WILTIMS #77: Anarchy in the classroom!

Today we had our first Medical Ethics classes and, amusingly, our first ethical dilemma was with the class itself. We were meeting in our small groups and our instructor didn't show. At first we thought that she was just running late or going off an old schedule. 10 minutes after the latest possible start time we sent out a few students to see if the other classrooms all had their instructors and we found one other that had been similarly abandoned.

Collectively, we tried to decide what to do. Who do we contact? Do college no-show rules apply? Could they trace it back to us if we left? Is it somehow more ethically wrong to ditch an ethics class than a normal class? Eventually we decided to take our own attendance and then some people left while others interrupted another room to ask what to do. Those of us who stayed joined the neighboring room for the second half of the class.

TIL: "Up the butt" may not be the most eloquent way to explain "suppository". It is recommended we use "inserted in one's bottom or rear".

A doctor can refuse to take any patient. A doctor cannot, however, refuse to see a patient with whom they have already established a doctor-patient relationship. The doctor must give the patient a reasonable amount of time (a few months) to find another doctor before the doctor can refuse care.

Telomerase carries its own RNA primer. Let me back up a bit... DNA polymerase, the enzyme that helps make new copies of DNA from old copies, requires an RNA primer to help it initiate replication. Think of it like the little metal guide at the end of a zipper^* that helps the slider attach to the teeth. The problem is that the RNA primer isn't stable and will be degraded, leaving the DNA strand a little bit shorter. To make sure that the important information coded by the DNA isn't lost after multiple cycles of replication, the cell adds a whole bunch of non-coding repeat sequences. These chromosomal end caps are called telomeres. Eventually, these do run short and need to be built back up.

That's where telomerase comes in. This is an enzyme very similar to DNA polymerase that's sole job is to add telomeric repeats to the end of chromosomes. It gets around DNA polymerase's primer problem by providing it's own primer. It then extends one strand of the DNA until it is long enough that another primer can be added and DNA polymerase can take over.

*Apparently this is called an "insertion pin" by zipper aficionados