Great Experiments: Endothelium reportedly told smooth muscle, "Dude, relax. Acetylcholine's cool."

Endothelium reportedly told smooth muscle, "Dude, relax. Acetylcholine's cool."

Approximately 1/3rd of Americans have high blood pressure which contributes to two of the leading causes of death, heart disease and stroke. One of the most important discoveries that contribute to our understand of blood pressure regulation was made entirely by accident. For years, Robert Furchgott's lab had used strips of rabbit aorta to study constriction and relaxation of vessels. When they switched to a new method using rings of aorta in 1978, acetylcholine, which previously caused constriction of the vessel, now cause relaxation. It became apparent that they had unintentionally been rubbing away the inner cell layer of the vessel, the endothelium, and that it's presence was necessary for acetylcholine to relax vessels. Their discovery has been essential to our current understanding of the cardiovascular system.

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FOR COURSE PARTICIPANTS:

Our goal: to learn about important, beautifully designed experiments from across the biological and biomedical sciences.

In the course, you'll gain experience in reading classic papers and explaining key experiments from your own fields of interest to colleagues in other fields.

Students propose papers to discuss in the form of short written posts on this site. Papers to discuss are selected by class vote each week.

This course should strengthen your communication skills and your understanding of diverse fields of biology–and importantly, it should inspire creative thinking about your own research.

Writing your posts

Each person should contribute at least 4 posts about their favorite experiments by 1 month before the end of the semester. Please propose your own schedule for 4 posts in an email to Bob.

Please post about experiments that you consider to be (1) fundamental to an area of science and (2) beautifully designed. Experiments that changed or founded a field and also made you hit your head and say, "damn, why didn't I think of that?!" are great choices.

Posts should be 150 words or fewer, plus a picture or movie with an appropriate image credit included. Please do not exceed 150 words. This is an exercise in clear, concise writing.

Your post should be written for an intelligent audience who understands biology but knows little-to-nothing about the field you're writing about. Avoid confusing jargon. Informal wording is fine. Your post's title should capture what's interesting and fundamental about the work, for example the central question addressed by the work.

Please provide a link to the paper you chose, bullet-pointed so that there's no confusion about which one this is. If you like, you can also provide a link to a companion paper or two that can help put the main paper in context.

It's considered very bad form to cut and paste text from programs like Microsoft Word for your post, because hidden formatting comes along and can cause headaches. It makes me sad. A tip: copying your text from Word into a browser's address box, and then copying and pasting that instead, eliminates the formatting.

You can modify your posts at any time. It's okay to fine-tune your dusty old posts to try to re-invigorate interest.

Voting

Voting will take place each Monday until 5pm on a poll that will be sent to you . Each poll will generally include all posts that are up by that Monday at 8am.

Please vote every week. Please don't vote for your own selections. The voting will decide which paper we'll read for the following week's meeting. Posts that are getting few or no votes will be removed periodically.

Meetings

We'll meet each Mon at noon in GSB2101. Each week, we'll discuss the winning paper. The person who chose it will present it along with anything else that seems relevant, with everyone's help, tolerating constant interruptions for some interesting discussion.

An important part of the course: Everyone else should plan to present one other thing briefly and informally to everyone–a related paper, some historical background, or anything at all you chose to explore because you found it interesting and relevant. Come prepared to answer questions, since we're all curious.

If you don't have time to do the readings one week, please skip the meeting that week. This way, everyone who comes will be full participants. No one will be badgered for missing just 1 or 2 meetings, I swear.

-Bob Goldstein