GPS, Maps and Medicine — Happy For What I Get
High-tech navigation devices such as Global Positioning System units specialize in giving directions, but William Folk thinks the GPS gizmos can also help guide high school students to a better understanding of living cells.
Folk, a professor of biochemistry and a senior associate dean for research at the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Medicine, and a small group of colleagues plan to incorporate GPS and other devices into a science curriculum they are developing called Maps in Medicine….
Interesting read here. I’m not 100% clear on the concept of the connection between the way cells “know” their place and how to get to it and the way GPS knows it’s position, but then if I already was, what would there be for professor Folk to teach, eh?
Given the abysmal level of science education most US high school students get steps like Dr. Folk’s plan are to be rewarded, in my view.
GPS and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) can certainly be of great value to the medicine and public health fields in ways beyond cellular (that’s the cells in you body, dude, not the Nokia that’s glued to your ear) behavior. Tracking the domiciles of patients with infectious diseases, locating they mysterious “pockets” where some forms of cancer and birth defects seem to develop, right down to the nitty-gritty aspects of providing better, faster and cheaper emergency medical transport being just a few that come to mind.
map On!