I must be the last guy on the planet to see this judging from the emails I’m getting, but the music group They Might Be Giants has put out an album called “Here Comes Science”, and it has this very cool video called Science Is Real:
While I knew about Istanbul and Constantinople before TMBG, everything I know about James K. Polk, the Napoleon of the Stump, I learned from them. I know he served one term, was austere, severe, a Democrat. seized the Southwest from Mexico, got Oregon from the British and that precious few have mourned the passing of the 11th President, Young Hickory.
While some of their recent material is geared more the young, they are still catchy tunes and very helpful for presenting actual facts in a fun way. I learned just a few years ago about Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal and Gilgamesh ARE the Mesopotamians.
Check out I am a Paleontologist:
Or leanr how Davy Crockett knew who was guilty bbefore there was a crime:
And they do quite good real songs, such as No One Knows My Plan:
They Might Be Giants are full of whimsy and useful facts. I am glad they are still around and anyone who can create a song called ‘Roy G. Biv’ is deserving of notice.
Best known as the oxygen-carrying component of hemoglobin, the protein that makes blood red, heme also plays a role in chemical detoxification and energy metabolism within the cell. Heme levels are tightly maintained, and with good reason: Too little heme prevents cell growth and division; excessive amounts of heme are toxic.
It is tough being someone who writes press releases about research. They have to take very complex topics and distill them into forms that are understandable by others. It is not easy to do it well.
My pet peeve is when the release adds a little too much of the old time snake oil peddlers pitch whose elixir could cure anything. This is going to fight obesity, diabetes, cancer and who knows what else.
This press release details some really interesting science behind the control of heme production in a cell. It helps us understand how heme levels are kept in a very narrow range. Overall, a pretty nice demonstration of a metabolic feedback loop.
I love the science in it. That is written up fairly well in the release. As a researcher I wanted to know more. But the added hype of a cure for cancer or diabetes or obesity seemed almost add-on boilerplate for me. Doesn;t everything seem to be useful for fighting one of these three things, nowadays?
But, to me, it is a long, long way for anything dealing with obesity to be developed, with so many ifs in there as to be almost unthinkable. As I mentioned yesterday, it is very hard to get a useful drug to market.
The belief that manipulating this feedback loop could affect metabolic processes is a worthwhile scientific hypothesis. But there is no molecule mentioned that could to this. This is hard part #1.
Even if such a molecule could be found to work on the isolated parts of the system itself it might not work on a whole cell. Hard part #2. Then it might not work on a whole animal. Hard part #3. Then it might not be deliverable to a human being (who does not usually put up with the delivery systems a mice will). Hard part #4.
The it might not have the pharmacokinetics that would make it useful (i.e. you would have to take pills every hour for it to be effective). Hard part #5. Then it has to be found safe for human use. Hard part #6. Then it has to be found effective in human use. Hard part #7. Then it has to be found to have few or minimal side effects. Hard part #8.
Then it has to be manufactured in a reproducible manner at a cost that can be justified. Hard part #9. Then it has to be effectively marketed in order to get doctors to use it. Actually, this is probably the easiest part, if the drug has made it this far. Something like 1 in 10,000 do.
It could be 20 years before a drug directly based on this work makes it to market. Yet press releases all the time make some sort of connection to obesity, heart disease, hair loss, or sexual dysfunction in order to provide a little more juice to the release so that it will hopefully be picked up by major media to publicize the school and its research.
The original release states:
Now the question is, can this pathway be exploited in the clinic. Lazar’s team showed that downregulating heme stifled cell division and metabolism, while upregulating heme enhanced them. It therefore is possible, Lazar says, that by pharmacologically “tickling” Rev-erbα or its other cellular partners to believe the cell has more or less heme than it actually does, researchers may be able to either boost or suppress metabolism accordingly, opening the door to potential therapies for cancer and obesity.
It is possible but then many things are possible.It is also possible that ‘tickling’ the protein will also result in cell death. There is just so much work that will have to be done to answer these really interesting questions.
Maybe this is necessary. Hype is a big part of the world. It brings in money and it helps keep research going but it also does two things. First, it demeans the wonderful work for its own sake. This is a pretty nice construction of how a negative feedback loop can control metabolism. This sort of work adds to our total understanding of the cell in ways that could be very important for our understanding of many sorts of drugs. But perhaps only indirectly.
It directly points not to a cure for diabetes or obesity, other than in a very general and nonspecific way, but to a greater understanding of how the cell works, how it is able to function. A fuller understanding of this will have much greater ramifications than most anything else.
Hype also makes the public think that a cure for whatever is just around the corner, when it may be 20 years away. This constant bombardment of the public with releases promising so much more than can be delivered in a reasonable time could make people more cynical about a cure for anything being produced.
But that is just me. Now I’m going to continue watching the movie. ‘Song and Dance‘ is another one of my favorites. (It is much more fun when you know his goblet contains poison.) UPDATE: I’ve embedded a better version of the entire scene.
