Question times and timed questions

Funny thing that, multi-lecturer courses. Right now I am taking a C-level course in Immunology (here, at Uppsala University, D-level is the highest and toughest course level). The course includes thirty-odd lectures with about fifteen to twenty lecturers. This is thought to give us the most recent data in different immunology aspects directly from the people involved in acquiring it. Sounds really cool, doesn't it. The second someone makes a discovery, you are going to know about it. Well, as you know, the coin always has two sides. It turns out we, the students, are the only ones who know what the whole course is all about. Not the lecturers, not the administration. Which is also kind of cool.. you know, sharing the secret lore of the elders and taking delight in the fact that sometimes we know more than them.

So, the elders demand that we know everything they have talked about. To ensure that give us an allmighty Oracle who is supposed to bestow answers on all our prayers, i.e. questions. This role is usually performed by the course-leader. And here comes the fun part. The Oracle can be as unenlightened as we are. For example, we have a lecture about special kinds of receptors (you can stop holding your breath, I am not going to go into details, abbreviations or strange alphabets) and how their functionality is enhanced. The German Ph.D. student holding the lecture mumbles something of "promiscuity". For those of you that scratch their heads right now, this means "not restricted to one sexual partner, indulging in casual and indiscriminate sexual relations".. or as a friend of mine likes to tease me - omniphil, i.e. "all-lover". What has this to do with antigen presentation? How can three consecutive nights in the club scoring with different girls improve my immune system? If you think about it, chances are that it gets seriously damaged if I countinue doing this... in the name of science, of course. (*sigh* The things I do for my education).

Concerned about all of this, we asked the Oracle (the course-leader) what is promiscuity in the context of immunology. And this is not a Ph.D. student, she is a well-regarded professor with more than 20 years of research in the field of immunology (plus the hardest willpower-expressing jaw I have ever seen in a woman... don't get in this one's way, she is going to run all over you without a second thought). Imagine the looks on our faces when she went: "Pro-What?" So we had to explain to her what the lecture was about. Nope, still doesn't ring a bell. Then the whole room was filled with answers and interpretations. Luckily no-one asked for more condoms. In the end we were able to cook up some reasonable explanation about low antigen specificity and thus the ability to bind to a broad spectre of molecules.

My faith in the multi-lecturer system is kind of eroding. It would seem that I am bitching too much about minor details. After all it's only one definition. Well, not when we have to go through three-quarters of the textbook for two weeks, plus going to lectures, plus going to work. I am no plant, I can't photosynthesise my food. And so, every detail counts.

Well enough about this. It was still a good laugh. And there is going to be more in the afternoon, when we are going to extract murine thymus and spleen. This involves killing the mouse in a gas chamber, cutting the neck, opening the skin, extracting the organs and squashing them to bloody pulp. Oh, the gory happiness.