McCartney - Scary Bacteria - Internet vs. Science?

I have railed before on rock stars for being idiots, and Sir Paul McCartney has definitely done that in the past - only 2 years ago joining his then-wife Heather Mills in a damning crusade against the Canadian seal hunt. Now he's playing a free show for the 400th anniversary of Quebec city and some Parti Québecois members are protesting that a performance by a Brit on the Plains of Abraham (where Wolfe and Montcalm fought in 1759 and Britain conquered the forces of France) is a dreadful insult. Which I guess is sort of understandable, and if nothing else predictable.

The following from Sir Paul in response to the criticisms from the PQ was neither: "They won," he said, apparently referring to the war. "What are they moaning about? They won... I wouldn't have minded if they lost. It's me that should be moaning, right?" He pauses for several seconds. "I'm only kidding you know."

Wow. Kidding about what, exactly? Kidding that you're that ignorant about the history of this country (and a significant battle in the history of Britain)? Or kidding around about an event that essentially represents the instant the Québecois came under British rule, which is a bit of a sensitive issue. Even significantly more so than the seal hunt.

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Science has an excellent piece this week on antibiotic resistant bacteria. Some infections (C. difficile, for example) are just impossible to fight with most of the antibiotics we've invented so far. The bacteria have evolved to resist the drugs we have, and as a result are extremely difficult to kill. And we don't seem to have any blockbuster antibiotic drugs on the horizon, which is actually quite frightening - about the only things in biology scarier than these things are prions. Which I won't get into here.

But it does bring me to a personal pet peeve - I have a big problem with antibacterial soaps. First of all, some bacteria are quite useful, for example, mice raised in a sterile environment have seriously compromised immune systems. Secondly, you are a human-bacteria hybrid - bacterial cells in our bodies outnumber our own human cells by a factor of 10 to one. Accepting that evolution exists (and failing that, antibiotic-resistant bacteria indeed exist), using antibacterial soaps is just going help you grow resistant strains of bacteria in your house, which may or may not be good for your immune system - or your own bacterial cells...

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This Wired blog brought an interesting article from Science to my attention - surely it's changed science for the better, but has the Internet changed scientists for the better? The author of the article has some interesting data that as Internet resources have risen in size and accessibility, authors are citing more recent and more high-impact journals, and less journals overall. This implies that their breadth of scholarship is declining somehow, and allegedly relates to the fact that scientists no longer browse through paper-based journals.

I don't think this is the right interpretation of the data. I would say that this means that the pace of science is quickening. We're doing things quicker and better than ever before: 15 and 20 years ago, some of today's fairly major fields simply didn't exist. For example, stem cells weren't an issue in biology 20 years ago. Now, there are thousands (possibly tens of thousands) of people working in the field. What literature from 20 years ago are they going to cite, exactly?

Personally, I think the Internet can be of great benefit to the breadth of a science education. But it's a bit of a double-edged sword. You can be an academic viking, pillaging the literature to get support for the assertions and/or hypothesis you want to make (and trust me, you can find stuff to support almost any argument). But you can also use it to make other fields more accessible, to browse journals and sometimes doctoral theses, and have search tools email you articles from backwater journals you've never even heard of.

Is that a bad thing? Nobel-winner Eric Kandel is reviving a comparitively ancient (1970s) animal model of safety, and investigating possible antidepressant targets based on differences in gene expression in safe, happy rats compared to anxious, shocked rats. Those at the forefront of science right now still remember the old days, and some of those scientists were much more inventive than you might give them credit for. However, I remain convinced that scientists will continue to be clever in the future, and we probably shouldn't worry about whether the Internet is good or not. Science seems to be doing just fine on it's own...

Evil Tofu

News roundup (the BBC wins this week) - continued craziness in Britain as two leading sexual health charities have announced the sex lessons should begin at age 4; they conclude with a quote from a 16-year old mother who seems to have been unaware that sex might lead to pregnancy. As if you needed a reason not to eat a lot of it, researchers have shown a correlation between tofu consumption and dementia risk. Those eating tofu at least once per day seem to have increased memory loss by their late 60s. Lastly, according to our Prime Minister's reckoning, it is a "mathematical certainty" that the developing world will have to shoulder most of the world's carbon emission reductions by 2050, which is a relatively original take on the situation. I'd like to see those calculations.

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An interesting question in science, ethics and health was discussed this week (as well on the BBC) by Sir John Sulston, a Nobel-winning biologist and advocate for freedom of information in biology. It is his studied opinion, and my lesser one, that we should not be able to do things like patent genes or genomes, that we are allowing drug companies to become "disease mongerers," and that we are allowing the health of our citizenries be eclipsed in importance by intellectual property law. I think these are irresponsible things for a society to do - the tools by which knowledge is produced can be patented, but I am not sure about the knowledge itself. However, I am sure that health isn't an economic indicator like GDP and shouldn't be overlooked in favour of it because it's more difficult to measure.

I am reminded of what Brazil did a couple of years ago with regard to AIDS medications. Brazil, a developing nation currently straddling the gap between the third and first worlds, has some 620 000 people infected with HIV according to AIDS Alliance. Brazil took the rather noble viewpoint that everyone who had AIDS in their country should be medicated. This was a rather expensive proposition in 1998; the cost of treatment in the developed world is about US$10 000 per patient per year. Even after significant reductions by the pharma companies, the total was still around US$5 000, which runs to a grand total of roughly US$3.1 billion per year of treatment. Rather than let prohibitive costs hold them back, Brazil - which has a remarkably enlightened stance on intellectual property in general - broke the patents and started producing the drugs locally.

This had a tremendous effect - it created skilled jobs, saved the Brazilian government billions of dollars, and - most importantly - ensured that they had the capacity to provide the medications required by that portion of their population. Of course, Merck was pretty upset about this, even going so far to say that this might mean it would be no longer profitable to develop drugs for the developing world. Considering we now know that at least one major drug company spends over 50% more on marketing than drug development, I don't think we should be very sympathetic to this sort of reasoning. Allowing profit to trump health is evil, and that's all I have to say about that.

The Mirror of the Terminator is Still Bad News.

I don't mean to keep ragging on the English, but who was the genius that decided to name the British Military's new communication satellite network "Skynet?" We can only hope that, actually no, they've never seen Terminator 2, what an unusual coincidence that is... (uncomfortable laugh). Otherwise officers in the British Army have a worryingly dark sense of humour.

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Wired reported yesterday on the fruits of a relatively new "drug" discovery processes that might lead to new migraine meds. What is most interesting about the story is the "drugs" in question, which aren't like drugs at all. The problem with most drugs, particularly in neuropharmacology, is that they are "dirty," as we call them - they bind to many biological targets, which can make their mechanisms of action difficult to understand. This technique sidesteps that difficulty in a very innovative fashion.

Proteins do the work of cells, which is to say absolutely everything you do, and their structures are what is being coded for within our so-called "genetic code" that lies along DNA strands. Genes are "read," and transcribed to an intermediary between DNA and protein known as "messenger" RNA. This mRNA takes the message to another region, where it is translated into a protein. Another kind of RNA - RNAi - was discovered fairly recently and the subject for which the Nobel Prize in Medicine was given to Mello & Fire in 2006. In theory, they are used by cells to shut down the mRNAs of one or many specific gene(s) so they are never translated, providing a potentially much more selective and rational approach to drug design compared to pharmacology.

The neatest thing that these guys did was their homework - trust me when I tell you that mRNA is a bitch to work with. In the body, it seems to be a very dynamically regulated process, and things called RNase can break the mRNA down quickly. RNase is everywhere outside of cells, and if you're not careful when doing work with mRNA, you will find it's all been eaten at the end of your experiment. This is why we convict killers on DNA rather than RNA evidence.

This company, however, took advantage of a strange property of molecules - stereoisometry - and designed mirror-image molecules of the sugar backbones of our RNA molecules. Think of it this way - your left hand is a mirror-image of your right hand. While they are identical, you can't make them overlap. Our bodies can't digest these mirror-image sugars, but they should still bind to their target mRNAs. Which, in theory, would make them a brilliant medium for drug discovery and could provide much-needed new insight into understanding human mental health and disorders thereof.

If I had money, I would probably invest in these guys, assuming they have stock available. They just got a pile of money from Eli-Lilly to do this, too...

Keith Chen rules. Bumblebee women less so.

I was going to blog about something else, but something really stupid piqued my interest instead.

First, a tour of the science news - British researchers prove once again that size isn't everything - unsurprisingly to us neuroscientists, intelligence seems to have a better correlation to synapse number (the connections between brain cells) and complexity than simple brain size. Leading journal Nature shows it's behind the times (the New York Times, at least) by reporting that an Italian group has shown that monkeys can understand money; Keith Chen has been doing this for years as reported here. Finally, the Swiss have gone bugf#$k nuts, as evidenced by a new law prohibiting the use of research techniques that may sacrifice the dignity of creatures, which apparently includes the dignity of plants.

So on to the stupid part. I was fortunate enough to travel to England in April on the boss' tab, where I spent a couple days with friends before I headed on to a conference. England had some minor culture shock associated with it - but I enjoy drinking in public, arguments, sarcasm, cask ales and so forth. What I don't like, and call me sexist if you will, is women drinking like blue-collar alcoholic middle-aged men (particularly if they have a beer gut to match).

So that helped to explain to me this gem from the BBC, published March 26 2008(!), declaring that drinking during pregnancy might be a bad idea. You would think this was a no-brainer, but apparently not - this British woman gave birth during a pub crawl (any bets on her alcohol intake?), claiming she didn't even know she was pregnant. Tragically, the baby boy weighs only 2 pounds and has about a 50/50 chance of living. No punch line here, folks, unless you count the fact that she was dressed as a bumblebee at the time, which is significantly more sad than funny, p < 0.05.

My brother and I bitch every year that we haven't come anywhere near as far along as some futurists/sci-fi writers believed we would have by this time (It's 2008! Where's my damn flying car?!), but the Brits are just getting around to banning drinking during pregnancy. I guess it's nice to see the colonials pulling ahead of empire... but I still want my friggin' flying car.