After dropping out of school 8 years ago because I was going into a major I was uninterested in I stumbled upon something that sparked my passion, emergency medicine. After dropping out I enlisted in the Army as a combat medic, thinking it would be a 20-year career, but while working along side doctors in the emergency department I realized that I wanted to be operating on their level and that school was the only way to achieve this goal. So, I took a risk, ended my time in service and began working full time as a low wage line cook in a small-town diner to put myself through community college and save my G.I. bill for university and medical school.

While attending community college I found another passion, chemistry, so I decided to work towards a degree in biochemistry, which will also help me achieve my goal of medical school. I have been fascinated with how living things work for most of my life and saw biochemistry as a way to combine my curiosity about life with my enjoyment of chemistry. I am drawn to it because I find it interesting how different chemicals react with and integrate with biological systems, how organisms create chemicals, and why they create them.

In this course I would like to learn about how cells work, individually and as part of a system, and the basic commonalities found in every type of cell. I am curious about how cells work both individually and as a system because of a briefing I attended about biological weapons. Clostridium botulinum stood out to me during that briefing because I thought it would be interesting to see if the toxin it created could be manipulated to repair neuropathways instead of ruining them. I am interested in the commonalities because I am curious whether alien species from different planets will share these or differ and why they do. I do not know much about any of these, although I assume there would have to be some similarities between alien cells and cells from our planet because they would most likely have to fulfill some of the same basic functions, such as consuming energy and reproducing.

The effect of the toxin created by clostridium botulinum on nerve cells and the sending of signals between those cells interests me greatly. I would love to better understand how it works and why so that I could understand if it can be manipulated to do the opposite. If it cannot be manipulated to repair neuropathways I would like to understand why not as well. Does it kill the nerve cells or simply make them unable to control the signals they send and receive?