Fighting the virus carried by Man's best friend

Man's best friend the dog, is the most common carrier of history's most dreaded virus: rabies. Although very few deaths occur from rabies in the US thanks to post-exposure vaccination, fifty thousand people die worldwide from this horrid disease. A raging and innovative virus, it does not travel through the bloodstream (where it might be detected by our immune systems) but travels slowly but surely through the nervous system to drive us quite literally crazy before death.

The preventative vaccination of our dog population has not prevented rabies in the US but given us the proverbial buffer between this disease and the human population. In the US raccoons and bats are still common culprits that serve as a vector between the virus and our vulnerable nervous systems. Humans are considered an accidental exposure in this disease as we, personally, rarely spread it to others before our demise if we are infected. A rabid, sharp toothed creature on the other hand does a much better job at keeping the virus alive--infecting many before it dies a grisly death.

Many of the most lethal diseases are zoonotic, they originate in animals and then cross from species to species. Measles came from a disease in cattle, influenza from pigs, smallpox from rodents, the plague and typhus from the rat. "With most zoonotic leaps in disease, animal contact is the spark, but urbanization is the bone-dry tinder" (Wasik and Murphy, 71)

As an emergency nurse, I gave many doses of post-exposure rabies vaccine. Yes, I knew that the disease was brutal and always fatal. (Since I last administered the vaccine, some rare people have survived with the help of modern medicine) I did not fully appreciate the bravery that Louis Pasteur (he, of the pasteurization fame) and his assistants as they risked their lives, literally, to obtain serum from the jaws of salivating rabid dogs to make the vaccine. It is said they kept a gun handy, so that if one of the three was bit, his friend/assistant could shoot him quickly before the disease ravaged him mad. A virus too small for the scientist to see under the microscope--yet he was convinced he could make a vaccine for this unseen killer. The lives that Frenchman has saved!

After the news release of the news (at the turn of the 20th century) that there was a vaccine for this dreaded disease, three American boys in New Jersey were bit by a rabid dog. The news of their plight was in the newspapers, to be facing certain death when a vaccine was across the ocean. Many readers sent in money that enabled the boys to journey to Monsieur Pasteur's lab to be cured. Am I jaded in wondering if the public would be able to mount such a campaign to effect a cure for three such American youth today?

You've Come a Long Way Baby! Or Have You?

Tantalizing bits from this book on human DNA include:

1) "...humans have ten times more microorganisms feasting inside us than we do cells" (Kean, p. 301)
2) "The name HUMAN Genome Project even became something of a misnomer, because it turned out that 8 percent of our genome isn't human at all: a quarter billion of our base pairs are old virus genes. Human genes actually make up less that 2 percent of our total DNA, so by this measure we're four times more virus than human." (Kean, p. 302)
3)  Zipf's law: "It says that the most common word in a language appears roughly twice as often as the second most common word, roughly three times as often as the third most common, a hundred times more common than the hudrendth most common, and so on. In English, THE accounts for 7 percent of words, OF about half that, AND a third of that, all way down to obscurities like grawlix...These distributions hold just as true for modern Hindi, Spanish, or Russian." Zipf's law can be applied to music, city population ranks, income distributions, mass extinctions, earthquake magnitudes, the ratios of colors in painting...." (Kean 163)
4)  Creationism vs. Evolution? A lot of the greatest work in genetics has been done by those in religious orders. Mendel of biological fame (the Mendelian laws of inheritance) was a monk and the Dominican
nun, Sister Miriam M. Stimson was a pioneer in DNA research in the 1940s and 1950s. "Women

at the time usually had to relinquish their careers upon marrying, while unmarried women (like Franklin) provoked suspicion....Catholic sisters, meanwhile, respectably unmarried and living in church run     convents, had the financial support and independence to   pursue science." (Kean, pp. 201-3)

Time and Age

"It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age; when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others."
--p.88, "The Sense of an Ending" by Julian Barnes

Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

A fascinating read if you are trying to create a successful business, promote an idea, stop smoking, prevent a deadly epidemic, or simply understand why the Kardashians or Facebook is popular. How does one get to a "tipping point" where something that just touches a few people, ends up touching a huge number of people? If you were ever curious this is the book for you!

I had heard of the 80/20 principle but did not know it applied to so many things. This is the idea economists refer to when they say that 20 percent of a workforce does 80 percent of the workload. Or as Gladwell extended it: 80 percent of crimes are committed by 20 percent of the criminal element, 20 percent of motorists cause 80 percent of accidents, 20 percent of people consume 80 percent of all beer. (Gladwell, 48)

Speaking of people who do all the work...old Paul Revere had a helper...someone who rode the other direction and covered the same amount of territory to tell people the British were coming. William Dawes, however was not as charismatic and his word of mouth epidemic did not spread. Why was Paul Revere so incredibly successful with mobilizing the revolutionaries while William Dawes mobilized no one? What makes a person charismatic? How do word of mouth epidemics get started? How does something like "Silly Bands" (animal shaped rubber bands) become a huge business? Gladwell will entertain you as he explains the science of epidemiology of social fads as well as medical epidemics.

Killing Lincoln

Killing Lincoln----a murder mystery it is not, or so one would think. We all know that Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford's theater and died soon after. So how do Martin Dugard and Bill O'Reilly keep readers engrossed in the story knowing how it will end? They do this quite ably by explaining the circumstances and seemingly non related tangential events that all culminated in this horrifying event.

Where was our sixteenth president's bodyguard when John Wilkes Booth snuck into his theater box? The man was shirking his duties and drinking ale next door. John Parker, this never-do-well bodyguard did not have a good reputation, but was still hired to guard the president. Mary Todd Lincoln even wrote the letter that exempted him from serving in the military (enabling him to stay on the force protecting her husband.) Somehow he was acquitted of charges of dereliction of duty. John Parker showed up the morning after the assassination at the police station with a known prostitute. (The Secret Service appears to have had an early history of agents that enjoyed their company.)

The writers point out many of the great ironies of history. John Wilkes Booth's lover was also interested in Lincoln's own son. The bed that Lincoln was carried to and died upon had often been rented by his murderer. John Wilkes Booth slept in that bed just three weeks before the dying president's long, broken body was laid across it to die. These and other ironies enable the authors to engross the readers in a tale that has a sadly known outcome.

Breasts: A natural and Unnatural History

Breasts: Why do we have them?
             Why do men like them?
             Why do babies like them?
             What size do babies like? What size do men like?
             What state is the home of the boob job?

Curiosities in the book:
1. The inventor of the Barbie doll was a breast cancer patient, she designed and promoted some of the first prosthesis for masectomy patients. Hmm, this from the inventor of a doll that has "proportions
that only one in 100,000 women ..compared to Ken's bod, which is found in one in 50 men." (as determined by the researchers at the University of South Australia)
2. Babies only need a breast the size of "half an eggshell."
3. Between 5-10 MILLION women are walking around with
breast implants.
4. Breast milk has "endocannabinoids" in it "note the root CANNABIS in there. These substances which cause the munchies, probably play a role in enticing infants to eat...but make the infant feel full... formula lacks these compounds, and formula fed babies have
a notoriously higher caloric intake...why we have a childhood
obesity epidemic."

Breasts, boobs, boobies. Whatever you want to call them, we all have them. Women have more pronounced ones that provide a vital function: feeding our young. No matter how pronounced yours are, you probably love someone with developed functional breasts. This book is not just about the disease of the breast which is becoming all too common. It is an uplifting (hah!), eye-opening, and at times humorous look at breasts. It also is an alarming account of the interplay between the environment and humans, who are mammals (no matter how technological or cerebral we may be.)

Ironically it may be male breasts that answer the question: what chemicals cause cancer? A cluster of men plagued with breast cancer has been found in Camp Lejeune, home of the Marine Corps. Former marines, and sons of marines are coming down with breast cancer (rare in men). "The Few, The Proud, The Forgotten" is a website for such men that tracks the progress of the investigation into the contaminated drinking water which they drank while in service to their country (or while their fathers were serving.) The author of the book discusses the chemicals that contaminated two of the wells that provided "the most contaminated public drinking supply ever discovered in the United States." (Williams, p. 463) The picture of the proud shirtless marine saluting while sporting a masectomy is heart wrenching. (Williams, p. 458) More on the plight of these men can be found at the afore mentioned website: http://www.tftptf.com/

"At its heart, Breasts is an environmental history of a body part. It is the story of how are breasts went from being honed by the environment to being harmed by it. It is part biology, part anthropology, and part medical journalism...the book's publication marks the fiftieth anniversary...of the first silicone implant surgery in Houston, Texas, in a woman who really just wanted and ear tuck." (Williams, 127-8) Silicone was an industrial compound for lubricating machinery and insulating air craft engines. After WWII in "American occupied Japan, another, less orthodox use was found for silicone. Drums of the stuff, needed for cooling transformers went missing...it turned up in the breasts of Japanese prostitutes" (Williams, 130) Injecting it randomly into the breast was a bad idea as it hardened like the caulk it was. In 1962 a woman wanting an ear tuck received the first silicone (in a bag) boob job in exchange for volunteering. More cosmetic boob jobs are still performed in Texas than anywhere else in the US!

Of particular note is the function of breasts. (No, they are not just about attracting men...for which numerous studies cited prove they are quite effective in this task.) Breast feeding provides infants with many nutrients that formula can not even begin to duplicate. An incredibly responsive organ,a woman's mammary glands even cater to the age, size, and sex of her infant in formulating the milk. It is amazing that antibodies produced by the mother protect the infant. Having provided two infants with this food I was particularly delighted at the health benefits that breast fed infants receive. I was less thrilled to learn that "mothers who breast-feed for a year also siphon off to their infants 90% of PFCs" that were absorbed from Scotchguard, Teflon....and dioxins, and PCBs....Dolphins have it particularly bad and their first born bear a particularly hard burden of inheritance. Even polar bears, as isolated as they are, are not immune and are passing along such carcinogens to their young. (Apparently, non breast fed kids catch up in exposure levels within two years so I can stop feeling guilty, but no less worried about the environment around us.)

The author is fair and balanced and reminds the reader that although the breast functions as a "sentinel" organ highlighting the damage done to the environment, and by the environment that this is a long term problem. Over half the world has the emergent short term problem of a lack of clean drinking water resulting in a huge number of children not living past the age of five. Toxins may lead to death long term, but pathogens lead to a much sooner demise. It does put things in perspective, but after reading this book you won't look at your sofa cushions or your water bottle in quite the same way again.

"The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"

I was mesmerized by this biography of a woman who has touched most of our modern lives, Henrietta Lacks. If you have ever used a cosmetic or taken a medication you are probably indebted to this woman who died a tragic death at the age of just thirty-one. Cells taken from her cancerous tumor were the ones used to determine the most basic essence of human life, the number of chromosomes in our DNA chains.

Taken as part of a biopsy, before informed consent, Henrietta Lacks' cells populate so many laboratories that "one scientist estimates that if you could pile all Hela (the acronym for her cells)cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more than 50 million metric tons-an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing." (Skloot, p. 21) Most cells in culture grew across a glass surface, slowly. She unknowingly participated in a study on cervical cancer headed by Richard Telinde..."like many doctors of his era, TeLinde often used patients from the public wards for research, usually without their knowledge. Many scientists believed that since patients were treated for free in public wards, it was fair to use them as research subjects, as a form of payment." (Skloot, p. 49) Henrietta Lack's cancerous cells grew in suspension stupendously well and would be the basis for mass production of human cell cultures.


Her cells' influence on the eradication of polio, and treatment of disease and production of medications is awesome and extensive and makes interesting reading. Her biographer details these contributions while concurrently describing Henrietta's children's lack of access to medical care. Medical care that today was hugely benefited by their mother's tragic disease and death.

Henrietta's cells helped bring "informed consent" to US health care, but not until the 1960s. A cancer researcher had been directing the injection of her cancerous cells into unknowing patients (causing malignancies so that he could measure their growth rate) for over a decade before three young Jewish doctors refused to inject these cells into twenty-two patients at the Jewish Chronic disease clinic in Brooklyn...scarily similar to the actions of Nazi doctors just sixteen years earlier.(Skloots, p. 157)  It wasn't until late in the 1960s before this prompted the National Institute of Health to require that for a study to qualify for funding-- the study had to be approved by "independent bodies made up of professionals and lapeople of diverse races, classes, and backgrounds...including detailed informed consent." (Skloot, p. 162) Shockingly, it was such a common practice that the researching physician received just a one year "probation" on his medical license!

Various case studies of companies profiting hugely from unknowing patients provides fodder for thought on the ethical, moral and legal ramifications of the tissue samples we so readily provide at our doctor's office. One recent abuse, cited in the book, was a hospital collecting placenta samples routinely at deliveries so that if they were sued for malpractice they could defend themselves on the grounds it was a genetic condition instead. A thought provoking read in an increasingly litigious society.