Taxus baccata / yew tree - its bark provides a chemical for producing taxol, one of the most common anti-cancer drugs.
To keep everybody a bit more awake and to rise the audience's activity, we will have "Faraday discussions" in one of my lectures (Biomaterials). In Faraday discussions the presentation-question-ratio is nearly inversed, i.e. we will have five minutes of presentation and 20 minutes for questions (if not even more!). The terms and conditions are, that the non-presenting people have to read all papers which are going to be presented and have to send two questions per paper to the instructor beforehand. It seems that the presenters get the easier part this time, but you still have to answer questions for 20 minutes ;) Indeed, there might not be only questions, but also comparisons to other papers because they all concern the same topic (hydrophobic drug carriers - that's exciting and new!). I'll talk about hypersensitivity reactions (HSR) which are caused by common cancer drugs.
However, (which might be even more difficult) you have to sum up a paper in 5-7 minutes! I got a review which is twelve pages long ;) - this is going to be fun and a really good challenge, I think.
During the next session we are going to switch roles, so I'll be part of the audience (together with all the people who are presenters this time) an the audience will give the talks. But the group numbers are not exactly equal and I got lucky, so I won't have to read eleven papers, but only nine in two weeks ;).
PS: I don't have any clue why it's called "Faraday" discussion - there's nothing on the Internet about it. I can only speculate, that Faraday liked to discuss, what a guess...
