Words about science and hiking
I’ve been thinking about this for a while from the standpoint of biology. The basic business of the pharma industry is to find small molecules that bind to large molecules and alter their activities. There are lots of these large molecules (mostly enzymes and cell surface receptors), but “lots” does not equal “infinity”. And the Read More …
I don’t believe there is any evidence that smoking marijuana makes the immune system stronger – that is, able to better fight off infections. Smoke of any kind will cause lung damage, and is likely to make you more susceptible to lung infections. There is some evidence that pot smokers suffer from increased rates of Read More …
Useless? Never. The key thing to keep in mind is that antibiotic resistance usually carries a fitness cost. Generally speaking, resistant bacteria grow more slowly than susceptible bacteria. This is true for most classes of antibiotics: And it is true for most pathogens: Figures from The fitness costs of antibiotic resistance mutations It’s also generally Read More …
Quite possibly, none. Protein digestion begins in the stomach, with acidic hydrolysis (breaking apart by water) and enzymatic cleavage of protein peptide backbones. Protein-degrading enzymes are also abundant in the upper small intestine, which has a relatively low level of bacteria. By the time proteins get to the large intestine, where most of our bacteria Read More …
It does seem like we are being confronted with an onslaught of new diseases – Ebola, Zika, MRSA, CRE etc. But seeming and being are two different things. Our notions of probability and prevalence are strongly biased by their availability to our memory. Dying from these diseases is a horrible prospect that triggers a strong Read More …
Since the advent of germ theory in the 1870s, our approach to dealing with microbes has been to eradicate them whenever possible. The result has been an upsurge of antibiotic resistance and a host of other disorders that result from the disruption of our microbiomes: diabetes, obesity, depression, all kinds of inflammatory diseases. But most Read More …
Unless you slurp up an enteric pathogen like Salmonella, probably not much. How do I know? As a grad student and post-doc I commonly mouth-pipetted bacterial cultures. This technique, which involves sucking up liquids into a tube (a pipette) with volume markings, is now considered unsafe. As it should be. From Why you should be Read More …
The chance that extraterrestrial bacteria would be deadly to humans is zero. Not just very, very small. Zero. Pathogenesis requires intimacy, which is only attained through millions of years of co-evolution. The need for intimacy is apparent when you look at how bacteria and viruses cause infections and disease. Infection requires binding to a cell Read More …
No, and probably not in the long-term future either. DNA is very good at dense information storage (about an exabyte per cubic millimeter) and (potentially) at parallel computation. It is also chemically very stable and could be used for long-term data storage. But reading and writing information from DNA, whether by hybridization reactions or enzymatic Read More …
Phage therapy has not been shown to be safe and effective for any condition or disease. Phage therapy has been around for nearly a hundred years. There are many scientific reports of its efficacy in treating infections, but these reports are uniformly of low quality and do not meet modern standards for clinical evidence. The Read More …