terrasig | September 20, 2008Dr 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…
terrasig | September 20, 2008Dear 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…
terrasig | September 18, 2008Tom Levenson at The Inverse Square blog recently lost his uncle and godfather, Daniel D Levenson.
I've been lucky enough to meet Tom once and yet he still answers my e-mails. Beyond his current position as a prof in the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Tom is a prolific author and award-winning producer of several science documentaries.
This is what you get when a professional writer lovingly remembers a wonderful and influential man whose suffering has finally ended.
Tom asks that Uncle Dan be remembered by a memorial donation to Mazon.
terrasig | September 15, 2008The Japanese scientist who grew fascinated by fungi as a boy is one among five of this years' recipients of a Lasker Award. Endo was specifically given the Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award.
Dr Akira Endo first isolated the hypocholesterolemic compound, mevastatin or compactin, from Penicillium citrinum. Compactin was the forerunner to the 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme A reductase (HMG CoA reducatase) inhibitors. This fungal natural product gave rise to the cholesterol-lowering "statin" drugs. While not without risk of adverse events, this drug class is widely…
terrasig | September 15, 2008I'll be a little light on blogging this week so I'll mostly be sharing a couple of quick reads I've stumbled upon recently.
This one is presented in light of my post last week on National HBCU Week and the accompanying post from my colleague, DrugMonkey (whose referral generated even more discussion).
This tidbit is from the journalism and news production students of James Logan High School in Union City, CA:
"I always, always, always like mathematics." Marjorie Lee Browne.
Marjorie Lee Browne (9 Sept 1914-19 Oct 1979) was a notable mathematics educator, the second African-American woman to…
terrasig | September 14, 2008Oy vey! So this is how to handle them bloggers? Thanks for my morning chortle walking back from the driveway this morning with the Sunday New York Times:
And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor's career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.
"You should be ashamed!" Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. "Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!"
And how dare you exercise the First Amendment!
But PharmGirl just castigated me on putting this up, saying that we really need to get over the…
terrasig | September 12, 2008I can't believe that it's only been a year.
Back in March I wrote about the importance of local wine shops, community resources just as important as your library or local farmer. Therein I sang the praises of my local heros, Seth Gross and Craig Heffley, proprietors of Wine Authorities in Durham, NC, and their then-recent ink in Food & Wine magazine.
My latest Wine Authorities favorite is an unusual German Pinot Noir Spätlese from Weingut Schäfer in Mettelheim (US$18.99).
Yes. Red. German. A German Rhinehessen red. An overripe red. No kidding.
Their notes, accessible on their…
terrasig | September 11, 2008. . .and I thank you for your support.
I'm not a huge blog traffic addict and, in fact, I mostly keep a SiteMeter counter below because I get to see the geographical distribution of our readers. They have a great map feature where you can look at the locations of the last 100 or 500 hits and I love to see folks from Perth, Australia, Jawa Timur, Indonesia, or Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada.
At 1229 GMT on 10 Sept 2008, we received our 200,000th visitor - a reader from Truro, Nova Scotia - to whom I owe some Alexander Keith IPA (e-mail me to redeem your gift!).
After looking back at my original…
terrasig | September 11, 2008[Here is why I will always remember. This was posted here originally on 11 September 2006. ]
Let me tell you about John Michael Griffin, Jr.
Griff, as he was known in high school, was a friend of mine.
Late in the first half of our lives, he stood up for me physically and philosophically, for being a science geek. John's endorsement was the first time I was ever deemed cool for wanting to be a scientist.
Griff died an engineer and hero in the collapse of one of the World Trade Center towers five [seven] years ago today.
We lost touch almost twenty years before, but his kindness and…
terrasig | September 10, 2008Despite having to employ biophysical methods in my day job, I must admit my woeful understanding of physics as a discipline. I wasn't like my high school grease monkey friends using torque wrenches on their cars with Springsteenonian dedication and my lowest grade in undergrad came in physics. For that reason, I rarely have the opportunity to link to fellow ScienceBlogger, Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles. Prof Orzel was one of the earliest science bloggers, coming online in June, 2002.
Chad posted about being on the programme of a meeting in Waterloo, Ontario, entitled, "Science in the…
terrasig | September 9, 2008When I went away to college after the summer when MTV was first launched, I had never heard of the term, "Historically Black Colleges and Universities." But during the following summer while taking organic chemistry, I lived in a dorm with two visiting HBCU students who were doing internships at a local pharmaceutical company. The gentleman who I grew closest to had come from Hampton University (then-Hampton Institute) in Virginia.
As a Yankee born the same year as passage of US Civil Rights Act, I had not truly appreciated that African Americans, particularly in the South, had…
terrasig | September 7, 2008I just received a lovely e-mail from Dr Chris Patil, blogger at Ouroboros and postdoc fellow in the lab of the well-known aging researcher, Dr Judith Campisi at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Chris dialed me up to submit one of my posts to Hourglass, a monthly blog carnival he launched in July that focuses on the field of biogerontology. Chris used the celebration of his second blogiversary to establish the carnival.
Hourglass goes up on the 2nd Tuesday of each month and the next installment will be hosted on 9 September by Alvaro Fernandez over at SharpBrains. I told Chris that I'd…
terrasig | September 6, 2008If you ever have been so bored as to scroll down the blogroll on the sidebar to the left, you'll see a category of links for "Other Stuff I Care About." The Southern Law Poverty Center (SPLCenter) is amongst that stuff and the renewal form sitting beside me here at the home office tells me I've been a member since 1999.
The SPLCenter is a fabulous organization in Montgomery, Alabama, that was founded in 1971 by the civil rights attorneys, Morris Dees and Joe Levin. Their original mission was to fight racist, Neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic hate groups through litigation that caused the…
terrasig | September 6, 2008When one serves on NIH grant review panels, or study sections, one must now register with the US government as a government contractor in order to get reimbursement for hotel and meals, plus the staggering $200 honorarium for each day of the meeting (for which you have spent between two and four weeks of reading, writing, and prep time.)
As a result, you get on e-mail lists for all sorts of federal solicitations for bids on all kinds of projects, or "federal business opportunities." I chose not to opt out of these e-mails because, well, you just can't have enough e-mail, right?.
In all…
terrasig | September 5, 2008It wasn't triskaidekaphobia that kept me from submitting to the Cancer Research Blog Carnival - I just thought I hadn't written a useful cancer post in quite some time.
But thanks to Walter at Highlight Health, our discussion on the relevance of an article on in vitro antileukaemic activity of methadone was included in the proceedings.
Walter also has a very timely message to kick off the carnival:
Everyone knows that cancer is a devastating disease. What many people don't know is that cancer kills more than 1,500 people a day; that's one person every minute. Tonight, Stand Up To Cancer, a…
terrasig | September 4, 2008Today is the second anniversary of the passing of Steve Blackwell, a Midwestern transplant who came to the Sunshine State as a high school English teacher and became a fixture in the Florida folk music scene. My path crossed with Mr Blackwell in the months before his untimely departure from melanoma at age 58.
I detailed my connection with Mr Blackwell in this repost of my thoughts from the day of his memorial service. Mr Blackwell's daughter and other former bandmates continue performing as Still Friends. Steve's memory was also honored musically this past March with SteveFest '08 in Port…
terrasig | September 3, 2008You are an assistant professor in the biomedical sciences and are three or four years in, trying to really hammer on your productivity before the tenure dossier goes in a couple of years from now. Professor MegaMentor, editor of your society's second-tier journal (impact factor of 2.5), approaches you to write an invited review article on the state of your field. You take a look at the promotion and tenure guidelines for your institution and find that review articles are not counted as "original, peer-reviewed research publications."
Professor MegaMentor has been very good to you since she…
terrasig | August 28, 2008To coincide with the Nature Science Blogging 2008 conference this weekend in London, we present this guest post from Coracle, the away-from-the-bench scientist who writes the Science and Progress blog. I've long been a fan of Science and Progress and Coracle shares my love of natural products pharmacology and skeptical eye for alternative medicine.
If you're in London and see Coracle at the conference, please buy him a pint and send me the bill.
"Last Friday, April 16th, 1943, I was forced to interrupt my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon, being affected with a…
terrasig | August 28, 2008All of us at Terra Sig world headquarters are sending out hearty congratulations to the boys over at Deep Sea News - Peter Etnoyer, Craig McClain, and Kevin Zelnio - on the announcement of their September move to the Discovery Channel online.
I've had the good fortune of meeting all three gentlemen in person, even breaking bread with Craig. I can tell you that they are individually and collectively superb stewards of the deep sea and tireless promoters of conservation and habitat preservation. Best wishes to you fellas - we'll miss you but we'll keep reading (plus the Zelnio family is…
terrasig | August 28, 2008A couple of colleagues turned me on the other morning to a press release by researchers at the University of Warwick who recently published in PNAS that their data apparently overturns the Meyer-Overton Rule regarding solubility of a compound in olive oil and its propensity for crossing biological membranes. I'm having trouble understanding exactly why their conclusions are earth-shattering.
At the turn of the last century, Meyer (1899) and Overton (1901) independently conducted experiments to demonstrate that the longer the carbon chain of a molecule, the better it partitioned into olive…