2015/11/18

Faraday - we made it!

A: "Why don't we kill all the IgE in a cancer patient? I mean, then there's no mediator for the allergic reaction and the patient will be fine, right?!"

B: "Mh, I think there's some function to IgE despite just reacting in a harming, allergic way..."

A: "Oh, wait, ... I just looked it up, IgE is super important, never mind, guys..."

That's a brief abstract of our Faraday discussion on Monday and Tuesday night and it was super fun! For the Faraday discussion some people prepared a presentation (5 min.) and others read all the papers which were going to be outlined. The readers have to come up with questions, so that you have an actual question / discussion session (20 min.).

And it's not an answer-response game! There've been many different ideas to questions and cross-links between the papers, so you could compare the research results and find even contradictory outcomes!

Our discussion was about lipids and their function as drug carriers (often used for cancer medication). But after about ten papers we were really glad to have a slightly different topic ;) I learned a lot about the different antibodies our immunsystem has (e.g. IgE, IgG, ...) and additionally, I did not read my paper to present it, but to answer questions, so I had to find the "difficult" points in it. That's a lot more interesting! I can only recommend this style of paper discussion!