Research and Medical School, by blogger of the month Aaron Dobie

Loading cDNA into liquid nitrogen trays for long term storage.

A cool and unexpected part of my first year in medical school has been participation in new types of medical research. Since arriving in July I’ve been able to participate in two different research projects – one qualitative and one quantitative. The first was an ethnographic case report on in-home quadriplegic care in the Golan, a region roughly three hours north of Beer Sheva.

            Early on in the fall semester, Dr. Seema Biswas (referenced in Jonah Kreniske’s 24 September 2013 blog post) arranged for eight students in our first-year class to visit one of her colleagues in a community health clinic in the Golan. The doctor in the Golan had a number of patients whose stories and conditions cast interesting lights on different topics in Global Health. Fellow classmate Baila Litwak and I interviewed a quadriplegic man whose parents quit their jobs six years ago to be his full time caregivers. We performed the interviews in their home and we were able to see the man’s medical setup – respirator, feeding machine – and talk to his parents about their story. The community doctor had trained the family how to use all of the equipment and it was powerful to see the well-functioning links between a robust primary care system and the people it’s designed to serve.

The liquid nitrogen tank

            My other research experience was more quantitative. In college I never had the chance to do any hard bench science research but was always interested in learning some of the lab techniques that I learned about in various classes. One morning in the fall semester I got to talking with our biochemistry professor (emeritus) Dr. Nava Bhashan (who, as a side note, wrote MSIH’s problem-based-learning biochem curriculum with actual cases she’s encountered over the years as a clinical biochemist). I knew that Dr. Bhashan used to do research on the cardiovascular effects of HIV antiretroviral therapy and I asked her if she knew of any similar research projects going on at Soroka Hospital. Without hesitation she whipped out her phone, made a couple of calls, and arranged a meeting for me the following week. I ended up talking with Dr. Ran Taube who runs a lab looking at the molecular mechanisms of HIV transcription. With no HIV vaccine visible in the nearby future, his research elucidates and proposes ways in which latent HIV within the body can be re-activated so that the body’s immune system (along with concurrent antiretroviral therapy) can actually “see” and clear HIV infected cells. Dr. Taube was fine with me shadowing in the lab and during January I put in four 20 hour weeks after school in which time I learned many lab techniques: cell culture, lentiviral gene transfection, RNA extraction, cDNA reverse transcription, and PCR.

View of Soroka Hospital one night after leaving lab

In the end I decided that simultaneous research and medical school wasn’t going to work for me but it is definitely an option for so-inclined future students. There is a lot of interesting research happening around the BGU campus in Beer Sheva and I think both of my experiences illustrate the close knit community of students, professors and researches at Soroka Hospital and MSIH. 

-blogger of the month, Aaron Dobie