Lab Monkey

Scientists are coming to realize that prions or some other sort of misaggregation of proteins may be responsible for more diseases than we thought. Derek Lowe writes:

The authors injected material from human Alzheimer’s patients into the brains of normal mice, and saw what appears to be the induction of amyloid pathlology. This didn’t happen in control animals, got worse with time, and wasn’t just noted at the point of injection. Their hypothesis is that Alzheimer’s might be a prion-type disease of protein misfolding, and possibly capable of being spread by infectious particles.

On a very related note, I recently saw a talk from Zemer Gitai on an enzyme called CTP synthase that forms polymers, a property that’s evolutionarily conserved from bacteria to yeast to fly to human. That’s quite remarkable considering that it’s a general metabolic enzyme involved in making nucleotides. And based on their high-throughput study of many enzymes, it seems like a lot more of them form these large-scale structures than people previously thought.

Steven P. Jobs, may he rest in peace.

Stephen Wolfram reflects on Steve Jobs’ influence on the development of Mathematica, including the name. Mathematica was bundled on all NeXT computers at the debut, apparently. And this interesting aside:

And as a curious footnote to history (which I learned years later), one batch of NeXTs bought for the purpose of running Mathematica went to CERN in Geneva, Switzerland—where they ended up having no less distinction than being the computers on which the web was first developed.

You can still download some of the early code from 1991-ish by Tim Berners Lee, the first “WorldWideWeb” browser written in Objective-C.

A good discussion from In the Pipeline about Andy Grove’s proposal for changing how drug development works:

Once safety is proven, patients could access the medicine in question through qualified physicians. Patients’ responses to a drug would be stored in a database, along with their medical histories. Patient identity would be protected by biometric identifiers, and the database would be open to qualified medical researchers as a “commons.”

Derek Lowe talks about problems with selecting patients, potentially swamping out clinically relevant results because of too much patient and treatment heterogeneity, and so on.

Another thing that’s relevant is that “safety” is often relative to potential benefit, and there’s no clear line that says “these are safe” and “these are not.” Many cancer treatments, for example, are often just poisons that kill cancer faster than they kill you, but their potential benefit is generally worth the harmful side effects. You always have to consider how well something might work to consider whether those risks are worth it (e.g. might be worth it for cancer, but maybe not so worth it for stopping hair loss), so deciding in advance whether something is safe before you ask how well it works can potentially rule out things that are harmful, but lead to a great enough benefit that they could be worth trying out.

I love Ars Technica’s gaming editor Ben Kuchera:

I did not make it far in this game, because one day I will die, and I refuse to go out thinking I spent one second more than I had to playing Bodycount.