Terra Sigillata

Shocker on the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 05:49:22 -0500

The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been split between the discoverers of two viruses of major pathophysiological importance.

Half of the prize goes to German Dr prof Harald zur Hausen for his discovery of human papilloma virus as the cause of cervical cancer while the other half went to the French team that discovered human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), Françoise Barr´-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier.

Just a few early thoughts: Notably absent from the award is American Robert Gallo, whose role in the HIV discovery has been long disputed. That this Nobel can only be awarded to a sum total of three individuals means that the committee chose to honor zur Hausen's seminal work on HPV rather than acknowledge Gallo's questionable role on HIV (ouch!). (note added: Perhaps I'm being a little harsh as Gallo and Montagnier acknowledged the roles of each group in Science in 2002; Montagnier cited the crucial contribution of Gallo's group as the use of a the T-cell growth factor, now known as interleukin-2, for short-term virally-infected cultures. I'm very interested to hear how Montagnier comments on this obvious issue today.)

I will also be interested to see how the HIV-denialist community chooses to spin this award acknowledging the importance of the discovery of HIV as the cause of AIDS. I do not believe that the Nobel Foundation is beholden to Big Pharma or receives proceeds from the sales of HIV diagnostics or HIV therapeutics.

Lastly, I am simply tickled to see Dr zur Hausen recognized for the HPV work, of which much of the early work was conducted with HeLa cells. HeLa is a well-known human cervical carcinoma cell line first isolated at Johns Hopkins from an African-American woman from Virginia with cervical cancer. The engaging story of Henrietta Lacks and her cells has been the focus of writings by Rebecca Skloot (PDF of 2001 NYT article) and will be compiled in her upcoming book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Congratulations to the professors on these outstanding accomplishments.

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Wishing Stetson Kennedy a Happy 92nd Birthday

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 18:46:02 -0500

The author, human rights activist, folklorist, and environmentalist, Stetson Kennedy, is celebrating his 92nd birthday today in the company of friends and family near St. Augustine, Florida.

His website, StetsonKennedy.com, used to have a guestbook but the webmaster, his grandson Sean, took it down after extensive spamming.

So, please leave your birthday wishes in the comments below as we have it on very good authority that those close to Stetson actually read Terra Sigillata.

Much of my generation probably only knows Stetson Kennedy as the Klan-busting infiltrator popularized in Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and economist Steven Levitt. Music fans may know of him from the eponymous lyrics penned by Woody Guthrie and put to music by Billy Bragg with Wilco on 2000's Mermaid Avenue, Vol.II.

Kennedy is best-known for his undercover infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in and around Atlanta during the 1940s. While he has been criticized for co-opting the stories of some compatriots as his own, there is no doubt that Kennedy risked his life in feeding Klan identities and codewords to the public, some of which were aired in four episodes of the Superman radio program. Kennedy was exiled to France when the Klan put a bounty on his head.

To urge federal action on the Klan, Kennedy appeared in 1948 (and was escorted out of) the US House Committee on Un-American Activities at the US Capitol wearing a KKK hood and robe while carrying a briefcase full of documents to raise awareness of the role of prominent leaders and regional officials in organized racial terrorism. (There is no truth to the rumor that some officials were unfazed and simply said, "Why, Senator Byrd, what brings you over to the House today?," as the West Virginia senator did not take office until 1959).

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Atheist group sues over Bush's day of prayer in the workplace

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 10:17:29 -0500

We here at Terra Sig are peripheral to Teh Atheist Cabal at ScienceBlogs so I had to do a consortium-wide search to be sure no one like PZ, revere, or Laden wrote about this lawsuit filed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

The nation's largest group of atheists and agnostics is suing President Bush, the governor of Wisconsin and other officials over the federal law designating a National Day of Prayer.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation sued Friday in U.S. district court, arguing that the president's mandated proclamations calling on Americans to pray violates a constitutional ban on government officials endorsing religion.

The day of prayer, held each year on the first Thursday of May, creates a "hostile environment for nonbelievers, who are made to feel as if they are political outsiders," the lawsuit said.

Interesting approach to cite what sounds like a hostile work environment claim.

All I can say is that I'm praying that my grant reviewed last week received a fundable score.

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Unsolicited advice on unsolicited advice: geography and the academic job search and the etiquette of turning down offers in places you don't want to live

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 10:08:32 -0500

DrDrA just posted on a currently 37-comment-long thread of a post by PhysioProf at DrugMonkey based on a quote from a post by Dr Brazen Hussy (opening sentence almost as long and convoluted as the title, eh?).

The short summary: postdocs and other academic job candidates are disqualifying themselves from even applying for certain positions because:

1. they don't feel they meet the job description in the ad

2. the job is at a "lesser" institution or department

3. the job is in a place (they think) they'd never want to live

4. they'd feel bad about turning down a position at a place they know they'd never want to be.

First things first: in this climate, academic job candidates are lucky to be offered faculty positions anywhere. Community colleges big and small, Research I universities, desolate field stations of major universities, #24 of a 24-institution state university system, Bob Jones University. . .anywhere.

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DonorsChoose: you can donate $1.5 million without spending a penny

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:18:35 -0500

As I alluded to in the previous post, many science bloggers like us are currently running challenges to readers to donate to projects at DonorsChoose.org.

This great organization has been a sponsoring clearinghouse for all kinds of educational projects proposed by US public schoolteachers, many of which are very basic activities for which public funds are not available, then donors like you and I get to choose to whom we wish to send a few doubloons.

Independently of the ScienceBlogs drive, I just learned that American Express has selected DonorsChoose as five finalists who are competing for a $1.5 million donation from them. All you need to do is vote for DonorsChoose; you don't even need to be an American Express cardmember - here's the message I received:

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Yes, we're doing DonorsChoose, too!

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:42:41 -0500

I am completely crushed, hammered, and otherwise incapacitated at work right now - apologies to readers who are looking for some natural products and pharmacology wisdom. It is in my brain but just not making it into pixels right now.

In the meantime, I did want to let readers know that we are participating for our 3rd year in the DonorsChoose.org Blogger Challenge here at ScienceBlogs. More later on the program and my interests, past experiences, etc.

In the meantime, you can check out some of the projects about which I am passionate at:

Terra Sigillata's "More Abel To Do Science" Blogger Challenge

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Melamine and cyanuric acid revisited

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:02:45 -0500

This morning's post from Molecule of the Day reminds me to ask "cyanuric acid question."

With the recent adulterations with melamine of Chinese milk and milk products (like White Rabbit chocolates) and foods with other milk-derived ingredients, we wonder if we will ultimately hear that a compound from fertilizer, cyanuric acid, is part of the mix.

Melamine is a cheap chemical that gives a false positive in typical protein assays; therefore, it can be used to make food appear to contain more protein than it actually does. You'll often hear of cyanuric acid being referred to as a pool chemical as it helps stabilize chlorine donors in the sun, but it is often used as a nitrogen source in fertilizers. It tends to concentration in wheat gluten and that's how it may end up together with melamine in some food products.

What is not mentioned too often in the press is that melamine alone is remarkably safe - an FDA report notes that the oral dose required to kill 50% of test rats, or LD₅₀, is 3161 mg/kg body weight - an astronomical dose. Cyanuric acid is even less toxic, with a reported LD₅₀ of 7700 mg/kg. While the LD₅₀ is a single-dose, acute toxicity test, even prolonged daily dosing of either compound is relatively safe with a no-observed-adverse-effect-level (known as NOAEL) of 63 mg/kg daily for 13 weeks in rats.

So, while you don't want to ingest either compound unnecessarily, they become much more problematic when combined. Melamine and cyanuric acid polymerize and precipitate out in the kidney, causing renal failure and death. In May 2007, I posted on one of the best journalism stories on the topic, by David Brown at the Washington Post, who wrote on the pet food contamination episodes then.

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But if Tina Fey were the VP pick. . .

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:10:44 -0500

My apologies, dear readers, for having little time to write proper natural products content.

I just got home and was watching Olbermann with the Family Pharmboy where clips from Tina Fey's faux Katie Couric interview were mashed up with Sarah Palin's actual one. (See Orac for the SNL clips).

Pharmboy: I wish Tina Fey were the Republican VP pick.

PharmGirl: I think Tina Fey should have been the Republican candidate.

P.S. I would donate to the McCain campaign if they let Sheril Kirshenbaum debate Sarah Palin.

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The Friday Fermentable: Don't Harsh on Palin Syrah

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:11:29 -0500

I received this tip earlier in the week from a former PharmD student and Pharmboy lab alum who now lives in the SF Bay area. In saving it for The Friday Fermentable, I am now just another of the literally hundreds of media outlets covering the story.

If you haven't heard, there is a Chilean organic winery called Palin (but pronounced, 'pay-LEEN') that makes an organic Syrah, a lovely french wine grape.

I want to give credit (since the rest of the media hasn't) to San Francisco wine industry veteran, Amy Monroe, a marketing and sales associate at Ridge Vineyards, one of my favorite but now overpriced makers of single-vineyard zinfandel (sorry, Amy).

Monroe, it turns out, was who first informed the Serious Eats blog about this wine. Palin Syrah has been selling quite well by the glass when first offered this past July by Chris Tavelli's Yield Wine Bar. However, sales plummeted since McCain selected as his running mate the Alaska governor with the inverted name.

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Looking for a good biotechnology video targeting HS students

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:35:00 -0500

Any of you working in academic programs that offer forensic sciences training are well aware that CSI has been a boon this multidisciplinary area of biology, chemistry, engineering and materials sciences.

However, we don't yet have any television programs glorifying a career in pharmacology or biotechnology.

I've just spent a few hours on YouTube, BSCS, Bio-Rad, and a bunch of other science education sites but I can't find what I am looking for.

What I need: A 10-12 minute video for high school students that demonstrates career opportunities in biotechnology and/or the biologicals side of drug development. Free links are great but I'm very happy to pay a price for something that is good. Please leave suggestions in the comments below.

By the way, while looking at the BSCS site I came across a fantastic five-minute preview for their video, "Drug Abuse, Addiction, and the Adolescent Brain." This program (details here) was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the DVD and 120-page instruction manual are available later this month for only the price of shipping and handling.

(For those who do not know of the 50-year-old, non-profit Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) organization in Colorado Springs, CO, I have sung their praises previously and encourage that anyone interested in science education visit their site at http://www.bscs.org.)

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ScienceOnline'09: a special message to the pseudonymous blogger

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:36:41 -0500

As you may have heard elsewhere, the third annual major (and free) US science blogging conference, ScienceOnline'09, began accepting registrations last Monday. The meeting will be held 16-18 January 2009 in Research Triangle Park, NC, USA.

As of 10 am EDT today, there are already 78 registrants on the way to a cap of 225-ish. However, I have noted that only one registrant is listed on the wiki under a pseudonym.

This is a special message to my kindred spirits who write under a pseudonym and are wondering how in the heck they can go to such a great communications extravaganza and bloggy bonding bellwether without blowing their cover.

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Bush administration adopts NIH plan to shorten applications

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:16:22 -0500

I had to laugh, through my tears of course, that the Bush administration's bill requesting $700 billion for the Treasury Department to purchase failing mortgage assets is not even three pages long.

Where did the idea come from for such a concise funding request???

Those of us with NIH research funding received e-mails last week on the outcome of "Enhancing Peer Review," a year-long effort by the funding agency to "fund the best science, by the best scientists, with the least amount of administrative burden."

One of the outcomes garnering the greatest attention has been the proposal to reduce the application page-limit of the R01 from 25 pages to 12 pages. This code, R01, is the NIH's term for the bread-and-butter, investigator-initiated research grant that is the basis for any academic biomedical research career and the primary metric for promotion and tenure. The R01 generally provides $250,000 of support per year for up to five years; while this sounds like a great deal of money, one must pay part of one's salary plus two to four individuals in the lab, plus a fringe benefit rate of 20-35% as prescribed by one's institution, plus any materials and operational costs (yes, research associates and postdocs: the university tells you that they pay your retirement and benefits but it is actually your boss who earned the grant from NIH).

Many words have been spilled elsewhere to note that the shortened proposal length will disproportionately place junior investigators at an disadvantage since senior investigators can replace pages with reference citations that they have been doing technique X since the Magna Carta.

But hey, even 12 pages for $250,000 per year is a good deal. Even if one considers a total project period of $1.25 million, that's just over $104,000 per page (yes, I'm not getting into the other 50 or more pages of supplemental information required.)

In contrast, the Wall Street rescue bill is even more direct: $233 billion per page (and that's an underestimate since it is less than three pages.) Assuming that one page is 250 words, that's $933 million perword.

Hence, I believe that NIH overestimated the page limit for their $1.25 million grant applications.

A simple comma would be more than enough.

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More fallout from New Mexico garbage truck E. coli-gate - up from the comments

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 08:22:52 -0500

Here's an update on E. coli-gate in Tularosa, NM:

Okay, so it's more than fluid - it's about a pint of sludge left in front of each house where the garbage truck stopped. But this is ridiculous:

[Tularosa resident Ken] Riedlinger took samples from the sludge puddle to the Diagnostic and Technology Center in Alamogordo and they found a huge amount of E. coli, he said.

"The upper tray reported it's infinite, the numbers were too great to count," Riedlinger said. "This is massive, massive E. coli. This is deadly stuff."

E. coli is a bacterium found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded animals, Riedlinger said, reading from an Internet report. Some strains of E. coli can lead to infection and death if ingested.

We here at Terra Sigillata World Headquarters were fortunate to have been visited by, not a garbage truck, but rather a couple of commenters who spoke with great authority on the issues at hand.

I first saw that jre from Lyons, Colorado, also commented at the KRQE-TV website but then also left a comment here:

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Dr Ernest Ludwig Eliel (1921 - 2008)

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 19:28:46 -0500

Dr Ernest Eliel, a past-president of the American Chemical Society, passed away in Chapel Hill, NC, on Thursday evening. Dr Eliel was 86.

His obituary notes:

Born December 28, 1921, in Cologne, Germany, Dr. Eliel was the son of the late Oskar and Luise Tietz Eliel. He moved to the United States in 1946, and received a Ph.D degree from the University of IL at Urbana-Champaign in 1948. Dr. Eliel lived in South Bend, IN, where he taught at the University of Notre Dame from 1948 until 1972, at which time he moved to Chapel Hill, where he was the W.R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received the North Carolina Award in Science in 1986, and received an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from Duke University in 1983 and from Notre Dame in 1990.

He is survived by his wife, Eva Schwarz Eliel; his daughters, Ruth Eliel and Carol Eliel both of Los Angeles, CA; and his grandsons, Ben and Sam Muller.

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E. coli in fluid dripping from New Mexico garbage truck

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 13:05:37 -0500

Dear PharmMom,

Your daughter-in-law found this one on your local TV news station:

TULAROSA, N. M. (KRQE-KBIM) - Fluid leaking onto city streets from a contract garbage truck has tested positive for the E. coli bacteria, according to the town's mayor.

Alamo Disposal has been picking up the trash for many in Tularosa for the last three years. Recently resident and city officials noticed something leaking from a truck into the middle of the street.

Tularosa Mayor Ray Córdova then inspected the vehicle and smelled something extremely foul coming from it. That's when he told residents to take samples of the fluid so he could send it off to a lab for testing.

Those tests came back positive for the E. coli bacteria. . .

. . .On Thursday Alamo Disposal owner Art Cardiel said the leak came from a crack in the truck. However he also said believes the E. coli is coming from the bacteria in people's trash and not the truck itself.

"In this area, a lot of people grow their own fruit because there's a lot of water," Cardiel said. "Now how am I supposed to have any control over what I put in my truck that comes out of their trash cans?"

"I'm abhorred about it," Córdova said. "I don't like it, and I don't want it. . .

. . ."I spoke to him on the phone and said this has got to stop," Córdova added. "I said can't even allow your trucks into the city limits if that's what they're doing."

The New Mexico Environmental Department has given the owner 10 days to fix the crack in his truck.

But the mayor and trustees will meet on Sept. 23 to decide if they want to terminate the contract.

There have been no reports of any residents coming down with E. coli from the fluid.

Two sentences: 1) The E. coli is coming from the dog and cat poo that is dumped into household trash. 2) The fluid is harmless unless you drink it or put it on a piece of fruit.

The article is currently followed by 15 comments of various degrees of comedic creativity. For example, when has anyone not smelled a foul odor coming from a garbage truck?

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