After 4 tests this week, I finally have some time to write a post on this blog, which I have been neglecting. The past recesses week had not been much of a break considering much of my time spent was at home studying, to various degress of effectiveness. But I guess this is the life of a university student and a necessary lesson to teach us how to manage time better.

This is week 7 into Sem 1 and I am glad to say that my initial impressions of SP1202 before the semester had not been wrong. This course had thought me how to appreciate the importance of the English language –the using and understanding of it – in the area of Science where it may not seem to have direct relevance at first thought. It is wonderful to still have the opportunity to have language classes even after enrolling in a Science course in university.

Some thoughts about writing the SUJA draft 1, which I have submitted to Turn it in two days ago. Personally, I found to areas particularly difficult and with which I have spent most time on. One area was the gathering of sources. I personally took almost half the time searching for sources and compiling them. Sometimes, it was necessary to read the whole article and probably only one idea was relevant, or only one sentence from the article was used and paraphrased in my article. The understanding of the authors’ stand and arguments took quite some time but I am glad I did. This, however, taught me the reality of most science research, where gathering of previous works and making sense of them typically takes more time than the actual writing of your article.

The other part I had difficulty on was in the paraphrasing of sentences and ideas and writing complex but grammatically correct sentences. Many times, I found myself re-reading my own sentences only to find that my ideas didn’t flow properly or it wasn’t correctly constructed. That took a lot of effort and I attribute that to my weakness in the English language itself. Given time, I would like to re-visit my basic grammar that I have learnt in primary school:)That aside, I think writing the SUJA had given me the practice that I need to brush up on my language ability. Also, I found that the skills taught in tutorials were also relevant during the writing of the SUJA and in the process, I could understand how to apply these skills better.

I look forward to the 2nd conference for improvements I can make to my 1st SUJA draft.

SUJA topic presentation

Hi all,

presentation of SUJA topics by each classmate took place in class today, and all I can say is that I am looking foward to writing a convincing and compelling paper, as well as knowing more about how my peers are arguing their topics which included synthetic biology, carbon fixation and euthanasia.

However, probably due to haste and lack of organisation, I felt that I could have stated my topic's controversy more clearly, instead of providing an example driven stand. So here I would like to briefly explain again the various arguements surrounding this subject and where the "controversy" is.

In short, the tentative title for my paper would be "Medical advances: real hopes or false promises?" It re-examines the hype that is created around new medical technology and research findings, and proposes an alternative view of slowing such research advances or even discontinuing some.

One might ask why we should stop something which has apparent benefits for all mankind? Afterall, ever since the discovery of penicillin, medical drugs and research findings have successfully increased our quality of life and our life-span tremendously. Long gone are the days where a single virus could wipe out an entire population and patients who have lost their limbs to diseases are not able to walk again. The science surrounding biomedical research and technology have been so advanced that world population has exploded over the past centuries and humans remain an ever more dominant species. This is precisely the view shared not only by patients and non-scientists, but also by many other researchers, medical practitioners and drug sellers all over the world. Medical advancements are indispensible where improvements in human life is concerned.

Having said, however, there are another group of people who are strongly against such improvements in medical technology and critical about what research findings show. The arguments are that newer drugs or procedures do not offer substantial advantage over the so-called obsolete and less effective measures to cure diseases. Some of such newer findings may cause undesirable effects, incur high costs for no marginal benefit or create false impressions that fuel more of such vicious cycles. The opponents are generally proposing to slow down the advancement in research and saying that focusing on current developments and educating the public is in fact more feasible and less harmful.

For everyone reading this post of mine, I h0pe this short introduction had set you re-thinking on the health checkups you had, the drugs you have taken in the past or the articles that presented new medical findings you have read. Are they really there for a beneficial cause or do you firmly believe that the majority of doctors and researchers out there are doing all for the sake of mankind. Hope my text have been clear enough and I would be glad to receive comments or suggestions about this topic. =)