The old faithful couple at the Old Faithful

Janice called from the Old Faithful yesterday afternoon; we’re there two summers ago, here are some of the pictures.

Yellowstone National Park is the geyser country, about one-third of the world geysers, of which the Old Faithful is the most famous one, are here between Madison Junction and the Old Faithful. There are all types of nature wonders, such as mud caldrons, bubbling and colorful paint pots, and fumaroles. The most amazing is that there are all close together, proving God is considerate, creating the Wonders for the tourists’ convenience.

The old faithful couple at the Old Faithful

The Old Faithful presently erupts every 90 minutes or so, there was a mathematical relationship between the duration and intervals. The intervals between eruptions are longer now than used to be; it was attributed to the earthquake, not the 1988 fire as explained by our tour guide. The eruption shoots out up to 8,400 gallons boiling water to a height up to 184 feet lasting for up to 5 minutes.

It is OK not to read the books you collected

I spotted two used volumes of Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization: Volume V The Renaissance and Volume VII The Age of Reason Begins at Harvard Book Store while visiting Janice last November, and only took them out to look for something on a few occasions. (I have checked them out from library many times in the past, though.)

I once got Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson from a book sale in the library, even though I already have had one copy for many years. I have two copies of Churchill’s Blood, Toil, Tears & Sweat (The Speeches of Winston Churchill); it was only $1.98, I simply couldn't resist not taking it home, even though I do not need it.

I brought a bag of used books home from library last week, costing $2 a bag, and those books are still in the bag. One of the books was A Planet called Earth by George Gamow; Joy, he was the same Gamow in James Watson’s Genes, Girl, and Gamow (the book you bought me) after the Double Helix; the other was James Michener’s Iberia: Spanish Travels and Reflections.

Janice, I am hoping you haven’t thrown away May 31 the Wall Street Journal (Weekend Journal) yet. Hopefully you didn’t miss the article “The Book Collection that Devoured My Life”. There was a “Letters to the Editor” on the Journal today (June 9)—Not reading the books I collected, I now proclaim myself as “the elite and unruffled ranks of the truly cultured" as the letter said.

To read or not to read

Both Janice and I are avid readers; of different breeds, though: she tries to read 50 books, page-to-page, a year, and I rarely read a book from preface to epilogue and every page in between.  I went through the list of books she has read past several years and few, if any, overlap with mine.  We both read John Updike, she read his short stories (Museums and Women) and I essays and criticism (Due Consideration).

While plunging into WWII (limited to European theater), I browsed many books that include Churchill’s The Second World War, Martin Gilbert’s Second World War: a complete history, Ike’s Crusade in Europe, Harry Butcher’s My Three Years with Eisenhower, The Rommel Papers (edited by Liddell Hart), Ernie’s War: The best of Ernie Pyle’s WWII dispatches, or even Kay Summersby Morgan’s Past Forgetting: My Lover Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower and more.

The title of this posting borrowed from Oscar Wilde’s that he wrote in 1886, in which he wrote, (may click the photo to enlarge it)    

“To tell people what to read is as a rule either useless or harmful, for the true appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching, and nothing that one can learn is ever worth learning.  But to tell people what not to read is very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission to the University Extension Scheme.”

He went on to write that his age is “an age which reads so much that it has no time to admire, and writes so much that it has no time to think.” So is our age, if not more so.

Janice once wrote, “I know some people who read constantly but the rigor of their reading material leaves much to be desired.”  I couldn’t have agreed more or said it better.  It is not only whether you’re reading or not, but also what you’ve been reading.  It is safe to say ‘you’re what you read.’ 

I often lament ‘I have much to write, and more to read,’ and I have no hesitation to drop a book that is not informative, insightful, rigorous, provocative, or entertaining to me.  I emphasize “to me” and that’s why I can tell you what book I am reading and there is no use to ask you to read it.  You need to pick it up on your own and do not hesitate to put it down if it doesn't please/help you.

Wilde wrote, “Books, I fancy, may be conveniently divided into three classes: 1. Books to read, 2. Books to re-read, and 3. Books not to read at all.”  Since I am of the opinion of not to tell one what book to read, I’ll copy what he said about the third class,

“Books not to read at all, such as Thomson’s Seasons, Roger’s Italy, Paley’s Evidences, all the Fathers except St. Augustine, all John Stuart Mill, except the essay on Liberty, all Voltaire’s plays without any exception, Butler’s Analogy, Grant’s Aristotle, Hume’s England, Lewes’ History and Philosophy, all argumentative books, and all books that try to prove anything.”

Witty though he might be, Wilde might not be the one telling us what not to read, considering his ‘art for art’s sake’ philosophy.

Physician addresses woman’s club

The Waynesburg Woman’s Club monthly meeting was held at Washington Street Methodist Church on February 26, 2008 and was hosted by Katy Tsai.  Dr. Jer-Yuan Tsai was invited to give a talk on the current news and controversies in medicine, covering many topics of interest.

Making flu vaccine is a calculated and educated guess; he explained why the influenza vaccine this season doesn’t work as well as anticipated and emphasized the science behind the vaccine is still solid and sound and do not lose faith to it.
 
He mentioned many of the medical controversies derive from statistical analysis and jokingly said there is a line in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” and the best way to prevent medical controversy is “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the statisticians.”  On a serious note, he emphasized that, like medicine, statistics is also science, something to be reckoned with.

He talked about the shingles and shingles vaccine in great detail so that one can make an informed decision in deciding whether to take the shingles vaccine or not.

The talk focused on type 2 diabetes.  He explained the concept of insulin resistance and the mechanisms by which many kinds of diabetic drugs work and why some type 2 diabetes patients may eventually end up requiring insulin.

Many in the audience were surprised, just like many doctors were puzzled, to learn that the mortality rate of the Intensive-glycemic-control arm of ACCORD trial was higher than that in the more laid-back standard strategy.  ACCORD is being conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  Speaking of whether one should be aggressive in controlling diabetes: “To be or not to be, that is the question” with no answer, at least for now.  Dr Tsai also pointed out the outcomes of many landmark studies didn't agree with that of ACCORD study.

He used the example of current controversy of Vytorin and Zetia (cholesterol-lowering drugs) to illustrate

the relationship of media and medicine and how sometimes physicians may see things differently in a given study.  He pointed out that TV medical news reporting is generally commendable, but due to the time constraint, the details, which can be important in helping us drawing the conclusion, are often let out.
He briefly touched the topic of E-coli O157:H7 and the use of the the medication Evista to prevent breast cancer.

He ended the talk by quoting Moses Mamonides (1135-1204) “Live sensibly—among a thousand people, only one dies a natural death, the rest succumb to irrational modes of living.” Dr. Tsai’s best advice is “Eat less, exercise more, and go extra miles when walking” which is better than every thing he said or every medicine he mentioned.

Not all patients with myasthenia gravis are grave

Myasthenia gravis (MG) is another autoimmune disease in that the body is tricked to think acetylcholine receptor, an important component in the nerve conduction, is ‘foreign’ and dutifully attacks it.

There is a gap between nerves or between nerve and muscle, through which the conduction of impulse depends on chemical substances called neurotransmitters, in the case of MG, it is acetylcholine between nerve and muscle.

There are two clinical forms of myasthenia gravis: (1) ocular form (affects the eyes only)  and (2) generalized form (may affect any skeletal muscles on the whole body) Myasthenia means “muscle debility”; Latin gravis means “serious” and having a generalized form of myasthenia gravis is indeed serious (grave); but this dreaded name makes the more limited ocular form seem more serious than it actually is.

(click the photo to enlarge it)

About half (50%) of patients with purely ocular MG are seropositive (i.e. has acetylcholine antibody in the blood).  About 85% of patients with generalized form, and virtually all patients (98-100%) with MG and thymoma (tumor in thymus) have this antibody.

About 10-15% of MG patients have thymoma, and about 85% have thymic hyperplasia (i.e. thymus gland overgrow, but there is no tumor) It is postulated that all patients with myasthenia gravis have B cells that produces acetylcholine antibody.

Most experts feel it is beneficial to surgically remove thymus gland (whether thymic hyperplasia or thymoma) and it may take many years to see the benefit of thymectomy (surgical removal of thymus).

It is well known that a given disease may present with a widely varying severity and course.  Another example is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease in the U.S.) in which the motor neurons are destroyed.  Lou Gehrig succumbed to it less than two years after he proclaimed that he was “the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.” in his touching farewell address at Yankee Stadium.  And yet Stephen Hawking has lived with this disease for more than 40 years and is still going on ‘strong’ in his quest in the fields of cosmology and quantum gravity.

Pernicious anemia is no longer pernicious

The once invariably fatal pernicious anemia is nowadays easily treated with a monthly injection of vitamin B₁₂.  Vitamin B₁₂ (cobalamin) is only present in animal products (meat and dairy products).  Cobalamin is required in making blood; without proper supplement, the strict vegetarians are in danger of developing megaloblastic anemia.
 
The cobalamin we take in needs intrinsic factor (secreted by parietal cells lining the stomach) to carry it to the small intestine (terminal ileum) to be absorbed.  Pernicious anemia is one of the numerous autoimmune diseases that plagues us.  The body somehow treats the intrinsic factor (IF) as ‘foreign’ and attacks it, rendering it useless.  This is why pernicious anemia has to be treated with injection of cobalamin, and taking it orally wouldn’t work.

Recent discovery that there is second back up transport system for cobalamin, lower efficiency though it may be, that does not require intrinsic factor or a functional terminal ileum.  But, it requires taking megadose (at least 1,000 to 2,000 μg (1-2 mg) orally a day. (for injection 1,000 μg or even 100 μg a month is more than enough.)

The word ‘pernicious’ means highly destructive or exceedingly harmful; Shakespeare used it in Henry VI (part 2), “Pernicious blood-sucker of sleeping men!” its Latin root “nex” means ‘violent death’.  English physician Thomas Addison first described it in 1855 and German physician Anton Biermer coined the name of “pernicious anemia” in 1872.

Pernicious anemia was still invariably fatal in 1930s when three physicians (two from Harvard) were honored with Nobel Prizes in Medicine (1934) for their using liver-rich diet in successfully treating patients with pernicious anemia.  I read the following in the presentation speech in 1934 Nobel Prize in Medicine,

“I propose to say a little about pernicious anemia.  As the name tells us, it is a fateful disease, which, previous to the labours of our prize-winners, almost invariably, with only a few exceptions, ended fatally in the course of a few years, or in a still shorter time, a few months.  Its cause is unknown. . .”

Of note, vitamin B₁₂ was not isolated until 1948 and they didn’t have any idea of what actually helped; medical science was not always exact, even for the Nobel-Prize work, in those days.  And those improved upon this diet probably did not have true pernicious anemia, in which 70% would have antibody against intrinsic factor (IF) and would require vitamin B₁₂ injections to get better.

Many elderly have atrophic gastritis leading to decline in IF production, in which cases, antibodies are directly against the gastric parietal cells that produce IF.  The inadequacy of IF can be compensated by the realtively large amount of vitamin B₁₂ in the diet, otherwise, these three physicians wouldn't succeed and became laureates.

Medical students learn Structure and Function in their first year schooling before they plunge into the Scientific Basis of Medicine the second year.  Using X ray crystallography technique; Dorothy Crawfoot Hodgkin labored, coupled with high intellect and intuition, from 1948 to 1956, and figured out the structure of vitamin B₁₂, a very large and complex biomolecule—a tremendous feat that earned her the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964.  I believe that the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher once studied under Dorothy Hodgkin at Oxford.
 
Elucidation of the structure of vitamin B₁₂ opened the door of the understanding of the metabolism, synthesis, and function of vitamin B₁₂ that we have come to know.  And the name of pernicious anemia stays only for sentimental reason.

Exubera never brought exuberance to Pfizer

It was touted as a revolutionary new delivery system for insulin since it was developed some 80 years ago when Exubera, an inhaled insulin, was approved for adults with types 1 or 2 diabetes in January 2006.

Unfortunately it never took off, failing to gain the acceptance of patients and physicians and Pfizer announced on October 18, 2007 that it will end the marketing of Exubera, phasing it out over the next three months.

It was a business decision and there was no issue of safety or efficacy.  But FDA has warned on April 10, 2008 that more cases of lung cancers have been reported in patients treated with Exubera than in controls in clinical trials. FDA added that “too few cases to determine whether the emergence of these events is related to Exubera” and all patients diagnosed with lung cancer had a history of cigarette smoking.

Having a ‘philosophy’ of “never be the first one to use the new medicine o.r the last one to discard the old medicine,” I somehow never prescribed Exubera.

From Californium to Seaborgium to Fermium and injustice to female scientists

Today (March 17) in 1950 scientists at the University of California at Berkeley announced they had created a new radioactive element, named “californium.”  The team was headed by Glenn Seaborg, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1951 for his work on the chemistry of transuranium elements, which have atomic number greater than that of uranium (92), and with the atomic number of 98, californium is the 6^th transuranium element.

Two of Seaborg’s heroes were Gilbert Lewis and Enrico Fermi, whose biography, Atoms in the Family, was written by his widow, Laura (of Jewish heritage), after his untimely death at the age of 52 or 53.  Right after receiving his Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938, he escaped to America from Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship (Fermi's wife is Jewish.)

While serving as the chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and during one of the Senate hearing in 1960s, Seaborg was grilled by Senator Gore Sr. (Al’s dad), as he laid off many machinists at Oak Ridge Lab in Tennessee due to budget constraint. “Dr. Seaborg, just what do you have against machinists?” Seaborg responded, “Senator, I don’t have anything against machinists, . . . my father was a machinist, and my grandfather was a machinist . . . and my great-grandfather was a machinist.  And if I had any talent for it, I would have been a machinist myself.”

I always lamented that it was a great injustice that Gilbert Lewis was snubbed by the Nobel committee.  His contributions were worthy of several Nobel Prizes.  It was Lewis to tell us that electrons bonding is how molecules stick together, and only the valence electrons participating the chemical reactions.  He coined the term ‘covalent bond.’  We’re still drawing the valence electrons the way he did long time ago—simplistically beautiful and practical.  Because of him, we understand better about acid and base:  Lewis acid and base, Lewis structure, just to mention a few. 

After getting his Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley, Seaborg was Lewis’ personal assistant for two years.  In Adventure in the Atomic Age, Seaborg analyzed why Lewis never received the Nobel Prize.

Glenn Seaborg

Seaborg was the only person having an element named after him while he was still alive—Seaborgium (atomic number 106)  I believe Enrico Fermi was aware that one element (Fermium with atomic number 100) would be named after him, but he died a few months before the naming became official.

In his letter to President Roosevelt, Einstein began with “Sir:  Some recent work by Fermi and Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. . . .”

Fermi conducted the first nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago.  It was Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner first bombarded uranium nuclei with neutrons, freeing neutrons, releasing the enormous God-made and God-hide energy, a process they called nuclear fission.

Being a theoretic physicist, Lise Meitner was the one provided the theoretic explanation as Otto Hahn was a super chemist; and yet Otto Hahn was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944—another injustice to the female scientist.  Meitner fled Nazi’s Germany to Sweden in 1938 and therefore didn’t participate the final experiment.

Years after the drop of the atomic bomb, Meitner wrote in a letter to friend that before the war, “one could love one’s work and not always be tormented by the fear of the ghastly and malevolent things that people might do with beautiful scientific findings.” 

The above is from James Watson’s Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science; Watson clearly agreed that it was the Hershey-Chase Experiment that led to Hershey’s sharing the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1969 with Max Delbrűck and Salvador Luria.  From what I read Martha Chase was an equal partner, not Hershey’s assistant, and yet the rule of no more than three people share a prize sacrificed her.

It was Leo Szilard (a Jew) to reveal in 1933, after fleeing Hitler’s Germany to England, that a nuclear disintegration releasing more neutrons than it consumed would unleash the tremendous amount of energy of the atom that follows Einstein’s E = mc² equation.  It was Szilard who ‘penned’ Einstein’s letter to President Roosevelt.  Szilard and Enrico conducted the first nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago in 1942.

I always want to write an article of “In praise of the physicists who advanced the life science” and Leo Szilard is on my list.  He was the co-founder of the Salk’s Institute at La Jolla and unfortunately died a few months after its completion. 

I read in the March 2008 issue of Discover, in which it was mentioned that Austrian physicist Freidrich Hasenőhrl published the basic equation E = mc² a year before Einstein did.  the poor Hasenőhrl failed to connect the equation with the principle of relativity.  Just imagine how much it cost him.

American Prometheus, Oppie: the one I know

Martin Luther, Michelangelo, and J. Robert Oppenheimer all died today (February 18, Luther in 1546, Oppenheimer 1967)  I wrote about Luther yesterday and do not know Michelangelo enough to write, but I can say a thing or two about Oppie.

Richard Feynman, the Genius, (the title of his biography by James Gleick) was thrilled when he learned that the Descriptive Astronomy can be considered a required course in humanity at MIT.  I was surprised to learn that A.J. Jacobs, in his The-Know-It-All, says Feynman read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica.

As the title of his biography by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, American Prometheus (see photo) implies, Oppenheimer is forever associated with the triumph and tragedy of developing the first atomic bomb.  But, in my view, his greatest contribution to this country is setting up the first school of quantum mechanics at U.C. Berkeley, where he told his students, “I can make it clearer, but I can’t make it simpler.” Many of his students took his class for the second or even the third time, not because they failed to pass it.

Like Oppenheimer, Linus Pauling also went to Europe at the time when Quantum Mechanics was born and both were exposed to many of the giants that literally made it happen. Both Oppenheimer and Pauling spread the gospel of the Quantum Mechanics in this country.

In contrast to Richard Feynman, J Robert Oppenheimer is a completely different breed of physicist.  While Feynman couldn’t tolerate any non-scientific reading, Oppenheimer enjoyed French literature and Shakespeare, wrote poetry; sometimes in French, read Dante aloud in Italian, gave a lecture in Dutch six weeks after arriving Netherlands to study with Ehrenfest.  And of course he knew German well as it was at Göttingen where he thrived.  He studied Greek and Latin before going to Harvard in 1922.  When Alfred North Whitehead arrived on Harvard campus, he was one of the only two undergraduates had the courage to sign up for a course with the philosopher and mathematician.  The following is from his obituary in the New York Times.

“On a train trip from San Francisco to the East Coast he read Edward Gibbon's seven-volume The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. On another such trip he read the four volumes of Karl Marx's Das Kapital in German.”

They do share many similar characteristics:  Jewish, outrageous intellect and quick mind, charismatic, and handsome.  Both lack ‘music cells’ (a Chinese expression of saying one has no musical talent) Even though Feynman was a gifted drummer; he didn’t read the musical notes.  And Oppie never could ‘suffer’ through or beyond the first act of an opera.  After the success of the Trinity (the code name of the test explosion of the first atomic bomb), the mood at Los Alamos was elated and Feynman ‘was sitting on the hood of a jeep beating his bango drum.’

It was during his stay with Paul Ehrenfest at Holland that he obtained the nick name of ‘Opje’ which was anglicized into ‘Oppie’ by students at Berkeley.  (A non-English language transforming into more English language is called ‘anglicize.  Jo, this is how Oppie got his nickname.)

Oppie graduated from Harvard in 1925 with a degree in chemistry in 3 years; when he petitioned to take upper-level of physics courses, he listed 15 books he claimed to have read.  A professor quipped, “Obviously if he [Oppenheimer] says he’s read these books, he is a liar, but he should get a Ph.D. for knowing these titles.”  “He was assigned a single room in Standish Hall, a freshman dormitory facing the Charles River.” (Janice, apparently the freshmen’s dorms were not in the Yard then.)

When it was announced that Oppei will head the Manhattan Project, one scientist remarked, “He couldn’t run a hamburger stand.’  This is reminiscent of what E.O. Wilson said of James Watson when the latter was appointed as the Director of the Cold Spring Harbor Lab, “He couldn’t run a lemonade stand.” Both turned out to be a resounding success.

After graduating from Harvard, he went to Cavendish Lab at Cambridge U. where be barely survived (This was also where Watson & Crick figured out the DNA structure.) and Göttingen U at Germany, where he thrived.  So he was at the 2 of the 3 birth places of the quantum mechanics at the time every thing was happening. He was in the company of an extraordinary collection of the greatest physicists.  His mentor, Max Born (also a Jew, whose granddaughter is Olivia Newton-John of the Grease fame; this is why Olivia was born in Cambridge, England), coined the term quantum mechanics in 1924. Heisenberg, Eugene Wigner, Wlofgang Pauli and Enrico Fermi were also under Born's wings.

On his second tour to Europe, he wanted to spend 6 months with Bohr at Copenhagen, but his mentor, Ehrenfest (mathematician and theoretic physicist) then suggested him to go to Pauli for a better match, otherwise, he would have studied at all 3 birth places of quantum mechanics.  In May 1927, when he sat down for his Ph.D. oral exam at Göttingen U, one of his examiners, James Franck (got a Nobel 2 years earlier) told a colleague, “I got out of there just in time.  He was beginning to ask me questions.”  In the world of quantum physics, “Niels Bohr was God, and Oppie was his prophet.”

His greatest gift is his intellect, quick mind, and capacity to understand things esoteric and was not known for his original idea which is a prerequisite for a Nobel Prize.  The only exception that I am aware is Born-Oppenheimer approximation, which is all Oppenheimer’s idea.  His understanding of quantum mechanics was incomparable in its breadth and depth in his time.  He was nominated for the Nobel after the War; and his direct association with the atomic bomb probably wouldn’t help.

And this same characteristic also explains why he was chosen as the Director of Manhattan Project and later the Director of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton.  It was James Conant (then Harvard President) said he should be the man for the job.

While at Princeton, he was able to attract the great minds such as Paul Dirac, Richard Feynman, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr or even poet T.S. Eliot (see photo), whose stint at the Institute never worked out as Oppie would like to expect, and of course, Einstein was already there.  He even had the vision to recruit Chen Ning Yang and T.D. Lee in 1949, eight years before this pair got their Nobel Prizes in Physics in 1957.

A cultivated scientist, “a linguist of eight tongues” who once said, “Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful .”  A Renaissance man, indeed he was.  Let me conclude by quoting from his obituary of the New York Times which touched the scientific and spiritual quest that marked his life.

As he clung to one of the uprights in the desert control room that July morning and saw the mushroom clouds rising in the explosion, a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita, the Hindu sacred epic, flashed through his mind. He related it later as:

“If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One.”

And as the black, then gray, atomic cloud pushed higher above Point Zero, another line--"I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds"--came to him from the same scripture.

Understanding E-coli

Hardly a month or a week went by without E. coli popped up in the news nowadays.  It happened again today (1/22/08): an AP news dispatch with a headline of “Ongoing health issues haunt some food-poisoning victims,” and E. coli is the major food-borne disease.

 

E. coli is short of Escherichia coli in honor of the German scientist Theodore Escherich, who discovered it in 1885.  If you can be famous you might as well have an easier name to remember, otherwise, you’ll be reduced to an E. (Not an E!, for those over indulged in entertainment!)

There are hundreds of strains of E. coli, and I am wise enough not to bore you with its classification.  The E. coli of interest is the notorious E. coli O157:H7, which was first isolated in an outbreak of bloody diarrhea in 1982.

Strain of E. coli is determined by its antigen (a molecule that can elicit an immune response).  O antigen is in the outer membrane and H antigen in the flagellum.  The emergence of new strain tells us the evolutionary biology is alive and well.  This mutation (a freak of nature event in Nature) renders it to produce Shiga (originally from Shigella) toxins that wreak havoc in its victims.

The most dreaded complication is hemolytic-uremic syndrome, which often occurs in children younger than 5 to 10 years of age.  The initiated event is that the Shiga toxin damages the lining of tiny blood vessels, causing a cascade of events that lead to clogging the vessels and hemolysis (breakdown of red blood cells) and kidney failure.

The major reservoir for E. coli O157:H7 is the gastrointestinal tract of cattle; the organisms are excreted by up to 10% of healthy cattle.  Beef can be contaminated during slaughter or processing if the intestinal contents of an infected (not sick) cattle contact the meat.  And if the hamburger is undercooked; it is likely that a small number of E. coli O157:H7 can survive in the center of an undercooked hamburger.

Like shigella, only 10 to 100 E. coli O157:H7 bacteria needed to sicken people, this is amazingly small numbers, considering the fact that 10⁵ to 10⁸ Salmonella or Cholera bacteria needed to make one sick.
A number of outbreaks of E. coli O157:H7 infections have been associated with the exposures and contacts with animals in petting zoos and county fairs.

Food borne illnesses (caused by Salmonella, Campylobacter, Listeria, and E. coli O157:H7, etc) result in 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths a year. The great majority recover without lasting sequelae.  

Published in Kidney International, 2006 August; 70:807, an article reported none of  the 951 victims (those developed hemolytic-uremic syndrome were excluded from the study) of a drinking water outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 had no evidence of kidney disease 4 years later.

Today’s AP dispatch may cause unnecessary anxiety to those who recovered from a food borne illness.  Rest assured the data so far indicate that serious health problems may occur years later only in those unfortunate who had a very serious disease in the outset. 

A special strain of E. coli (E. coli K1) can cause meningitis in infants, rarely in adults.  It is of interest to learn this K1 antigen is very similar to that of another meningitis-causing Neisseria meningitides.  Pregnant women are susceptible to colonization of E. coli K1, even though they do not get sick.  This is what I like to say that bacteria are smarter than you thought; they know the best way to get hold the infant is through the pregnant mother.

Enough bad things said about E. coli, which has a ‘complicated’ personality; they are part of the normal flora in our intestines doing all sorts of good deeds.  They participated in many scientific researches greatly expanding our understanding about life.

When I began my practice in mid 1970s, diabetic patients taking either ‘beef’ (cow) or ‘pork’(pig) insulin (like serving in a restaurant, I might ask “beef or pork?”); the pharmaceutical companies collected pancreases in the slaughtered houses.  Thanks to recombinant DNA technology developed by Paul Berg and (Stanley Cohen and Herb Boyer discovered the restriction enzyme made it possible to 'cut' the DNA) this practice has since become a thing of the past. Using ubiquitous E. coli as the manufacture factory by inserting insulin-producing genes into E. coli genome, and that makes E.coli produce human insulins faithfully and dutifully.  The race to make human insulin between Genentech and Biogen is a fascinating story.

The fact that we share the same nucleotide bases (adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine—the ‘language of God’) with bacteria should be the best argument for those advocate Intelligent Design as it must have been designed by the same Creator.  Gee! I thought I am writing science, I better stop. : )

In search of memory

My main criticism of A.J. Jacobs’ The Know-It-All is his lack of understanding of science and that makes him only half qualified to cover Encyclopaedia Britannica.  I feel I was not alone after reading Joe Queenan’s “The Know-It-All: A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing” in the New York Times book review (10/3/04)  Jacobs’ rebuttal (also published in the same book review) proves he is indeed a good writer, but is one who cannot take criticism; if I were him, I would write a different rebuttal, borrowing or even ‘plagiarizing’ Samuel Johnson’s sharp tongue and wit of insults.

Jacobs wrote if he doesn’t have ‘waxy pallor’ he doesn’t have aplastic anemia. Not only did he not tell the essence of aplastic anemia, he laid bare his ignorance in understanding medicine.

Knowledge is yours only when understood (and remembered, since the topic is 'memory'.)

My 1987 EB defines memory as “the retention and retrieval in the human mind of past experiences.”  This is not quite correct, as animals obviously have memory, too; and the model organism that Eric Kandel used in studying memory is a marine organism Aplysia.  Kandel was awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2000 for elucidation of the molecular mechanism of memory.  Here is the story:

In his 2002 Nobel Lecture (“Nature’s Gift to Science”), Sidney Brenner talked about the importance of choosing a model organsim for a given project.  He used the ‘elegant’ C. elegans (a nematode with about 1000 cells in all, among them 302 cells in nervous system, its genome is only 20 times that of E. coli).  Alan Hodgkin (1963 Nobel Prize in Medicine for ionic channels in nerve cells) used squid for its “giant nerve fibers, which may be as much as a millimeter in diameter.”  and Kandel used Aplysia, which has only 2 x 10⁴ neurons (nerve cells) in its brain, comparing to 10¹² that human brain has, and its capability of simple learning.  Aplysia also has very large nerve cells in brain so the microelectrodes can be inserted.

The most striking finding is that short term memory doesn’t require the protein synthesis whereas the longterm memory does, although both use the same synapses. Thus whenever we remember something for the long-term, our chromatin (complex of DNA and protein) structure in brain changes and synaptic strength enhances, and the neural networks of the brain are not fixed but dynamic.

Kandel said ‘repetition’ and ‘practice makes perfect’ is the only sure way to convert short-term to long-term memory.  This was well documented in his 48-page Nobel lecture or one-hour video.  This may be the best ‘take home’ message of this writing.

A synapse is how the nerve cells communicate each other:  it usually works by neurotransmitters which are secreted by a presynaptic cell, sending the message to the postsynaptic cells.  We have hundreds of billions of nerve cells, one can imagine how many synapses that we have.

Signal transduction of synapse involving memory storage, complex though it can be, is where the beauty of science lies; there is CREB-1 which is a stimulatory protein, and inhibitory CREB-2.  That is, for a memory to be stored, CREB-1 has to be activated and inhibitory constraint has to be removed. (i.e. CREB-2 to be inhibited)

This may explain why some people can remember well without effort and others have trouble remembering.  Kandel said (in the lecture video, I cannot find this in the text format.  I have noticed that, the text formats of many Nobel lectures are somewhat different from the videos) “I have a friend, Sigbund ?, seems to remember every thing, I always thought he was a bright kid at Columbia [Kandel is at Columbia University], now I am afraid he is a mutant with a specific defect in CREB-2 protein.” (laughter erupted)

A few days ago, either CNN of Fox news interviewed a man who can remember everything happened any given day in his life. (He didn’t get 100% correct.)  He most likely has a defect CREB-2 protein (due to a mutant CREB-2 gene) and if one is without an inhibitory constraint, one remembers every thing.

Kandel became philosophical when he explained why there is a need of inhibitory CREB-2 gene when it comes to memory storage, “It is clearly evolutionary advantage for an animal to learn and store in long-term memory only facts important for survival, rather than retaining everything.”

By now one should get an idea why memory capability is not considered a component of intelligence (analytic, creative, or whatever) by the experts in this field.  And this is why we have those absent-minded professor anecdotes.

Shortly after Einstein arrived at Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study in 1939, he was a hot pursuit of paparazzi [did we have paparazzi in his days?] so school officials were asked not to give away Einstein’s where about.  One day the university president received a call asking where Einstein lived, the president responded by saying he was not supposed to tell, an embarrassing whisper came from the other end of the line, “but, this is Einstein” who forgot where he lived and happened to carry with him the president’s phone number [I doubt he could remember the phone number.]
 

Alzheimer’s disease is a clinical disease characterized by gradual decline of cognitive function from a previously higher level and the impairment of recent memory.  There are no laboratory tests can confirm it, although an MRI finding of hippocampal atrophy is suggestive, but not specific or sensitive.  It is of interest that synapses involving memory and learning are highly concentrated in hippocampus.

In his memoir, In Search of Memory, Kandel spent many pages praising the pioneer in neuroscience, Santiago Ramỏn Cajal who shared the 1906 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Camillo Golgi to whom Kandel had many negative comments, though.

Cajal proposed in 1894 “a theory of memory storage: memory is stored in the growth of new connections [synapse in modern term]” A great mind tends to have prescient idea, it never fails.