Don't Know Much 'Bout New Biology

“‘The new biologist’ is not a scientist who knows a little bit about all disciplines, but a scientist with deep knowledge in one discipline and a ‘working fluency’ in several.” 

A report released today by the National Research Council “calls on the United States to launch a new multiagency, multiyear, and multidisciplinary initiative to capitalize on the extraordinary advances recently made in biology and to accelerate new breakthroughs that could solve some of society’s most pressing problems — particularly in the areas of food, environment, energy, and health.”

The release noted that recent advances in technology call for an approach that brings together physicists, chemists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and other scientists to create a “new biology” research community that can tackle society’s big problems, such as:

• Food security: develop capacity to quickly adapt plants to new growing initiatives.
• Environmental: monitor ecosystems; repair damage
• Energy: speed development of alternatives to fossil fuels.
• Medicine: personalize treatments with a goal of providing “individually predictive surveillance and care.”

 The authors note that “new biology” holds great potential to attract new talent to the field: people who want to use their talents to solve real problems, not just live in the lab. They also make explicit an underlying challenge: quantitative skills will be more important than ever.

The report was requested by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and U.S. Department of Energy. Read the release here.

More H1N1 flu controversy: vitamin D deficiency, being elderly, and the seasonal vaccine

Here are a few questions that have been asked of me in response to my first H1N1 post, or at work in the process dealing with other healthcare providers who are concerned about their well-being during the flu this season. I’m not an expert in H1N1, and below are simply my opinions on the issues raised. I think discussion is important and you can take what you will from it.

1. Is Vitamin D deficiency linked with H1N1?

According to the website of naturopath Dr. Mercola, being deficient in Vitamin D makes one susceptible to H1N1. He argues this by employing CDC data about recent deaths in chronically ill children. [ JI: I hope you will bear with me as I think this is an important idea, and it's worth re-hashing our discourse in this public forum]

The argument is as follows:

1. kids who are sick are more susceptible to getting sick! (i.e. kids with cerebral palsy are more likely to get very sick with H1N1)
2. kids who are chronically sick are vitamin D deficient
3. those who get H1N1 must be vitamin D deficient

Yes, the correlation may be there, but premise 3 does not follow from the axioms 1 &2.

As the article says, lots and lots and lots of children are Vitamin D deficient, and they don’t all have H1N1. Also, of those who have H1N1, not all are Vitamin D deficient [ok, this article does not demonstrate that ANY of the children who died were in fact Vitamin D deficient, it just says it is likely]. In addition, no mechanism for Vitamin D and susceptibility for flu is proposed.

Compound this with the fact that the website sells Vitamin D  (hello, conflict of interest!) and I just don’t buy it. This is where I feel the Internet can be a dangerous place. I am lucky enough to have been through the rigours of undergrad science and medical school, having had critical thinking beaten into me.  I think lots of non-allopathic practitioners and health reporters (including those with the CBC) are lacking in this area. Education in language and logic, as well as scientific reasoning, should be necessary for anyone trying to draw scientific conclusions or to interpret technical literature.

That said, in my part of the world, people don’t get enough Vitamin D from the sun between October and April. Talk to your doctor and see if you need Vitamin D for bone health.

2. Are older  people already exposed to H1N1, and thus resistant?

Yes and no. People born before 1950 may have encountered, carried, or been actively infected with a similar strain of the flu, according to a CDC report in May 2009 (MD Consult news). Past exposure means a potential for current resistance. But not everyone over a certain age will have been exposed, and even if they were, it is not certain that they will have maintained any degree of resistance. On an individual level, this fact should not affect whether a person get a flu vaccine. I think it’s best to consider this piece of news as an interesting explanation for the lower-than-expected rate of H1N1 in the senior population.

3.  Does the seasonal flu vaccine interfere with the H1N1 vaccine’s efficacy?

Maybe? So far, there isn’t a lot of data on this. Preliminary testing reveals there may be some interaction. Quebec has taken a hardline stance on this, intending to offer only the H1N1 shot, but I think the safest thing is to wait for more information. Lots of medications are known to interact, and in many cases, staggering the dosing (i.e. leaving enough time between each medication) can be helpful for avoiding/reducing the degree of interaction. Seasonal flu shots are due in October, and H1N1 vaccines won’t be available until November. Seasonal flu is not a nice beast either. Just because then H1N1 strain is getting all the media attention, it doesn’t mean the seasonal flu is going to forget to infect us.

4. Are vaccines safe? Aren’t they full of Mercury and other toxins? Don’t they cause autism?

I hear these questions a lot. I’m going to address it more thoroughly in a separate post, because I think it deserves a lengthy discussion. Stay tuned!

Cancer Therapy Herbs

If You Require Cancer Therapy Herbs look No Further

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People are looking for cancer therapy herbs in places we never knew they were places. Wish they would save them the trouble and just go to the site mentioned below.

Summithealthproducts.com is a site where you can get all your cancer therapy herbs under one roof. So look no further.

Gold stars. Alone with his dead.

My desk is pretty awesome.

As bedroom furniture goes for the most part I am very lame. My bed is just a box spring and a mattress on a metal frame, my chest of drawers is a hideous old hand-me-down I can’t bring myself to get rid of, and my bookcases are Ikea standard issue. Until a few years ago my nightstand was – I am not making this up – an old Tandy XT monitor jammed into the top of a white milk crate. For the longest time I figured “oh, well, this monitor-stuck-in-a-milk-crate keeps my glasses and whatnot off the ground just as well as a fancy-schmancy ‘night table,’ so why shouldn’t I have this next to my bed? Oh, how droll and utilitarian and twentysomething I am!”

Of course, at some point when I was 28 or so I realized, as all intelligent folk do, that utilitarianism is a joke and John Stuart Mill is a fucking dickhead. I threw out the monitor-stroke-milk crate and resolved to keep my essentials on the corner of my desk. People like me who are largely blind without their glasses will recognize the need to place them, Leonard Shelby-like, in the same place every night. So now I keep my glasses and wallet and phone and whatnot on this one corner of my desk.

And this isn’t just any desk, mind you.

From the time I was approximately seven years old until about two years ago my desk was this ancient, mirror-topped mahogany behemoth I assume was scavenged from one of my mother’s dead relatives. This was how we obtained just about all of our furniture back then. Now bear in mind two important things at that time: 1) My parents were literally the age I am now, but with two kids and a mortgage living on the salary of a schoolteacher and a part-time optometrist. 2) In the entirety of my mother’s comically-abundant extended Irish family, by some cosmic demographic hiccup we were the ONLY new family with young kids. So every time someone died – which was quite often given the sheer quantity of family members – my parents would end up with their furniture because, “oh, John and Teresa need it.” This is why my father didn’t have a reliable car until he was 40 but we have three complete dining room sets, and why as a third-grader I was given a gigantic antique for a desk.

Over the next twenty years or so I would proceed to beat the living shit out of this desk, and when I started going back to school a couple years ago I realized I needed a place to both put my computer and do homework and that my desktop wasn’t big enough for that. (The lack of such realization perhaps explaining some of my poor academic performance beforehand.) I also realized that the mirror that was the top of my desk was sufficiently cracked and broken such that if I slipped while typing my hands would be sliced off at the wrists.

So with much sadness I disposed of my old desk. My sadness ended when I proceeded to replace it with something that looked like it came from the bridge of the JJ Abrams Enterprise. This desk DOES NOT FUCK AROUND. It is acres of polished glass held up by gleaming black metal in a way that at first glance seems to defy the laws of physics. It is awesomely L-shaped so that I have, essentially, an entire desk for my computer and another entire desk for homework and reading and whatnot, with a third smaller desk in between usually reserved for laptops of dubious purpose. It has got LEVELS: on side of it has an entire second story. My desk is what you would get if you force-fed mescaline to Frank Lloyd Wright and then chained him to a drafting table and held a gun to his head while shouting: “a desk, Frank, MAKE US A FUCKING DESK!”

At the moment a significant portion of it is covered with half-painted Space Marines and a forest of medicine bottles.

For the longest time I tried to keep some order to the medicine bottles, to maintain a sort of straight line that I could go down as I needed to, but as I grew more and more resentful of the fact that I take so many goddamn pills every semblance of order faded and now there are just bottles all over the place. For the back: Neurontin, Vicodin. For the liver: Vitamin E, Milkthistle, Ursodiol. For emergencies/special occasions: Dilaudid. Now that one, that’s special. Dilaudid is what your body turns morphine into. It is wicked bad juju. When I first got the prescription my pharmacist told me, “okay, basically, never take this stuff. It will erase the world.” Since then I’ve taken it three times when the pain in my back flared to a point where I was unable to successfully prosecute my day to day life. My pharmacist’s warnings were not inaccurate. I’m going to hold on to the rest of it and give the pills out as Christmas presents; the nicer you are to me between now and then the more you’ll get.

This weekend I was down with a cold and added some NyQuil to the menagerie. My love of NyQuil borders on abuse, and not even for its alcohol content: taken at half-dosage it is the only medicine I have ever found that actually relieves my symptoms when I have a cold, and as a sufferer of chronic anxious insomnia a full dose is one of the few things guaranteed to put me to sleep. At one point this Saturday I was sitting at my awesome desk, taking my NyQuil, and as I put the bottle down it landed next to the Dilaudid. I thought, “I wonder what would happen if I mixed them,” and then realized that thoughts like that bring me dangerously closer to being a character in a James Ellroy novel. The fact that I am currently reading a James Ellroy novel probably contributed to that realization, but I stuck with that line of thought for a little. Well, let’s think, what would that be like?

I mentally composed a list of pros and cons.

Pros: an authority figure of some sort (police, FBI, etc). Get to hobnob with interesting underworld types and make lots of money. Get to experiment with heretofore unknown combinations of drugs and alcohol. Get to have sex with (inexplicably lots of) interesting women. Free to regularly indulge darkest, basest, vilest desires. Witty yet realistic dialogue.

Cons: complicity in most heinous acts of the 20th century. Tendency for every associate to be evil scumbag. Utter moral bankruptcy.

As I sat there at my awesome desk, I felt the delicious warmth of red NyQuil seeping into my tissues and I thought, “tough call, tough call…”

JLK

Health Care- US.

One thing is sure .US Government is subtle in promoting Big business. In India, it is done quite openly and brazenly.In Tamil Nadu,A state in India,the State Government arbitrarily deducted premium for personal health care from govt.employees for a multinational insurance company.Federal Govt. openly sold Spectrum band licences for about Rs 2000 crores which could have fetched Rs.60,000 crores, other wise.(Rs 50=1$).This is just a tip.Be happy in America, for there seems to be atleast some subtlety.None can save us from the politicians or from big businesses.

Healing puffed-up stomach

Insya Allah this can help you
Healing puffed-up stomach

Bake 2 seeds of “Kedawung” (Parkia biglobosa Benth). After getting ripe, pulverize it with a thumb of red onion and fennel sufficiently. Then stick it on your stomach, especially around its center, buttock, and sole of foot.
———————————————————————————————————————–

Insya Allah ini bisa membantu Anda
Mengobati perut kembung

Bakar 2 biji kedawung. Setelah matang dilumatkan bersama bawang merah sebesar ibu jari dan adas secukupnya. Kemudian tempelkanlah pada perut, terutama di sekitar pusar, pantat, dan telapak kaki.

lose 45 lbs in just 30 days easily

A lady doctor named Dr Suzanne Gudakunst has just release what many are calling the end of the need for potentially harmful weight-loss drugs and designer foods made to help you lose weight.

Dr Suzanne’s discovery allows anyone regardless of their particular diet to do “just one simple thing” and instantly start shedding anywhere from 15 lbs to as much as 200 lbs of unwanted and dangerous fat!

Typical results average 45 lbs in just the first 30 days alone for most people just starting out using her new secret.

The reason this is so is because her secret (aptly titled: “Top Secret Fat Loss Secret”) operates on an entirely different approach in the battle against the ever-increasing “bulge.”

Dr Suzanne discovered that harmful crusty “plaque” builds up over the years in all of us – and which is the direct result of harmful chemicals, preservatives, pesticides, etc. deliberately placed in perhaps every food on the market (much of which is now suspected as being carefully and intentionally done so that people will continue to get fatter and thus sicker, and in order to make the food & drug companies richer!)

The result: This harmful plaque is responsible for your weight gain because is BLOCKS your body’s natural ability to absorb proper nutrition – and which causes two (2) chief things to occur:

>>  Your body starves no matter how much you eat – so by not
feeling satisfied you continue to stuff your face and get very
very fat (and eventually at the permanent cost of your
health!)

>>  Your body thinks it’s starving so your ‘hypothalamus’
adjusts your metabolism to burn food much, much slower in
an effort to store food – thus making you even more and
more fatter than even before!

So it makes sense that if and when you REMOVE this unwanted “garbage” from lacing your ‘insides,’ you will naturally start dissolving the fat and “stored chunks of lard” that disfigure an otherwise more attractive and healthier frame and sexier body.

As if this ‘plaque’ goop weren’t enough, Dr Suzanne identified multitudes of specific species of “parasites” (i.e., little worm-like “critters” – some which have ‘fangs’ but no eyes) living inside nearly 99.964% of all people’s small and large intestines in the United States alone, and about 92.36% of people on average worldwide.

These parasites excrete (meaning they take a CRAP inside YOU!) a jelly-like “SLUDGE” they coats your insides and which is very, very harmful and extremely TOXIC!

Additionally, much like the plaque, they often steal your nutrition which in turn again causes your body to believe it’s starving, and as a defense you continue even more just to get FATTER and FATTER!

These parasites usually end up dying (but not before laying millions of eggs!) — and once they die they fossilize forming a coral-like barrier preventing your even further from absorbing the correct amounts of proper nutrition.

When these parasites are FLUSHED from your guts, you end up magically losing tons of fat and extra weight – and even WITHOUT making one slight change to your diet or how much you eat!

SHOCKINGLY, these same “little critters (as Dr Suzanne calls them) actually release chemical “messengers” that make you crave foods that you are not even supposed to eat at all!

People who get rid of the parasites, therefore, suddenly find that they no longer even desire the Cheetos, pork rinds, jelly-filled treats, and 10,000’s of other equally deadly so-called “foods.”

In the past 6 years alone Dr Suzanne has tested her amazing new discovery and “TOP SECRET Fat Loss Secret” privately with a select group of volunteers, and seen results that fall nothing short of the truly FANTASTIC!

For instance, a Chicago woman who weighed until recently a whopping 587 lbs and who had even been visited by a living-legendary diet and fitness guru (name withheld by request), but who after much direct assistance from him (the guru) was not able to shed even 1 lb, suddenly dropped 449 lbs from her body weight in under 5 months using Dr Suzanne’s SECRET! — and she didn’t change or reduce one thing she regularly ate in her diet!

Now the woman weighs just 138 lbs, looks like a completely different woman altogether — and as if that weren’t enough, she became a swimsuit model for a well-known company! (But most importantly, this woman added who knows how many years to her life as a direct result of using Dr Suzanne’s “Top Secret Fat Loss Secret!”)

Another equally tearfully-joyous account was of a woman named Lisa Stephens from Ohio who was told her diabetes could “never” be cured or reversed — and this by countless doctors.

After shedding over 156 lbs in just 91 days of having used this same amazing revolutionary breakthrough secret discovered by Dr Suzanne, her diabetes is gone completely and she no longer depends on insulin just to be able to survive!

These kinds of results are flooding Dr Suzanne’s email each and everyday from all over the world (not just from North America — which has by far the fattest population as a group).

And even though you like me recognize these results as both newsworthy and for the common good of humanity as a whole, there are some who are literally out to get the good lady doctor.

Recently investigators began carefully keeping an extra protective eye on Dr Suzanne after she received death threats from “individuals” purportedly connected to the vast drug empires and weight-loss food manufacturing companies.

It would appear on the face of it that Dr Suzanne’s “Top Secret Fat Loss Secret” must really work, because if it didn’t no one would care to bring her harm.

This would be akin to an inventor discovering how to make a car that runs on water instead of gas assassinated by the major auto manufacturers!

Investigators insist that the reason she received threats is largely because what she is doing may actually make people healthier, leaner, sexier and trimmer, as well as make them live longer fuller lives — and as a result they stand to lose lots of money (possibly BILLIONS of dollars!!)

The BEST part of her secret is that it’s nothing difficult to do, and it doesn’t require a major change in either your lifestyle or diet.

In fact, “Nature’s actually on our side” according to Dr Suzanne, as her solution to the arduous ills of fat and obesity is simply the ingestion of Nature’s own ‘protections’ against both the harmful death-causing/obesity-causing plaque as well as the nasty little critters living in your bowels!

Anyone with anywhere from just a few extra pounds to those 100 lbs or more overweight must as a rule now secure for themselves Dr Suzanne’s “TOP SECRET Fat Loss Secret” (and before someone tries to lobby against you ever discovering what’s truly in it!)

I recognize a great thing when I see one — and THIS SECRET is definitely the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.

We all know that people are just getting fatter and fatter, and more and more UNHEALTHY – so this is a secret whose time is long overdue.

While many people may tell you to just stick to your diet, exercise to the point of exhaustion, etc, the naysayers will definitely be disappointed when they find out that Dr Suzanne’s cure to obesity is completely NATURAL!

If you want the good doctor’s secret for yourself and so that no one can ever take it away from you or steal out of your hands, then all you need to do is grab your own PDF copy here:

=>   http://AFF_ID.fatsecret.hop.clickbank.net

But I have to warn you of two (2) things:

1. Pay processors are already struggling to keep up with orders as this SECRET is now one of the most sought after things anywhere online! (So if you put off, don’t be surprised to find you can’t even place your order, and may not receive notice as to when order-taking may resume.)

2. Dr Suzanne in an effort to get people to get off their butts and to take action for their own good, is making it available at nearly HALF OFF just for people getting over there TODAY through the next 48 hours only — after that, the low price now nearly DOUBLES! (So you’d best beat the crowds over there NOW!)

So if you’re wise, and want to grab her secret before something unforeseen forever prevents you from doing so, then you’d best do what I did and go secure it now at:

=>   http://samgrg.fatsecret.hop.clickbank.net

How many times have you seen sudden “breakthroughs” of such great controversy potentially come along and cause a woman doctor to actually get death threats for her secret ‘know-how?’ — You’re right … very, very few.

So don’t overlook this email as it may very well prove to be one of the most influential and important ones you’ve ever received…

Copy the link below and paste to your browser..

=>   http://samgrg.fatsecret.hop.clickbank.net