story telling

“Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome! Sing how it bloomed two and a half centuries ago on the slopes of mount Olympus…Sing how it passed down through nine generations, gathering invisibly within the polluted pool of the Stephanides family. And sing how Providence … sent the gene flying again…” (p 4).

Sandra Cisneros seems to have a way of creeping up on me… of finding me over and over again. Her short stories popped up when I attended Bryn Mawr’s Writing for College program, and when I tutored students in English over the summer. The week before we looked at selections from A House on Mango Street in this class, I went to my education field placement and observed a seventh grade class who was reading the same book. She always finds her way into my life, and she always inspires me to keep writing when she does. For years, I have struggled to find my voice both as a writer, and as a woman in today’s society. I admire Cisneros because she writes about what she knows – her family, living in poverty, being a woman

Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison’s book An Unquiet Mindprovided many examples of biological concepts that we discussed throughout thecourse in the context of an individual’s life.  Due to the intricacies of her condition and her acuteawareness of death, her story embodies, perhaps to an extreme, the complexitiesof what it is to be fully human and not just a creature of chemical processesmoving through life.

Godly Delusions

A woman with child found an ascetic outside her home, the unkempt 

man dressed in rags appeared to be meditating next to her door steps. 

Understanding his sacred duty she did not dare disturb him, but as the woman 

was coming down the steps her foot slipped, and down she landed on top of 

I think the element of Biology 103 that I enjoyed most was its ability to answer all my ‘big questions.’ Before the course, I did not understand molecular evolution, the purpose of the scientific method, or how chemistry was connected to biology, and I left feeling pretty confident in my comprehension of these things. Because science is a loopy storytelling process, though, I was continually reassessing my ideas of what these processes meant, in particular, evolution. While our society’s great debate on evolution often hinges on the idea that evolution denies the ‘miraculous’ associated with a divine being (like that of creationism or intelligent design), the play between genes and environment and particularly  improbable assembly certainly seemed miraculous to me.

Monster. Cocaine. Red Bull. Venom. Whoop Ass. Just a few years ago, these names might look like a list of fears. But they aren’t—in fact, those are the names of something that young adults seem obsessed with getting: energy drinks. You can find them at the school bookstore, the drug store, or restaurants you go out to, either to help you stay awake to study or give you energy as you rush from activity to activity. Though energy drinks are not marketed specifically as “health” beverages, their potential dangers have certainly raised many new questions in the health world. Like most consumer products, these drinks are not made primarily to give people energy; they are created and defined through their “brand” to make money. But how does brand work as a scientific story?