HMX Faculty Perspectives

Biochemistry

Program instructors Kevin S. Bonham, PhD and Ole-Petter (“OP”) Hamnvik, MB BCh BAO, MMSc share their thoughts on the importance of biochemistry. 

Why do you think it’s important for health care professionals to learn biochemistry?

Kevin: All biological processes, including those that are necessary for health and those that lead to disease, are governed by the chemical interactions of molecules. Life itself is made possible by enzymes – biological catalysts that can control the rate of chemical reactions. This means that in order to truly understand biology, you have to understand biochemistry.

More practically, because our health is rooted in our biology, everything about the practice of medicine, from diagnosing disease to the drugs we use to treat it, is also based on chemistry.

OP: To be able to provide effective medical care to patients, health care professionals need to first understand how the human body functions in health and in disease. To truly gain this understanding, you need to master what happens at the smallest functional units of the body – the cells and the molecules within them – and how these small units aggregate into a functional human body. In a way, biochemistry is the core of medicine; health care providers rely on an understanding of biochemistry in most of their routine tasks.

What do you want students to take away from this course?

Kevin: Because biochemistry touches every aspect of biology, there’s no way to cover everything in a single course. But there are a small number of key principles that show up again and again, and that’s what I want students to take away from this course.

There’s no need to memorize enzyme names like phosphofructokinase, but understanding conceptually how enzymes work, and how the regulation of enzymes alters the behavior of a cell and of the whole body, will help students make sense of the rest of biology. Students won’t need to do complex calculations or derive the equations of thermodynamics, but understanding how energy is extracted and consumed will deepen their understanding of metabolism and human disease.

OP: The course illustrates the important idea that biochemical principles – while describing events that happen at a microscopic scale or smaller – has real implications on patients and the practice of medicine. For example, understanding the biochemistry of carbohydrate metabolism allows the students to understand how the body can deal with fasting and with the sudden influx of nutrients after a meal, and also provides a good understanding of diseases such as diabetes mellitus. The molecular events cause discernible clinical effects.

Learn more about the Biochemistry course.

Genetics

Program instructors Christine DeGennaro, PhD and Carrie Blout, MS, CGC, LGC, share their thoughts on the importance of genetics. 

Why do you think it’s important for health care professionals to learn biochemistry?

Christine: As DNA sequencing becomes cheaper and more readily available, the role of genetics in medicine is expanding. With our increasing understanding of the variation in the human genome, we can start to predict how specific changes in DNA sequence will affect an individual’s health. Human genetics is extremely complicated, but it is apparent that many human diseases are influenced by genetics. From a medical perspective, this includes everything from rare DNA sequence variants that drastically increase risk of a disease, to common variants that lead to small changes in risk.

Historically, genetics specialists have helped patients to navigate these situations, but genetics is beginning to permeate medicine as a whole. This means that health care professionals across many fields are faced with new questions. When do you recommend genetic testing to a patient? What kind of testing will provide the most conclusive results? How do you help the patient to understand those results, and use them to make decisions about his or her care? Moving forward, an understanding of the principles of genetics and an ability to apply them in today’s medical landscape will be an enormous asset for any health care professional.

Carrie: Genetics is really a subspecialty of all specialties. The more we understand the genetic basis of biology, the more we will understand human health and disease. Having a strong background in genetics will be important as genomic technologies continue to expand and are implemented more and more into clinical care. Understanding how to look for patterns of disease and when to refer a patient to other specialists is an important tool for every health care provider, and as more patients have genetic results in their medical records, having the ability to understand how this is or is not important to your patients’ medical care will be of the utmost importance. Overall a global knowledge of genetics will help you to provide better care to your future patients.

What do you want students to take away from this course?

Christine: Even outside of medicine, genetics has a very important presence in our world today, so, fundamentally, what I would like students to take away from this course is a level of genetic literacy that will allow them to navigate the questions and decisions that they will face in their own lives.

Direct-to-consumer genetic testing now allows everyone to learn about their own genetics; these tests can potentially include information about health and disease risk and ancestry that have significant impacts for individuals and their families. When making decisions about genetic testing, it is important to be informed about exactly what you will learn and what the consequences of the results might be down the line. In this course, we put the fundamental principles of human genetics into the context of the world today, which will provide students with the tools and resources to ask the right questions and make informed genetic decisions.

Carrie: I hope students are able to grasp some of the basic concepts about genetics and to understand why it is a vital part of medical care. I hope that this background knowledge will be useful to them if and when they care for patients who come to them with a genetic test result, a family history of genetic disease or a presenting genetic diagnosis. I hope this course excites them about the concept of genetics and genomics and encourages them to want to learn more as their career progresses.