Monthly Archives: May 2005

Here’s a screenshot (thumbnailed) of what’s on my dashboard right now:

Bad Matrix Joke

Amanda was telling me yesterday of the difficulties of studying medical school material. She said she wished she could learn her pulmonary physiology like in “The Matrix”, wherein via a computer all of the information could be loaded in. Possibly the most clever joke I have ever come up with on my own *cough* occurred to me as she mimiced Neo getting information loaded into his brain, head shaking and so on. When she finished I chimed in, “I know Lung Fu!”

Get it? Pulmonary Physiology? Lung Fu? Geez I crack myself up.

HRS Interviews – Molly Maleckar

While I didn’t have much luck with interviews at Heart Rhythm 2005, I did get two. Here is a transcription of the first, with Molly Maleckar from my own lab.

VS: So I’m here interviewing Molly Maleckar of Tulane University. Molly, how many times have you attended NASPE or HRS conferences?

Molly: Well, actually, technically when it was still NASPE, I attended the first one a few years ago in Washington, DC, this is actually my third time at NASPE/HRS, my third conference.

VS: And would you please try to summarize what you work on in the lab?

Molly: Sure, I’m here presenting a study which is about determining the defibrillation threshold from the upper limit of vulnerability, defibrillation shocks, but my main work has to do with developing a model of infarction so we can study arrhythmogenesis in the post-infarcted heart.

VS: Okay, and what do you see as maybe the upcoming hot foci in the field right now?

Molly: I think that our lab really has a leg-up because disease models right now are really what’s happening. People are doing a lot of experimental work and have been for probably the last ten years in terms of ion channel kinetics and gross effects on the defibrillation efficacy of post-injury heart situations, but they’ve really — mechanistically there’s not a lot of insight, so I think our lab has really got it down. We’ve got ischemia 1a, 1b, the infarction, and I think that that’s really where it’s going.

VS: What about mechanical [mechano-electric] feedback?

Molly: Also extremely important, of course I didn’t think of that since I’m not working on it, but also Wendy in our lab does that — that’s the next step. The ideal would be to have a computational model of the human heart, post infarct, with a little bit of heart failure thrown in there [with mechano-electric feedback]. That’s probably fifteen years away, maybe ten, maybe less, but definitely those are also very important things to look at now.

VS: Alright, thank you Molly.

Molly: No problem.

Next, maybe tomorrow, I’ll post my interview with Martin Fink of UCSD.

I haff no monny left, I’m brock

Amanda forwarded an email to me that her friend wrote. The part regarding me is below:

Hey, those were neat pictures. Your boyfriend appears scholarly. I like the smirk. Seems stocky too. I’ve noticed that a lot of my respect for other men comes from sort of ‘judging the book by the cover.’ You know, guys that can do things for themselves. Strong, Assertive, Reliable, Competent, Calloused hands, and no egos. The thing that throws me off, and always has is his name. Brock. Brock. Bee Are Oh See Kay. Hi there, my name is Brock. To me, that has
always been a specific sound effect. Specifically, a new tennis ball. “Jeez! Hey buddy, watch out for that ball!!!” What?? BROCK!!! Or an Asian getting accustomed to American music. “Ya, I like Brock and Broll.” Put a firecracker in a hole in a tennis ball, KA-BROCK!! Or a vegetarian refering to a wholesome green on a friendly, familiar basis, “want cheese on your brock?” Or a gambler in Las Vegas with a lisp, “I haff no monny left, I’m brock.”