Words about science and hiking
As you gathered from this post, I am skeptical that genomics will have much impact on improving human health. An immediate objection to this skepticism would be that genomic-driven advances have simply not had enough time to work their way into tangible treatments. It has only been 15 years since the first human genome was published. Read More …
Antibiotics have been around for a long time now, and we know which bacterial proteins they attack. ß-lactams like amoxicillin inhibit the enzyme that crosslinks peptidoglycans in bacterial cell walls. Fluoroquinolones like ciprofloxacin bind DNA topoisomerases and prevent them from coiling and uncoiling bacterial chromosomes. But so what? How does blocking these processes actually kill Read More …
There’s no doubt that the emergence of genomics was a huge scientific breakthrough. It supercharged research in any number of disciplines, and essentially created new ones such as microbiomics. But it hasn’t done the one thing it was supposed to do: transform the diagnosis and treatment of disease. The first genome was sequenced in 2001. Many Read More …
Gut microbiome composition, with exceptions that I’ll discuss below, is remarkably stable, particularly in adults. Although probiotics are expected to be a $45B business by 2018, their effects on microbiome composition are small and transient. A recent meta-analysis of seven randomized control trials found “a lack of evidence for an impact of probiotics on fecal Read More …
The default assumption is that antibiotics have no clinically measurable effect on immunity. But several lines of evidence bring that assumption into question. Basically, there are three pathways by which antibiotics could affect the immune response: Altering gene expression in bacteria. Some bacteria, most notably S. aureus, have devised elaborate and extensive mechanisms to evade and defeat Read More …
The easiest procedure would be to make tea from cinchona bark – enough quinine can be extracted this way to make a therapeutically useful dose for malaria treatment. Making a reasonably potent antibacterial compound is much more difficult. The natural ß-lactams, such as penicillin, are not chemically very stable, so you would have a very Read More …
Doctors are taught that it is important to finish out a course of antibiotics, and they dutifully relay this information to their patients. But the determination of therapy duration is usually based on almost no evidence at all. This is especially true for our understanding of the risk of the development of resistance, which is Read More …
The number of cultivatable bacteria in a typical office environment is about 100 per cubic meter, somewhat lower than outdoor levels: From Concentrations of airborne culturable bacteria in 100 large US office buildings from the BASE study Hospitals show higher levels of cultivatable airborne bacteria, around 720 per cubic meter[1] . But if you really Read More …
The first rule regarding new studies of the inheritance of intelligence is to be very suspicious of all studies of the inheritance of intelligence. The history of these studies is not a happy one. Stephen Gould wrote a whole book (The Mismeasure of Man) detailing all the ways in which biological research has been co-opted Read More …
It is hard to imagine how this could happen. Let’s assume that all the technical obstacles that now plague gene therapy[1] are resolved. In other words, that we learn how to deliver genes efficiently to the appropriate tissues without any side effects. Gene therapy would still be appropriate for only a tiny fraction of human Read More …