Sci arrived early to ScienceOnline, and got for the first time to go on one of the lab tours. This time she got to go into the Duke immersive virtual environment (DiVE). This is a completely awesome interactive experience where you put on 3-D glassers, step into a virtual reality room that looks JUST like the virtual reality deck on Star Trek, and in you go! You fly into the body along with ALCOHOL, the ethanol molecules, and run through the stomach, small intestine, and into the blood, and thence to the liver, where you look in detail at an alcohol dehydrogenase, learning the chemical reactions that turn alcohol into acetaldehyde. You can actually control the chemicals, fitting them together in the precisely right way to loosen and release the protons and electrons.
It was so fun! However, Ed complained of my backseat metabolizing. He wouldn’t have had such a problem if he’d just moved that molecule to the RIGHT!!!!
