Fearless

Today I volunteered at the Triangle Caregivers Conference, which is a collection of vendors/exhibitors as well as sessions for caregivers who are taking care of spouses or parents or relatives with a debilitating disease. It was a really interesting experience and I enjoyed the many conversations I had with people who were interested in the only Indian girl under 30 at the conference. By that I mean, only Indian, only person under 30. Both things.  One of the things that really struck me was how careful these caregivers have to become in what they say to their impaired loved one and also to the children of the family who will take offense to the mood swings that their grandparents are having or be so hurt that their grandparent won't remember them. You have to lie to your loved one sometimes, just to keep the peace and hold down the fort. You have to give children only age appropriate information. You have to do this without guilt. That's something I would have a lot of trou...

So I haven't written in a while or had any life crises or anything so I figured I'd just write about what I've been doing and learning life wise this summer. I'm doing research at Duke through the Bass Connections program so I get lots of money to live here and then go to a neuroimmunology conference in Montana in the middle of July. I'm looking at how overexpression of a protein whose gene has been shown to predispose Alzheimer's disease affects a mitochondrial stress response called the unfolded protein response. Pretty much it means that when there are a lot of unfolded proteins in the mitochondria, there are pathways that cause more chaperones and proteases to be transcribed and translated to deal with it. It's an interesting project, though it's hard to see the real world application right away. It was for me anyway. If this mitochondrial stress response is an implication of Alzheimer's, we can try to treat the cells with drugs and see how th...