Recently, it was discovered that halving the typical 10 day course of antibiotics for ear infections did not work in infants. Now, if you have ever worked with bacteria, this makes some sense. The 5 day course was insufficient to kill all of the bacteria, so patients suffered a relapse, likely helping to create resistant bacteria in the process. However, this was likely an important question to ask. It is now known that medicines are processed differently in children of various ages and adult men process medicine differently than adult women. Are antibiotics processed differently in infants? How long of a course is necessary in infants with ear infections? The standard course is 10 days, but with all the fun side-effects of antibiotics, can a shorter course be used? The answer was no, but the study was well done. As soon as it became clear that the shortened course was ineffective, the study was ended and all patients switched back to the standard course.
Of course, another source of antibiotic resistance is over-prescription of antibiotics. An interesting study would be to compare the effectiveness of a standard antibiotic course vs. a palliative course of painkillers. The current belief is that the majority of ear infections are bacterial, but some are viral. It would be interesting to test how effective antibiotics are. This is not casting aspersions on antibiotics. An important part of science is testing assumptions. If doctors had not researched whether a lumpectomy with adjuvant radiation was as successful a treatment as a radical mastectomy, millions of women would have undergone a brutal and disfiguring surgery that was an overzealous treatment. Asking questions is important in science and medicine, regardless of whether or not old assumptions are proven correct or overturned.
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Thursday, December 15, 2016
What's in my cup 15 Dec 2016
Today I'm enjoying a cup of white peony tea from Three Rivers Tea. It is a lovely white tea with delicious floral notes. Even accidentally leaving the tea steeping while playing an interesting board game called Circular Reasoning didn't ruin the deliciousness of the tea. It didn't wind up tasting burnt or bitter. This would be a great tea for the grandfather style of tea brewing, since it can stand a long steep and the leaves are fairly large.
Friday, December 9, 2016
The Issue with "Happy Holidays"
Once again, we are in the Christmas season, and once again certain groups are ranting about the "War on Christmas" and attacking phrases like "happy holidays" and "season's greetings" as being anti-Christian. Personally, there is nothing wrong with either of those phrases, even if you are an evangelical Christian, as long as they are being used in an inclusionary instead of an exclusionary manner. The crucial problem is the subtlety of that distinction.
Having watched a lot of PBS kids programming lately (thank you, little monster), it is amazing the lengths certain shows go to avoid saying Christmas or Merry Christmas, when it is clear the episode is supposed to a Christmas episode. For some shows they make it work, when there is no reason the characters should be celebrating Christmas like on Dinosaur Train or Nature Cat, however, for others like Thomas and Friends, the bending-over-backward to avoid saying Christmas gets quite painful and breaks the world. I now understand what the evangelicals complain about, even if I think they exaggerate the problem and apply it to areas where it isn't a problem.
I personally prefer using "happy holidays" or "season's greetings" on my Christmas cards and in general, because I am trying to wish people a Merry Christmas AND a Happy New Year in the same breath. For part of my family, I am also adding Happy Hannukah. There is nothing wrong with the phrase when used in this manner and I wish people would see that instead of issuing a blanket statement that using "happy holidays" is PC BS. It isn't and should be used in an inclusionary manner. At the same time, if what you are doing is a Christmas party or a Christmas episode, just come out and say it, particularly if that is what the characters would be doing. Otherwise it can get quite annoying.
Having watched a lot of PBS kids programming lately (thank you, little monster), it is amazing the lengths certain shows go to avoid saying Christmas or Merry Christmas, when it is clear the episode is supposed to a Christmas episode. For some shows they make it work, when there is no reason the characters should be celebrating Christmas like on Dinosaur Train or Nature Cat, however, for others like Thomas and Friends, the bending-over-backward to avoid saying Christmas gets quite painful and breaks the world. I now understand what the evangelicals complain about, even if I think they exaggerate the problem and apply it to areas where it isn't a problem.
I personally prefer using "happy holidays" or "season's greetings" on my Christmas cards and in general, because I am trying to wish people a Merry Christmas AND a Happy New Year in the same breath. For part of my family, I am also adding Happy Hannukah. There is nothing wrong with the phrase when used in this manner and I wish people would see that instead of issuing a blanket statement that using "happy holidays" is PC BS. It isn't and should be used in an inclusionary manner. At the same time, if what you are doing is a Christmas party or a Christmas episode, just come out and say it, particularly if that is what the characters would be doing. Otherwise it can get quite annoying.
Tuesday, December 6, 2016
The Serendipity of Research
Often when writing grants or giving presentations, a lot of emphasis is made on research being translational, i.e. being able to take the discovery and turn it into medicine or find some other way to make it useful. This is distinguished from basic research, i.e. research for the sake of expanding knowledge. Part of the problem of emphasizing translational research is that research is blind. If you could sit down and predict perfectly the results of every experiment, it's not research, it's blindly following recipes. The most exciting words in scientific research are not "wow" or "eureka" but "huh, that's weird." That's when an experiment doesn't give the expected result. Most of those get filtered out by repeated experiments and troubleshooting, but not all do. Those are the fun results.
One of the classic "huh, that's weird" moments is of course the discovery of penicillin. Alexander Fleming went away on a summer holiday leaving a messy lab bench covered with staphylcoccus petri dishes and came back to find his plates contaminated with mold. Most researchers would just pitch a contaminated plate, but not Fleming. He had discovered lysozyme back in 1922, by investigating what a lot of doctors ignored. Fleming discovered that mucus contains an enzyme that can kill bacteria, which he named lysozyme. Fleming was also primed to believe that microbes secrete substances to kill other microbes. During World War I, Fleming noticed soldiers with deep wounds treated with antiseptics developed sepsis more often than soldiers not treated with antiseptics. Fleming discovered that while antiseptics were great for treating surface wounds, they could not reach the dangerous microbes in deep wounds and killed the helpful microbes near the surface. Fleming those knew that microbes were useful tools when fighting disease. Thus Fleming examined the plates, noticed the ring of dead bacteria surrounding the mold, and thus penicillin was discovered. Of course, Fleming said "that's funny," not "huh, that's weird" but the sentiment is the same. While it could be argued that Fleming wanted to find anti-microbial substances, he was not looking for one when it landed in his lap.
Another of my favorite "huh, that's weird" moments was the discovery of the atomic nucleus. The existence of atoms had been proposed by John Dalton in papers that he published in 1805. Then 7 years after discovering the electron in 1897, J. J. Thomson proposed a model of atomic structured dubbed the "plum pudding model" which proposed a diffuse cloud of positive charge with electrons scattered randomly throughout. As is the nature of science, different scientists started trying to disprove Thomson's theory of atomic structure. One of the laboratories that took up this task was Ernest Rutherford's at the University of Manchester. Under Rutherford's direction, Ernest Marsden and Hans Geiger set up an apparatus to fire alpha particles at a sheet of gold foil. If Thomson was correct, the alpha particles would pass straight through. Instead, some of the alpha particles seemed to ricochet, as if they had hit something. From these results Rutherford proposed a model of a small central core of positive charge with electrons orbiting around.
It is also impossible to know what discoveries will become important. Who would have thought that studying jellyfish bio-luminescence would lead to Green Fluorescent Protein, better known as GFP, an important tool in cellular biology used to tag cells and track gene expression. GFP was discovered in 1962 but wasn't used as a research tool until 1992. In 2008, the researchers responsible for its discovery and development as a research tool received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Taq polymerase is a similar example. No one would have guessed that studying how thermophilic bacteria can survive in high temperatures would lead to the crucial component for DNA polymerase chain reactions (PCR), the common way to amplify a small piece of DNA, used for everything from gene sequencing to detecting a murderer.
Science is not predictable. No one knows what the next great discovery will be or how it will be discovered. All science is important. Even research that earns an Ig Nobel or gets laughed at by Congress may prove vital to all of mankind. Science is important to fund and defend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysozyme
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutherford_model
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geiger%E2%80%93Marsden_experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plum_pudding_model
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom#First_evidence-based_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Shimomura
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fluorescent_protein
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_polymerase_chain_reaction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction
One of the classic "huh, that's weird" moments is of course the discovery of penicillin. Alexander Fleming went away on a summer holiday leaving a messy lab bench covered with staphylcoccus petri dishes and came back to find his plates contaminated with mold. Most researchers would just pitch a contaminated plate, but not Fleming. He had discovered lysozyme back in 1922, by investigating what a lot of doctors ignored. Fleming discovered that mucus contains an enzyme that can kill bacteria, which he named lysozyme. Fleming was also primed to believe that microbes secrete substances to kill other microbes. During World War I, Fleming noticed soldiers with deep wounds treated with antiseptics developed sepsis more often than soldiers not treated with antiseptics. Fleming discovered that while antiseptics were great for treating surface wounds, they could not reach the dangerous microbes in deep wounds and killed the helpful microbes near the surface. Fleming those knew that microbes were useful tools when fighting disease. Thus Fleming examined the plates, noticed the ring of dead bacteria surrounding the mold, and thus penicillin was discovered. Of course, Fleming said "that's funny," not "huh, that's weird" but the sentiment is the same. While it could be argued that Fleming wanted to find anti-microbial substances, he was not looking for one when it landed in his lap.
Another of my favorite "huh, that's weird" moments was the discovery of the atomic nucleus. The existence of atoms had been proposed by John Dalton in papers that he published in 1805. Then 7 years after discovering the electron in 1897, J. J. Thomson proposed a model of atomic structured dubbed the "plum pudding model" which proposed a diffuse cloud of positive charge with electrons scattered randomly throughout. As is the nature of science, different scientists started trying to disprove Thomson's theory of atomic structure. One of the laboratories that took up this task was Ernest Rutherford's at the University of Manchester. Under Rutherford's direction, Ernest Marsden and Hans Geiger set up an apparatus to fire alpha particles at a sheet of gold foil. If Thomson was correct, the alpha particles would pass straight through. Instead, some of the alpha particles seemed to ricochet, as if they had hit something. From these results Rutherford proposed a model of a small central core of positive charge with electrons orbiting around.
It is also impossible to know what discoveries will become important. Who would have thought that studying jellyfish bio-luminescence would lead to Green Fluorescent Protein, better known as GFP, an important tool in cellular biology used to tag cells and track gene expression. GFP was discovered in 1962 but wasn't used as a research tool until 1992. In 2008, the researchers responsible for its discovery and development as a research tool received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Taq polymerase is a similar example. No one would have guessed that studying how thermophilic bacteria can survive in high temperatures would lead to the crucial component for DNA polymerase chain reactions (PCR), the common way to amplify a small piece of DNA, used for everything from gene sequencing to detecting a murderer.
Science is not predictable. No one knows what the next great discovery will be or how it will be discovered. All science is important. Even research that earns an Ig Nobel or gets laughed at by Congress may prove vital to all of mankind. Science is important to fund and defend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysozyme
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutherford_model
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geiger%E2%80%93Marsden_experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plum_pudding_model
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom#First_evidence-based_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Shimomura
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fluorescent_protein
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_polymerase_chain_reaction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction
What's in my cup 6 December 2016 part 2
This afternoon I'm having Berkshire Afternoon from Gryphon's tea. It is a lovely upper 30s low 40s rainy day. I already had to be out once to take the little man to the doctor and treated myself to some afternoon tea to warm back up. This tea is deliciously malty with chocolate undertones and no astringency.
What's in my cup 6 December 2016
Today I steeped a tea I've had for a very long time, a loose-leaf Lipton Ceylon that I picked up in Japan. It's malty and astringent, but not too astringent for my tastes. Hubby usually needs to add milk.
Saturday, December 3, 2016
What's in my cup 3 Dec 2016
It's a different tea today, artisan black needle from Three Rivers Tea. This is a lovely yunnan black tea full of malty notes with very little astringency.
Friday, December 2, 2016
What's in my cup
Currently I am drinking Russian caravan from Gryphon's Tea in the morning. It is a nice brisk tea with very little of the smokiness traditionally associated with Russian caravan due to the absence of lapsang souchong. In the evening I have either genmaicha or chai latte tea made from powder. I'll start a new morning tea tomorrow.
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