asalamon's blog

Structural inequalities are found in societies not only create environments were disease can thrive within those of lower position but also increase the stress of those same people's life which increases their stress even more.  One of the most impactful stories from these week's reading that resonated with these issues was the increased change of pre-term births as well as infant mortality.  This pattern was found across education levels of African Americans (an atypical birthing pattern) in the United States which indicated not just a case of structural violence but as well as cultural violence.  Cultural violence is key in normalizing all the structural violence which is why it took so long for these patterns to be recognized and accepted by science.  Structural violence is often hidden within society.  Those who created the system of violence and power are often those who benefit from the structure and do not want to accept its flaws to the minority for the sake of it turning on them.  Another key theory in violence theory is the fear of the unknown (additional stress).  When in a medical system with no understanding of what is going on around them and in their body brings this fear to the forefront of worry.  As a result, violence entails either in aggression to the medical system or it riddles the human body.

In a 25 mL Erlenmeyer flask, add benzoin (0.5 g) and ethanol (4 mL) and gently swirl the contents for several minutes at room temperature.  Even if not all the benzoin dissolves, add sodium borohydride (0.1 g) using the microspatula in small increments over the span of five minutes.  For 20 min, swirl the mixture at rt.  In an ice water bath, cool the mixture.  To the flask, add distilled water (5 mL) and HCl (.3 mL, 6 M).  After 15 min in the ice bath, add more water (2.5 mL) to the mixture.  To collect the product, vacuum filter the mixture using the Hirsch funnel and wash the solution with a small amount of ice-cold water.  After the solution dries on the filter for 15 min, determine the crude mass and percent yield (0.544 g, 107.8%) of the product and save some of the crude product (~1-2m g) for thin layer chromatography analysis and melting point determination (134-135 °C).  Using acetone (~2 mL), recrystallize the crude product in a 25 mL Erlenmeyer flask.  Erlenmeyer flask is removed to the heat, add an equal portion of room temperature hexanes (~2 mL) to the solution.  When the white crystals are dry are dry, determine the mass and percent yield (0.278 g, 55.1%) melting point of the pure product (136-137 °C).  For thin layer chromatography (TLC) analysis, dissolve a small amount of benzoin (starting material), reserved crude product, and recrystallized pure product (~1-2 mg) in ethyl acetate (~2 mL).  On one silica gel plate on a line 1 cm from the bottom of the plate, spot the starting material in lane 1, crude product in lane 2 and co-spot the starting material and crude product in lane 3.  On the second plate one a line 1 cm from the bottom of the plate, spot the starting material in lane 1, in lane 2 spot the recrystallized product, and in the third lane co-spot both the starting material and recrystallized product.  The solvent used to run the TLC of each plate is a 9:1 CH2Cl2 solution.  To view the results of the TLC, view them under shortwave UV light.   

During TLC, the starting material is less polar than the product and will be the highest spot on silica gel plate because the presence of the double bounded oxygen decreases the polarity of the substance because it more evenly distributes the electrons on the keytone as compared to an alcohol.  The less polar substance has a less interaction with the silica gel plate and will travel up the silica gel plate more.  Therefore, the product will be lower on silica gel plate because the starting material’s double bonded oxygen was reduced to an alcohol group via nucleophilic addition reaction.  The other two spots seen on the crude material and co-spot TLC plate are the products of the nucleophilic addition of a hydride.  Nucleophilic addition can attack the oxygen from either side and as a result, a mixture of diastereomers could be the product (refer to the image below as the possible diastereomer mix that could be formed from the nucleophilic addition of benzoin).

The other method of identification and purification is through TLC.  Two plates were run, one with a comparison of the crude product with the starting material and another with the final, pure product compared to the starting material.  Because the starting material is less polar, than the expected product as it is a keytone, it will have a larger Rf value because it travels farther up the silica gel plate as it has less interactions with the plate.  The product of the reduction has an alcohol group and therefore more polarity.  As a result, the product is expected to have a smaller Rf value.  In the TLC of the crude 1,2-diphenylethane-1,2-diol, the filter paper of the TLC chamber was likely in contact with the right side of the plate causing the co-spot of starting material and crude product to travel inward. Despite this factor, the results of the TLC were still conclusive.  The spot of just the crude product’s Rf is 0.7708 and there no spot above it indicating there is no remnant starting material.  The Rf of the crude product is also similar to the Rf (0.7917) found in the co-spot of the starting material and the crude product.  In the TLC of the second plate comparing the starting material and the recrystallized pure product, 1,2-diphenylethane-1,2-diol, the results showed a slightly lower Rf value of 0.6808 of just the pure product and 0.7021 of co-spot.  Based on these lower numbers, the recrystallization process must have removed some nonpolar impurities from the solvent.  It also revealed the presence of some of the starting material in the pure product as seen by second higher spot with the Rf of 0.8936 which is consistent with the other starting material spots of the first lane (Rf= 0.8936) and the co-spot (Rf= 0.9149).  Based on the TLC, the final product is 1,2-diphenylethane-1,2-diol with some residual starting material in it causing the lower melting point as well as the second, higher spot of starting material.   

To understand what lead to my sister’s disease and treatment, one has to look at the structure of the hospital.  Biomedicine often tries to find a specific cause to the disease.  For my sister, she was looking for an event which would have caused a UTI which having gone untreated would lead to pyelonephritis. Although she was asymptomatic for a UTI, she recalled a shift she came in early at 11a.m. to cover for understaffing.  Her shift had been so busy that she did not realize until she left the hospital at 11p.m. that she had not gone to the bathroom all day. Likely, this was a the cause of her UTI and she diagnosed it as urinary infrequency, something she consistently suffers from. When she got treated, the ED had been understaffed as well which resulted in her long wait time.  Although the hospital has adequate supplies, the one resource that seemed to be lacking in both these cases were nurses.  Often times, nurses in the ED of her hospital have anywhere from 8-10 patients from critical to stable condition.  For any capable nurse, this patient load would be overwhelming.  There is a flaw to the structure of her hospital which lead to her illness as well as the inadequate care and treatment when she sought out medical care.  Not only did her illness affect her quality of work before she was diagnosed but her disease impaired her from working for a week. My sister’s illness narrative revealed a flaw in the structure of her hospital which perpetuated harm, not only to her but her patients as well as her fellow nurses.  

When she was first admitted, she had her vitals taken as well as blood work and a UA (urinalysis).  With clinical proficiency, she was able to recall her vitals from her stay as all being well above average from her normal baseline.  Her blood work showed a white blood cell count of 22 (above normal).  When my sister told me about her UA results, she said the physician only stated they were “grossly positive.” When I asked her to elaborate on the results, she didn't know precisely the results as she didn't go into much detail with the physician but would assume that meant white blood cells, bacteria, glucose, and blood were all present in her urine.  With these result in hand, the physician started her on IV antibiotics as well as Toradol (IV ibuprofen).  A CT scan revealed her diagnosis to be pyelonephritis (kidney infection) as well as urosepsis.  For most patients, treatment would mean a night in the hospital for monitoring while they administered IV antibiotics.  My sister, unwilling to spend a night in the hospital as a patient, knew exactly what to tell the doctor to make sure she went home.  Although her condition is something that should not be taken lightly, she knew because of her age the physicians would expect her to bounce back relatively quickly upon treatment.  From there, she would just have to inform them she had an appetite and was not in a lot of pain, both things she had become conditioned to over the past week.  She was released from the hospital that night with a prescription for antibiotics in hand.

Modes of inhertiance can vary greatly depending on what gene is being expressed.  In sex influenced traits, autosomal traits are influeced by the sex of the individual.  For example, in the gene that leads to baldness, it is dominatnt in men.  This means if they have the big "P" they are going to have the trait for baldness.  In females, the trait is recessive.  This means it is much less likely for the female to exibit the trait.  They would need to big "P"s to exhibit the trait.  Although the trait is not coded on the sex chromosomes, Y and X, it is influenced by the traits expressed.  Due to the difference in inhertitance, there is a probability a man would exhibit the trait is larger than a female exhibiting the trait.

When it comes to biodiversity offsetting, there is no accurate way to measure the equivalent gains made after the destruction of one area of biodiversity.  Often times, the destruction of biodiversity is done for capital gains.  With this in mind, the company doing the destruction is going to look for the lowest cost option compensate for the loss.  Depending how the compensation was measured, there could be a loophole that could  be exploited by the company.  As a result, the biodiversity of an area will suffer because of the greed of a company.

    Our world is currently suffering due to the actions of humans.  We are living in a time where the biodiversity might not ever recover.  Although “equivalent gains” sounds good in theory, it cannot fix what was destroyed.  It might make the hurt feel a little bit better but there is no way to completely match the biodiversity lost.  If humans are so interested in maintaining biodiversity, then why are we destroying it in the first place?

 Throughout the evolution of humans, we moved out of our environment of evolutioary adaptiveness and into a new, novel environment.  One major shift humans made was in their diet conposition and  as a result, humans have become vulnerable to different diseases and conditions we were not vulnerable to before.  For humans, the major physiological change change was an increased brain size occurred during the Paleolithic Era which lasted for 2 million years.  Because a larger energy input was needed to sustain the growth of a large brain, our diet played a key role in giving us the energy and nutrients that enabled these changes.  The human diet is something that has changed considerably from the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness and we are now facing a slew of health consequences as a result.  One of major heath consequences is obesity, which often leads to the other conditions are at risk of developing.  There are two aspects of the the human diet which varies from the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness: the eating patterns of humans and the composition of the diet.  With both these factors different in the novel environment of humans, humans are now vulnerable to a variety of detrimental health conditions.

In the experiment run, cyclohexanol was dehydrated using phosphoric acid and heat as catalysts to form the produce cyclohexene and produced a 40% yield.  The dehydration reaction utilizes 1 mole of the alcohol to produce 1 mole of the alkene.  To determine the purity of the product, infrared spectrometry and gas chromatography was used.  If the product was pure, there would be peaks at around 3000-27000 cm-1 which indicate a carbon bonded to a hydrogen.  In addition, there will be a peak at about 1700 cm-1 indicating the carbon double bonded to another carbon.  In the IR, both these trends were seen.  Importantly, there was no peaks in the stretch before the 3000-27000 cm-1 band which would have indicated the presence of an alcohol group.  The alcohol is found in the starting material and a sign of a pure product and complete reaction would be its removal in the product.  In gas chromatography, the product was injected into the column where it is heated and is pushed through the column with helium.  The lower boiling product will move quicker through the column and have a longer retention time.  In the results of the gas chromatography of the sample, only one peak was found indicated a single product as 100% of the area of the results can be found under the curve indicating a pure product.  Based on the results testing the purity of the cyclohexene product, the sample is pure.