Words about science and hiking
The skies cleared and the views of the early morning eclipse were spectacular. Right on cue, a pair of coyotes began howling just as totality began. My focus on the moon was disrupted by a light flashing on and off every five seconds in a wash about a quarter mile south. I stopped taking pictures Read More …
Up early for what I knew would be a challenging hike. My sleep was disturbed last night by a pair of vehicles that pulled up to the trailhead at Alamo Canyon around 3. They got out and conferred casually in Spanish, like tourists rather than smugglers, then left on foot. They returned about an hour Read More …
Out here again. Under the moon, under the stars, surrounded by saguaros and chollas. Feels like home. Everything went smoothly today, getting from Boulder to Denver to Phoenix with minimal brain damage. Other than having to wait for a sporting goods store to open so I could get a canister, I had no trouble getting Read More …
As with all things biological, it depends. Some antibiotics, like rifampicin and chloramphenicol, readily give rise to spontaneous resistance mutations. These drugs target transcription and translation, respectively, and alterations of a single nucleotide in the bacterial genome can confer resistance. Since point mutations like these arise spontaneously at about one per million bacteria, there are Read More …
The most well-known, and one that I can recommend, is “The Billion-Dollar Molecule” by Barry Werth. It describes the founding and early days of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and their efforts to use rational drug design technologies to create a new immunosuppressant drug for transplant patients. Werth does a great job not only of explaining the science, but capturing the Read More …
My wife was a backpacker when we met. This was definitely on my list of qualifications for a serious relationship, along with being beautiful and smart. Although raised in Cleveland, she escaped at first opportunity to the west, and our first times away together were invariably camping or backpack trips. We were poor grad students Read More …
Most antibiotics are based on natural products synthesized by bacteria and fungi. Quinolones (like Cipro) and sulfa drugs (like sulfamethoxazole) are the major exceptions to this rule. Antibiotics belong to a class of natural compounds called secondary metabolites. These are molecules that are not essential to normal growth and metabolism (like sugars, amino acids and nucleic Read More …
There’s a good chance that we will never be able to use CRISPR in otherwise healthy human beings. Not safely and ethically, anyway. Let’s assume that all the obvious technical problems are solved – that we learn which genes to modify and how, and that we learn how to deliver CRISPR-Cas complexes safely and efficiently to Read More …
No, this is not a joke. Well, the “genius” part is, but the “feeding bacteria to fight infections” is not. I saw this press release in IDSA’s Twitter feed. I read it and wondered anew at the reality disconnect between academic research and clinical application. The gist of the story is that non-growing bacteria are Read More …
The time required to recover from antibiotics is somewhere between zero and infinity. Antibiotics target bacterial proteins and (for the most part) have no direct effect on human proteins, cells or tissues. Antibiotics in general, and ß-lactams and cephalosporins in particular, are so free of acute adverse effects (the “zero” scenario) that physicians often hand Read More …