Saturday, December 27, 2008
Nerd alert
I know I've been MIA lately, but that's because I've literally been up to my tits in lab work that needed to get done six months ago. Also, I took a break for a hot second to guest on my mentor's podcast, This Week in Virology. I think it's a testament to how lab-intensive my life has been of late that the only time I take a break is to talk virology.
So if you want to hear my sexy voice talking with a bunch of other sexy-voiced science nerds about viruses, give it a listen. The podcast is geared toward a lay audience, so you don't have to be a big nerd yourself to understand what we're talking about. In fact, you'll probably enjoy my blaming bird flu for the soaring prices of chicken wings at my usual football bar. You can either subscribe through iTunes using this feed, or just go to the TWiV website.
I'll be back with some non-virological Razzification next week, I promise.
Labels: epidemic geekery, excuses, grad school bullshit, science, viruses rule
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
With virology, anything is possible
Thursday night television is really a great conduit for my rage. All night there's something on TV for me to utterly hate. At eight, we have a double dose of "Ugly Betty" and "Smallville," followed by an hour of stupid Seattle surgical sex drama on "Gay's Shitnatomy." Now that I know the producers of this broadcast spunktrap (my new favorite word) are total lesbian-hating homophobes, "Gay's Shitnatomy" may as well be the proposition 8 of primetime television. I also especially want nothing to do with any type of drama involving science. On CBS there is some shitshow called "Eleventh Hour" that looks a lot like that "Fringe" trash on Fox, except it doesn't have Pacey from "Dawson's Creek" in it. There's a freaky, borderline autistic yet obnoxiously arrogant scientist who knows everything about everything in spite of the fact that his hypotheses are ill-informed and he can't bother to run a single fucking control on any of his poorly designed attempts at experimental science. Somehow this ass-clown got a job with the FBI despite having zero social skills (which, one could argue, makes him far better suited for academia) and competence only in the area of insufferable scientastic gibberish, and he's in charge of solving any X-Files-type crap that should arise.
Last Thursday, I was busy working (hence no updates in a week...sorry, dudes, it's been a rough week) and texting (unfortunately, my primary means of communication these days) and turned on the TV for some background noise. Apparently I turned on this "Eleventh Hour" crap, because I was jerked away from my attention to rhinovirus 1A sequence data on my laptop when I heard the following words issue from my television:
"With virology, anything is possible."
Virology? On TV?! That hardly ever happens! Despite the fact that viruses impact all our lives on every level, from the cold that infects us to the HIV epidemic that burdens our global economy, most people don't find viruses sexy or interesting enough for primetime. They certainly don't find virologists to be a component of engaging television programming, so I was slightly shocked to see that CBS not only had that hot swarthy guy from The Mummy and Resident Evil: Apocalypse playing a virologist, he was waxing poetic about the grand potential for a career in virology. I got momentarily excited.
My excitement, unfortunately, was short-lived. Almost immediately Annoying Know-It-All Doctor Guy started having a conversation with the Hot Swarthy Virologist that made my blood boil with rage at the piss-poor fact-checking on the part of the "Eleventh Hour" writers. They were talking about how some terrorist or something made a chimeric virus out of adenovirus (another cause of the common cold, although not NEARLY as hot as rhinovirus) and variola, which is better known as smallpox. Supposedly this was done to make smallpox airborne, like the common cold. Too bad this is unnecessary because a simple Wikipedia search would have informed Hot Swarthy Virologist that variola is already transmitted by the airborne route. Frankly, if he's the "Head of Virology" somewhere, he should know that anyway. It certainly would save him all the time and trouble of making an adeno-poxvirus chimera that is unnecessary and after all the tedious cloning required to construct such a thing, probably wouldn't even be infectious. If you're such a crack virologist that "anything is possible" on your watch, then maybe it would be possible to learn how to pronounce "adenovirus" correctly, you loser!
This annoyed me because there are way more pressing issues in the field of virology that people should know about. I don't like shows coming along that confuse people with a lot of scientastic, impossible, pointless bullshit when there are more pressing virology-related issues to address. In fact, while I was busy fucking around with virus sequence data and getting pissed at the scientific implausibility of "Eleventh Hour" episode plots, I was also trying to improve public health by educating a concerned layman. Specifically, I was discussing diseases that one might get from banging porn stars. I was texting back and forth with my ex-boyfriend Benzo about whether or not the Daily Kos is full of self-congratulating jerkoffs when he got sick of arguing with me and decided to switch to a topic we both enjoyed discussing: pornography. It seems Benzo has recently discovered the many talents of one Miss Flower Tucci, the star of cinematic masterpieces such as Flower's Squirt Shower vols. 1-6, Jam It all the Way Up my Ass, Can a Brotha Get a Squirt?, Viagra Falls, Squirt in my Gape 2, and White Butts Drippin' Chocolate Nuts, to name a few. Here she is, dressed in finery reflecting the elegance and sophistication befitting an anally inclined female ejaculation specialist like Flower:
I've always been somewhat intrigued by Flower because the girl has a fucking firehose in her vagina. I've personally female ejaculated a couple times, but it's always been really random. I couldn't really associate it with any sort of particularly amazing or distinctive sex. It just happened and I have not figured out how to do it on cue, much less with anywhere near the volume and force someone like Flower Tucci achieves on a regular basis. I'm pretty comfortable with my body and generally very aware of how it works, but that's one of the few aspects of my sexuality that remains shrouded in mystery for me. However, clearly Flower has knowledge more advanced than I because the woman has mastered the craft. She's so infamous for her squirting talents that she even engaged another squirting pornstar, Cytherea, in the porn star equivalent of a 2Pac vs. Biggie style beef over who could get the most distance. This is a level of sexual competence above and beyond what most people can even imagine, and it's hardly surprising that even veteran porn viewers like Benzo and myself would be impressed by it. However, the price of porn is often infection, and as I pointed out to Benzo, I don't think from a virological perspective it's a very good idea to take a faceful of Flower's squirt.
Benzo: Oh by the way, what do you think of pornstar flower tucci?Benzo: She's a squirter!Razzy: Oh i know who she is! famous ass, loves anal, and can squirt 100 feet. But i find her striking because she looks a lot like (this girl who went to college with me)!Benzo: Ooooh that kinda ruins it for me. Although (this girl) was physically hot I felt she always came off in a non-sexual manner.Razzy: Yeah me too! I imagined she was always busier smoking joints than smoking poles.Benzo: Now flower looks like the kind of girl that might fuck you to death!! A wet death! :-)Razzy: Truly. Flower is no joke.Benzo: I'm not sure why flower is sooo hot but she's a slut and she's hot!! Anal and squirting don't bother me at all.Razzy: Nor I. I'd just think she was hotter if i didn't think of (this girl) chuckling that 'heh heh heh' stoner laugh at (this girl's ex) every time i see herBenzo: Now that's funny, (this girl's ex) used to stop in at my old job and see meRazzy: Not really something you want to masturbate to, thoughBenzo: That dependsRazzy: And how can you argue with fact? (This girl) is no flower tucci.Benzo: No argument. I'd let flower fuck me before I fucked (this girl)!Razzy: You know, though, flower probably has the herp. Almost all pornstars do. Now known thanks to an outbreak belladonna myspace blogged aboutBenzo: Yeah, that's why you j/o to porn and fuck real girls w/ rubbers. In nyc you can find a "pornstar" experience any night. Nut you've got to wrap it.Razzy: As lil wayne says, 'better wear a latex, so you don't get that late text, that i-think-i'm-late text.' Equally bad is the 'call me ron mexico' text.Benzo: Yeah...blah, blah! Lil wayne blows.Benzo: Having said that, I would still love to hook up with Flower TucciRazzy: You can still get herpes with a condom, ESPECIALLY during anal and doing stuff like getting squirted directly on a mucosal surfaceBenzo: Damn science...such a dick limper!Benzo: But only during an outbreak right??Razzy: Usually, but you often cant tell just by looking. And ppl can still shed virus between outbreaks. Getting anything on your mucosa is asking for troubleBenzo: Fair enough, I'll tell flower that we're off for dinner this weekend. I won't even eat her ass.Razzy: Yeah, she'll be disappointed. But i bet your girlfriend will be glad she's on ass-eating detail instead of flowerBenzo: She will be
A little more investigation confirmed that indeed Flower has starred alongside the 2007 "Dirtiest Girl in Porn" Belladonna herself in 5 different movies. About a year ago, Belladonna confirmed that not only is this title accurate because she can do things like deep throat all eleven inches of Lexington Steele's penis and get assfucked by baseball bats, but because she had a vicious outbreak of the herp all over her infamous ass. She said she was planning to retire, then changed her mind because in her words, "Dude, there's no way I can not be in that scene sucking that dick." Since her retracted herpes-based retirement, Belladonna has starred in Belladonna: Manhandled 3, Belladonna's Cock Pigs, Belladonna's Cock Happy 2, Belladonna's Fucking Girls 6, Defend Our Porn, Discovering Alexis Texas, Pirates II, and Strap-On Chicks 20. In the course of filming these eight cinematic classics, probably at least 20 actors/actresses were exposed to Bella's herpes. When you consider that she claims to have been infected in 2002 and she has starred in over 200 films since then, it's a wonder that there are any porn stars who aren't spreading the simplex. Considering Flower's professional associations with Belladonna, it's hard to imagine her signature squirting as anything but a gushing torrent of infectious herp. Probably some papillomaviruses too, since Flower starred in an orgy scene in Fashionistas Safado: The Challenge with Sasha Grey, who is rumored to take long career breaks due to recurrent anal warts.
According to hot, swarthy fake virologists the sky's the limit for crafting scary bioweapons with nature's coolest intracellular obligate parasites, but I'd be far more wary of Flower Tucci's ejaculate than some sort of made-up super smallpox (that isn't all that different from regular smallpox). While anything might be possible with virology, it's a lot more probable that it's just going to make your porn a little less fun to watch knowing that everyone starring in a given scene is popping an industrial-sized dose of Valtrex and rubbing Herpecin on their genitalia before the camera starts rolling.
Labels: Benzo, epidemic geekery, perversion, porn, science, TV, viruses rule
Thursday, October 23, 2008
The only thing missing was "Razzy's a pimp" on the Goodyear Blimp
So you may have noticed that I've been remiss the last week or two in posting regularly. In fact, you were probably rending your garments and wailing and gnashing your teeth and other assorted Biblical-type expressions of lament and sorrow that you weren't getting Razzified on the regular. This is because unfortunately I have this thing I'm doing called grad school, and I'm almost done with it. Therefore, not only do I have acute senioritis (or more accurately, sixth-yearitis), I have more bullshit to do than you even want to hear about. I have experiments to run, mice to kill, viruses to grow, cloning projects to finish, two riveting first-author papers to write, and a thesis committee to appease. I was doing the latter today, which is why I spent most of the week cranking out some last minute experiments and preparing to rock their faces off with some hot Power Point action.
Well, not only can I say "mission accomplished" to that notion, but on the VERY SAME DAY I discovered that, after two long years of passaging and plaque assaying and begging my virus to replicate, I gave a mouse a goddamned cold! And not some bullshit real-time PCR assay showing RNA replication like certain competitors of mine managed to get published (in a fucking Nature journal, of all places), but actual, honest-to-God, infectious motherfucking rhinovirus that kills cells and will give you a cold, make you miss work or school, and possibly exacerbate your asthma, COPD, or cystic fibrosis. REAL rhinovirus, not some pussified replicative form of the viral genome.
I know this doesn't sound like much, but I'm seriously having a fucking awesome day. In fact, this is one of the most awesome days in recent grad school memory. In fact, I can't think of a day when I was happier in grad school. I suppose the day I graduate will be better than this, but for now, I'm right up there in O'Shea "Ice Cube" Jackson territory regarding "good day" status. This is the science nerd equivalent of looking in the mirror and ascertaining that there are no jackers in sight while getting a beep from Kim, who reputedly can fuck all night. This is like no barking from the dog and mama cooking the breakfast with no hog (if I were a fake-me-out Muslim like Ice Cube apparently was when he released The Predator, anyway). It's like picking up the cash flow, then playing bones and being the individual skillful enough to be repeatedly yelling "domino." I probably won't be getting laid tonight with anyone who can fuck all night or doing any backyard gambling, but I will at least be having beers with J-Sexy, who apart from my PI is the one person in the entire world capable of deeply appreciating exactly how fucking mindblowingly, orgasmically, phenomenally awesome THIS is:
I know, I know...try to resist masturbating furiously at the sight of such a sexy piece of data until you are in a private place more appropriate for that sort of activity. I'm off to drink some beer and eat a fucking cheeseburger. And come up with topics for lots of interesting posts that I'll have slightly more time to throw together every couple of days, of course. Thanks for your patience with me being an absentee blogger, and please feel free to have a drink or fifty in my honor!
Labels: epidemic geekery, excuses, grad school bullshit, I LOVE IT, rap, Razzification, science, viruses rule
Friday, October 03, 2008
And in other science media news...
I've noticed that on some completely non-science websites (like fucking GAWKER!), snarky bloggers noticed this week's front and back covers of Nature and are questioning whether or not this Sigma-Aldrich ad with the yellow and chocolate Labrador retrievers isn't just a little TOO similar to the front cover with McCain and Obama to not be racist.
I doubt there was any intentional racism at work, since Sigma has been bombarding me with leaflets of this very ad at work and were probably just continuing their marketing blitzkrieg on the print edition of Nature. In fact, we just got a bunch of chemicals from Sigma the other day in lab, and the box contained a stack of crap talking about the unique forensic properties of dogs' nose prints. Somehow this is supposed to make me want to buy oligos from Sigma. What it does in actuality is make me say "awww, cute dogs" for about two seconds, then say, "FUCK SIGMA AND THEIR SHITTY-ASS OLIGOS!"
Oligos, also known as oligonucleotides or primers, are little snippets of DNA we use in PCR reactions. PCR is basically a technique for photocopying specific stretches of DNA, and that specificity is conferred by the oligos you use. I think that's Sigma's point about the dogs...their primers are as unique as a dog's nose print. Too bad Sigma takes forever to synthesize their primers and half the time they mail you the wrong ones! We used to use Sigma primers in my lab, until we realized that they charge way too much, fuck up orders all the time, and don't synthesize or ship them in a timely manner. I'm way less offended by the perception of accidental racism than the notion that cute dogs and their cute noses should be exploited to whore out Sigma's inferior-ass primer business. Cute dogs never make me wait two weeks on doing some PCR I need because they haven't gotten around to doing quality control on my dumb oligos.
Labels: grad school bullshit, media whores, nerd alert, science
Science says that dissent over descent is dumb
I was just catching up on this week's scintillating issue of Science, and was surprised to see that the editors have obviously been keeping up on this week's debate on creationism versus evolution here on the RAZZY.org comment pages. While I'm hardly surprised that the obviously smart person who puts together the "Books et al" section of Science reads my website, I was a little shocked to see that they selected a book review to contribute to the debate.
The reviewer, Michael Ruse, doesn't think much of philosophy professor Steve Fuller's support of the intelligent design theory, either as an expert witness supporting its relevance in a Pennsylvania classroom or as a competent philosopher. This is probably not surprising, considering this review is published in America's most highly regarded science publication, which also happens to be called Science. However, Ruse nails exactly what those of us in the scientific community reject about intelligent design as a viable, reasonably sound theory on the origin of life. Specifically, after you strip away all the scientastic lingo intended to discredit Darwin's reasoning and give some sort of scientific credibility to Biblical accounts of the origin of the species, you're stuck with something that is based on faith and religious conviction rather than experimental evidence. Ruse scathingly notes:
Intelligent design theory is a form of Christianity made up to look like science. The judge correctly ruled that it has no place in science classrooms. Reading Dissent over Descent should not change anyone's verdict. As a historian and philosopher of science, I can only hope that the science community does not judge us all by Fuller's example.
Well said, Michael Ruse. Could you please get on my comment boards and start explaining this?
Oh, and is anyone besides me disappointed that last night during the VP debate Gwen Ifill didn't ask Sarah Palin if she really believes that Adam and Eve coexisted with the dinosaurs, and those dinosaurs weren't so much "dinosaurs" as mythic dragons? I wanted to see Joe Biden grimace smugly as she tried to tackle that question with Joe Six-Pack in mind. Missed opportunity, Gwen Ifill!
Labels: Dear God, nerd alert, scathing indictments, science
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
The Razzy.org monkey trial
When I wrote this past weekend's post about my planned Sarah Palin Halloween costume, I didn't expect to get that many comments, if any at all. Who really cares what my Halloween costume is beyond a couple "oh, ha ha, you're pretending that gross dog of yours is a baby with Downs syndrome" quips? Therefore, I was surprised when the comment section blew up with readers hotly debating the merits of evolution versus creationism. The back-and-forth is getting a little heated, so I figured it was high time I stepped into the fray. Besides, if you want to know about evolution from the top down, there's nobody better to ask than me. I'm one of the most highly evolved human beings the world has ever seen. This is true, and you'll find diagrams like the one below in most reputable biology textbooks. Look it up!
The comment that started all this was by the ever-wily "anonymous." Actually, it was a couple of anonymous comments, the first one suggesting that I shouldn't be so happy about voting for McCain because he's a dick and because he represents "extremists who want to ban books and teach creationism in public schools." This baited some anonymous creationist, who responded with the spark that ignited the powder keg:
Why is teaching creationism extremist? It takes more faith to believe in evolution than creation.
My buddy Morrissey'sHair vehemently disagreed with this, and proceeded to set it off with some of his patented comment page bitchery. Some other people got in on the action, and I have to say I can't blame them. The above comment makes no sense whatsoever to me, along with some of the quips this person has since posted, such as "I beleive [sic] there is more evidence for a Creator (not throwing religion around here) than there is for the evolution 'theory'" and "there is more proof for creation than evolution."
Before I get into why I think the theory of evolution is correct, however, I would like to note that I am also a creationist. I believe in God, and that this God created the heaven and the earth and the birds and the bees and all that trash. However, I don't believe that God did all this in 6 24-hour days and then took a day off exactly as described in the Book of Genesis. I am well aware that the Bible (or any other account of divine creation from other faiths) is not intended as a scientific text, and that the whole Adam and Eve business is a myth to explain a religious truth (God's omnipotence and creative power) rather than an accurate account of how the whole creation business went down. For this reason, I have never found my creationist beliefs as a Catholic to contradict my understanding of evolution as a fundamental principle of biology as a professional scientist. Belief in God is inherently a matter of faith, since God wouldn't be God if you could prove his existence or otherwise understand him by our imperfect human means. Therefore, if you believe in God, you can't prove anything about what he gets up to, and you'd be an ignorant moron to try and take some four millenia-old Hebrew mythology and try to spin it as credible evidence capable of proving or disproving any scientific theory. Creationism is an inherently unprovable belief, while the science that yielded the theory of evolution is a method for answering questions through experimentation and reason. Because reason and faith operate within different realms, I have never thought that creationism contradicted or disputed evolution, and I do not think they should even be discussed in the same conversation.
That said, the unfortunate proliferation of slow-witted, excessively religious idiots in this country have somehow convinced everyone that creationism, despite being entirely rooted in faith (which is by definition irrational), is a scientifically legitimate alternative theory to evolution. I don't care what faith your creation narrative of choice is based on; believing in a divine creator just because it suits your individual spiritual beliefs is a theory which cannot be proven or even tested experimentally, and thus has no business in a debate about biology in the first place. I think that the creationist movement has illustrated this by going out of their way to give "creationism" the trappings of science. I don't care if it's called "intelligent design;" if it's based on the notion that God is somehow involved, it's not scientific and has no business being described as such, much less taught in science classes. If you're going to teach "creationism" as legitimate science, then how do you even decide which creation story to go with? Who is to say there is any more proof backing the Judeo-Christian version of things than that earth was a chick named Gaia who banged a sky-dude named Uranus and begat the Titans? The fact is that the only "proof" behind any tale of divine creation is the conviction of the faithful who subscribe to that particular mythology and their selectively chosen claims about pseudoscientific instances of evolution being contradicted that only serve to illustrate their ignorance of biology.
I've noticed that the creationist crew likes to point out that evolution is a "theory," not a fact, and has busted out with a bunch of supposed "evidence" about how evolution contradicts nature. For example, evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. For those of you who are rusty on your high school chemistry, let me remind you that this is also known as the law of entropy, or the notion that all ordered systems proceed toward disorder. The creationists argue that since Darwinism mandates beings evolving to a "higher" or "better" state of being, this can't be consistent with our understanding of entropy. However, this argument ignores the molecular basis for evolution, which is genetic mutation. As a commenter correctly pointed out, this is a random process, both in terms of how mutation is generated and the environmental conditions that lead to specific mutations being selected. Now that we have the technology available to sequence and apply bioinformatics to entire genomes, we can trace specific genetic changes between evolutionary relatives. For example, we can use sophisticated analytical techniques to mine sequence data and determine roughly when the human lineage diverged from the common ancestor we share with our closest primate relative, the chimpanzee. Suggesting that evolution has a "goal" to somehow result in a "higher" or "better" being demonstrates nothing save ignorance about the molecular basis of life. But just in case it isn't enough to point out that the old "second law of thermodynamics" attempt at disproving evolution is a bust, I should point out that a proper application of scientific fundamentals also negates creationism. The laws of conservation of mass and energy essentially demonstrate that something (whether matter or energy, and life certainly constitutes BOTH) cannot be created from nothing, which is inconveniently THE essential feature of any creationist hypothesis. I suppose it is convenient supporting a theory that allows the most fundamental principles of any branch of science to be violated due to the presence of an omnipotent God.
Another pseudoscientific argument I expected to come up in this debate is the issue of "microevolution," and sure enough, I was not disappointed. The concept of "microevolution" has been developed by the so-called "intelligent design" community to discount experimental data supporting evolution. Microevolution is the notion that changes occur at or below the species level (such as phenotypic differences in dog breeds or pathogenic bacteria evolving drug resistance due to antibiotic overuse), but not at a larger level (such as dinosaurs evolving into modern-day birds). The only difference is the time scale, as over millions versus thousands of years, organisms accumulate more and more mutations distinguishing them from their evolutionary progenitors. I suspect what the creationists like to call "macroevolution"–or distinction at higher taxonomic levels–will be proven eventually. The only difference between genetic variations distinguishing an eagle from a hawk compared to those distinguishing a velociraptor from any extant bird are the cumulation of many mutations over time. Unfortunately, we can't extract high-quality DNA from dinosaurs to prove they are the "macro"-evolutionary ancestors of birds with existing technology. As soon as we do have that technology, I expect that the fossil record will be linked by molecular means rather than the simple linking of common phenotypic traits. I find the evidence of "microevolution" extremely convincing that ALL evolution proceeds in this manner from personal experience.
I work on RNA viruses, which are probably the fastest-evolving almost-organisms known to science (viruses are "almost-organisms" since they are not technically alive, as they can't reproduce without a host cell). RNA viruses have an incredibly high mutation rate, because the enzymes that copy their genomes have an incredibly high error rate. These enzymes, known as RNA polymerases, make an error in replicating genomes 10 times more frequently than DNA polymerases. Also, unlike DNA polymerases, they don't have reliable proofreading capabilities. Also, RNA viruses can reproduce in 6-12 hours, meaning that between their rapid generation time and high mutation rate, they can "evolve" right in your lab incubator. If I want to make a rhinovirus that grows well in mouse cells, for example, I can just culture rhinovirus in mouse cells over and over again. Eventually I will select variants which are adapted to growth in mouse cells, and in fact, I have...that's the basis of my entire doctoral thesis. The intelligent design people can call this, as well as similar variant selection strategies for bacteria and other rapidly dividing microbes, "microevolution" to dismiss it as an actual example supporting Darwin's theory. However, this is no different than evolution of larger organisms over longer periods of time. We can never see humans evolve into different species because our generation time spans decades rather than hours, and we are complex multicellular organisms that need to accumulate more mutations to display an obvious phenotype, much less one significant enough to be considered a divergent species. However, it happens the same way for humans, dinosaurs, whales, and anything else with a genome made of nucleic acids that it does with RNA viruses. I don't see how any reasonable, intelligent person can say that maybe "evolution" in the form of genotypic mutations resulting in the selection of particular phenotypic variants more adapted to growth in their environmental conditions occurs only in the microbial world, but every other living thing on earth was created on days 4-6 of the Genesis narrative.
I doubt that I've convinced anyone on the merits of the "theory" of evolution who was already determined that creationism is more reasonable, more probable, or less extremist. In fact, as I've been working on this post, the debate has raged on and culminated in the creationist implying that all the evolutionists are going to Hell. While that's not explicitly stated, I certainly know a veiled burn-in-Hell threat when I see one:
Oh course there's really only one way to test this theory, and we ALL will test it one day, die. Of course if I'm wrong, what's my loss, I'm dead. If you're wrong well...You better be 100% sure you're right, you have much more to lose than I do.
One thing I am 100% sure about is that our death and ascension to the afterlife is a pretty shitty test of which theory is right. I have no idea whether or not anyone gets filled in on how God rolls with running the life game once they die. Furthermore, I have a hard time believing that using what I consider our God-given reason to accept a theory that has been extensively proven by a number of experiments and observations is something meriting eternal damnation. For one thing, as I said before, I am a creationist who ALSO fully subscribes to the theory of evolution. Evolution doesn't exclude divine creation; it just excludes the six day creation theory. In fact, the more I know about evolution, the more impressed I am at how brilliant God's creation actually is. If anything, I think evolution supports the existence of God more than excludes or denies it, so I hardly think it's something worthy of a neverending trip to perdition. Of course, in my case, this is probably a moot point since St. Peter's just going to take a gander at my file and send me straight to the "Down" escalator, but I doubt it's going to be because I think evolution is a valid and convincing explanation for the wonders of the living world. That's one thing I have a certain measure of faith in.
Labels: Dear God, nerd alert, Razzyphiles, retard rage, science
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
A circumstance in which hygiene and sex actually DON'T go well together
Normally, I think that good oral hygiene practices are a must for anyone who wants to stick their face in my crotch. I don't like the idea of some person with furry teeth or bleeding gums or gaping tooth-holes going to town on my holiest of holies, so I always scope a honey out to ensure that their mouth meets my standards for cleanliness. This is advisable because usually if someone bothers with a regular dental care routine, they also shower and shave and do other necessary personal maintenance regimens. I may like fellow dirty minds, but I do NOT like dirty bodies or mouths, so good hygiene is a must for me. However, I just learned that too much hygiene can actually be bad, at least as far as getting head is concerned.
I just received an email containing a link advising me that I'm not supposed to floss 30 minutes to 4 hours before performing oral sex on some lucky guy or gal. Flossing can make your gums bleed a little, and this can increase the risk of passing on the HIV and basically every other gross form of twat rot known to man.
Is it safe to floss before oral sex?
Experts say various things about oral sex and flossing, but agree flossing is not recommended before engaging in oral sex. The advice varies anywhere from 30 minutes to 4 hours, regarding how long to wait. It takes 4 hours for membranes around your gums to heal.
The risk of contracting HIV from oral sex is relatively low, but other STIs can be transmitted through mouth to genital contact. If you have sores or cuts in your mouth or gums or an inflammation from an infection in your throat or mouth, you are at greater risk for contracting an infection or HIV.
Oral sex is a common sexual behavior. People enjoy various combinations of positions and techniques when engaging in cunnilingus and fellatio, but it is the mouth and tongue that provide the pleasure in all cases. (RAZZY Edit: Um, DUH!)
I'm a little curious as to who these uncited "experts" are. As a virologist, I recognize that it's theoretically possible to transmit the HIV by oral if you have a cut there, but extremely unlikely. It's a lot MORE likely you'll get it by swallowing a big load of HIVved up jizz (at least per this 1996 article that I totally wish I'd written, because getting a Science paper about blowjobs rules), but that's got nothing to do with flossing. Unless you have some serious gum disease, I can't imagine that flossing would cause copious enough mouth bleeding to significantly increase the risk of HIV transmission. Frankly, if your mouth is in such bad shape that flossing causes a gingival hemorrhage, you probably aren't flossing regularly anyway.
I'm getting really annoyed with all these articles highlighting the supposed dangers of oral sex. I love oral sex, and I really hate the notion that I'm going to have to start using condoms, or even worse, the albatross of prophylactics AKA dental dams. I'm already constantly worried about throat cancer since apparently sucking more than 6 dicks increases your risk more than smoking, and as many Razzyphiles have observed, I've done a shitload of both. I'm also especially annoyed that this might discourage people from flossing. Ultimately, that's going to lead to more bad breath, which is going to lead to my not hooking up with people, and thus no oral sex anyway. Everyone loses!
Labels: medical drama, science, sex, sluts, viruses rule
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Not grounded, not dead
Reason #4765 to stop fucking whining: we're not fucking dead.
Wednesday was a different day around the Experiential Marketing ranch. It became a little tougher to endure the nonstop river of conference call inanities, the continual misinterpretations of cretin clients and Cro-Magnon coworkers. The words "leverage" and "manage change" came tinged with far more bitterness than usual. What could be the matter? Too much carbon monoxide coming from the vents? A widspread, sudden existential crisis? Was everyone simultaneously unlucky in love?
Perhaps so, but more pressing: the Swiss were poised to conduct a test on a particle accelerator in the hours to come, at 2:30 in the American morning.
If it ended up a success, we would make a great leap in particle physics and introduce some compelling questions about the nature of matter. Hoo ha. Well, not we; the professor and the nearly 2,000 other physicists whose input he requested. But no matter.
IF, however, THE SUCKER FAILED, those no-side taking, unempathetic fucktard Swiss would have swiftly conducted the planet into a black motherfucking hole, thereby bringing on the end of the motherfucking world.
Blessed be, though, we were able to wake up on Thursday morning, not dead. Our phone bill was not sent off in vain. We still had time to call our moms. There would be yet another big fat bucket of movie popcorn in the bright future to come. We could return to work, able-bodied and with a bounce in our steps. Work wasn't any less mind-numbing. But we were no longer faced with spending the last day of our lives at fucking work. How do you say "amen" in Swiss German?
Wednesday was a different day around the Experiential Marketing ranch. It became a little tougher to endure the nonstop river of conference call inanities, the continual misinterpretations of cretin clients and Cro-Magnon coworkers. The words "leverage" and "manage change" came tinged with far more bitterness than usual. What could be the matter? Too much carbon monoxide coming from the vents? A widspread, sudden existential crisis? Was everyone simultaneously unlucky in love?
Perhaps so, but more pressing: the Swiss were poised to conduct a test on a particle accelerator in the hours to come, at 2:30 in the American morning.
If it ended up a success, we would make a great leap in particle physics and introduce some compelling questions about the nature of matter. Hoo ha. Well, not we; the professor and the nearly 2,000 other physicists whose input he requested. But no matter.
IF, however, THE SUCKER FAILED, those no-side taking, unempathetic fucktard Swiss would have swiftly conducted the planet into a black motherfucking hole, thereby bringing on the end of the motherfucking world.
Blessed be, though, we were able to wake up on Thursday morning, not dead. Our phone bill was not sent off in vain. We still had time to call our moms. There would be yet another big fat bucket of movie popcorn in the bright future to come. We could return to work, able-bodied and with a bounce in our steps. Work wasn't any less mind-numbing. But we were no longer faced with spending the last day of our lives at fucking work. How do you say "amen" in Swiss German?
Labels: FalloniusMonk, pro-apocalyptic zeitgeist, science
Friday, August 22, 2008
Parasites get parasites
I have never paid much attention to Amanda Peet, since any actress introduced as an "X Files: I Want to Believe star..." draws my gaze about as much as a bowl of plain oatmeal or a selection from Oprah's book club. However, a while back, Amanda Peet made me care about her for five seconds when she told some parenting magazine that not only did she vaccinate her spawn, she thinks people who don't are "parasites."
Vaccines prevent epidemic disease thanks to the concept of herd immunity, the notion that if enough of the population is immune to an infectious disease, said pathogen won't be able to cause an epidemic because it can't spread due to a dearth of susceptible people. Amanda Peet's point seems to be that people who choose not to vaccinate their children are relying on herd immunity rather than maintaining it themselves. Ultimately, like with parasites, this will be detrimental as the ranks of the unvaccinated swell to provide a new reservoir of infection.
Viruses are by definition parasites. They are technically not considered "living" by biologists because they cannot reproduce without a host cell. Viruses then reproduce at the expense of their host, appropriating molecular machinery normally performing cellular functions for viral replication. Therefore, Amanda Peet's observation concerning the parasitism of parents who don't vaccinate (usually because of vague, unfounded concerns about autism) is underscored by the irony of their kids succumbing to the very diseases they choose not to protect their children–and the entire population–against. Congratulations, idiots: your kids don't have autism, but they sure as fuck are enjoying a scourge of yesteryear like motherfucking MEASLES.
The last time I wrote about vaccination, I got a bunch of haughty referrals to various websites "proving" the link between immunization and autism. This "proof" amounts to little more than circumstantial evidence and the hysterical first-person accounts of parents whose children were diagnosed with autism around the same time they received their first immunizations...since coincidentally, autism typically becomes apparent around age two. Because autism has increased as childhood vaccination has become more prevalent, the two must be related. Never mind that autism was basically unrecognized as a legitimate disorder until 1938, and wasn't officially diagnosed until 1943. One could argue that given the coincidental chronology of autism diagnoses and childhood immunization, the increases have more to do with physician awareness about autism than with vaccines taken by the vast majority of the population. I don't see anyone blaming global warming, nuclear power, or whatever other unfortunate by-product of our developed civilization for autism. This is because those arguments are obviously bullshit, so people unfortunate enough to have an autistic kid rely on scientastic misinterpretations of epidemiology statistics concerning a topic most people are poorly educated about: vaccination.
Vaccination has been going strong since the fucking tenth century, when the Chinese realized that infecting someone with a low dose of smallpox produces immunity (although sometimes had the unfortunate consequence of actually causing smallpox). This practice, known as variolation, was used until Edward Jenner developed vaccination in the eighteenth century. Edward Jenner was a physician in the English countryside who observed that milkmaids were relatively immune to smallpox and this resistance seemed associated with crusty sores on the milkmaids' faces. In an experiment reflecting the extremely lax ethical standards of the time, he took scrapings of the milkmaids' faces and injected them into a ten-year-old boy who had never contracted smallpox. He subsequently injected the boy with the exudate of pustules from a smallpox patient, and observed that the boy did not develop disease. Though he did not know it at the time, infection with the cowpox virus causing the unattractive but relatively harmless milkmaid face sores elicits antibodies which cross-react and protect against smallpox. The old timey medical name for cowpox is vaccinia virus; hence the term "vaccination." While vaccination is no longer practiced in the literal sense since smallpox was eradicated in 1972, we refer to immunization as "vaccination" out of convention.
The development of vaccination radically changed the way we regard epidemic disease, and as far as viruses are concerned, smallpox was one of the worst. I guarantee if these assholes who spend their time reading blogs written by parents more concerned with seeking an explanation for their child's autism than being scientifically factual were faced with the prospect of their kid coming down with variola major, they would be singing a different tune. Behold, the disease which merited the original vaccine:
Measles might not be QUITE as bad or as deadly as smallpox, but it's still pretty fucking gross:
If you are stupid enough to believe that you're protecting your kids from unsubstantiated, conjecture-based autism risks by declining to immunize them, consider that by making this decision, you are not only exposing them to the risk of contracting the disease above, you are putting everyone else's kids (especially those too young to be vaccinated, who are more likely to die from measles) at risk too. You truly are a parasite, as your own need for enforcing your ignorance damages everyone else's right to public health. Shut the fuck up and stick your kids with the MMR.
Vaccines prevent epidemic disease thanks to the concept of herd immunity, the notion that if enough of the population is immune to an infectious disease, said pathogen won't be able to cause an epidemic because it can't spread due to a dearth of susceptible people. Amanda Peet's point seems to be that people who choose not to vaccinate their children are relying on herd immunity rather than maintaining it themselves. Ultimately, like with parasites, this will be detrimental as the ranks of the unvaccinated swell to provide a new reservoir of infection.
Viruses are by definition parasites. They are technically not considered "living" by biologists because they cannot reproduce without a host cell. Viruses then reproduce at the expense of their host, appropriating molecular machinery normally performing cellular functions for viral replication. Therefore, Amanda Peet's observation concerning the parasitism of parents who don't vaccinate (usually because of vague, unfounded concerns about autism) is underscored by the irony of their kids succumbing to the very diseases they choose not to protect their children–and the entire population–against. Congratulations, idiots: your kids don't have autism, but they sure as fuck are enjoying a scourge of yesteryear like motherfucking MEASLES.
Measles cases in the U.S. are at the highest level in more than a decade, with nearly half of those involving children whose parents rejected vaccination, health officials reported Thursday.Although Jenny McCarthy literally screamed "BULLSHIT!" on Larry King about this, the fact is that no matter how much she wants something to blame for her son's autism, there is no correlation between autism and childhood vaccines. In fact, 10 of the 13 authors of the only legitimate study to ever speculate about a causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism have retracted their conclusions. That study examined only a dozen autistic children, and other studies examining thousands of patients have repeatedly shown no statistically significant causal relationship between vaccination and autism. There is, however, a direct correlation between measles outbreaks and a refusal to vaccinate. As these recent measles outbreaks demonstrate, vaccines are a much less serious public health problem than the abject stupidity of people who rely on former Playmates and Candies shoe spokesmodels for medical information.
Worried doctors are troubled by the trend fueled by unfounded fears that vaccines may cause autism. The number of cases is still small, just 131, but that's only for the first seven months of the year. There were only 42 cases for all of last year.
In a typical year, only one outbreak occurs in the United States, infecting perhaps 10 to 20 people. So far this year through July 30 the country has seen seven outbreaks, including one in Illinois with 30 cases, said Seward, of the CDC's Division of Viral Diseases.
None of the 131 patients died, but 15 were hospitalized.
Childhood measles vaccination rates have stayed above 92 percent, according to 2006 data. However, the recent outbreaks suggest potential pockets of unvaccinated children are forming. Health officials worry that vaccination rates have begun to fall — something that won't show up in the data for a couple of years.
The vaccine is considered highly effective but not perfect; 11 of this year's cases had at least one dose of the vaccine.
Of this year's total, 122 were unvaccinated or had unknown vaccination status. Some were unvaccinated because the children were under age 1 — too young to get their first measles shot.
In 63 of those cases — almost all of them 19 or under — the patient or their parents refused the shots for philosophical or religious reasons, the CDC reported.
In Washington state, an outbreak was traced to a church conference, including 16 school-aged children who were not vaccinated. Eleven of those kids were home schooled and not subject to vaccination rules in public schools. It's unclear why the parents rejected the vaccine.
The last time I wrote about vaccination, I got a bunch of haughty referrals to various websites "proving" the link between immunization and autism. This "proof" amounts to little more than circumstantial evidence and the hysterical first-person accounts of parents whose children were diagnosed with autism around the same time they received their first immunizations...since coincidentally, autism typically becomes apparent around age two. Because autism has increased as childhood vaccination has become more prevalent, the two must be related. Never mind that autism was basically unrecognized as a legitimate disorder until 1938, and wasn't officially diagnosed until 1943. One could argue that given the coincidental chronology of autism diagnoses and childhood immunization, the increases have more to do with physician awareness about autism than with vaccines taken by the vast majority of the population. I don't see anyone blaming global warming, nuclear power, or whatever other unfortunate by-product of our developed civilization for autism. This is because those arguments are obviously bullshit, so people unfortunate enough to have an autistic kid rely on scientastic misinterpretations of epidemiology statistics concerning a topic most people are poorly educated about: vaccination.
Vaccination has been going strong since the fucking tenth century, when the Chinese realized that infecting someone with a low dose of smallpox produces immunity (although sometimes had the unfortunate consequence of actually causing smallpox). This practice, known as variolation, was used until Edward Jenner developed vaccination in the eighteenth century. Edward Jenner was a physician in the English countryside who observed that milkmaids were relatively immune to smallpox and this resistance seemed associated with crusty sores on the milkmaids' faces. In an experiment reflecting the extremely lax ethical standards of the time, he took scrapings of the milkmaids' faces and injected them into a ten-year-old boy who had never contracted smallpox. He subsequently injected the boy with the exudate of pustules from a smallpox patient, and observed that the boy did not develop disease. Though he did not know it at the time, infection with the cowpox virus causing the unattractive but relatively harmless milkmaid face sores elicits antibodies which cross-react and protect against smallpox. The old timey medical name for cowpox is vaccinia virus; hence the term "vaccination." While vaccination is no longer practiced in the literal sense since smallpox was eradicated in 1972, we refer to immunization as "vaccination" out of convention.
The development of vaccination radically changed the way we regard epidemic disease, and as far as viruses are concerned, smallpox was one of the worst. I guarantee if these assholes who spend their time reading blogs written by parents more concerned with seeking an explanation for their child's autism than being scientifically factual were faced with the prospect of their kid coming down with variola major, they would be singing a different tune. Behold, the disease which merited the original vaccine:
Labels: epidemic geekery, retard rage, scathing indictments, science, viruses rule
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Daily Next Six Months' Douchebag: Razzy
While this may cause a great deal of lamentation and sorrow among my legions of dedicated Razzphiles, I have to sadly announce that the "Daily Douchebag" and "Daily Dude I Want to Hit" features are indefinitely suspended.
I'm sure you all just attempted to punch your computer screens in shock and rage, but before you destroy your gateway to the internets, let me offer an explanation. The other day, one of my lovely anonymous Razzy Haters left the following comment:
Sure, make fun of world class athletes who are actually succeeding in life. Of course, you are successful, if you consider being an alcoholic a success. How about publishing some articles? So much for publish or perish: no wonder Columbia is the laughingstock of the Ivy League. By the way, you have already failed in your goal to model rhinovirus in mice (see: Bartlett et al. 2008 Nature Medicine)
I thank the commenter for recognizing my achievements in avoiding sobriety, and applaud them for picking on me in a way that I figured someone would have done a long time ago: hating on my publication record. It's true that I have not published my research in a peer-reviewed journal, primarily because, as the commenter also notes, my thesis project has been an abject disaster. I spent my first three years in graduate school working on a transgenic mouse. "Transgenic" means that it was genetically fucked with to express the human receptor for rhinovirus. In theory, this would mean that it would express said receptor in its respiratory tract, and thus be susceptible to infection with some mouse-adapted rhinoviruses we had sitting around the lab. I showed by every means possible that this mouse had integrated the transgene into its germline DNA (PCR and Southern blot), it was expressing the transgene (Northern blot and real-time quantitative PCR), and the receptor was present in the mouse trachea (immunohistochemistry). However, the mice still were not supporting virus replication, so I eventually did some flow cytometry and saw to my horror that the receptor was not present on the cell surface. Since the receptor normally is responsible for snagging the virus at the cell surface and bringing it into the cell, this was a major blow to my thesis work. After three years of doing every experiment imaginable to understand what was going on, I realized that while this mouse might be transgenic, it was never going to be susceptible to infection. With a heavy heart, I sacrificed the mice and began to plot a plan B.
Because making transgenic mice is time-consuming and expensive, I decided to instead isolate rhinoviruses that could use a mouse cell surface protein as a receptor. This means I can use any mouse to develop my model, but first I need some rhinoviruses that can grow in mice. The reason why people aren't busy doing all kinds of in vivo work with the common cold is that rhinovirus does not grow well in mouse cells at all. There is a block at the level of viral RNA replication that results in negligible production of infectious virus from mouse cells either infected with virus or transfected with viral RNA (in human cells, you can just pop the viral genetic material itself into a cell, this will be translated into viral proteins and replicated by the viral polymerase, and voila–the cell makes new virus). So I spent the next two and a half years passaging rhinoviruses capable of using the mouse LDL receptor for entry back and forth between mouse and human cells, to select variants which grow better in mouse cells. I did this through two different mouse cell lines, and finally showed that I did indeed select viruses with robust growth in mouse cells. The next step would be to try it in actual living mice.
Unfortunately, right at that time, an epidemic of mouse hepatitis virus tore through our mouse facility. The veterinarians made me stop breeding my colony for five months, which translates to NO MORE MOUSE WORK. So I spent that time trying in earnest to clone my adapted viruses, which has been a whole other technical bitch and a half that I won't get into. A few months ago, I was given the go-ahead to resume breeding, and I thought, "FINALLY! I can get these mouse experiments finished, write it up, maybe dabble in some asthma work, get Ph.ake doctored, and get a real job (or a post-doc)!" However, the technicians in my animal room have been rough with maintaining our colony and all the dams (mommy mice) have been on a gluttonous spree of eating their young. When mice get stressed, they tend to eat their newborn pups because they're stupid and gross. I tried to avoid this by instructing the mouse facility staff to add cotton nestlets (squares of cotton that the mice shred up and nest in), ensure they are eating breeder chow for maximum fertility, and not disturb cages with newborn pups (baby mice). The technicians have not heeded these formally requested instructions, so I had to send a bitchy e-mail to their boss. How many of you have ever had to address the topic of CANNIBALISM in a work e-mail?
I was just in our mouse room and noticed that many of our breeder cages did not have extra cotton nestlets and, in a few cases, breeder chow in them. Some of the cages without nestlets appeared to have been recently changed. As you may recall, I recently requested that all breeder cages not be changed if they contain newborn pups, that all breeder cages be given breeder chow, and that all breeder cages be given several cotton nestlets when changed. I made these requests to both maximize litter size and reduce cannibalization of newborn pups, which has been a problem for some time. While a certain amount of cannibalism is normal and unavoidable, I have noticed evidence in many of my breeder cages (ie: blood, viscera, and partially cannibalized pup corpses) of widespread dam cannibalization. In fact, despite having numerous cages devoted to breeding some strains of mice, I barely get several pups per month that survive to adulthood because most are neonatally cannibalized, likely because the dams are stressed by cage changes and a lack of nesting material. This is having a significant impact on my research, as it dramatically reduces the number of mice I'm able to work with. Today I noticed evidence of recent cannibalization in several breeding cages (neither of which had additional cotton nestlets in them when discovered).
The recent outbreak of MHV has taken its toll on my ability to perform mouse work, and now that our room is cleared, I was hoping to have access to as many mice as possible. I believe that the requests I have made will significantly reduce the cannibalism problem which has plagued our colony since I was able to resume breeding following clearance of MHV from our room. Would you please ensure that the requests for special care of our breeder cages are being rigorously implemented?
The facility manager was very apologetic and assured me she would have a staff meeting to address these issues and they would be handled. God willing, in three weeks I will have mice to complete my thesis with. This still means another nine months of work, which is where suspension of my "Daily Whatever" posts comes in.
Those of you who are suffering alongside me in the trenches of scientific research funded by the elusive NIH RO1 grant know that thanks to our current president's hatred of all things involving "stem cells," the entire NIH budget has been drastically cut and everyone is having a hard time getting grants to fund their labs. My PI (boss), who is extremely well-regarded in his field and who writes a fucking textbook on the subject to prove it, has experienced the trials of securing funding as much as more junior faculty who aren't endowed full professors at an Ivy League school. Therefore, our lab has four students on one grant, which is too many. You would think that in the interest of supporting research which will yield papers and grant money and thus enhance its reputation, Columbia would use its considerable financial resources to help out, but you would think wrong. Columbia doesn't give a fuck because they haven't gotten any bad press for it, and that's the only thing which spurs this institution to do ANYTHING. That is why, as anonymous hater pointed out, Columbia is the laughingstock of the Ivy League. Instead, my department's brilliant solution to our lab funding problem is to get rid of students. Because three of the students on my PI's grant (including myself) are sixth years, they are graduating all of us ASAP.
You might think, "But Razzy, you complain about grad school all the time! Don't you want to get Ph.ake doctored like tomorrow?" While I absolutely would love to move on to my post-doctoral life, I don't want to do it before I publish my dope-ass mouse model. Unlike anonymous, I don't believe that I have "failed" at my project because another group published a model before I did. Other models have been published similar to that one which have many drawbacks. The specific paper anonymous cites shows viral RNA replication in mice, but virtually no production of infectious virus. I consider production of infectious virus critical to a useful model, because what's the point of using an animal model if it doesn't mimic the human disease? When you get a cold, you shed tons of infectious virus out your nose. That's how the damn disease is transmitted. I probably could have demonstrated production of negative strand RNA two years ago and published it, but my standards for a model require production of infectious virus by infected mice. The fact that Bartlett et al published their subpar model in a demi-Nature journal only goes to show that there is a substantial need for this kind of experimental system, and the rhinovirologist community will take what they can get. That's why when I complete my experiments, my paper is going to rule everybody's face off. However, I won't be able to do that if I have to graduate in December, a prospect that was sprung on me last week.
I have worked it out with my department to graduate in February, which should give me enough time to complete my experiments, submit one or two papers for publication, defend a thesis I am proud of, and get a real job. This timeline is feasible, but mandates working extremely long hours. I have worked hard throughout graduate school and have experienced many setbacks due to events beyond my control. However, now that I'm on the homestretch, I don't want to give the haters any ammunition suggesting that I didn't overcome all of it with some hot publications and the respect of my scientific peers. Therefore, if I'm going to get up at 5 a.m. to write for four hours every day, it's going to have to be papers rather than blog posts. I'm still going to do my best to write at least one thing every day, but I just can't justify researching and writing (usually copiously) about a minimum of two topics. I love writing this blog and I am sad that I have to dial it back a little, but sometimes you have to prioritize your life, and what you want to do takes a backseat to what you need to do. I need to blind some bitches with science for the next six months, so please be patient with my reduced output of Razzification during that time. I promise at the end, you'll have some SWEET peer-reviewed journal articles to read! TRUST!
Labels: excuses, grad school bullshit, Razzification, Razzy Haters, science, viruses rule
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Anthrax ROCKS
I received the following e-mail from a Razzyphile the other day:
Hey, Razzy
Thank you for the useless bullshit. You are definitely fulfilling a societal need.
I was hoping you could post about the anthrax dude who recently killed himself. You are an expert in the field and we razzyphiles would like to hear from you anything germane to our greater understanding of the entire incident.
PS great rack
I'm a recent law school grad but not admitted so I can't help legally yet.
I am always happy to accommodate requests to drop some science for an interested Razzyphile, particularly one who simultaneously compliments my tits, declares the demand for useless bullshit a "societal need," and might be able to potentially join my crack pro bono legal team of criminal defense and bankruptcy attorneys once he passes the bar exam. I'm also always especially happy to discuss this sexy Gram-positive spore-forming facultative anaerobe:
I've had a real scientific hard-on for Bacillus anthracis since I started studying microbiology. By all accounts, it's a hardy little survivor, which is what makes it a successful pathogen and a relatively efficient biological weapon. The above picture (which looks like a colored transmission electron micrograph) depicts B. anthracis in a state called vegetative growth, which is the type of growth most people imagine bacteria do in an Erlenmeyer flask or a petri dish of culture media. They divide by binary fission until they run out of nutrients or growth conditions become otherwise unfavorable. Most bacteria, like E. coli or Salmonella species, will proceed to die or at least stop dividing under conditions of nutrient deprivation, but B. anthracis can do something special. It can sporulate, meaning it changes into a dormant spore form, until it is again exposed to more favorable growth conditions. This is equivalent to watching TV and taking a nap on the couch when nothing good is on, to conserve your strength and attention for when something awesome like "I Love Money" or a rerun of Red Dawn merits waking up.
B. anthracis spores are extremely durable and can remain viable for decades in the soil, which is why livestock are most often afflicted with anthrax. The spores get from the earth into grazing animals' hair and basically hang out there. If they get into vulnerable areas of skin (via a cut or a mucosal surface like the eye), they germinate, and result in cutaneous anthrax. Generally the humans that get this are farmers, herders, slaughterhouse employees, and other people working with livestock. In both animals and humans, cutaneous anthrax presents as an ulcerating lesion that is usually pretty gross, but usually treatable with antibiotics and not fatal.
It's much more serious when the spores are inhaled and germinate in the lungs. Prior to the Cold War era of state-sponsored bioweapons programs, pulmonary anthrax was known as "Woolsorter's Disease," because it typically affected people who worked in places where animal hides were processed and resulted in high concentrations of airborne spores. However, when World War II came around, a number of countries (including the great U.S. of A., Great Britain, and the Soviet Union) decided to test the feasibility of using aerosolized anthrax spores as a biological weapon. They are naturally a great bioweapon because not only are the spores incredibly hardy, but pulmonary anthrax is not transmissible from person-to-person. Therefore, you can target an enemy efficiently without worrying about causing an epidemic. However, nobody ever used anthrax as a weapon in an actual war, partly because of the lasting effects. Gruinard Island, off the Scottish coast, was used by British scientists to test their anthrax bombs in the hopes of using them against Germany. They stopped developing anthrax as a weapon when they concluded that, while effective at killing their test sheep, the spores were so durable that they would render any German city attacked this way uninhabitable for years afterward. In fact, Gruinard Island was so heavily contaminated that it was quarantined for almost 50 years after these tests, until the Brits got sick of going back to test it all the time and bombed the whole place with 280 metric tons of formaldehyde.
The major world powers then signed a treaty in 1972 pledging not to develop new biological or chemical weapons. Apart from an incident in the Russian city of Sverdlovsk in 1979 when a number of factory workers across the street from a "vaccine plant" died from pulmonary anthrax (the Kremlin attributed the incident to contaminated meat, while Soviet defectors involved in the Soviet bioweapons program attributed it to a filter being left off an exhaust vent), no government has openly developed anthrax as a biological weapon. However, anthrax is still studied from both a basic research and a biodefense perspective, and there are certainly cultures of highly virulent B. anthracis growing in many research facilities all over the world.
For anyone with a basic knowledge of microbiological technique, weaponized anthrax is easy to make. In fact, if you can make homebrewed beer, you can make an anthrax weapon. Anthrax is not like Ebola virus, which is hard to get, harder to culture, and almost impossible to deliver to the intended targets. If you wanted to attack someone with Ebola, you'd have to go to Africa in the midst of an Ebola outbreak, somehow smuggle viable samples of virus through customs (and "samples" in this case would probably consist of bloody vomit or shit from an Ebola patient on ice), find a bunch of monkeys to covertly infect to grow more virus, and try to attack and inject infected tissues from these monkeys into my unfortunate victims since most strains of Ebola (at least the ones that infect humans) don't appear to be airborne. Since Ebola is a virus, it needs a host cell to grow in, and the virus particles alone are not stable for long at room temperature or when exposed to UV radiation (ie: sunlight). You can't just make some powdered Ebola and spray it all over people, and someone is bound to notice if you're running around attacking people with a syringe. There's about fifty ways that such a scheme would fail, and even if you somehow did manage to make some homegrown Ebola, it would be pretty fucking difficult to infect many people before your evil plot was discovered.
Anthrax is much easier to make. I could go dig up soil from a cow pasture in Oklahoma, culture anthrax bacilli from that, grow them in a fermentation tank which can be constructed from materials at my local hardware store, dry the culture, chop it into powder, and mail it to whoever I wanted. Even worse, pulmonary anthrax is usually deadly, because the initial symptoms aren't much different than a chest cold. Unlike other bacteria that cause pneumonia by growing to the point of taking over the lungs, pulmonary anthrax causes respiratory failure via a toxin the bacteria secrete. By the time it becomes apparent that a patient has pulmonary anthrax versus a more common respiratory pathogen, even getting rid of the bacteria with antibiotics doesn't get rid of the toxin, and then it's usually too late. Therefore, it's quite easy for someone with a rudimentary knowledge of microbiology to make a deadly, easily transportable terrorist weapon. Fortunately, most scientists (including myself) aren't looking to break into the bioterrorism business, and have serious ethical problems with biological weapons. Unfortunately, there are some who do not fit that description, which is where the recently suicide-d Dr. Bruce Ivins comes in.
In the wake of those anthrax mail attacks in 2001, the federal government obviously put a lot of effort into determining where that anthrax came from. Like people or any other living organism, anthrax from a lab is genetically distinct from anthrax in a podunk cow pasture somewhere, so the government was able to determine that it came from a virulent lab strain. In fact, it came from a strain that our own government uses to develop anthrax vaccines. That's why the government fucked up royally by running a colossally inept investigation of Dr. Steven Hatfill, the wrong anthrax scientist, who just collected a $5 million settlement from the federal government for the ruin it wrought on his career and his not-a-terrorist reputation.
As it turns out, it was more likely Dr. Bruce Ivins, who killed himself last week when he discovered that he was going to be indicted on capital murder charges for being the actual anthrax mailer. Dr. Ivins was involved in all sorts of sketchy activity, including renting post office boxes under assumed names, using his lab after-hours (although as a grad student, that seems like a perfectly normal workday in the slave labor culture of academic research), having a number of unreported anthrax spills, threatening to kill co-workers, frightening his shrink into getting a restraining order against him, and being strangely obsessed with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority at Princeton. He was also apparently a loner and a dick.
While anyone has reason to be skeptical of the FBI's largely circumstantial case against the late Dr. Ivins given their total shitshow of an investigation into the now-exonerated Dr. Hatfill, I can state from personal experience that science has been known to harbor some disturbed people that remind me of Dr. Ivins. Without specifically referring to anyone in particular, a person with a need to dominate, threaten, and harass his colleagues, has a troublesome and obsessive relationship with women, does not respond to reprimands or psychological treatment, and takes no personal responsibility for his actions is not unprecedented in the field of microbiology. Unfortunately, these kinds of mentally unstable people can simultaneously be good enough at their jobs to get access to dangerous pathogens, and sometimes the underlying craziness isn't recognized until it's too late.
Even worse, this personality type can sometimes combine the monstrous need to kill innocent people via anthrax with a desire for personal gain. Because these people are Ph.D scientists, they are obviously intelligent, and can sometimes engineer a situation to benefit financially from their own reprehensible crimes. For example, a person might be able to get away with being a scary, abusive, potentially violent asshole by threatening lawsuits or otherwise manipulating the legal system to get what they want along with a substantial cash award. In Dr. Ivins's case, his numerous patent claims over anthrax vaccine technology would provide a significant financial motive to create a nationwide panic about attacks with weaponized anthrax. Currently, the anthrax vaccine approved for use in the U.S. is primarily reserved for military personnel and the odd first-responder. If everyone in the country suddenly became hysterical over the prospect of a large-scale anthrax attack, the demand for a vaccine would increase logarithmically. Dr. Ivins stood to make millions of dollars personally from this kind of nationwide terror, and that can only be icing on the cake for acting out on his reprehensible misanthropic impulses.
Now, many people are probably wondering whether or not they should be afraid of future anthrax attacks since it's so easy to grow and distribute as a lethal bioweapon. I would say no. Sure, the possibility exists. So does the possibility of a flu pandemic as serious as the Spanish flu of 1918 that killed as many as 100 million people by some estimations. So does the possibility of some terrorist getting their hands on one of the few poorly secured smallpox samples, of an airborne strain of Ebola emerging, of all bacteria developing multiple antibiotic resistance, and so on. The Russians alone have a whole arsenal of Cold War-era biological weapons that could be procured on the black market and released, but I'm not laying awake worrying about dying from a terrorist attack of weaponized Soviet tularemia or glanders. The microbiological world is full of nasty (and fascinating) pathogens, and there are plenty of nasty human beings who would gladly facilitate their assault on us. However, I find it more productive to worry about the infectious problems we already have to contend with than the ones that may or may not decimate our civilization. I think it's much more practical and sensible to worry about getting HIV when I have incautious drunk sex with a fellow New York City resident than to fret that there's a slight chance some lunatic spiked my cable bill with anthrax spores. Hell, I'm even more worried that I might get herpes! I dodged that bullet one time when I ALMOST had unprotected sex with a guy who then advised me that he had it (because he is a decent and ENTIRELY admirable human being), and 20% of adults have the herp. As a microbiologist, I'd advise you all to think more about the scourges we already face than the hypothetical ones that might be.
Labels: correspondence, crime and punishment, epidemic geekery, nerd alert, Razzyphiles, science, terror, viruses rule
Friday, July 18, 2008
How NOT to throw a virology conference
I just got back from the absolutely thrilling annual delight known as the American Society for Virology Conference. The last time I attended ASV two years past, it was in Madison, Wisconsin and was quite fun. They have a large conference hall in close proximity to both our hotel and the many bars where all the UW-Madison college kids get their drank on. I was expecting something similar this year, except minus the agonizing Northwest Airlines flight home that J-Sexy and I endured with one hour of sleep and a crushing hangover. Too bad I was very, VERY wrong. The only thing this year's ASV had in comparison to Madison was the central theme of virology; every thing else could be considered a cautionary tale about how NOT to throw a major scientific conference. I have conveniently itemized the lessons for your edification, because I know you're all contemplating getting into the virology conference organizing business, and you might want to know what NOT to do.
Everything is a million fucking miles apart. When I arrived, I received a folder saying "Cornell: More than a great resource–a SPECTACULAR setting for academic and professional events." This folder included a pamphlet noting that Cornell is a "a full-service 745 acre conference center in the heart of the beautiful Finger Lakes." What these pamphlets gloss over is that Cornell is atop a gigantic fucking hill, which means that you are always huffing and puffing up some steep-ass grade to get wherever you are going. Furthermore, the "745 acres" mentioned in the pro-Cornell material also ensure that everything is spaced at least a half-mile apart, so if I want to catch a talk about poliovirus replication and immediately after go to some talk about innate immunity in a different session, I have to hope that there is some talk I don't care about in between because transferring sessions means a 15 minute run uphill. Of course, despite the fact that there are large college lecture halls everywhere, the organizers planned all the sessions in the most disparate locations possible.
2. Ensure that the shuttle service runs as infrequently and unpredictably as possible
Given that Cornell is huge, you would think that ASV would compensate by arranging a regular shuttle service to ferry us around from nerdy talk to talk, or back down to the main part of Ithaca where all the hotels are. Instead, they chartered three decrepit old school buses with no air conditioning and semi-retarded drivers who actually asked US for directions. They also instructed said shuttles to run sporadically early in the morning and late at night, so if there was no shuttle, you had to call your hotel or take a city bus. Luckily most of the hotels (including ours) ran free shuttles, but sometimes these were in high demand and you had to either walk or catch Ithaca public transport. I live in New York City and take public transport all the time, so this would normally be no problem...except for the fact that my trusty ASV bag didn't come equipped with a bus map or schedule. It's hard to take the city bus when you don't know where to catch it, you don't know where it goes, and it doesn't run on Sundays.
3. Require use of precious drink tickets for non-alcoholic drinks
When I picked up my hot-ass "ASV 2008" bag and my $200 travel grant, I immediately dove in to find the drink tickets. When I saw there were seven of them, I thought, "BOO YAH!" This momentary elation turned quickly to horror, however, when I realized that you had to use these for water as well as beer. This was a slap in the face to those of us who rely on the generosity of the sober nerds for extra swill, because it guaranteed that those (lame) scientists who don't drink weren't willing to give up their drink tickets to their boozy colleagues as they normally would. Last time at ASV, my drunken crew managed to acquire at least fifteen extra drink tickets from kindhearted teetotalers willing to put their spare booze to good use. This time, all those drink tickets were wasted on Cornell Big Red water and apple juice by the temperance-minded set and by day 3, I was actually paying for alcohol.
4. TOO MUCH VIROLOGY
I know this is a virology conference and I shouldn't complain about hours upon hours of virology talks, but even for professionals in the field, FOURTEEN HOURS A DAY IS TOO MUCH. The conference organizers were not selective about who got to present a talk, and let everyone who wanted give one. That meant that talks went on until ten p.m., and half of them were unfinished crap that had no business wasting my twelve minutes. For every interesting talk in which I heard about "abortion storms" (gross) caused in livestock by Rift Valley fever virus, I got to hear two talks where some dumb skank elaborated on optimizing buffer conditions for some assay they just got working and thus don't have any real data from whatsoever. Thank God Cornell was at least equipped with wireless everywhere and I could spend these talks surfing the internet or simply spacing out.
5. Bad food