I may work in an Immunology Lab, but when you spend your days on the paperwork, you don’t learn a terrible amount about the – you know – science. This is why I seek out anything lay-friendly I can get my hands on. Lately, I’ve been collecting notes on some of the most basic elements of immunology; in this case, it’s been all about blood.
In advance of my attempt to explain it to non-scientists, I offer a quickie introduction to the dreaded Prion. Why is it dreaded?
A prion is a misshapen protein that acts like an infectious agent (hence the name, which comes from the words protein and infection).
Prions cause a number of fatal diseases such as mad cow disease in cattle, scrapie in sheep and kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans. There is no cure and potential treatments are highly speculative.
In recent years, however, biologists have discovered several animals that are immune to prion diseases. These include horses, dogs and rabbits. Nobody knows why.
That’s from a recent piece in MIT’s Technology Review.
Basically, proteins fold themselves. Sometimes, they fold themselves poorly, like when I get fancy with paper-airplanes. When this happens, they can become prions, and those things are bad news. A creature infected with such a disease experiences nervous system degeneration.
The University of Ballarat’s Jiapu Zhang thinks he’s on to something:
Zhang has simulated how these proteins change shape as their temperature and pH changes.
His conclusion is that the immune proteins are more stable than the others because of a salt bridge that connects two parts of the immune proteins “like a taught bow string”. This prevents them from misfolding into an infectious form.
So salt could be the answer? All I can say is follow the data. I’d love to learn that someone has duplicated his findings. All kinds of potential problems with our nervous system could be addressed. So, there.
Mark Hurst kicked off the first Gel Health conference with an talk that should be interesting to anyone who’s had a frustrating experience at their doctor’s office. Within the embedded video below, the relevant span of time is between 3:00 and 7:00.
Simply put, it’s about Mark’s awful experience with a few facets of his health provider. They are, in order of gripe:
- Called to schedule a flu shot, was told that he could not pass a note to his doctor.
- Waited thirty minutes to see his doctor.
- His doctor didn’t actually see him; the attending nurse handled flu shots.
- The attending nurse is curt and impolite; tells him he can’t see the doctor.
- Can’t even say “Please come to my conference on improving patient experience” because his soul has been crushed.
- Has to wait an extra ten minutes to check out/pay his co-pay.
The questions that any of us would, right, have are: Do you feel listened to? Do you feel cared for? Was it efficient?
A Contrast
My primary physician is part of the Virginia Mason Medical Center, and though BRI is affiliated with VMMC, that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t call them on their lousy service. But, my experience has routinely been far more pleasant. Contrast the above list with what I have experienced:
- Am always permitted to pass notes to my doctor. In fact, I can directly email him at any time. He, or any other designated person, always get back to me in a matter of hours (at most).
- I rarely wait more than 5 minutes for my appointment.
- Even if a nurse were administering something as routine as a flu shot, I am always permitted to ask to see my – or any – doctor.
- The attending nurses are very kind and pleasant, and don’t treat me like a file to be stuffed in a cabinet.
- I would have easily been able to invite my doctor to attend something like this. In fact, I think he’d be likely to attend.
- I never have to wait after an appointment. You pay your co-pay upon check-in (which is a blisteringly fast funnel at the entrance to the hospital).
Now, true, I’m seeing my doctor in a large campus. Also true is the fact that VMMC has spent the better part of the last decade completely reworking their administrative back-end. But, is there any reason that a smaller, more agile office couldn’t incorporate, say, basic human niceties into the equation?
There’s some data that suggests that instances of malpractice correlate with the user-experience. In this light, improving processes can be seen as a kind of insurance policy. There’s a whiff of plain-spoken wisdom that I read into all this: people are less likely to sue their doctors if they don’t come off as distant, pompous, jerks.
There’s some pretty wild stuff going on out there. In addition to all the gee-whiz gizmos our industries provide, university science departments regularly surprise me with the stuff they’re doing. Check this out:
This tickles me. I’m always searching for ways to make our complicated sciences more interesting. Using microscopic lifeforms to control a game seems to be a natural fit. Just wanted to share.
Mainstream science reporting is continuing its stellar job of reporting the facts absent context or clear baseline science literacy. I wish political reporting was handled the same way. I want to see more anchormen struggling to follow a train of thought instead of confidently making half-baked assertions. We can all pretend we’re political analysts, but it’s a lot harder to fake your way around a lab.
NASA has announced that arsenic-based life exists here on Earth. And no, it’s not alien. But, it expand the possibility of what evolving life may look like. Ed Yong notes “the results have nothing to do with aliens.” Thanks Ed, but we loves us some aliens. so that’s how it’s being sold. Arsenic E.T. is so cute. Why not buy a key-chain?
Fortunately, I know just enough about biology to find the following segment of Ed Yong’s piece understandable and interesting.
In 2008, Ronald Oremland (who was also involved in the latest study) discovered bacteria in Mono Lake that can fuel themselves on arsenic. Like plants, they can photosynthesise, creating their own food using the power of the sun. But where plants use water in this reaction, the bacteria used arsenic. Wolfe-Simon has taken these discoveries a step further, by showing that the bacteria are actually incorporating arsenic into their most important of molecules.
She took sediment from Mono Lake and added it to Petri dishes containing a soup of vitamins and other nutrients, but not a trace of phosphorus. She took samples from these dishes and added them to fresh ones, gradually diluting them to remove any phosphorus that might have stowed away onboard. And all the while, she added more and more arsenic.
Amazingly, bacteria still grew in the dishes. Wolfe-Simon isolated one of these arsenic-lovers – a strain called GFAJ-1. Using an extremely sensitive technique called ICP-MS that measures the concentrations of different elements, she showed that the cells of these bacteria did indeed contain large amounts of arsenic.
By giving the bacteria a mildly radioactive form of arsenic, Wolfe-Simon could also track where the element ended up in the cells. The answer: everywhere. There was arsenic in the bacteria’s proteins and in their fat molecules. It had replaced phosphorus in many important molecules including ATP. It was even in their DNA, a conclusion that Wolfe-Simon backed up with a number of other techniques. All other life uses phosphorus to create the backbone of the famous double helix, but GFAJ-1’s DNA had a spine of arsenic.
It’s an amazing result, but even here, there is room for doubt. As mentioned, Wolfe-Simon still found a smidgen of phosphorus in the bacteria by the end of the experiment. The levels were so low that the bacteria shouldn’t have been able to grow but it’s still not clear how important this phosphorus fraction is. Would the bacteria have genuinely been able to survive if there was no phosphorus at all? (Yong)
Oh, and here’s the official NASA report. Tenacious little buggers, no? And they’re darling.
I love data pictures. This is why I justify Tufte seminars to my employer every other year. It never hurts to brush up on some basics. Among those basics are: a clean look, plain language, and no chartjunk.
I owe a tip of the hat to Boing Boing for this great pointer to an infographic depicting the history of scientific thought (a la tube-map). My first thought was that the data are useful seeds for growing an interest in critical thinking skills.
The summary is priceless:
500 years of modern science, reason & critical thinking via the medium of gross oversimplification, dodgy demarcation, glaring omission and a very tiny font.
Wry pseudo-apologies be damned; the thing is wonderful. Planting seeds is my thing, so I had to share it. Just staring at the work makes me appreciate the painstaking development of thoughts that I all too often take for granted. It’s worth remembering on the next occasion that I shake my fist at the world. I can be impatient, but change takes time. Dammit.
Click here to directly view the graphic.
Over at Kongregate, there’s a game that purports to be both fun and educational. It purports to teach, but whether it does that well or not is directly related to its ability to engage.
CellCraft
Build a cell, fight off viruses, survive harsh worlds, and save the Platypus species!
This game was made possible by a grant from the Digital Media & Learning Competition. The goal was to make a truly educational game that was also genuinely fun to play. We hope students, teachers, and gamers will all enjoy the game, and encourage you to visit www.cellcraftgame.com, which will soon have an open forum and eventually downloadable teacher materials.
Based on what little I’ve played so far, it’s much better than the bulk of teaching games out there. That is to say, it’s actually fun – and that’s rare.