terrasig | November 21, 2007 All the kool kids are keeping their eyes on the Polk County, Florida, school board and their contention that 'intelligent design' should be taught alongside evolution in their public schools.
Fortunately, several states have groups of concerned citizens who contend that actual science should be taught in schools, lest we continue to suffer as a society from the erosion of critical thinking skills.
Florida Citizens for Science (FCS, or FlCfS) is one of those valuable groups. Brandon Haught has been doing a terrific job keeping us apprised of local developments via the Florida Citizens for…
terrasig | November 20, 2007I wrote about the general issue of eyelash-enriching "cosmeceuticals" on my Terra Sigillata back in July. Increasing the number and thickness of eyelashes is not some hokey magical wish - it is a known side effect buried in the prescribing information for the prescription glaucoma drugs, bimatoprost (Lumigan®) and latanoprost (Xalatan®).
Last Friday, the US FDA seized a product called Age Intervention Eyelash at the San Jose facility of Jan Marini Skin Research, Inc., citing that the product contained an unapproved drug and could be harmful to the user's vision.
When composing my post in…
terrasig | November 19, 2007As we approach 100,000 visitors since joining ScienceBlogs I am amazed to still be getting 500-700 visits per month at the old home of Terra Sigillata, all without any promotion or new posts. The most-visited of the old posts is the following which appeared originally on 21 February 2006.
Much of humankind's experience with pharmacologically-active natural products has been through the mind-altering effects of plants used in religious ceremonies.
Today [21 Feb 2006], the US Supreme Court upheld a decision to permit a New Mexico sect of a Brazilian religious order to continue using an…
terrasig | November 17, 2007Readers who are busting their butts doing basic and drug development research in pharmaceutical companies don't need this kind of alleged behavior from upper management - from Jeanne Whalen at the Wall Street Journal (online yesterday and in today's print edition) following up on a story first reported in the Journal on 24 May 2007:
Over a period of several years, drug maker GlaxoSmithKline PLC was so concerned about a prominent physician's negative views of its diabetes drug that it engaged in a concerted effort to intimidate him and stifle his opinion, a report by the U.S. Senate Finance…
terrasig | November 16, 2007You just never know - some weeks you don't get The Friday Fermentable; other weeks you get two posts.
Well, several readers gave me the heads up this week about an NPR story about resveratrol supplements. You may remember that this is the chemical present in red wine that kills cancer cells in culture and, as we discussed here, extends the lifespan in yeast when used at extremely high concentrations.
Turns out that our analytical chemistry colleagues at ConsumerLab.com have revealed that a great many resveratrol supplements don't even come close to having the labeled amounts of the chemical…
terrasig | November 16, 2007Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!
Yes, the 15th of November has arrived as have thousands of cases of a fresh, fruity wine, the Beaujolais Nouveaux. Grapes that were on the vine just a few short months ago have been heroically converted into a wine that has traditionally been rushed to Paris, and around the world, from the Beaujolais appellation of France, part of Burgundy. Made from a variety of grape known as Gamay (or 'Gamay Noir à Jus Blanc' to purists), this tradition has spread far and wide with some California wineries getting into the act.
The most famous, and largest producer/…
terrasig | November 15, 2007No..it's a false alarm. [***or not - see note added at end of post]
But I had to do a double-take last night when reading my e-mail notification of the new HealthCentral newsletter with the subject line:
Celebrate Alzheimer's Awareness Month; How risky is your sexual behavior?
For the grammar police out there, this is a great example of the difference in meaning of a semi-colon vs. a colon. However, given the size of the print on my screen and my pending need for bifocals, I couldn't tell the difference.
Anyway, I blame the editors of the e-mail release for alarming me.
Or maybe it was…
terrasig | November 14, 2007...is the title of a Newsweek article by Jonathan Alter posted online last night that draws more attention to the Medicare restriction on reimbursements for radioimmunotherapeutic (RIT) drugs used to treat lymphomas. Surgical oncologist, Orac, and I have spoken about this issue in the last few days.
Alter admits his bias a bit, as he was diagnosed with mantle cell lymphoma back in 2004 and received RIT. Moreover, Alter's Newsweek colleague (and SoCal singer-songwriter), Jaime Reno, attributes RIT to his long-term remission.
The article opens as follows:
What if they found a cure for a…
terrasig | November 13, 2007I got sidetracked today with activities in that thing called the meat world. So, I can only refer you to a very nice roundup of expert medical blogging over at RevolutionHealth and Dr Val and The Voice of Reason blog.
Dr Val (Val Jones, M.D.) has been a frequent and thoughtful commenter around these parts and I find her monthly (or so) roundups to be as good as any other medical blog carnival, except that she picks all the entries.
Enjoy....back to writing for me.
terrasig | November 11, 2007The travesty has come true, according to Karl Schwartz and Betsy de Parry of Patients Against Lymphoma.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has gone ahead with their plans to slash by half reimbursements to hospitals for two radioimmunotherapy drugs. For many hospital, reimbursement rates will be lower than their acquisition costs. We discussed this possibility back in August but had thought that CMS administrators would acknowledge the outcry from the lymphoma survivor/advocacy community, not to mention very strong statements from ASCO (American Society of Clinical…
terrasig | November 11, 2007I'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 musician, would love to give GarageBand software a whirl.
So, I read with great interest that jazz saxophonist, Branford Marsalis, will be speaking tomorrow (12 Nov, 6:30 pm) to the Triangle Macintosh Users Group at the NC Mutual Life Building in Durham, North Carolina.
The program format will be similar…
terrasig | November 10, 2007As 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 of physicians so it's not as though pharmacists are terribly outnumbered by other healthcare professionals.
So, it was with great pleasure that I stumbled onto Secundum Artem via a comment by the author, N.B., in a thread on Respectful Insolence.
Secundum artem is a Latin phrase meaning "according…
terrasig | November 9, 2007We 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 federal agencies (including the military), and some newspapers and scientific publishers. While mostly American, a good many of you are from Canada, Great Britain, and Australia. Your age ranges from the early 20s to the early 60s. Many of you are practicing scientists, physicians, or other…
terrasig | November 8, 2007My 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 bead adhesive.
Yes, the product was manufactured in China, but it was distributed by a company in Toronto.
A recall has been ordered by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission.
The NYT article by Keith Bradsher has a great angle on how a scientist identified the GHB and GHB precursor after a case…
terrasig | November 8, 2007About 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 modestly newsworthy story for a dean who happened to be a man is instead noted in the press release and on the webpage as:
Andrews, 48, is the first woman to be appointed dean of Duke's School of Medicine and becomes the only woman to lead one of the nation's top 10 medical schools.
When I read that, I…
terrasig | November 7, 2007Okay, 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 made Internet history! During the month of October, readers of more than a hundred blogs gave $420,000 to classroom projects on DonorsChoose.org, benefiting 75,000 students. To put that in perspective, it took four months for the hugely successful Facebook causes application--with millions of users--…
terrasig | November 7, 2007Orac'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 source of beneficial pharmaceuticals. In sharp contrast, homeopathy is based on a faulty 19th century principle that is the direct opposite of dose-response pharmacology and I intended to comment briefly on the distinction, as stimulated by a misleading picture on the cover of one of my favorite print…
terrasig | November 5, 2007Just 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 - I had not been aware that this work has been going on for more than 30 years. Here is a quote from the 17 March 1997 issue of Business Week:
Starting in the 1970s, report Claudia Goldin of Harvard University and Cecilia Rouse of Princeton University, symphonies began to implement major revisions in…
terrasig | November 3, 2007During 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 of "women in STEM," (STEM=science, technology, engineering and mathematics)." My good friend here at ScienceBlogs, Zuska, encouraged a few of us boys to submit something on the inner dialogue we have about gender in our profession. I continued to be bewildered that women continue to be treated…
terrasig | November 2, 2007For 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. Everytime Erleichda posts, I put another pin on my world map of places I need to visit. The New Zealand Marlborough Valley is no exception. In fact, annotating his post with the winery websites showed me the incredibly beautiful country in which these wines were tasted. Enjoy!
Another Wine Experience:…