Science | Alex Farris Photo Blog

Hello world!

It's been two years since I've updated the website. As I mentioned in the last post, I started medical school in August 2015. Since that time, my life has been dominated (by choice, mostly) by the Krebs cycle, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, standardized patients, computed tomography images, treatment algorithms, and, in the past four months, real patients in need of real care. It's been quite an adventure, and although I sometimes pine for the relatively simpler days of taking and submitting pictures, I don't regret exchanging one thrilling career for another.

This month, I'm taking an advocacy elective, and its seminar format affords a lot more free time than my first two clerkships of surgery and psychiatry. So, I finally have time to post an update to this six-year-old blog. It's not the post that I promised two years ago ("a catch-up catch-all entry ... before school completely dominates my life"); that post will come next. First, I want to post some pictures from the thing that completely dominated my life (mostly; I had some free time). Most of these pictures are of concepts I drew for study purposes, but there is a bonus collection of images from the solar eclipse this year. Explanations for each concept appear in the captions.

Welcome back!

The metabolism of hemoglobin (and then some). This is a long and winding road involving vitamin B12, an iron-binding protein called ferritin, and chromosomes 11 and 16. I combined multiple individual pathways that wouldn't seem to go together, such as the metabolism of methylmalonic acid and the fate of bilirubin. It seems I was in a synthetic mood on January 22.

Medical school classes start this week, so before all that madness, I took a smaller, but still adventurous and slightly myopic, trip. On July 17, I set out for Chicago on a road trip through Omaha and Casper, Wyoming, to take a hike in Shoshone National Forest.

This is as high as I hiked. The view felt so surreal (and I was so tired from the walk up to it) that this was a good place for a break.

tap for title text

In a flashback to an entry from four years ago, I took photos of an insect. This time, it was a bee, and because bees buzz, I was only able to get one relatively okay photo that wasn't too motion-blurry. So, there's that.

Tonight (just like the previous entry, this one is really posted on May 5, but I can change dates because I built this website and can control things like that), I'm covering the Republican primary for mayor of Carmel for the Star. It's my first assignment for the paper since March, and it's rather exciting.

More referred business! Andrew Lyon (right) conducted the Columbus (Ind.) Symphony Orchestra on April 26, and the night before, he called me saying his original photographer was unable to cover his concert. I obliged, and thus covered my first orchestra concert since my IDS days.