This morning, the front page of the national newspaper reads “BC put on alert for huge quake.” Yet again. So do I hop on a plane to Calgary or continue obliviously sipping my coffee? The reality of an eventual massive earthquake on the British Columbian coast is a given. As my mom, discontent with raging snowstorms and -30oC temperatures, declares, “there are consequences to living in paradise.” Earth-shattering consequences. But do we understand the nature and the true extent of these consequences? To understand why Vancouver is at such a high risk for earthquakes relative to Calgary or Toronto, one…
The Science Creative Quarterly
By katepotter
Kate Potter, unfortunately, is not related to and has no plans to name her future son Harry. She is currently stuyding the role of amyloid in Type 2 Diabetes and whether amyloid formation affects the success of clinical islet transplants. She is in the MD PhD program at the University of British Columbia, where she also did her B.Sc. in Pharmacology and where she is competing for the record of longest time as a student. In her spare time, she loves hiking, singing, dancing, and sunshine.
ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE: SORTING THROUGH TANGLES AND CLEARING UP THE PLAQUE…
In 1907, Dr. Alois Alzheimer published the first case study on a patient with what is now known as Alzheimer’s disease. Shakespeare almost beat him to it in the “All the World’s a Stage…” monologue from As You Like It, describing the last “scene” of a 7 part life ending in “second childishness and mere oblivion/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” The Canada Study on Health and aging estimated that 8% of the Canadian population over 65 years of age had a form of dementia and that 5.1% had Alzheimer’s disease (1). Alzheimer’s dementia has a devastating impact…