Cryptic Elliptic
going under
I'm heading into NSF/midterms/rotation-selection crunch time, so posting may be lighter than usual. Two quick observations and a recipe:
- I am where sports teams go to die (that is, me:teams::Ed:Sims). I did it to the Sox, I seem to have done it to the Bears and the Steelers, and now I'm doing it to the Penguins. Quoth Emily, "Please don't become a Chiefs fan." (Also quoth Emily, "Mario Lemieux is like the Mr. Bill of hockey.")
- I usually consider it tres declasse to discuss one's Google hits on one's weblog, but I find it a bit odd that this is the last hit for "Susan Ferrari". Maybe that'll help, heh heh.
And the recipe: I don't know quite what to call this--lazy girl's pasta? I only cook it when I'm too lazy to make a proper meal. Roma tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, and frozen chicken breasts are the few things I nearly always have on hand.
Cut up a few chicken parts (in the neighborhood of eight ounces) into bite-sized pieces. Peel and smash ten cloves of garlic. Put a large pot of water on to boil. Toss both in a skillet with 1/3 cup of olive oil. Cook over low heat, stirring occasionally until chicken is just cooked through. Coarsely chop six Roma tomatoes and toss in with chicken and garlic. Salt and pepper to taste, and if you haven't got any fresh herbs, add some dried ones now (or you could throw in some chopped fresh basil right at the end). Cover and let simmer. Salt the water, bring it to a boil, and add 8 oz. pasta (this is usually half a package). I'd use cut pasta (penne, ziti, rigatoni, cavatelli, fusilli, farfalle, oriechette--all of these are fine), but that's my preference in most recipes, so suit yourself. Cook pasta for about eleven minutes. Drain pasta, toss with sauce, and serve. I suppose if you were enterprising you could add in some cheese, but my favorite Italian cheese (Fontina) is quite unsuited to this dish, so I don't. You could probably add some Parmesan or Asiago, though; I think they'd complement it better. Eat lazily. This reheats fairly well.
oops
A while ago, I
asked, "So what's the point of doing pharmacogenetic studies with ifosfamide?"
None, evidently; there doesn't appear to be a strong genetic basis for sensitivity to 4-HC (a closely related compound; long boring explanation of differences upon request), so I'll be using cisplatin instead. There
is some genetic basis to sensitivitiy to platinating compounds, but this is a whole other set of toxicities (ototoxicity, bone marrow toxicity, and, uh, something else) I have to learn. I wonder how the ototoxiticity works. Huh.
On the upside, I got my grant proposal back, and most of my edits are issues of rewording (=easy to fix). Hurrah! Maybe I can finish it up over the weekend.
Back to nauseatingly dull proteins problem set.
those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it; also, drugs are fun!
Will on the FDA: "...let medical doctors prescribe drugs that fail FDA review, or that simply haven't made it through the FDA pipeline yet."
Uh, one word: thalidomide.
To weaken my (tiny) argument a bit, Will seems to be referring more to potentially life-saving drugs. Thalidomide hasn't been conclusively shown to be a lifesaving drug yet; in the 50s and early 60s it was prescribed as a sedative, and today it's mostly used as an antiinflammatory agent.
Thalidomide, by the way, is an absolutely fascinating drug, especially from a cancer biologist's perspective; it appears to affect two of the currently "hot" pathways in cancer--angiogenesis and the NFkB-IkB signaling pathway. (Actually, thalidomide's antiangiogenic properties may mediate its teratogenic effects--if you can't form blood vessels in your limb buds, your limbs aren't going to grow.) Also, drugs that end up having unexpected therapeutic properties are generally interesting--another good example of this is isoniazid, which is used both as a first-line treatment and as a preventative agent against tuberculosis. There's supposedly an old newspaper photo of the "dancing invalids"--a group of TB patients joyfully dancing around their ward. In addition to its antitubercular properties, isoniazid is also a member of the monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) class of antidepressives (another fascinating class of drugs!).
a twist on a list
You're all talking about the Guardian's list of best and worst books. [Short version of my commentary: I've read 27 or 28.
Haroun and the Sea of Stories? Buh? Long commentary to follow.]
Now, I don't consider myself to be qualified to set up a list of the best books, novels, or whatever (any long-form work you'd read as literature); however, I'd be very interested in creating a list of the worst books that people are made to read. When the idea first occurred to me, I meant it to be "books that people are made to read in class," but I suppose that books that one is peer-pressured to read count as well.
I'll start off the list with the three worst books I've been compelled to read in class:
Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom,
A Separate Peace by John Knowles, and
July's People by Nadine Gordimer. Please
email me with your additions.
attention hyde park bibliophiles
The Hyde Park Book Sale is going on this weekend (Saturday through Monday) in the plaza by the 55th Street Co-Op. Everything is used (I think), paperbacks are 75 cents, and there's some good stuff. Also, there's a lot of John Updike.
grad school: it sure keeps you busy
See title. Grad school has forced me to put aside such fascinating occupations as blogging, setting up my computer, baking, and winning lots of money at pub trivia in favor of paper-reading and grantwriting. Fortunately, this means that I am learning things. Also, since I now have a rough draft of my grant proposal, I may be able to get back to a more balanced lifestyle soon. Hopefully, this lifestyle will involve cleaning house at some point.
In case you're curious, I decided to go with the pharmacogenetics proposal. Essentially, I'm using family studies, linkage analysis and mapping, and microarrays to evaluate whether there are genetic determinants to susceptibility to ifosfamide-induced cytotoxicity (my hypothesis: there are). Ifosfamide is a bifunctional DNA-crosslinking agent used in the treatment of a wide variety of cancers (head and neck, testicular, lung, hematologic, and more). Like many traditional chemotherapies, it is poison--it's a member of the family of nitrogen mustards, of World War I fame. Also like many traditional chemotherapies, it preferentially damages rapidly dividing cells (any agent that attacks DNA will). Ifosfamide is activated by oxidation by CYP450 enzymes in the liver. An alternate reaction (side-chain oxidation) gives rise to chloracetaldehyde (CAA), a very reactive compound that causes neurotoxicity. Anothe nasty byproduct of ifosfamide is acrolein, which is produced when 4-hydroxyifosfamide (the activated form of ifosfamide) breaks down to give isophosphoramide mustard (IPM), which is the actual crosslinking agent. Acrolein is very urotoxic; patients on ifosfamide are usually given a compound called MESNA to prevent them from bleeding out from the linings of their bladders. CAA-related neurotoxicity and acrolein-related urotoxitiy are major concerns in ifosfamide therapy; they also essentially set the limits on therapeutic doses. Some people are looking at chemotherapeutic modulators that could increase IPM activity while leaving CAA and acrolein activity unaffected; this would allow a smaller dose to have the same clinical effect with fewer side effects. That's essentially what I did last summer.
So what's the point of doing pharmacogenetic studies with ifosfamide? I'll tell you later. Other things I'll tell you later include:
- where new flus come from
- what an IRES is, and why it's so cool
- why I'm irritated by people who tout the Chicago core as being far more rigorous than it really is; in particular, I will address Jacob Levy's statement (quoted from an interview with him on Crescat Sententia that "[t]he Chicago core, on the other hand, offers the same foundational education to those who are future professors of a subject as to those who will never look at it again."
- how pleased I am to be Harry Potter III .
