Growth

From the time of Peter the Great the dacha has fulfilled various roles in the environs of Russia's cities : in the 18th century it was the palatial mansions of the aristocratic elite outside of St. Petersburgand Moscow ; in the 19th century the dacha became a summer rental property for urbanites to escape the cramped and dirty cities ; in the Soviet dominated 20th century the dacha was organized into garden plot communities for subsistence farming. However, the privatization of land following the collapse of the Soviet Union signaled a shift in the dacha's existence. Lamp-lined streets and perfectly pruned lawns began to fill the territory beyond the belt of gray, generic apartment structures where the dacha was once king. In light of the dacha's decline, this thesis explores the origins and development of suburbanization in post-Soviet Russia and discusses its shared and dissenting characteristics with that of the West.

Anticancer drugs, including nocodazole and vinblastine, work by disrupting the dynamics of microtubules. Unfortunately, these drugs often produce numerous side effects, including nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, loss of hair, increased chance of infection, and fatigue. My thesis research evaluated the efficacy of using repeated low doses of microtubule drugs instead of a single high dose, in an attempt to minimize side effects. Using nocodazole and vinblastine, I first established the minimum effective concentration that disrupts the microtubules in normal human cells grown in vitro and treated cells with those concentrations over a period of several days. I found that microtubules were increasingly depolymerized as the days progressed. Next, I tested a combination of nocodazole and vinblastine at low concentrations.