Comment on my own post--a test!

This photo was taken from the eastern side, so in effect, I was standing in what used to be East Berlin, right in the center of the Todestreifen, the "death strip" which was mined, covered by automatic guns, and guarded by Grenzentruppen (border guards) and dogs. While I was there in the summer of 2004, an exhibit had been put up below the wall on the "Peoples' Tribunals" which were the kangaroo courts used by the Nazis to try and, of course, convict "enemies of the State".
Last remaining section of the Berlin Wall in its original location on Niederkirchestrasse, Berlin

Houston, we're good for takeoff!

Its been a bit since my last post and I wanted to update the Blog on events upcoming for summer 2005. We've achieved our recruitment goal and as of today have 13 students signed up for this summer's program! I'm very pleased and excited about this but I am planning on continuing to recruit through the end of this month and will try and get our numbers up by a couple more people.

We also have our dates settled on and CJ and Willum (my AIB colleagues) have sent me a draft itinerary which looks fantastic! The program for 2005 will begin on July 11 (so students will need to leave the US on Jul 10) and will end on August 12. We've moved the southern Germany excursion to a point earlier in the program and cut it a day or so shorter than last summer. This gave us the time to schedule a final 3 night trip to Berlin, where the program will officially terminate. From Berlin, students can either fly home or, stay in Europe and travel about some more! I and my colleagues here at A&M will work over the details for the next week or so and then fire it back to AIB. We should have a final itinerary and program plan done within the next month or so.

This is all good. I'm very pumped and am looking forward to finalizing the class roster and starting the pre-trip orientations in early March!

Red Army WWII Memorial, Berlin 

Siegessaule, Berlin 

"Die Kuegelspielerin", city park, Duesseldorf

The Rheinturm overlooking the Rhine and the city of Duesseldorf

cool buildings near AIB HQ, Duesseldorf, Germany 

AIB building, Duesseldorf, Germany 

Genesis of a program!

Alright already--enough about me! Now let's post some information on how the Germany study abroad program in veterinary medicine came to be.

Sometime in late 2001 or early 2002, the Biomedical Sciences Program here in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Texas A&M sent out an e-mail looking for professors interested in developing a study abroad curriculum for BIMS (biomedical science) majors to be held during the summer session in either Bonn or Duesseldorf, Germany. I was intrigued and e-mailed back that I had lived in Germany for a year and a half prior to joining the A&M faculty and was interested in going back as part of a study abroad program.

At about the same time, Dr. Jeffrey Musser responded to the e-mail request. Dr. Musser had extensive international research and teaching creds and was a major player in the Great Diseases course offered by his department. Even better was the fact that, as long as our course could legitimately be said to fit within the Biomedical Sciences curriculum, we could teach whatever we liked and both Jeffrey and I were interested in developing a course in the history of human and veterinary medicine.

So, we jointly developed a syllabus for a course that would examine the development of modern human and veterinary medicine in Europe from about the 1760s (the time of the founding of the first veterinary school by Bourgelat in Lyons, France) to the present time. We argued that as it was in Europe that the antecedents of modern medicine (both human and veterinary) developed, it made considerable sense to teach the course physically where these events occurred. We were to be working with the Akademie fuer Internationale Bildung, the Academy for International Education, a German institution based in Bonn. The AIB worked to bring foreign (mostly American) professors and students to Germany for study abroad experiences and provided infrastructure, support staff, and planning/logistical support. In collaboration with the AIB's Dr. Rainier Zaeck in Bonn and with their Duesseldorf based colleagues, Willum Spanninga and Caro Janda, Jeffrey and I and Dr. Elizabeth Crouch in the BIMS office put together a 6 week program comprised of lectures, guest lecturers, and field trips. I can't overemphasize the greatness of the work done by our AIB associates in the design of this program.

Now we needed some students and, as it turned out, we were not able to attract an adequate number for the couse to go for the summers of 2002 and 2003. Nevertheless, we persevered and, in the spring of 2004, we finally recruited the requisite number of students and we were go for liftoff for second summer session, 2004!

I am born

I thought it might be useful, early in this Blog development project, to post a bit about myself. I was born on November 5, 1955 in the borough of the Bronx, New York City, New York. Other than a two year exile to the suburbs of New Jersey during 4th and 5th grades (the "nightmare years"), I grew up in the City, which goes some way, I believe, towards explaining my love of Berlin. Berlin, to me, from the moment I first set foot there in 1990, felt like home, albeit a home full of people speaking german. Berliners move fast, they talk fast, and they do things their own way--just like New Yorkers--the two cities and the people in them share archetypes and I've always felt completely comfortable and at home in both places.

Well, back to me. I graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and Mathematics and then decided to head off for a life of high adventure. I was thinking either the Merchant Marine or the French Foreign Legion but opted instead for Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio where I studied biology and geology with the intent of an exciting and dangerous career as an ornithologist (I'm being serious here). From Oberlin, I moved in 1976 to the University of Florida, Gainesville where I took a Master's degree in Zoology and where I became interested in physiology and abandoned my avian dreams. Thus, between 1979 and 1985, I worked on a Ph.D. project in physiology at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN where I studied hibernation physiology and biochemistry in water snakes. Ph.D. in hand, I traveled on to Brown University in Providence, RI as a postdoctoral fellow and I stayed in that wonderful city for 5 years. In 1990 I visited Germany for the first time as a participant in a scientific meeting at the Max-Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Goettingen. A colleague there invited me back as a guest scientist and I spent from August 1991 through December 1992 living in Nikolausberg, a village on the outskirts of Goettingen.

It was while in Goettingen that I began to study german as a student at the local Volkshochschule (in a class filled primarily with au pair Maedchen from around the world). While living in Germany, I went on the academic, tenure-track job market and finally accepted an offer from the Department of Veterinary Physiology & Pharmacology in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX. I arrived in College Station in January, 1993 and have been here ever since--the longest period in one place in my peripatetic academic life. I am now a tenured Associate Professor.

My research work over the years has been varied but has focused on issues in comparative respiratory and cardiovascular physiology, particularly the comparative physiology of cardiac hypoxia and ischemia tolerance (the ability of the hearts of some vertebrates to tolerate extreme stresses, unlike the hearts of humans). In recent years I have devoted more of my energies to teaching and to course development and I now teach physiology to first and third year veterinary students, undergraduate bioengineering majors, and graduate students. In the spring of 2004, I along with my colleague, Dr. Jeffrey Musser, began developing our Germany based study abroad course in the history of human and veterinary medicine in Europe. Last summer was the first year we took students to Duesseldorf for the 5 week program, but the details of this I leave for a subsequent post.

Jeremy

Birth of a Blog!

Greetings!

This morning I went ahead and (finally) set up the Blog I've been threatening to use in my History of Medicine course to be taught this summer at the Akademie fuer Internationale Bildung in Duesseldorf, Germany. The plan is to make this a group Blog with all of my students, my co-professor, and maybe a few other folks as members with ability to log in and post. I'm thinking of having my students be required to post, if not daily, at least often, and report on what they've been up to in Europe, what things they've learned or experienced, what has particularly interested or excited them, and so on. The course profs and the students will be posting pictures and links to other websites as well as their comments and I'm hoping we can get some sort of interactive, educational gig going here! I plan to continue last year's project of student video journals as well and, I suppose, might ultimately be able to post some of the video to the Blog as well.

So--I'm going to play around with Blogging for the next couple of months--see what I can get it to do and how to do it and then--this summer in Duesseldorf, implement the group Blog for the course! Wiedersehen!

Jeremy Wasser

Jeremy Wasser