Before Darwin was a writer, he was a natural historian and collector aboard a ship launched from England to chart the coast of South America. He collected specimens of rocks, plants and animals, preserved those that needed preserving and sent them home in few big shipments.
I never thought much about what those specimens might have looked like until seeing these gorgeous photos in the newly published Evidence of Evolution. The above photo is not in the book, but you can see some that are by reading The New Scientist, which has published a smattering online.
To mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of the Species (which is on Tuesday), photographer Susan Middleton and author Mary Ellen Hannibal have produced a beautiful volume showcasing specimens from the California Academy of Sciences.
The article in The New Scientist makes the point that even though bottling specimens in spirits seems terribly old-fashioned, in many cases it's still the best way to preserve materials for scientific study.
Darwin didn't have much training in collecting biological specimens, but the young man came through. Many of his actual specimens still exist, though apparently not in sterling condition.
Eighteen new grants worth $8.5 million represent part of an ongoing effort by the NIH to re-think old attitudes toward drug testing in kids.
The grants, awarded this week to researchers around the country, including Stanford's Gregory Hammer, MD, will fund studies of medications and devices used in pediatric cardiology, neonatology and pediatric neurology. Hammer's team at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital will compare two morphine-like painkillers used after cardiac surgery in newborns, infants and young children. The Stanford/Packard team hypothesizes that methadone may provide better pain relief with fewer side effects than commonly-used opioid painkillers, but no one has done a direct comparison to find out what works best for babies and children. The researchers will also study the blood levels of the study drugs and their metabolites, about which very little information currently exists.
Hammer's study provides a good example of the knowledge gap the NIH is trying to fill. In the past, scientists have hesitated to test drugs in children, partly because of ethical concerns that kids couldn't consent to participate in medical experiments. But that created a different ethical problem. Doctors were left guessing: After this infant's lifesaving surgery, which painkiller should I give? How much? How often? Because drug metabolism changes during development, they couldn't rely on results from studies in adults for answers.
So, the NIH is encouraging some drug testing in children, as well as studies that will give scientists the right equipment to monitor children's health during future drug trials. The press release announcing the new awards says:
The Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act of 2002 established a process to study on-patent and off-patent drugs for children and to improve pediatric therapeutics through collaboration on scientific investigation, clinical study design, weight of evidence, and ethical and labeling issues.
"People of different ages require research outcome measures that are tailored to their size and condition," said Steven Hirschfeld, M.D., Ph.D., NICHD associate director for clinical research.
Read the complete press release here. More details about Hammer's newly funded trial and the other studies that received funding are available here.
A team of scientists from the United States and United Kingdom have pinpointed an enzyme crucial for turning abnormal but non-malignant breast tissue into tumors, according to a study published online in the journal Cell.
In a study involving mice, researchers discovered higher levels of an enzyme called lysyl oxidase (LOX) increased the levels of collagen in mammary glands, made the tissue stiffer and correlated with a higher frequency of tumors invading the breast tissue. Scientists also found using chemicals or an antibody to block LOX reduced the chances of tumors forming, and increased the likelihood that when they did develop, they were smaller and less aggressive.
Co-author Janine Erler, PhD, at The Institute of Cancer Research in England explained in a release how the research could make cancer treatments more effective:
The enzyme triggers a clear physical change in breast tissue and, if we could stop this happening, we expect it would slow the growth of any cancers that did develop and make them easier to eradicate.
The scientific breakthrough builds on previous studies completed at the Stanford School of Medicine in Amato Giaccia's laboratory, where Erler completed a fellowship in 2008. In their research, Giaccia and his team highlighted the importance of LOX in cancer spread, showing that it promotes metastasis by sending out signals that prepare a new area of the body for invasion.
Today's New York Times has two excellent articles that give some depth, analysis and perspecive to what happened this week in the public debacle over new guidelines for breast cancer screening. In the first, a front page piece, "A Medical Culture Clash", Kevin Sack pinpoints why health-care reform is so terribly hard to accomplish in this country. He writes:
"This week, the science of medicine bumped up against the foundations of American medical consumerism: that more is better, that saving a life is worth any sacrifice, that health care is a birthright."
Gina Kolata also has a terrific piece, "Mammogram Debate Took Group Off Guard." Most damning are comments by Philip Lee, MD, former assistant secretary of health in the Clinton administration. He wonders, could the panel possibly have been that naive not to realize in the middle of a huge health-care debate the new guidelines would drop like a lead balloon? A very good question.
A week ago, I noted that being old enough to have experienced earlier forms of the H1N1 influenza strain that were circulating prior to 1958 seems to protect against the new, pandemic H1N1 strain. In that post, I mentioned evidence that even getting vaccinated for the garden-variety seasonal flu appears to reduce your likelihood of coming down with a case of H1N1 and, especially, to lower the risk of needing hospitalization if you do get it.
That's a big surprise, as seasonal shots have to be redesigned every year due to the influenza virus's notorious ability to change its stripes. Different viral strains have differently shaped outer coats, so exposure to those strains (or to vaccines against them) raise different sets of antibodies. (An antibody is a protein, secreted in abundance by particular immune cells, that recognizes the three-dimensional shape of a pathogen and binds to it, inactivating it and flagging it for heavyhanded "follow-up" -- a euphemism for getting the crap kicked out of it -- by "thug" cells we carry around in our blood and lymph for that purpose.) It's known that the seasonal shot doesn't cause you to produce antibodies with the correct shape to stop H1N1 in its tracks.
Yet, now this: A study of U.S. military personnel reported yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene found that vaccination for seasonal flu cut H1N1 infection rates by half or more among soldiers below age 25 or older than 39.
How can this be? Your immune system has another potent way of recognizing pathogens: In every infected cell, viral proteins (as well as our own normal ones) get routinely carved into little pieces called peptides that eventually find themselves on display on the cell's surface, where each peptide can be inspected by roving immune road-warriors called T-cells. If the peptide looks suspicious, the T-cells call in the big guns.
T-cells recognize chopped-up peptides' constituent amino-acid sequences, rather than whole, functioning proteins' outer hillocks and hollows. What's more, essentially every part of every viral protein -- inside or outside -- is subject to T-cell inspection, not just their outsides as antibodies do. So, one might imagine, there are a whole lot of common viral protein pieces that can be sussed out by T-cells, but would have been missed by antibodies.
But what about the poor 25- to 39-year olds that, in this study, got no H1N1 cross-protection from the seasonal vaccine? That's a bit of a mystery, although some speculate that it could be related to the dirth of circulating H1N1 strains back in these soldiers' immune-systems' formative years.
My take: You don't have to be old to keep from getting a nasty case of H1N1, although it helps. Get yourself vaccinated. If there's no H1N1 vaccine available, and you're over 40 or under 25, the seasonal vaccine may protect you against H1N1, too. (If you can, get both.)
Come Friday, some researchers might take issue with Nebraska's cheerful welcome sign. The New York Times reported today that the University of Nebraska is considering severely restricting embryonic stem cell research by its faculty members. Under the potential new guidelines, researchers would only be allowed to work with the 21 human embryonic stem cell lines previously approved by President George W. Bush in August of 2001. The matter is to be discussed by the university's board of regents tomorrow, Nov. 20. If the restrictions are approved, the university would be the first in the country to take such a step. According to the article, the university's president and the chancellor of its medical center support human embryonic stem cell research. But unlike most public universities, the eight voting members of U of N's board of regents are elected, rather than appointed. And many observers believe that they may have secured the necessary 5-3 majority with the election of a new regent at the end of last year.
“It would taint this university for a long time,” said Dr. Harold M. Maurer, chancellor of the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, which conducts stem cell research.
Because of the uncertainty over Friday’s vote, Dr. Maurer said, the medical center has postponed efforts to compete for billions of dollars in federal stimulus money for future studies and efforts to attract a new leader of the center’s regenerative medicine program have been slowed. “They won’t come unless we have approval to do stem cell research,” he said.
Comparative effectiveness research has had a bad week. CER, a scientific analysis to determine what treatments, drugs and medical devices are most effective, has been called a key building block of health care reform. But what happens if a federal advisory panel throws a CER party and no one shows up? Didn’t this just happen this week with the tsunami of criticism against a federal advisory panel’s new recommended guidelines for breast cancer screening?
After a raft of criticism in the Congress from both sides of the aisle, The New York Times columnist Gail Collins drolly stated today, that it’s clear from this debate that “whatever happens, we do not want the government conducting any studies on whether current health practices actually do any good.”
It’s hardly a surprise in this hyper-political era and in what might be the final weeks before passage of a huge health-care reform package that recommendations like these would start a prairie fire. It was getting so hot out there that HHS Secretary Sebelius trashed the panel’s guidelines and said they were merely “an outside panel of doctors and scientists who make recommendations” and do not “set federal policy.” Ouch.
It’s fair to say that this type of research will face uphill battles from both physicians and consumers. A recent perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that physicians’ remain skeptical about using CER to guide clinical decisions. And how do you convince Americans that studies like these have the best interests of the consumer in mind when health care institutions are viewed with such suspicion and derision?
A protein found in the saliva of ticks may spur the development of a new Lyme disease vaccine. Details of the study led by scientists at Yale University were published online today in the journal Cell Host & Microbe.
During the transmission of the disease the Lyme bacterium known as Borrelia burgdorferi moves through the tick and is coated with a salivary protein known as Salp15. Yale researchers injected Salp15 into healthy mice and found that it significantly protected them from being infected. When combined with outer surface proteins of B. burgdorferi, the protection was even greater.
A Lyme vaccine was removed from the market in 2002 and to date no other antigen has been tested in phase III clinical trials.
In a release, lead author Erol Fikrig, MD, explained the importance of the findings saying:
We believe that it is likely that many arthropod-borne infection agents of medical importance use vector proteins as they move to the mammalian host. If so, then this paradigm, described with the Lyme disease agent, is likely to be applicable to these illnesses. Currently, we are working to determine if this strategy is likely to be important for West Nile virus infection, dengue fever, and malaria, among other diseases.
For those of you who, like me, tend to fret over small (and big) things, it's probably a good idea to learn to relax. Yet another study has shown that reacting in a positive way to stressful situations is good for your health - and, more specifically, your heart. From WebMD:
Researchers found that people who have a positive attitude during stressful events are 22% less likely to have a fatal or nonfatal heart attack than those who have negative attitudes.
"This is the first set of studies [looking at a large population] that shows that having positive feelings and positive attitudes during negative events may prevent first heart attacks," says researcher Karina Davidson, PhD, of Columbia University in New York.
Above Hugh O'Brodovich, MD, talks about using a $3.5 million grand-opportunity grant to examine a severe form of lung disease in premature infants that can lead to a lifetime of medical difficulties
In the last six months, the School of Medicine has been awarded more than $84 million in grants because of the stimulus package, and the money is expected to create up to 200 jobs.
To better understand the wide-ranging economic and scientific impact of funding provided by the ARRA, visit ScienceWorksForUs, a new initiative that tracks the flow of stimulus dollars to scientific research and related activities. U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other members of Congress announced the launch of the site yesterday.
