Thursday March 31

Today we'll talk about your library assignment and how you should use the time to do some research that can result in a background paragraph or two in your final paper.

The Open Notebook blog has a useful new piece on writing elegant background.

Here are also some nice pieces of work from the Welham story. I'm still not through all of them -- malfunctions in the learn@UW site have vexed me.

Remember: Next Tuesday April 5 at Steenbock Library. Thursday April 7 no class to work on your library assignment, which is due in Dropbox at classtime Tuesday April 12.

Voice work:

Lead:

Kylie:
When speech-language pathologist Dr. Nathan Welham and his colleagues were able to bioengineer vocal-cord tissue able to transmit sound, they had no idea how big of a splash their research would make.

Billy:

Dr. Nathan Welham is the big man on the University of Wisconsin campus. The New Zealand native has become famous for his research on growing muscle tissue. Why is that so important? Well, that tissue is for one of the most important muscles in your body: your vocal cords.

Background & transitions:

Katie:

With his patients as his motivation, Welham set out to develop a vocal cord replication. The tissue had to be tough enough to bang together, but soft enough to make human sounds. In addition, people’s immune systems could not reject the tissue after transplant, making this no small undertaking.

The researchers developed a replacement tissue that felt similar to Jell-O. Welham and his team conducted research on dog cadavers as well as mice with human-like immune systems to test the effectiveness of this firm, yet pliable, tissue. To their surprise, the engineered tissue was quite a success. Welham realized, “Gosh, maybe this is going to be a big finding.”

Melanie:

Almost immediately after his findings were released, Welham began receiving calls and emails from people all over the world. He participated in two to three weeks of non-stop interviews with reporters ranging from local newspapers to the Today Show and even BBC news. Before his discovery, Welham rarely had to deal with the media. Fortunately for him, these findings received only positive feedback.

Quotes:

Melanie:

After six years of trial and error, Welham said, “the final product was amazing but the journey to get there was many steps forward and many steps back.”