First Molecules to Medicine test

The first Molecules to Medicine test is tomorrow. I'm not nearly as scared about it as I was going into my first Human Body test, but that has both its upsides and downsides.

Pro: I'm no longer a Scary Medical Student whose temporary best friend is his cadaver and who has to take vitamin D supplements because he studies 16 hours a day and doesn't get any sunlight because of it. In fact, I now have meaningful non-medical-school-related conversations with my family/friends, I've renewed my Netflix account, and I've even gone out a few times. (Okay, I've gone out once since anatomy ended. After the last exam.)

Con: Motivation is a problem. Whereas all the anatomy material was brand new to me, I've had a lot of molecular and cellular biology before, both in undergrad and graduate school. That's not to say that this block will be a cake walk, by any means, just that my mind is primed to re-learn a good portion of this material and to place new information within a pre-existing framework of knowledge. But, it also means that I have to guard against boredom and procrastination.


The material being covered in this first test includes: bioenergetics, DNA structure, DNA replication, DNA repair, DNA transcription (process of converting DNA to RNA), RNA structure and post-transcriptional processing, gene expression, amino acids and proteins, translation (process of converting RNA to protein), the cell cycle, and various tools of molecular biology.

Also, one of the highlights of Molecules to Medicine so far has been clinical vignettes. These are lectures of specific diseases that tie into relevant material being covered in other lectures. For instance, we learned about prion disease after a lecture on protein folding. We are also responsible for knowing the molecular biology of Alzheimer's disease and Li-Fraumeni syndrome for tomorrow's test.


N.B. Yes, writing this post was indeed an exercise of procrastination. Back to studying.