Toronto: Day 3
Today was the first official day of the course. Breakfast was part of the deal, but you had to wake up early. Coffee tasted like shit. No, I’ve never tasted shit.
The first talk was by Prof. Ross Ethier on biomechanics. The most interesting part of his talk were the details of hemodynamics (blood dynamics) projects from his lab. He compared mouse hemodynamics with that of humans to study arterial diseases based on blood flow patterns. Contrary to intuition, the blood flow patterns in mice are completely different from that of humans. If you’re familiar with fluid dynamics, you’d know that one of the key characterizations of fluid flow is the Reynolds number. This dimensionless constant marks the boundary between laminar and turbulent flow. The constant for mice is atleast a magnitude different from that of humans. Doing a literature search on pubmed for “mice hemodynamics” brings up more than 3000 articles, most of them incorrectly drawing parallels between mice and human. Needless to say, scientists in biomechanics were quite unhappy with his findings.
Atherosclerosis is a common disease affecting the aeterial blood vessel. What’s interesting is that there is no non-invansive way to check for plaques in blood vessels. We only come to know of one from the symptomns, which are usually a myocardial infarction (heart attack) or a stroke. By then it might be too late - tissues/cells in the heart/brain die from the lack of blood.
The second talk was by Prof. Stephen Davies on genetic circuitry. He built analogies between TTL and protein networks to build very simple logic elements such as NAND gates. That was the gist of his talk - the rest was rushed and I couldn’t follow it.
The third talk was on tissue engineering. The lecturer was a biologist and used words that I’ve never heard before. All I learnt from the talk was that stem cells are cells that haven’t been differentiated yet.
Our next stop was MaRS, an incubator for startup companies. If you didn’t already know, an incubator is a place where you’d rent space, network, receptionist and other things that a company needs. It was pretty cool is see about twenty companies in a small alley. The latter half of the visit was networking with Dr. Tony Redpath, the Venture Group Advisor at MaRS. I had so many questions for him that I had to skip lunch. BTW, if you’re looking for something like the Vancouver Enterprise Forum in Toronto, try the Toronto Venture Group. They have regular breakfast meetings.
We then headed out to the Steamwhistle Brewery. This is one of the local beers from Toronto. The guide took us through the entire brewing process. Another piece of trivia, beer in brown bottles hold the cold far longer than plain or green bottles. Brown is Good.
That is all.