A ray of hope and a reminder of old times.

For an enzyme action lab report, I was asked to prepare a section on a drug's enzymatic mechanism of action. I'm currently engrossed in writing about quercetin and kaempferol as alternative xanthine oxidase inhibitors to allopurinol in the treatment of gout.

Quercetin and kaempferol are compounds found in the leaves of , and have been used as anti-inflammatory analgesics for rheumatic pain for centuries as part of Indo-Pakistani ethnomedicine. Allopuinol was discovered in the 1960s; the responsible scientists won a Nobel for their work in 1988.

I'm reminded almost immediately of all the things we talked about in Professor Edberg's Impact of Culture on Health course. Back then, I wouldn't have been able to make any sense of the above two paragraphs-- I was without any real scientific knowledge. Now I'm drinking out of a firehose connected to that fountain and losing motivation because I so infrequently get to apply these basic principles to my passion for public health.

Anyway, it does me a world of good being given the chance to explicitly extend molecular biology to public health and medical anthropolgy. If you'll permit me to mix a metaphor, it keeps my eyes on the prize while my hand's on the plow.