What's less well understood, by both researchers and laypeople alike, are the stories of the biological materials they work with.  Often these materials are cell cultures, tissue samples, human DNA.

From left to right: Dave Etler, Eboni Jones, Victoria Baptiste, David Lacks, Alison Pletch, and Greg Pelc.

Unlike the chemicals, reagents, test tubes, and machinery used in research, these materials often come from people.  That's easily forgotten when they can be ordered from catalogs and websites in the way of other commodities. But those people, who may no longer live among us, have stories.  In the case of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman who passed away in the early 1950s of cervical cancer, the cells taken from her without her or her families' knowledge touched off a revolution in biomedical science. 

Henrietta and Day Lacks (From
"The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,"
R. Skloot, 2009)

They've contributed to the vaccine for polio, were the first cells to be cloned, and have been used in a number of cancer, virus, and pharmacological studies all over the world. Rebecca Skloot's 2009 book "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" noted that Mrs. Lacks' cells have been used in more than 60,000 studies, and 300 more are being added each month.  They are of huge importance to science because they were the first so-called immortal cell line--unlike most cells, they divide and reproduce essentially without limit.  But though no-one in Henrietta Lacks' family knew of their existence at first, the cells ultimately became of huge importance to her descendants.  In this episode, Alison Pletch, Eboni Jones, Greg Pelc, and I were honored to be able to welcome two members of the Lacks family to the show.  David Lacks is Mrs. Lacks' grandson, and Victoria Baptiste is her great granddaughter, and they spoke with us about their ancestor, informed consent, and their work with the National Institutes of Health on HeLa cell research guidelines.

Listen now to Episode 025: Henrietta Lacks vs. HeLa, and the People Behind the Specimens

Episode 020: Positive Exposure with Rick Guidotti

Photos by Rick Guidotti

Rick Guidotti is a fashion photographer working in New York, Milan, Paris, and London for everyone from Elle to Yves Saint Laurent. In 1997, he and physician Diane McLean founded Positive Exposure, a non-profit organization dedicated to using the visual arts to highlight the beauty of genetic diversity and challenging the stigmas associated with differences in appearance. Positive Exposure presents diversity workshops, educational and human rights programs, and multimedia exhibitions for physicians, nurses, genetic counselors, health care professionals-in-training, universities, elementary and secondary schools, legislators, and the general public.  Rick sat down with Iowa medical students Kurt Wall and Miriam Wiener to talk about his work with Positive Exposure, and about what families who live with genetic, physical, and intellectual differences want: to have their stories heard.

While you listen, be sure to visit http://positiveexposure.org/, and look at the galleries at the bottom of the page to meet the families and people that Positive Exposure works with.

Listen to Episode 020: Positive Exposure with Rick Guidotti.