Ideas Make Good Presents
Science Café passes another milestone this week: our 51st edition. If we were a television sitcom, we would throw a party. But since we cannot house the thousands of Science Café readers from Alameda to Addis Ababa, I will do the next best thing and send some gifts your way. Not that kind of gifts – the other kind, the ones that make you smile, nod your head, ponder, email to a friend or print out for future reference. I’ll call them ideas, sometimes disguised as information.
The Envelopes, Please
So what is the most popular Science Café produced so far? The prize goes to the surgeon-scientist with the electrifying name: Electron Kebebew, MD. His story tops the list with 4,370 page views to date. Electron has also been downloaded as a podcast 1,620 times. That’s not easy. He’s very tall.
Runner-up in the most-read category is “Alcoholism: Vice or Disease?” my first of three conversations with Howard Fields, MD, PhD, a senior researcher at the UCSF-affiliated Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center and director of UCSF’s Wheeler Center for the Neurobiology of Addiction. In third place is my story on the work of Mary Dallman, PhD, “The Biology of Fat.”
What does this mean? The most cynical among us might say that readers seem to be most interested in why they drink and what they eat and who can fix them up when addictions take their toll. I prefer to believe that readers want answers and that they, pardon the pun, hunger for real experts.
Biggest Science Café surprise? The success of the podcasts, hands down. At last count, the number of Science Café podcast downloads was nearly 85,000. Thank you, loyal listeners.
No Website Winner
Speaking of winners, whatever happened to the best science website contest advertised on these pages? Thanks to Scott Oakes, MD, from the Department of Pathology and Department of Laboratory Medicine and Colin Fahrion from the Division of Pediatric Surgery for submitting their sites for consideration. Both sites use the UCSF web banner correctly, which in itself is worth applauding. But our review of websites for the larger science community at UCSF revealed so many bad examples that we decided to hold the $750 prize this year and roll it over to next season.
Presidential Debate on Science
Now, here’s something we should all rally behind, maybe even stage at UCSF. In an article in the Washington Post, Matthew Chapman has thrown down the gauntlet to our long list of presidential candidates. He has called for a presidential debate solely on the subject of science.
As Chapman writes, “We must elect a president with a basic understanding of 21st century science.” He recommends that the debate not test arcane knowledge, but general principles and deep thinking about what the scientific method means to the acquisition of knowledge. I would be willing to moderate this debate for free.
Summer Favorites
I have been saving these story links from the summer of 2007. Enjoy. Here’s a story on why we need to know more about the interaction between food and prescription drugs. Here’s another one about food. Could taxes on foods that make us fat save lives? Switching gears, I pass along this link to a disturbing story about how the parasitic worm that causes river blindness is developing drug resistance. This story has a UCSF angle. James McKerrow, MD, PhD, is working toward a new treatment for river blindness, among other parasitic diseases.
And the School of Pharmacy’s C.C.Wang, PhD, has long been feted for his work identifying a protein target needed by the parasite Tritrichomonas foetus (found in cattle and cats), determining the structure of the protein, identifying molecules that might bind to and “immobilize” the protein, and synthesizing molecules that could bind more tightly to the protein while not interfering with its human protein counterparts. The significance? Protozoans are a major cause of deadly and debilitating illness in humans and livestock throughout the world.
PTSD Blues
I mention this additional story on a “cure” for PTSD not because it was conducted only in mice, but as a segue to the real story taking place at the UCSF-affiliated San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center. There, in 2003, the Northern California Institute for Research and Education (NCIRE) – also known as the Veterans Health Research Institute – founded, in collaboration with the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs, the nation’s first Neuroscience Center of Excellence.
To date, 28 projects in post-traumatic stress disorder, neuro-imaging of war-related brain injuries, traumatic brain injury, neurological war injuries and several other categories are underway. Sad to say, researchers have growing numbers of human subjects to study; the number of Middle Eastern war veterans suffering from such injuries is projected to reach the hundreds of thousands. But no one can really be sure. Look for more on the progress of this important research in future editions of Science Café.
Last Thoughts
As a former history major, I am happy to announce that Big History has arrived. For those who don’t know, and I count myself among the ignorant – at least until a few months ago – a new breed of historian has emerged in the last 20 years or so. Led by San Diego State University’s David Christian, PhD, and others, this field seeks to fuse human history and natural history and examine this fusion from the beginning of time to the present.
If you give no other book to a deep-thinking or curious friend, make it Christian’s 2004 masterpiece, Maps of Time. At 672 pages, it is a big read, but every page is rich with provocative and thoughtful details.
Consider this statement about the role of collective learning in human evolution: “Humans as individuals are not that much cleverer than chimps or Neanderthals; but as a species we are vastly more creative because our knowledge is shared within and between generations. All in all, collective learning is so powerful an adaptive mechanism that one might argue it plays a role in human history analogous to that of natural selection in the histories of other organisms.”
Some of these insights you might have read elsewhere or already know, but the magic is in the multidisciplinary context. Maybe it should be required reading for the presidential debate on science. Now that would be a milestone!
Alternative content
Related Links
- Is There an Electron in the House?
- UCSF Science Café, May 4, 2007
- Alcoholism: Vice or Disease?
- UCSF Science Café, April 2, 2007
- The Biology of Fat
- UCSF Science Café, July 6, 2007
- On Faith: Call for a Presidential Debate on Science
- Washington Post, Oct. 24, 2007
- Right Foods
- BBC News, July 17, 200
- Fat Taxes
- BBC News, July 11, 2007
- River Blindness Resistance Fears
- BBC News, June 14, 2007
- McKerrow Lab: The Parasite Page @ UCSF
- CC Wang Lab
- Brain Target for Stress Disorder
- BBC News, July 15, 2007
- NCIRE - The Veterans Health Research Institute
- Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History
- Google Book Search