I am surprised as to how much research I have been doing for these writing exercises. The one this week, writing exercise 8 I believe, I basically wrote in the style of the summary article except without the 250-word constraint. Both the summary articles and the writing exercises have helped me understand how to read a research article in a more developed way and I have been able to break down an article into its main comprising parts faster and faster. My favorite subject that I have learned so far would probably be how an infant is influenced by the mother’s microbiome and the environmental factors after birth. Going in, I had a general idea that environment influenced things like allergies but the extent to which infants are affected is way more than I anticipated. I thought it was really interesting that the mother’s womb and the nutrients absorbed in development have such a huge influence on the initial microbiome of the infant. I also had not considered the large difference in nutrients between breast milk and formula.
In my research for this recent homework assignment, I learned that the common belief up until recently was woman’s wombs was considered sterile environments. I have no idea how a sterile environment exists… when it is in the human body? It was a one-sentence explanation on one of my citations but it was so confusing it threw me for a loop. Maybe sterile means something different than what I am imagining but why is it called sterile? Is it because it is technically like a protected area for a child to grow in with an epithelial layer? Even so, I would not consider that sterile considering there are many nutrients and commensal bacteria that work to help a child grow. It is probably just the common belief because research is historically created by white men who believed women hormones caused hysteria for a while. But why sterile… is it just they were too lazy/scared to research beyond that and morally just said “can’t broach that subject because of morals. we’ll just say it is sterile”?
Reflection: I probably focused too much on the most recent assignment but since it was what was fresh in my head, I would say that this was an appropriate topic to write about for the first writing session. I think in the second paragraph, it was much more rambly than the first paragraph. I was definitely running out of things to say for the phrase part so I suppose that makes sense.
