I have been home from my mission for six months today. I think I have readjusted to life fairly effectively. I also have a lot of schoolwork to keep me occupied, so that's good. I guess.

I just watched a PBS documentary relating the black plague to AIDS. It was quite interesting. This geneticist researched what gave certain members of the European population resistance to the black death. He actually pinpointed plague resistance to a single mutation in one allele. The cool part is that the same allele is now being shown to confer resistance to AIDS, because the plague bacterium and the HIV virus hijack the body's white blood cells through the same mechanism. People who are homozygous for this mutation are basically impossible to infect with either plague or AIDS, and people who have only one copy show some degree of resistance. Everybody else dies. (If you want to see the documentary for yourself, you can see it on youtube starting here.)

Anyway, the point of that last paragraph is that I'm pretty excited to finally be into the science classes where everything starts coming together. I am so glad I took genetics last semester. I understand so much more about how life works. And now I'm seeing how my classes are building on each other and working together and I love it. I'm going to have to, because this term is going to be intense.

That's all.