terrasig
Posts by this author
November 11, 2007
I've been giving a fair bit of thought to moving my laboratory back to Mac computers. I had a superb, Windows-savvy postdoc in the late 90s who convinced me to go to PC machines because the choice made our grant money go further. But I miss the elegant simplicity of Macs and, as an amateur…
November 10, 2007
As a pharmacy professor, I've been surprised at how few blogs out there are written by pharmacists or pharmacy students. In my subjective observations, there are tons of blogs written by physicians and nurses. There are about 200,000 registered pharmacists in the US, about one-fourth the number…
November 9, 2007
We were asked recently by our ScienceBlogs hosts:
Is there a 'typical ScienceBlogs reader'? Who are these people? Why do they read Sb? What do they get out of it?
From my comments, e-mails, and traffic patterns, most of you have advanced degrees and are reading from universities, drug companies, US…
November 8, 2007
My wife just reminded me that PharmKid wanted us to buy her Aqua Dots a week or two ago.
The WSJ Health Blog nicely summarizes a New York Times article on the recall of the toy beads because their ingestion releases the CNS suppressant, GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyrate), from a precursor present in the…
November 8, 2007
About 10 days ago, I wrote a post on my thoughts regarding gender issues in science and medicine. In the post, I made note of the recent recruitment of Nancy Andrews, MD, PhD, from Harvard to become the new medical school dean at Duke University. In my post, I noted:
What would normally be a…
November 7, 2007
Okay, here's one final update on our drive to raise DonorsChoose.org funds for K-12 teachers to conduct projects in their classrooms.
An e-mail came in today from Charles Best, the Bronx schoolteacher who established DonorsChoose:
Thanks in great part to the attention ScienceBlogs generated, we…
November 7, 2007
Orac's recent post, A Real Death By Homeopathy, led me to dig through the archives at my old blog and reprint one of my first posts, this one from 6 January 2006. As a natural products researcher, I often see homeopathy associated with herbal medicines, the latter of which has often been the…
November 5, 2007
Just a quick post today following from an interesting comment by lindata on my post about gender in science and the Scientiae blog carnival.
lindata points out that blinding evaluators from the identity of musicians during auditions has resulted in increased representation of women in symphonies -…
November 3, 2007
During the week, I got too tied up to mention that one of our posts on thinking about gender in science and medicine got picked up by Yami McMoots at Green Gabbro for the 13th edition of the Scientiae blog carnival.
Scientiae "is a blog carnival that compiles posts written about the broad topic…
November 2, 2007
For new readers, The Friday Fermentable is our fun end-of-week feature devoted to the fruits of biochemical processes: wine and beer. I am fortunate to have a senior and more well-traveled colleague, Erleichda, who shares with us his wine escapades as accompanied by his beloved Sweetpea.…
October 31, 2007
Welcome, Reader: This post was updated on Halloween 2009 to remedy linkrot and add an interesting tidbit on the famous Macbeth passage. As it is likely you ended up here via a search engine, click here to go to the updated post.
Have you ever wondered, perhaps on 31 October, why witches are…
October 30, 2007
I chose not to plague you with incessant reminders to contribute to our drive to raise funds for projects at DonorsChoose.org - where public school teachers propose class projects and you decide which ones to fund. Just one post at kickoff and another halfway through. We just completed the drive…
October 29, 2007
Perhaps you've stumbled on this post late at night while tending to a child suffering from a cold.
Well, I've been reading a fair bit lately about the 18-19 October meeting of the FDA's joint meeting of their Nonprescription Drug and Pediatric Advisory Committees, trying to make sense about calls…
October 29, 2007
The Scientiae blog carnival has been soliciting posts for their November edition on "talking to yourself." Zuska brought this theme to the attention of some of us guy bloggers and carnival host Yami at Green Gabbro elaborated as follows:
...the past few Scientiae carnivals have been composed…
October 29, 2007
The always-insightful blog commenter, PhysioProf, had a terrific post yesterday on DrugMonkey about managing the various types of trainees in a research laboratory.
Some are focused on just doing interesting science. Some are working towards the goal of eventually achieving scientific independence…
October 27, 2007
This message has now appeared on the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting site:
UPDATE: Southern California Fires & Annual Meeting
As Neuroscience 2007 approaches, SfN is monitoring the fires in the greater San Diego County area very closely and we continue to be in regular contact with area…
October 26, 2007
Over at the WSJ Health Blog, Ron Winslow breaks the news that Jerry Bishop has passed away from lung cancer at age 76.
Winslow is an outstanding sci/med journalist in his own right and provides us with a detailed retrospective of Bishop's career and his role as a science writing mentor. In his 42…
October 24, 2007
We wrote a few days ago on the disappointing discontinuation of Pfizer's Exubera, the first inhaled insulin product.
The always-insightful Dr Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline has an excellent commentary on this case, including his own take on the futility of putting lipstick on a pig:
1. Marketing isn…
October 24, 2007
Update 27 October:
For those of you landing on this post via search engines, this message has now appeared on the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting site:
UPDATE: Southern California Fires & Annual Meeting
As Neuroscience 2007 approaches, SfN is monitoring the fires in the greater San…
October 22, 2007
Sci/Med blogging is an interesting pastime. You can spend a tremendous amount of time writing a post and get two comments and 30 total viewers, or you can write a brief post about your daughter asking where helium comes from and get many more commenters and nearly a thousand viewers.
Clearly,…
October 19, 2007
In a post the other day, we noted that the semi-synthetic natural product, ixabepilone, approved for advanced breast cancer was derived from a soil bacterium. Colleague PharmCanuck reminded us that the soil is not a new source for drugs: the anthracyclines, daunorubicin and doxorubicin, are…
October 18, 2007
From the University of Alberta, here comes this shocking finding:
In a study published in The Journal of Sport Behavior, researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton examined the relationships among perceived athletic competence, peer acceptance and loneliness in elementary school children…
October 18, 2007
Scott Hensley at the WSJ.com Health Blog had a banner day today with the sad withdrawal by Pfizer of their inhaled insulin product, Exubera. When I was a pharmacy professor in the mid-1990s, we shared Pharma's optimism that an inhaled insulin product would be a godsend for diabetes patients who…
October 17, 2007
So, PharmK'er and I were at the originator of the chicken sandwich and she wanted a balloon. She then asked why said balloon was floating. Dad was safe in explaining how helium is lighter than the nitrogen-oxygen-carbon dioxide mixture we breathe.
Then came the killer:
"Daddy, where does the…
October 16, 2007
As we discussed here yesterday, ixabepilone, a semi-synthetic anticancer drug derived from a soil bacterium was up for review by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Just over a half hour ago the manufacturer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, announced that the drug has indeed been approved for the…
October 16, 2007
These aren't the 1920s. If you want to get your remedy approved as a drug, you've got to abide by the rules everyone else plays by. From the FDA press release:
At FDA's request, U.S. marshals have seized about $71,000 worth of products from Florida-based FulLife Natural Options Inc. after the…
October 15, 2007
Perhaps not a cure but certainly another critical tool in the anticancer armamentarium.
If you've ever read our introduction to the left in my profile as to why this blog is called Terra Sigillata, you'd know that the first trademarked drug was dirt itself (or soil to be exact). Terra Sigillata…
October 14, 2007
Yesterday we spoke a bit on the progress of our DonorsChoose blogger challenge to raise funds that will support teacher projects in underserved areas to "Save the Science." Before joining this effort a year-and-a-half ago, I had not heard of DonorsChoose but I knew it was a great idea as soon as I…
October 13, 2007
Well, I've really got to hand it to Terra Sig readers, some of the most thoughtful and generous folks I've come across. Our "Save the Science" blogger challenge at DonorsChoose now stands at $1,881, 47% of the way toward our $4,000 goal.
For those reading for the first time, DonorsChoose.org is a…
October 12, 2007
Vote for Shelley!
Welcome readers, I am Dr John Jacob Abel, namesake of the proprietor of this blog and The Father of American Pharmacology. Among my many scientific and educational accomplishments was my establishment of the first American Department of Pharmacology at the University of Michigan…