Emily Mitchell - Interview Reflection 3/21/2012

1. Describe your feelings about or response to the interview.

I really enjoyed talking to Dr. Weinstein, and I thought the interview went very well. He was very helpful and although he had never heard of grid computing, he was enthusiastic to learn about it and contribute. As a neurologist, I knew he would have a background in diseases like Parkinson's, but I found that he had such a large amount of knowledge about Parkinson's and really enjoyed learning new things about the disease.

2. What changes occurred for you as a result of your interview?

Dr. Weinstein talked a lot about how much the increase in the average lifespan has an effect on neurological diseases like Parkinson's disease.  He explained to us that as we age, the frequency of disease due to protein misfolding increases, and so there is a higher prevalence of people with diseases like Parkinson's. I had never considered this, but it made me realize just how much each generation changes major health concerns. This also made me think about how medicine has to change with each generation depending on other factors such as lifestyle, lifespan, etc.

3. Did anything about the interview disturb you?

The thing that disturbed me during the interview was how misinformed the public is about diseases. Dr. Weinstein said that a lot of people he has come into contact with have a misconstrued idea about the cause of neurological diseases, which prevents them from being able to take preventive measures.  I think this is a major concern, especially because there is probably a higher percentage of people with neurological diseases such as type II diabetes, and there are ways to help prevent them if the public is well-informed.

4. Describe the connections you found between the interview and your research & classwork.

There were a lot of connections between the interview and our classwork, both on a molecular and population level. The mutations and protein misfoldings that lead to neurological disease had a lot to do with what we had studied in class about mutations and their effect on a population. It also made me consider how although protein misfoldings linked with Parkinson's and some other neurological diseases occur after reproductive age, there are probably some diseases, perhaps type II diabetes, in which mutations and protein misfoldings occur during reproductive age. If this is the case, this could have a huge effect on the population. This relates to our discussions in class about population genetics and the effects of microevolution on a population.