terrasig | July 21, 2008I was originally going to let this one lie since I was so late to the game: Jacob Goldstein at WSJ's Health Blog picked up on a recent NEJM perspective paper by Harvard Medical School Dean for Medical Education, Jules L Dienstag, MD, describing the need and justification for re-examining the pre-med curriculum. In the article, Dienstag notes that the current requirement of 1 year of biology, 2 years of chemistry (including organic chemistry), 1 year of physics and, in some cases, 1 year of mathematics, might be out of touch with today's required focus on human biology.
Dienstag notes:…
terrasig | July 21, 2008Go on over and offer your best wishes to Dr. Ventii.
She was just awarded her Ph.D. in cancer biochemistry from Emory University in Atlanta.
Karen writes the blog, Science to Life.
Congratulations, Karen!
terrasig | July 21, 2008In my previous post on race-based vitamins where I invoked the bitingly satirical publication, The Onion, I noted something funny about their frontpage photograph that accompanied the article, Man Returns To Place Of Birth To Mate. BTW, it's quite a clever article, as usual:
TWIN FALLS, ID--In one of nature's most stirring and mysterious rituals, human male Michael Forrester journeyed back to his place of birth Monday in order to pair off, reproduce, and ensure the propagation of his species. . .
. . .With his readiness to mate signaled by a loss of hair around the crown and a swelling of…
terrasig | July 20, 2008[Posted originally on 19 July but updated to include more information on BiDil]
DrugMonkey alerted me to this gem at Light-skinned-ed Girl on a company called GenSpec Labs who are marketing, African American-, Hispanic-, and Caucasian-focused vitamin supplements.
Seriously. I thought this was a link to The Onion.
The GenSpec promotion is a completely asinine and repulsive marketing exploitation of a concept that, surprisingly, often has some pretty good science behind it. But it's also very typical of the dietary supplement industry to take a little science and come up with some snake oil…
terrasig | July 18, 2008Among my favorite wines are those made from old-vine zinfandel, defined as vines with an age of greater than 50 years. Immigrants to the US from Italy, as well as Croatia and Eastern Europe, planted vines in various parts of California over 100 years ago, well before systematic irrigation.
Most of these old, untamed vines were ripped out when the California wine industry exploded in the 1970s and were supplanted with nicely manicured and trellised vines possessing a more defined genetic heritage (and much greater yields per acre). The wily old zin vines that remain are true survivors,…
terrasig | July 17, 2008Arachnologist and diplopodologist Dr Jason E Bond at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC, is most recently well-known for naming a spider (Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi) after Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, Neil Young.
Kristin Day of The Daily Reflector is now reporting that Professor Bond has agreed to name a spider after Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's host of "The Colbert Report."
When news emerged in May that Bond had named a species of trapdoor spider after Neil Young, the biologist could not escape Colbert's web:
"Where's my spider? I have lots of animals named after me: turtles,…
terrasig | July 16, 2008While I threaten to come back to real blogging, let me direct you to Orac's recent post on the loss of their family dog, Echo - the dog who ate corn off the cob (YouTube evidence therein).
Orac is a great writer but a lot of you know him mostly from his expertise in cancer medicine and in decrying all kids of pseudoscience. He may also seem on the surface to be a tough, unflappable medical professional, as one might expect from any high-powered academic surgeon.
However, I've had the pleasure of getting to know Orac personally and will divulge that he is really a sweetheart of a guy. And as…
terrasig | July 14, 2008A convergence of personal and professional issues have left me little or no time for blogging the last week or so. But many thanks to you for checking in here and even e-mailing to say hi. I actually have a couple of good science topics in the hopper but haven't been able to execute them fully. But as Arnold once said, I'll be back.
Let me also express my gratitude to my research and wine mentor, and stealth co-blogger, Erleichda, for his great Friday Fermentable column about wines of the Northern Italy Lake Country.
In the meantime, check out the DrugMonkey-recommended post from…
terrasig | July 11, 2008Another Wine Experience: A Romp thru Northern Italy's Lake Country
By Erleichda (about the author)
We touched down very early in Milan on what, for all eight of us, would mark the beginning of our hiking week in the Lake Country of northern Italy, a destination we had chosen after last year's successful Lot Valley (France) hiking experience. Sweetpea had to crash as she is circadian rhythm-challenged (easily jet lagged) while the rest of us got our leg muscles warmed up by walking to the Duomo and then climbing up to its roof for a great view of the city. By the time we walked to La Scala…
terrasig | July 7, 2008Well, I didn't exactly plan to break my silence with a non-science post but a couple of you asked if I had any comments on the passing of Senator Helms. Frankly, I was already going into the US Independence Day weekend with a bit of melancholia, feeling very much like the Philadelphia Inquirer's Chris Satullo in his not-so-glorious-Fourth essay.
Then Jesse Helms died on the 4th and I had to hear about "the passing of a great patriot," and any number of hypocritical invocations of God ("America has lost a great friend, but Heaven has gained another of the great cloud of witnesses. We stand on…
terrasig | July 3, 2008Well, you readers here really know how to draw attention to an issue. We're not a high-traffic blog but those of you who read regularly are quite thoughtful, insightful, and, now, influential.
Our little post the other day on the application of the ideal gas law in discussing the NPR/StoryCorps segment on the exploding bra of a now-94-year-old woman caught the attention of StoryCorps Senior Producer, Michael Garofalo. Mr Garofalo wished to respond to our post and several commenters who noted that the exploding bra story was the stuff of urban legend, such that snopes.com traced back to a…
terrasig | June 29, 2008If you didn't catch NPR's StoryCorps feature this week, you missed a charming doozy:
As a young woman, Betty Jenkins received a gift from her mother that was meant to attract the attention of young men. But as Jenkins, who is now 94, tells her niece, the attention she got wasn't the kind she was expecting.
"I was very skinny, and I didn't have any curves. I guess my mother got kind of worried, because she didn't think I had enough boyfriends," Jenkins said.
The gift was an inflatable bra that was designed to enhance its wearer's figure. A straw-like tube was used to inflate pads in the cups.…
terrasig | June 28, 2008The childlike wonder, creativity, observations and questioning are all qualities that we scientists try to bring to our research and teaching. The observations of a child may seem insignificant to some but I am amazed when PharmKid comes up with questions or associations that I cannot explain. I don't blog about this much unless it has something to do with scientific queries, such as our top-traffic answer and follow-up to her question about where helium comes from.
The latest question was fed by us recently adopting a dog and driving past a Veterans Administration Medical Center. I tried…
terrasig | June 25, 2008When I first heard that 24-year-old British singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse was hospitalized with early stage emphysema I said "what?" DrugMonkey, a drug-abuse research colleague, has a terrific post up now on the link between Winehouse's crack cocaine use, possible genetic predisposition, and the emergence of early-onset emphysema.
While sad to see a very young person so afflicted, I tend to be fascinated scientifically by these odd medical cases involving natural products - often drugs of abuse.
I'm also particularly impressed by Amy Winehouse's tremendous vocal talents and songwriting…
terrasig | June 23, 2008John Lynch let us know last evening about Carlin's passing on Sunday. I think you'll find many people sharing their favorite George Carlin moments today. I found him to be remarkably observant on how language is used to deal with social and political issues ("shell shock" became "battle fatigue" which then became "post-traumatic stress disorder').
The man also clearly had some interests in pharmacology, particularly natural products - from the AP report:
Despite his reputation as unapologetically irreverent, Carlin was a television staple through the decades, serving as host of the "…
terrasig | June 18, 2008This link is just to quickly follow up on yesterday's post, "FDA Warns Individuals and Firms to Stop Selling Fake Cancer 'Cures'." The US FDA has specifically listed those companies and individuals as well as their specific products that were cited in yesterday's action:
125 Fake Cancer "Cures" Consumers Should Avoid
And for more information to share with your family, friends, patients, colleagues, etc:
Beware of Online Cancer Fraud
This latter post is of great general value for the lay public to detect red flags for fraudulent cancer treatment or prevention products as well as some general…
terrasig | June 17, 2008Perhaps the #1 reason I started this blog was to distinguish therapeutic natural products (i.e., single chemical entities derived from plants, microorganisms, etc.) from questionably-marketed herbal and non-herbal dietary supplements. After doing research and teaching in this area for at least 13 or so years, I have found that patients with cancer and HIV/AIDS are most often preyed upon by unscrupulous marketers.
Hence, I was delighted to see this action from the US FDA today. I can add nothing more to their press release other than my thanks and encouragement to do more in this regard:…
terrasig | June 16, 2008My blog posts seem to run in themes - sort of like when after you buy a car, you see other people driving that model all over the place.
Yesterday we posted about homicide charges being leveled against an unlicensed California chiropractor operating a clinic out of his garage.
That post garnered a large number of hits from a related story in the Canadian National Post, where our blog was linked under "More from the Web."
An Alberta woman has launched a $529-million class-action lawsuit against provincial chiropractors after a neck adjustment allegedly left her paralyzed. Sandra Gay Nette, of…
terrasig | June 15, 2008This is not at all funny but I guess ironic might be a better word.
The science blogosphere has been alight this past week with the recognition of naturopathy by the state of Minnesota as well as other aspects of alternative medicine.
As if the risks of going to an alternative practitioner are not enough, here is an alarming case from Sacramento, CA, of a patient dying at the hands of someone posing as a chiropractor:
Authorities said Antonio Arellano, 76, was taken into custody on suspicion of homicide after operating his clinic in the 4000 block of Washington Avenue.
On Tuesday, a 66-year-…
terrasig | June 14, 2008As promised awhile back, my blogging frequency has dropped off a bit as I tend to some more time-consuming details in my meatspace existence.
I've also missed some fabulous posts around the blogosphere. I wanted to direct Terra Sig readers to a moving yet data-driven essay by Professor PZ Myers at the University of Minnesota at Morris, better known as the blogger who writes Pharyngula. PZ is a terrific writer but this post is particularly excellent.
I'll be back shortly with something meaningful.