Websites of note

Abstract

The two most popular lectures that I give are on obesity and alcohol. These topics cross over between objective scientific views of metabolism and the self-interest of students in formulating their life-style choices for health and pleasure. The biochemistry of alcohol has a lot to teach in reinforcing understanding of metabolic pathways. Simplistically, it is a precursor for acetate that is oxidized or stored as fat. However, it can also induce the cytochrome P450 form CYP 2E1 (the microsomal ethanol oxidizing system) that consumes reducing equivalents as NADPH, rather than producing them. The kinetics of alcohol dehydrogenase and aldehyde dehydrogenase that have multiple forms with different KM, make a valuable illustration of Michaelis-Menten principles. How alcohol is measured in blood and breath makes for discussing chemical analyses. The effects on the nervous system are unsubtle and progressive with concentration. The problems of addiction combine the multiple elements of nature, nurture, and environment. The site given here provides expert information on all aspects of alcohol. The site is biased toward the psycho-social aspects of alcohol, but it is commendably simple to navigate with drop-down choices that make it easy to locate objective information. You might also like to follow up by looking at the substantial Australian government publications on alcohol at www.alcoholguidelines.gov.au. Médecins Sans Frontières (doctors without borders) is well known as an international humanitarian aid organization that provides emergency medical assistance to populations in danger. Several of my medical students have donated their services to this organization that is both at the front line of conflict and the front line of endemic diseases. The role in treatment of trauma and disease is graphically evident from the stories on the home page of the organization. For example “Nutritional emergency in south-western Central African Republic” relates how 1,300 children, mostly suffering from severe malnutrition, have been admitted to Médecins Sans Frontières programmes. For these African children, there are many cases of malaria, diarrhoea, tuberculosis, or AIDS, which further complicate their already delicate condition. The item also points out the nutritional deficiencies of cassava that is the staple food of the region. For illustrating the real-world consequences of many text-book diseases, the Médecins Sans Frontières site has a wealth of illustration. You can access a large library of audio files, slideshows, photo galleries, and video. If you have a regional interest you can visit individual nation websites for Médecins Sans Frontières. For Australia, the website www.msf.org.au provided a feature article on Chagas disease (human trypanosomiasis) an infectious disease caused by the Trypanosoma cruzi parasite (pictures were provided of vectors and sufferers). The disease causes 14,000 deaths each year. It is estimated that 10–15 million people suffer from Chagas disease. It is endemic to Latin America and global migration and mobility are exporting the disease to nations including the United States, Europe, Australia and Japan. There will always be something illustrating topical biomedical subjects at the Médecins Sans Frontières sites. The Union of Concerned Scientists was founded in 1969 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Scientists formed the organization to contribute to government policy in areas where science and technology can help solve environmental and social problems. Nobel laureate Henry Kendall served as founding chairman of the board and directed major declarations including the 1977 Scientists' Declaration on the Nuclear Arms Race calling for an end to nuclear weapon tests and deployment in the United States and Soviet Union. In 1992, Kendall presided over the Warning to Humanity calling attention to a range of security and environmental issues. The document was signed by 1,700 scientists, including a majority of the living Nobel Prize winners in science. The Union receives substantial grant funds (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_Concerned_Scientists) and is using much of its money to study the global climate. Major menu choices at the site are scientific integrity, global warming, clean vehicles, clean energy, nuclear power, nuclear weapons and global security, food and agriculture, and invasive species. After choosing the menu option to browse articles on food and agriculture, I downloaded the 51-page Union-sponsored report Failure to Yield: Evaluating the Performance of Genetically Engineered Crops. This 2009 report summarizes the failure of the biotechnology industry to feed the world using genetically engineered crops with higher yields. Despite 20 years of research and 13 years of commercialization, genetic engineering has failed to significantly increase U.S. crop yields. I had a sense of the messages of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring being repeated here. Those messages are to look at the facts, look at what we are doing, admit that lofty hopes do not always become reality and that sometimes the application of science has adverse effects. The Union is providing a valuable resource to promote ethical and sustainable scientific effort for the betterment of our planet. Norman Borlaug (March 25, 1914–September 12, 2009) died at the age of 95. He won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in reducing world hunger and was popularly known as the father of the green revolution. He made inspired use of conventional genetics to dramatically improve crop yields. Borlaug was a prominent scientific figure who was held up to me as a role-model when I was an undergraduate in the 1960s. I consulted his biography at the Nobel site after reading of his death and coincidentally reading Failure to Yield, a commentary on the use of genetic engineering as reviewed earlier. Borlaug was born on a farm near Cresco, Iowa, and it is appropriate that cresco is the latin verb to grow. Borlaug collaborated extensively with Mexican scientists on wheat improvement as well as significant collaborations with India and Pakistan. His work was in large part to create and adapt new wheat strains to lands that had previously not grown that cereal. The means to achieve this was through high-density seed heads on dwarf stems. The Nobel site describes Bourlag as an eclectic, pragmatic, goal-oriented scientist who accepted and discarded methods or results in a constant search for more fruitful and effective ones. He avoided the pursuit of what he calls “academic butterflies.” He was a good athlete and performed heavy manual labor in the fields. His green revolution helped to avert global famine during the 20th century and he remained active in the 21st century campaigning for the use of biotechnology to fight hunger and alleviate poverty. The Borlaug hypothesis is that increasing the productivity of agriculture on the best farmland can help control deforestation by reducing the demand for new farmland. Junk science is faulty scientific data and analysis used to advance special agendas and pervert objective interpretation. This is familiar to us from the science used by big tobacco companies to maintain that smoking was neither harmful nor addictive. The junk science exploiters include the media who create sensational headlines and fabricate details to suit their readership, lawyers who use junk science to bamboozle juries as well as environmental extremists and other lobby groups who use junk science to advocate social and political change. Businesses use junk science to optimize profits and deny the legitimate claims of those injured by their products. The organic food lobby use junk science to blame others for causing illness. Unfortunately, some scientists also use junk science to achieve fame and fortune by advocacy that is self-serving. Steve Milloy founded JunkScience.com in 1996 and is a regular columnist for FoxNews.com. The site has merited several awards, including being named one of the most popular health news web sites by Yahoo. With such a rich field of duplicity and perversion of the truth to pick from you might expect to have a laugh a second in poring over the many instances of artifice. Rather than laugh, it is more often a matter of well-motivated people getting science wrong. If you visit the site it is worth starting with the short course on recognizing junk science. The first example is that of a cholera epidemic in Peru in the 1990s resulting in around 10,000 deaths. The epidemic was made worse by the decision of the Peruvian government to stop chlorinating drinking water in response to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's labeling of chlorine as cancer causing. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says chlorinated drinking water is one of the greatest achievements in public health and could not have anticipated the misapplication of other advice on chlorine. One more example follows before leaving it for you to continue with the tutorial, or to browse other information at the site. Women were put off from using intrauterine birth control devices (IUDs) by a 1981 study reporting that IUDs greatly increased pelvic infection. A 1991 reanalysis of the 1981 study concluded that the original researchers showed an almost complete disregard for epidemiologic principles in the design, conduct, analysis, and interpretation of results. Thomas Baldwin (University of California at Riverside) talked about research into the methodology of teaching biochemistry at the 2009 IUBMB conference in Shanghai (report below). Manuel Costa from Portugal asked him how education researchers could get funding and Baldwin gave a rather surprising answer. Baldwin said that it was relatively easy to obtain money through the US National Science Foundation for good proposals because there was less competition than for main stream science. It is not to say that it is easier than applying to any other funding source, just that the chances of success were good. The Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Engineering program seeks to advance research at the frontiers of learning, education, and evaluation. There is support for four types of proposals; pathways, knowledge diffusion, empirical research, and large empirical research. The administrative requirements to make an application are elaborated at the site given. The three sessions on education in Shanghai were organized by Don and Judy Voet (USA), Trevor Anderson (South Africa), and John Lagnado (UK). The theme that connected the sessions was the history of biochemistry and its value in reflecting on teaching approaches. Don Voet led the contributions with a talk titled “Has the content in introductory biochemistry courses reached a limit?” Unlike most papers posing a question, Don Voet did answer his question with a decisive affirmative. Don outlined the exponential growth of databases and journal publications citing examples such as Nature now publishing 33 separate titles. If knowledge is growing exponentially, is it logical that textbook and course content should follow this growth? Don showed a parade of text books that have served biochemistry from the 1950s, starting with Fruton and Simmons (they were husband and wife like Don and Judy Voet) who first published General Biochemistry in 1953. The content on DNA and gene expression was negligible in 1953, yet the book ran to around 1,000 pages like every major textbook since. This led Don to the reasonable conclusion that content is self limiting. Also, the fixed time for teaching in a semester means that a reasonably predictable core of biochemistry is all that can be covered in introductory courses. Don is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and he was well placed to make the analogy that Chemistry courses have had 60 years of teaching much the same content. He produced the content page of Linus Pauling's classic textbook General Chemistry (1947) and made a reasonably complete one-to-one comparison with the content of the chemistry text that his current students use. Comparing Fruton and Simons (1953) to Voet, Voet and Pratt (2006) Don showed many changes in content, but he argued that biochemistry has now reached the same maturity of content as chemistry. Don was rather proud of being taught by Linus Pauling as an undergraduate and Don considered Linus a superb teacher. Don also made an aside that whenever he talked about historical matters, such as Linus Pauling establishing the nature of the chemical bond, his students got bored and began asking “is this examinable?” Historical characters were of interest to Don because he personally knew some of the people he was talking about. Knowing the people who defined core knowledge is even more likely for seasoned biochemistry lecturers who are contemporaries of the people who did the research. Personally, I find that there is good value in adding a human dimension to the processes of discovery and I am not giving up on having historical anecdotes in my lectures. If you want to know more about the education proceedings in Shanghai then you can look at the site given. It is my personal compilation of the proceedings. Information is grafted into the answers.com site from Wikpedia, Encyclopaedia Brittannica, and other large resources. It is staggering how many answers this site has. I arrived looking for some facts on tuberculosis and stayed trying to find an area of bioscience and general knowledge that was not represented. The information on the individual steps of glycolysis rivals standard textbooks. This is hard to beat as a starting point for most enquiries. I even found the answer to Douglas Adam's ultimate question about life, universe, and everything.