March 3, 2001

This morning Cornelia began by describing the different types of science that are involved in Medicine and the Biosciences, such as anatomy, physiology, pharmacokinetics, biology, genetics, and many others.

Cornelia began the lesson by asking the students to brainstorm about the leading causes of death in the year 1900. Students were told to do a Web search to look for the top 3 causes of death during that year in the U.S. Students were cautioned to take the source of the information that they found into account, and were asked to think about the reliability of information that they gather from the internet.

Next students were asked to come up with the top 3 leading causes of death at present. Once the class had found the answers, the two lists were compared. Students noticed that while the leading causes of death in 1900 were communicable diseases, those of today are non-communicable. They then went on to brainstorm about why this might be and came up with the idea that there were less deaths by communicable diseases now due to advances in hygiene.

The next task was for students to build a simple model of an epidemic (in particular, the class modeled a flu epidemic). Once the simple model was built, the class added several more variables to their models and ran them again.

After break students examined human osteology (the study of bones) online. They compared human bones to those of baboons and gorillas.

To conclude the class students attempted to give the proper dosage to a hypothetical diabetes patient using an online model.