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13 Jul

@BretWeinstein

@BretWeinstein is either lying or just ignorant & dangerously irresponsible.

There's a body of work on why effective but not "perfect" vaccines greatly reduce variant emergence that includes SARS-CoV-2 specifically. I'm happy to cite a few dozen, but let's dig into the basics.

https://twitter.com/NikkiMcR/status/1413654756145475585

First, you have to think about "morphospace", all the genetic combinations possible for a given genome and their corresponding phenotypes like "virulence" and "pathogenicity".

Suppose SARS-CoV-2 makes one mistake in copying for every 1000 bases it copies.

In the space of a "naive infection" (not vaccinated), the number of viruses produced can be 100,000,000,000 or more, and its genome is 30,000 bp long.

In a single naive individual, that's 3 trillion errors/mutations produced during course of infection.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

Read 10 tweets

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@c0nc0rdance

12 Jul

Let's talk about People v. Hall (1853), which prevented Chinese people from testifying in California.

It extended Crime & Punishment Sect. 14: "No black or mulatto person, or Indian, shall be allowed to give evidence in favor of or against a white man" to include Chinese people.

The case was an appeal by George W. Hall of his conviction for killing Ling Sing, a Chinese miner, over a claim dispute.

The murder was witnessed by three of Ling Sing's fellow miners, but Hall successfully argued that their testimony should be invalidated by Section 14.

It's been declared by legal experts to "contain some of the most offensive racial rhetoric to be found in the annals of California appellate jurisprudence" and "the worst statutory interpretation case in history."

Read 7 tweets

c0nc0rdance

@c0nc0rdance

11 Jul

Hopefully you know that grapefruit juice can inhibit liver enzymes that break down the active ingredients in certain therapeutic drugs, which can result in dangerous overdosing with certain drugs.

A few surprising insights (thread):

1. It was only discovered in 1991, and mostly by accident.

A Canadian team were studying the impact of alcohol consumption on a hypertension drug, Plendil, and needed a "mixer" base for the control (water) and treatment (alcohol) so they mixed both into grapefruit juice.

The bioavailability of Plendil was higher than expected in the study, in both arms, but lower in a water-only control group.

That study (conducted in 1989, to clarify) led to this 1991 Lancet paper, but it wasn't well publicized until after more study.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1671113/

Read 8 tweets

c0nc0rdance

@c0nc0rdance

14 Mar

Audie Murphy, most decorated American soldier of WWII, lived with undiagnosed PTSD from service.

He slept with a loaded pistol under his pillow, abused sleeping pills to cope with nightmares, suffered frequent depression, insomnia with bouts of fatigue, vomiting.

His 1st wife Dixie said he held her at gunpoint after a fight, would collapse into a ball after watching new reel of German war orphans.

He would go on to advocate for mental health in the VA system, encourage others to speak out about the very real mental trauma of combat.

If you look at Audie Murphy as an example of how much tougher people used to be "in the old days", you've missed the second act of his life. He turned his own pain & trauma into the motivation to help others.

He knew how fragile humans can be, regardless of bravery or machismo.

Read 4 tweets

c0nc0rdance

@c0nc0rdance

1 Mar

Let's talk about Bob Marley's death. Maybe some of you had a Marley poster in college, or developed a love for his music or lifestyle.

His father was a white, English-Jewish Jamaican who died of heart attack in 1955 at age 70, when Marley was 10. Mother descended from slaves.

In 1977, at age 32, he was diagnosed with a type of melanoma known as acral lentiginous melanoma (ALM) under his toenail. It was malignant and suspected to be metastatic. The doctor he saw in England recommend amputation / radical biopsy.

(not his toe, but real case shown)

ALM is the most common subtype of melanoma for dark skinned people, and tends to present on tissues on non-hairy skin like soles, palms, under nails and on mucosa where it is often missed.

It's most common on those with African ancestry, and is associated with older age.

Read 11 tweets

c0nc0rdance

@c0nc0rdance

6 Feb

"Where did life come from?" is such a tantalizing question, but our understanding is still tenuous, the issue controversial, and so we rarely teach it in public school biology class.

At most, they might cover Miller-Urey, which means excluding the last 70 years of discovery.

There are 3 stages we need to understand:
1. Origin of self-replicating ('autocatalytic') monomers
2. Origin of high fidelity replication
3. Encapsulation of replication systems

Synthetic biology is already yielding helpful findings.

There's a much larger 'chemical space' of nucleic acids that never arose on Earth that are capable of high fidelity replication. These can be called XNA's, xeno nucleic acids.

RNA/DNA had cousins!
nature.com/articles/s4146…

Read 5 tweets

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