aforementioned great thing

Voila Gnostical Turpitude, a new Chicago group blog consisting of Ed, Matt, and me.   ¶
11:52 PM

  not dead

I'm not, you know.

Great things are in the works. Stay tuned.   ¶
5:34 PM

  catching up with the crescatters

(well, such a task is truly beyond me. however...)

Will recommends Brasserie Jo. Having been to both Brasserie Jo and Red Rooster, I'd cast my vote in favor of the latter (unfortunately, the Red Rooster website doesn't include the specials, which in my experience are invariably excellent). Both are relatively inexpensive French restaurants; both have a more expensive sister restaurant run by the same chef (Jean Joho's Everest and Bernard LeCoq's Cafe Bernard, respectively). Red Rooster wins in my book due to its superior ambiance and its not being a Lettuce Entertain You restaurant (my prejudice against Lettuce restaurants is no less strong for being irrational).

I do have to credit Brasserie Jo for the unintentionally amusing copy on its website: "The enormity of the room lends a great joie de vivre to the space."

Amanda, in a post about Bush's proposed space adventures, wishes that the NIH would would not limit their funding to "hypothesis-driven" research. I'm curious as to what she means by this.  ¶
10:52 PM

  briefly

Returned from Boston. Immediately became sick. Celebrated Christmas in Naperville, with all celebrations made extra-exciting by being hopped up on super-pseudephedrine. Returned to Chicago. Broke my toe on New Year's Eve (not in a fun drunken way--I walked into my closet door at nine in the morning while completely sober). Celebrated New Year's Eve (wearing ugly shoes) with Ed at the cab-unfriendly one sixtyblue (recommended), where I ate Bambi. Returned to class and was immediately crushed by massive workload (damn you, Genetic Mechanisms). Am slowly surfacing.   ¶
10:10 PM

  in boston

I have been in Boston visiting Ed for the past few days. I return Tuesday.

A few interesting links while I'm gone:

• A news article in Nature on a WHO program that may move flu vaccine design into the twenty-first century. (The recombination methods currently used to design vaccine strains are, as I understand them, fundamentally no different than those used in 1950s-era genetics.)
  
  
• Also in Nature, a nice article on pharmacogenetics which notes that pharmacogenetics (and pharmacogenomics) is the field that may produce the earliest public health benefits of the Human Genome Project.
  
  
• Somewhat more frivolously, I point you towards Ed's review of Return of the King. Also, you should check out Lord of the Tchotchke, a very amusing piece by Erin Dailey (who writes recaps for Television Without Pity, which anyone who likes their pop culture with large amounts of snarkiness should enjoy).
  

Happy holidays.
  ¶
9:29 PM

  nabokov

More substantive posts later, but for now I am up to great things (well, baking, laundering, writing Penn Bowl questions, and convincing my parents to watch Lord of the Rings). However, I have to post the following, which comes from the foreword of Invitation to a Beheading.

My favorite author (1768-1849) once said of a novel now utterly forgotten "Il a tout pour tous. Il fait rire l'enfant et frissoner la femme. Il donne a l'homme du monde un vertige salutaire et fait rever ceux qui ne revent jamais." Invitation to a Beheading can claim nothing of the kind. Old men will hurriedly turn from it to regional romances and the lives of public figures. No clubwoman will thrill. The evil-minded will perceive in little Emmie a sister of little Lolita, and the disciples of the Viennese witch-doctor will snigger over it in their grotesque world of communal guilt and progresivnoe education. But (as the author of Discours sur les ombres said in reference to another lamplight): I know (je connais) a few (quelques) readers who will jump up, ruffling their hair.

A few notes:

• The quote in French translates to something like this (my poor translation): "It has everything for everyone. It makes the infant laugh and the woman shudder. It gives to the man of the world a healthy giddiness and causes to dream those who never dream." Compare to Babelfish's take: "It has all for all. It makes laugh the child and frissoner the woman. It gives has the society man a giddiness salutary and made rever those which never revent."
  
  
• Ah, the favorite author. It's not clear who is meant; an interesting examination of some possible candidates is available here.
  
  
• The author of Discours sur les ombres (Discourse on Shadows) is Pierre Delalande, the creation of the author. Gennedy Barabtalo suggests that Delalande is the old French sage who is referred to by Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev (protagonist of The Gift) as the author of a text he wishes to adapt. (I suggest that any Nabokovophile--surely there's a better word--check out the fascinating Nabokov site hosted by Penn State.)

  ¶
12:11 AM

  silliness

From my cell biology practice final:

The receptor for FPF (flatulence promoting factor) also binds a second ligand, UBP (undercooked bean-derived peptide). Binding of the two ligands has differential effects, neither of which can be discussed in polite company.

From my genetics class (evolutionary genetics lecture):

professor: So you get random chromosome mixing. Which is like ... if I have two bags of something--let's say balls--and I can pick out red ones and blue ones, what is the likelihood that I would get two blue balls?
class: Hee.
professor (later on in lecture): And then we come back to the blue balls.
class: Hee hee.
professor: What? Is something funny?
class: Hee hee hee!
professor: I don't get it. What's so funny about blue balls?
student: Nothing is funny about blue balls.

Protein Fundamentals is quite dour by comparison.   ¶
10:41 PM

  helper T cells gone wild

Over at Crescat Sententia, Beth Plocharczyk reports some interesting medical news about the use of "ringworms" in treating autoimmune ulcerative colitis. [I have absolutely no idea why she calls them ringworms, as the organisms are whipworms (Trichuris suis), a type of nematode. Ringworm, as you probably know, is a fungus.] Unfortunately (and mystifyingly), her post fails to mention in any depth the reasons that people are even considering such a treatment. Since these reasons are fascinating and should be mentioned, I will elaborate.

First, it's important to understand what parts of the immune system are coming into play here. All hematopoietic cells begin as pluripotent hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in bone marrow, which then differentiate into common lymphoid progenitors or common myeloid progenitors (you can forget about the myeloid precursors for now). The lymphoid progenitors differentiate into either B cells or T cells. Effector B cells secrete antibodies, while T cells can differentiate into several types of effector cells: cytotoxic T cells, which kill their infected target cells; and TH1 and TH2 cells (helper T cells), which stimulate other immune cells to respond to infection. Basically, TH1 cells stimulate cell-mediated immunity, whereas TH2 cells stimulate humoral immunity.* Pathologically speaking, improper TH2 responses have been implicated in allergies and asthma, while improper TH1 responses have been linked to autoimmune diseases like MS.

In recent years, a very interesting theory called the "hygiene hypothesis" has arisen. First proposed in the mid-1990s, the hygiene hypothesis postulates that there is a balance between TH1 and TH2 responses in the body that must be maintained. Failure to properly stimulate TH1 cells through lack of exposure to pathogens (bacteria, viruses, parasites, etc.) can lead to TH2 overactivity and asthma or allergies. So far as I can tell, the original statement of the hypothesis assumed that TH2 responses always dominate TH1 responses; however, this no longer seems to be the standard viewpoint. Here we come to the relevance of the original article: various forms of colon problems (including the infamous inflammatory bowel disease) are thought to arise from overactive TH1 responses. Inducing a TH2 immune response may serve to balance the immune system and downregulate the TH1 response, providing relief from symptoms. If you're interested in this particular case, check out the Weinstock study (published in the American Journal of Gastroenterology).

It will be interesting to see if the hygiene hypothesis is therapeutically relevant. Asthma and MS are two of the most high-profile disorders whose etiology includes immune and environmental factors. MS, as you probably know, is incurable at present, and cases of asthma have skyrocketed in recent years. If the hygiene hypothesis can be used to develop new therapies for these diseases, the benefits could be immense. TH1/TH2 imbalance may also play a role in several less well-known diseases, the most interesting of which (to me, at least) is pre-eclampsia, a life-threatening immune reaction that occurs in some pregnant women. There's an interesting review on the subject by Saito and Sakai that's worth checking out.

*The consequences of inducing cell-mediated immunity versus humoral immunity can be profound; a good example of this is infection with Mycobacterium leprae, which lives in macrophage vesicles and causes leprosy. The only effective reaction to infection with M. leprae is cell-mediated immunity, which involves the activation of macrophages. When TH2 cells induce humoral immunity, the antibodies produced by B cells can't reach the bacteria (because they're inside macrophages) and thus are not effective. Tuberculoid leprosy (the survivable kind) is induced when cell-mediated immunity is favored, whereas fatal lepromatous leprosy occurs when humoral immunity is favored.   ¶
1:44 AM