Ruth Goodlaxson's blog

Anyone who has spent any amount of time in Baltimore, my hometown, probably knows the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in North America, is not healthy. The thought of Fells Point on a humid night in July or August wouldn’t be complete without the ubiquitous smell of the harbor after a storm, when all of the trash has been washed toward shore. It’s fairly innocuous, just present if you take the time to notice. However, for a few weeks of summer 2007, the smell wasn’t just present, it was overwhelming. Massive die-offs lead to hundreds of decaying fish crowding Fells Point and the Inner Harbor, the parts of town responsible for tourist revenues, and where my sister worked at the Maryland Science Center.

Bone Marrow Transplants: The Search for a Match

A friend of mine recently presented me with a question to use as a place to begin research for this paper. She had been studying blood types in one of her classes, and after asking about my family’s blood types, she inquired, “If you and your brother have different blood types, how could you give him bone marrow?”

I became a vegetarian about two years ago, and have since gone through periods of veganism as well as fish-eating. My choice was mostly motivated by ecological reasons, but I became curious about the health effects of vegetarianism after I noticed changes in how I felt after a change in diet. I found I lost weight as a vegetarian, and had more energy; I also had significantly increased energy in the first month of veganism, though this effect wore off eventually. I wanted to gather more observations to discover if my assumption that vegetarianism was healthier was, in fact, true, and true for people other than myself.