CBB

We just finished the first week of the cancer block ("Cancer: Bench to Bedside"). This block focuses on molecular/cell biology, epidemiology, oncology, and hematology. It uses cancer as an example to study basic science, biostatistics, and clinical trial design. I think I like it this way; if we learned these fields in an isolated fashion, it would feel a lot more dull. We started off with a lot of basic molecular and cellular biology (interesting because this usually comes in the first year for most medical schools). We had Bruce Alberts give us several lectures. He wrote The Molecular Biology of the Cell which I used in a ton of different courses, so that's pretty cool (he was also the president for the National Academy of Sciences for over a decade). To be honest, this block hasn't yet become as interesting as the other blocks; a lot of what we're learning right now is review. But hopefully when we start seeing the clinical aspects of cancer and hematologic disorders, it'll become better.