revere | October 21, 2007The biggest breakthrough in the treatment of tuberculosis was discovery of the antibiotic, streptomycin. It was isolated on October 19, 1943 by a graduate student, Albert Schatz, working in the laboratory of Selman Waksman. Waksman got the Nobel Prize for this in 1952. Schatz got the shaft. He sued Waksman and Rutgers, to whom he had signed over his discovery on the understanding this would be the best way to make it widely available. He settled out of court. In 1990 Schatz was given official credit. Not the Nobel Prize, but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, too.
Schatz worked…
revere | October 21, 2007Game Day. Don't pester God with petty Life and Death stuff. He's ready for some football!. And why not? Players on both sides pray to Him, credit Him with their touchdowns, sacks, interceptions. None ever blame Him for their Mistakes. It's all good stuff. What's not to like? Football's Biggest Fan. And his favorite team? Your team. The team from your local area.
That's not all. God is an Awesome Team Physician:
Detroit quarterback Jon Kitna expected people to snicker and laugh when they heard his explanation for his comeback against Minnesota after getting knocked out of the game with a…
revere | October 20, 2007The Erectile Dysfunction (ED) drugs already carry the required warnings we know from our misspent youth: Warning: you can go blind doing this. Okay, it says you may experience sudden loss of vision. Same thing. Now a new warning is being added: Warning: it might make you hard -- of hearing:
The impotence drugs Viagra, Cialis and Levitra will get prominent warnings on the risk of sudden hearing loss, U.S. regulators said.
[snip]
The FDA found 29 reports of sudden hearing loss in people who took the erectile dysfunction drugs since 1996. More than 40 million people worldwide have used the…
revere | October 19, 2007I don't have fantasies involving 75 year old women. At least not yet. But I remember comedian Gary Shandling once remarking he knew he was getting old when Mrs. Beaver started to look good to him (as in Leave it to Beaver, the TV show, you knuckleheads). However there is one 75 year old that could tempt me: Mona "The Hammer" Shaw.
Mona signed up for Comcast Cable's Triple Play: cable, internet and phone. But she couldn't even get to first base (excuse the mixed metaphor) and get it installed:
Shaw said they failed to show up on the appointed day, Monday, Aug. 13. They came two days later but…
revere | October 19, 2007The President vetoes health care for kids, the Congress almost overrides it but not quite, and the American Academy for Pediatrics says the next likely pandemic flu bug, influenza A/H5N1, targets children and is being overlooked as the country whistles past the pandemic graveyard:
"Right now, we are behind the curve in finding ways to limit the spread of a pandemic in children even though they are among the most at risk," said Dr. John Bradley of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which co-authored the report with the Trust for America's Health.
[snip]
Children have long seemed particularly…
revere | October 18, 2007I suppose this falls in the "It Can't Happen Here!" department. The "here" is the United States. "There" is Ireland, where the government has access to a wide range of personal financial information. Just for good purposes, you understand. Maybe as part of the Global War on Terror? Whatever. Good purposes:
The security of everyone's personal and financial details is in serious doubt after a civil servant mole leaked highly sensitive information to his criminal brother.
The Irish Independent can reveal the brother used the key information, which is held by the Government, to burgle one man and…
revere | October 18, 2007Almost everyone now seems to think the Iraq debacle was, well, a debacle. Many of us thought invading Iraq was a terrible idea to begin with. Others are silent on that issue (or approved) but think it was carried out poorly. No planning. Failure to plan, however, is a hallmark of the Bush administration. Their intentions are pre-programmed but they never seem to plan for the consequences of those actions. It's not just Iraq. Or Katrina, for that matter. It's also pandemic flu:
When you ask federal officials around the country if they are prepared for a pandemic flu, the answers are unsettling…
revere | October 17, 2007There are over sixty blogs under the Scienceblogs umbrella. There is an impression we are all "progressives" (aka left-leaning) and must agree on matters social and political. While we probably are more to the left than the average (we are reality-based and rational, after all) there is a wide spectrum of views amongst ourselves. While I have no hesitation declaring myself a Person of the Left (whatever that means), I am also a scientist and put a premium on critical thinking and rationality, values I share with other Sciencebloggers. This tends to reduce differences between us. But there…
revere | October 17, 2007In the first part of this two parter we summarized some biology background to a new paper that appeared online ahead of print in the FASEB Journal, Yuo et al., "Avian influenza receptor expression in H5N1-infected and noninfected human tissues." The paper addresses an important gap in our knowledge. Are there cells in the human body with appropriately matched receptors for avian flu virus and if so, where are they? Sporadic results in the last few years suggested that cells deep in the human lung (so-called type II pneumocytes) and ciliated cells in the upper respiratory tract might have…
revere | October 16, 2007The US bioterrorism program has claimed another victim. Not from a lab accident. Not from an attack. But from a ridiculous and mindless application of regulations meant to protect us from malefactors but which have instead punished scientists who may (or may not) have made missteps in this new Alice-in-Wonderland that is the biodefense world. The latest tragedy involves A highly regarded geneticist, Robert Ferrell at the University of Pittsburgh, who has just pled guilty to failing to follow proper mailing procedures. The actual charge he pled guilty to was "mailing an injurious article",…
revere | October 15, 2007The need for better information about the science of avian influenza is urgent. But science is a slow process, or at least slow relative to an urgent time scale, even in times of rapid advances in technology. Even so, while we are waiting for the other shoe to drop, we continue to learn and unlearn about the influenza virus. One major gap has been understanding where humans have cells with receptors for bird flu viruses. A new paper published online last week in The FASEB Journal is finally providing some information. As usual, it is both informative and confusing. To understand what it is…
revere | October 15, 2007[Today is Blog Action Day, where bloggers of all political stripes and subject interest are encouraged to put up a post on an environmental topic. Here is the second of two.]]
The January 2005 good news press release from the DuPont company was not exactly "the gospel truth." No, not exactly. Dupont's good news was about PFOA. A scientific study by the company showed it was perfectly safe. PFOA, or ammonium perfluorooctanoate (also called C8), is used by DuPont to make Teflon, but in reality, PFOA is a DuPont dollar's way of making another dollar. A stop-off point for investment, not a…
revere | October 15, 2007[Today is Blog Action Day, where bloggers of all political stripes and subject interest are encouraged to put up a post on an environmental topic. Here is the first of two.]
Maryland and its Chesapeake Bay have a water pollution problem. The size of the problem is not chickenshit, either. Or rather, it is chickenshit. 1 billion pounds of it. A billion. That's not chickenshit. Or rather, it is chickenshit. There's really a lot of chickenshit around in Maryland. Maryland regulators have been too chickenshit to regulate the source: the poultry business. Why? Guess:
Maryland requires [waste…
revere | October 14, 2007ScienceBlogs likes to take on quacks. Orac, over at Respectful Insolence, does it every Friday and does it well. It's a good project and I'm not against it. But there are a lot of quacks around that aren't called quacks. They have corporate suits and research departments. And advertising and marketing departments. Big companies. Like Nestle.
Recently a team of scientists in the UK decided to take them on:
[Physicist Jennifer] Lardge is one of an informal group of scientific researchers who had met through various workshops sponsored by the UK charity, Sense About Science. Over the past…
revere | October 14, 2007It's no secret atheists have an image problem in the US. That seems to be improving. What isn't improving is the public's view of Christianity. Young folks look around them and get the message. Christianity is a religion. Just like other religions. And that isn't such a good recommendation. The Barna Group supports religion, specifically, Christianity. They also do polling. I can't vouch for their methods, but the latest poll should give pause to the adherents of the Christian religion (one among many, remember):
Barna polls conducted between 2004 and this year, sampling 440 non-Christians (…
revere | October 13, 2007This is a weird story. It's about a dentist who has claimed he doesn't have to file taxes because he's "Ambassador and Citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven under its King Jesus the Christ" and therefore has diplomatic immunity from federal jurisdiction. That's pretty nutty and this guy is also a militant anti-tax activist. I'm not opposed to paying taxes. On the contrary, I believe there are things that are only possible if we each chip in: public safety (fire, police, health department), access to health care (aka, Universal Health Care), the social service safety net and much more. I detest…
revere | October 12, 2007We've written before about the disgraceful behavior of the American Chemical Society regarding its attempts to scuttle Open Access publishing in taxpayer supported science (see also here and here). To recap, taxpayers have paid for research once through research grants, usually from the National Institutes of Health if it is health related research. Upon submission to a scientific journal published by a big for profit publisher or scholarly society (like the ACS) the author is asked to sign over the copyright to the journal, who then can charge again, through subscription or licensing fees.…
revere | October 12, 2007Interesting paper from McAuley et al. (St. Jude's) on the PB1-F2 protein produced by an alternative reading frame on the PB1 gene of the influenza A virus. Most of you know that genes encode proteins via a three letter code. If you read the sequence of three letters by starting one letter earlier or later you will get a different sequence (e.g., ABCDEF is two three letter sequences ABC and DEF, but if you start a letter later you get BCD EF+whatever would have started the next three letter sequence originally). You have shifted the three letter frame for reading, hence the designation as an…
revere | October 11, 2007There are a lot of medical schools in the US (126 regular and 28 osteopathic schools), and you probably thought there must be a lot of schools of public health, too. It's true there are a lot more now than there used to be, but even with recent additions there are only 39 schools accredited by the Association for Schools of Public Health (ASPH), the official accrediting body (and in effect the trade association for the schools, although it wouldn't like to be referred to that way -- tough). So there are four times as many medical schools as Schools of Public Health. Says something.
The news…
revere | October 11, 2007Most people act locally, even if their behavior has a global appearance. Like birds. Starlings are a case in point. In many locales they can be seen swarming to roosting sites, huge clouds of them wheeling an gyrating at dusk before settling into trees or on buildings. If attacked, the swarm splits, merges and splits again, then comes back together. They don't just scatter, literally to the four winds. This kind of emergent behavior -- where local interactions produce global patterns -- has attracted scientists. Statistical physicists have been particularly interested, as this behavior…