This is my recommendation for Swampscott's town development meeting. Swampscott is a small town in beautiful place by the ocean and I would love to be able to walk around town more. Walkable communities are healthier having lower rates of obesity and diabetes, property values are higher because people want to live in walkable communities and there aren't enough of them. To get to a walkable community we need to develop infrastructure for walking and bicycling like more sidewalks and trails. We need to build mixed use higher density living/working/shopping/recreation zones so that people live and work close to things they want to walk to. Higher density mixed use development is made by permitting taller buildings with street level shopping, office and condo living at higher levels. The higher density needs to be offset by more public green spaces which will benefit the entire community more than individual back yards. And higher density living frees up more space for public u...
A PhD degree actually makes you a generalist. This is because for the dissertation you are in charge of the total project. It turns out any project is made of multiple components. As the project leader you have to plan, order supplies, schedule, deal with people, plan experiments, execute the experiments, analyze the data, write papers, promote your work. Because as a graduate student you won't have a staff working for you, you get to do a little bit of everything. When I needed access to clinical data I had to work through the administration to get myself permission. When I needed computer hardware I had to set it up. When I needed software I either downloaded and installed it or wrote it myself. I had to collect data, measure the data, analyze the data, write papers, and then promote the work at conferences. I found at earlier levels of education I could focus exclusively on laboratory experiments or on developing computer software tools but then at the highest level of education...
The main utility of genetics in health care may be in gene expression not mutation. We have this idea that by knowing our genetic profile we know our genetic disease destiny and can do something special about it. But disease causing mutations tend to either be rare variants with a strong ability to cause a disease or common variants that only slightly increase your risk of disease. If one of this rare strongly disease causing mutations runs in your family you probably know it and you could get tested to see if you inherited it, if you want to know and if there is something you can do about it. But most of us will have the other kind that increase risk slightly. For example about 4-5% of people will develop an intra-cranial aneurysm, an artery balloons in the brain and has a risk of rupture, during their lives. About 1% of aneurysms rupture a year so most people will live a long life and die of something else, more likely heart disease, than die from the aneurysm. If you come from a h...
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