REFERENCE:
Itzhak Khait, Ohad Lewin-Epstein, Raz Sharon, Kfir Saban, Revital Goldstein, Yehuda Anikster, Yarden Zeron, Chen Agassy, Shaked Nizan, Gayl Sharabi, Ran Perelman, Arjan Boonman, Nir Sade, Yossi Yovel, Lilach Hadany (2023 Mar 30). Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative. Cell, 186(7):1328-1336.e10. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2023.03.009, PMID: 37001499. ARTICLE | FREE FULLTEXT PDF
By Neuronicus, 5 December 2023
A principal investigator tells a graduate student to discover new antibiotics using well known methods. Student discovers new antibiotic. Then, another graduate student performs the antibiotic tests to see if it works. Who takes the credit? The PI got the credit and the Nobel and the money. The discoverer sued and got some credit and some money. The tester got nothing. The tester was a woman. According to the woman’s daughter, “her mother’s colleagues told her it wasn’t important that her name be on the patent because she would one day get married and have a family”.
After the streptomycin controversy, the universities put forth regulations to make (somewhat) clearer who gets what in the process of discovery. Thanks to this and thanks to the women’s liberation movement and, more recently, the women’s fight for equality in workplaces, if this would happen today in a serious University, probably all three would share the Nobel. Probably.
Bibliography:
1) Angelova, Lidiya. “Elizabeth Bugie – the invisible woman in the discovery of streptomycin”. Scientista | Women in STEM. Retrieved 2023-10-19.
2) Eveleigh, Douglas E.; Bennett, Joan W. (2018-05-01), Whitaker; Barton (eds.), “Women Microbiologists at Rutgers in the Early Golden Age of Antibiotics”, Women in Microbiology, American Society of Microbiology, pp. 317–329, doi:10.1128/9781555819545.ch34, ISBN 978-1-55581-953-8
3) Kingston W (July 2004). “Streptomycin, Schatz v. Waksman, and the balance of credit for discovery”. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. 59 (3): 441–462. doi: 10.1093/jhmas/jrh091. PMID 15270337. S2CID 27465970.
4) Schatz, Albert (1993). “The true story of the development of streptomycin”. Actinomycetes. 4 (2): 27–39. Couldn’t find the full text.
By Neuronicus, 19 October 2023
Few of the Generation X people are unfamiliar with the super-hit/movie cult Twin Peaks. And from those, even fewer find the dwarf dancing in the Red Room not scary as hell. And yet even fewer know who the man singing “Sycamore Trees” in that room is. For memory refreshment, here is the clip.
The man with the unusual voice, to match all the rest of the… um… “unusualness”, is none other than Jimmy Scott, a phenomenal jazz singer. If you listen to him, particularly in the hit “I’m Afraid The Masquerade Is Over“, you’ll notice that, if you close your eyes, you might be confused on whether the voice belongs to an adult man or a very gifted prepubertal boy.
And that is because Jimmy Scott suffered his entire life from a rare and obscure disease, called the “Kallmann syndrome”. This is a genetic disorder that prevents a person to start or to fully complete puberty. And that is because they have low circulating sex hormones: testosterone in males and estrogen and progesterone in females. And that is because their hypothalamus does not produce enough or at the proper times gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH). And that is because sometime during the first trimester of pregnancy, there was an abnormality in the development of the olfactory fibers. You might ask what does smell development has with sex hormones? Well, I’m glad you asked. The cells that will end up releasing GnRH during puberty need to migrate from where they are born (nasal epithelium) to hypothalamus. If something impedes said migration, like, say, a mass, then the cells cannot reach their destination and you get a person who cannot start or finish puberty, plus a few other symptoms (Teixeira et al., 2010).
As some of you might have already surmised, something else besides lack of puberty must happen to these people regarding their sense of smell. After all, their olfactory fibers got tangled during embryonic development, forming, probably, a benign tumor, a neuroma. Not surprisingly, the person ends up with severely diminished or absent sense of smell, information that can be clinically used for diagnosis (Yu et al., 2022).
The first one to notice that people with failure to start or fully complete puberty are also anosmic was Aureliano Maestre de San Juan, a Spanish scientist. Unfortunately, the syndrome he documented in 1856 was named not named after him, but after the German scientist Franz Joseph Kallmann who described it almost a century later, in 1944 (Martin et al., 2011). Kallmann not only he did not discover the syndrome himself, but he was a staunch supporter of “racial hygiene”, advocating for finding and sterilizing relatives of people with schizophrenia so to eradicate the disease from future generations. Ironically, he fled Germany in 1939 because he was of Jewish heritage into a country which enthusiastically embraced eugenics and performed their own sterilizations programs, the USA (Benbassat, 2016).
So, I hereby propose, in an obscure unvisited corner of the Internet, to rename the disease the Maestre syndrome or MSJJ, after the guy who actually noticed it the first time and published about it. Besides, it’s his birthday today, having been born on October 17, 1828.
REFERENCES (in order of appearance):
Yu B, Chen K, Mao J, Hou B, You H, Wang X, Nie M,Huang Q, Zhang R, Zhu Y, Sun B, Feng F, Zhou W, & Wu X (2022, Sep 22).The diagnostic value of the olfactory evaluation for congenital hypogonadotropic hypogonadism. Frontiers in Endocrinology (Lausanne). 2022; 13: 909623. doi: 10.3389/fendo.2022.909623, PMCID: PMC9523726, PMID: 36187095. ARTICLE | FREE FULLTEXT PDF
Teixeira L, Guimiot F, Dodé C, Fallet-Bianco C, Millar RP, Delezoide A-L, & Hardelin J-P (2010, Oct 1, Published online 2010 Sep 13). Defective migration of neuroendocrine GnRH cells in human arrhinencephalic conditions. Journal of Clinical Investigation, 120(10): 3668–3672. doi: 10.1172/JCI43699, PMCID: PMC2947242, PMID: 20940512. ARTICLE | FREE FULLTEXT PDF
Benbassat, CA (2016, Published online 2016 Apr 19). Kallmann Syndrome: Eugenics and the Man behind the Eponym. Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal, 7(2): e0015. doi: 10.5041/RMMJ.10242, PMCID: PMC4839542, PMID: 27101217. ARTICLE | FREE FULLTEXT ARTICLE
Martin C, Balasubramanian R, Dwyer AA, Au MG, Sidis Y, Kaiser UB, Seminara SB, Pitteloud N, Zhou Q-Y, & Crowley, Jr WF (2011, Published online 2010 Oct 29). The Role of the Prokineticin 2 Pathway in Human Reproduction: Evidence from the Study of Human and Murine Gene Mutations. Endocrine Reviews, 32(2): 225–246. doi: 10.1210/er.2010-0007, PMCID: PMC3365793, PMID: 21037178. ARTICLE | FREE FULLTEXT PDF
Original references which I couldn’t find, as they appear in Martin et al. (2011):
Maestre de San Juan A. (1856). Teratologia: Falta total de los nervios olfactorios con anosmia en un individuo en quien existia una atrofia congénita de los testículos y miembro viril. Siglo Medico, 3:211–221 [Google Scholar]
Kallmann F, Schoenfeld W & Barrera S (1944). The genetic aspects of primary eunuchoidism. Am J Ment Defic, 48:203–236 [Google Scholar]
By Neuronicus, 17 October 2022
In biology, organizing living things in categories is called taxonomy. Such categories are established based on shared characteristics of the members. These characteristics were usually visual attributes. For example, a red-footed booby (it’s a bird, silly!) is obviously different than a blue-footed booby, so we put them in different categories, which Aristotle called in Greek something like species.
Biological taxonomy is very useful, not only to provide countless hours of fight (both verbal and physical!) for biologists, but to inform us of all sorts of unexpected relationships between living things. These relationships, in turn, can give us insights into our own evolution, but also the evolution of things inimical to us, like diseases, and, perhaps, their cure. Also extremely important, it allows scientists from all over the world to have a common language, thus maximizing information sharing and minimizing misunderstandings.
All well and good. And it was all well and good since Carl Linnaeus introduced his famous taxonomy system in the 18th Century, the one we still use today with species, genus, family, order, and kingdom. Then we figured out how to map the DNAs of things around us and this information threw out the window a lot of Linnean classifications. Because it turns out that some things that look similar are not genetically similar; likewise, some living things that we thought are very different from one another, turned out that, genetically speaking, they are not so different.
You will say, then, alright, out with visual taxonomy, in with phylogenetic taxonomy. This would be absolutely peachy for a minority of organisms of the planet, like animals and plants, but a nightmare in the more promiscuous organisms who have no problem swapping bits of DNA back and forth, like some bacteria, so you don’t know anymore who’s who. And don’t even get me started on the viruses which we are still trying to figure out whether or not they are alive in the first place.
When I grew up there were 5 regna or kingdoms in our tree of life – Monera, Protista, Fungi, Plantae, Animalia – each with very distinctive characteristics. Likewise, the class Mammalia from the Animal Kingdom was characterized by the females feeding their offspring with milk from mammary glands. Period. No confusion. But now I have no idea – nor do many other biologists, rest assured – how many domains or kingdoms or empires we have, nor even what the definition of a species is anymore!
As if that’s not enough, even those Linnean characteristics that we thought set in stone are amenable to change. Which is good, shows the progress of science. But I didn’t think that something like the definition of mammal would change. Mammals are organisms whose females feed their offspring with milk from mammary glands, as I vouchsafed above. Pretty straightforward. And not spiders. Let me be clear on this: spiders did not feature in my – or anyone’s! – definition of mammals.
Until Chen et al. (2018) published their weird article a couple of weeks ago. The abstract is free for all to see and states that the females of a jumping spider species feed their young with milk secreted by their body until the age of subadulthood. Mothers continue to offer parental care past the maturity threshold. The milk is necessary for the spiderlings because without it they die. That’s all.
I read the whole paper since it was only 4 pages of it and here are some more details about their discovery. The species of spider they looked at is Toxeus magnus, a jumping spider that looks like an ant. The mother produces milk from her epigastric furrow and deposits it on the nest floor and walls from where the spiderlings ingest it (0-7 days). After the first week of this, the spiderlings suck the milk direct from the mother’s body and continue to do so for the next two weeks (7-20 days) when they start leaving the nest and forage for themselves. But they return and for the next period (20-40 days) they get their food both from the mother’s milk and from independent foraging. Spiderlings get weaned by day 40, but they still come home to sleep at night. At day 52 they are officially considered adults. Interestingly, “although the mother apparently treated all juveniles the same, only daughters were allowed to return to the breeding nest after sexual maturity. Adult sons were attacked if they tried to return. This may reduce inbreeding depression, which is considered to be a major selective agent for the evolution of mating systems (p. 1053).”
During all this time, including during the emergence into adulthood of the offsprings, the mother also supplied house maintenance, carrying out her children’s exuviae (shed exoskeletons) and repairing the nest.
The authors then did a series of experiments to see what role does the nursing and other maternal care at different stages play in the fitness and survival of the offsprings. Blocking the mother’s milk production with correction fluid immediately after hatching killed all the spiderlings, showing that they are completely dependent on the mother’s milk. Removing the mother after the spiderlings start foraging (day 20) drastically reduces survivorship and body size, showing that mother’s care is essential for her offsprings’ success. Moreover, the mother taking care of the nest and keeping it clean reduced the occurrence of parasite infections on the juveniles.
The authors analyzed the milk and it’s highly nutritious: “spider milk total sugar content was 2.0 mg/ml, total fat 5.3 mg/ml, and total protein 123.9 mg/ml, with the protein content around four times that of cow’s milk (p. 1053)”.
Speechless I am. Good for the spider, I guess. Spider milk will have exorbitant costs (Apparently, a slight finger pressure on the milk-secreting region makes the mother spider secret the milk, not at all unlike the human mother). Spiderlings die without the mother’s milk. Responsible farming? Spider milker qualifications? I’m gonna lay down, I got a headache.
REFERENCE: Chen Z, Corlett RT, Jiao X, Liu SJ, Charles-Dominique T, Zhang S, Li H, Lai R, Long C, & Quan RC (30 Nov. 2018). Prolonged milk provisioning in a jumping spider. Science, 362(6418):1052-1055. PMID: 30498127, DOI: 10.1126/science.aat3692. ARTICLE | Supplemental info (check out the videos)
By Neuronicus, 13 December 2018
Reference: Beas BS, Wright BJ, Skirzewski M, Leng Y, Hyun JH, Koita O, Ringelberg N, Kwon HB, Buonanno A, & Penzo MA (Jul 2018, Epub 18 Jun 2018). The locus coeruleus drives disinhibition in the midline thalamus via a dopaminergic mechanism. Nature Neuroscience,21(7):963-973. PMID: 29915192, PMCID: PMC6035776 [Available on 2018-12-18], DOI:10.1038/s41593-018-0167-4. ARTICLE
Approximately… give or take…
REFERENCE: Landenmark HKE, Forgan DH, & Cockell CS (11 Jun 2915). An Estimate of the Total DNA in the Biosphere. PLoS Biology, 13(6): e1002168. PMCID: PMC4466264, PMID: 26066900, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002168. ARTICLE | FREE FULLTEXT PDF
By Neuronicus, 1 September 2018
REFERENCE: Burns CS, Heyerick A, De Keukeleire D, Forbes MD. (5 Nov 2001). Mechanism for formation of the lightstruck flavor in beer revealed by time-resolved electron paramagnetic resonance. Chemistry – The European Journal, 7(21): 4553-4561. PMID: 11757646, DOI: 10.1002/1521-3765(20011105)7:21<4553::AID-CHEM4553>3.0.CO;2-0. ABSTRACT
By Neuronicus, 12 July 2017
By Neuronicus, 16 May 2017.
Reference: Russell, B. (10 May 1933). “The Triumph of Stupidity”. In: H. Ruja (Ed.), Mortals and Others: Bertrand Russell’s American Essays, Volume 2, 1931–1935.
The history of the quote and variations of it by others can be found on the Quote Investigator.
By Neuronicus, 6 November 2016
Avogadro’s number is 6.02 × 1023. Muahahaaa!
#scilaughs
#scilaughs
Reference: von Bonin, G. (1950). Essay on the cerebral cortex. Ed. Charles C. Thomas, Springfield. ISBN 10: 0398044252, ISBN 13: 9780398044251
Image credit: geralt.The whole image: Public Domain
By Neuronicus, 15 September 2016
Scientist, by any other name…
History of science is, unfortunately, not among the mandatory classes required for earning a diploma that allows oneself to be called a scientist. Worrisomely, nor is Logic as a formal class. All the more the pity because in the Middle Ages, when the word science entered the English language, to have scientific knowledge meant you have arrived at it by following the Aristotelian way of logical reasoning (a.k.a deductions and inductions). To be fair, the word existed already in Romance languages with the same meaning: new knowledge obtained by applying the rules of Aristotelian syllogisms. By the way, Aristotle is also the guy to whom we owe the basis of the scientific method, but that’s a story for another day.
Although words like scientific or science were altogether frequently used with regards of the scholarly endeavors of the ladies and gentlemen of the early 19th Century (yes, there were ladies too that dabbled into the sciences, even if sometimes it was only to write about the spectacular discoveries and controversies of their time), the term scientist has been officially coined in 1834 by William Whewell. A man truly blessed in the art of words, being credited with coining a lot of other famous words like anode and physicist, he proposed the word in a review of a science popularization book written by one Mrs. Somerville. The circumstance of how this came to be is masterly imparted to us by Sydney Ross in a superb historical account of the word scientist, published in 1962.
For the rounded scientist or for the merely curious, I truly recommend the lecture of the referenced papers. They’re delightful!
Reference 1. [Whewell W] (1834). Art. III. [Review of] On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. By Mrs. Somerville. The Quarterly Review, 51: 58-61. FULLTEXT PDF at GoogleBooks
Reference 2. Ross S (1962). Scientist: The story of a word, Annals of Science, 18:2, 65-85, DOI: 10.1080/00033796200202722. FREE FULLTEXT PDF
P.S. I checked and Wikipedia is correct with the following statement:
“To be exact, the person coined the term scientist was referred to in Whewell 1834 only as “some ingenious gentleman.” Ross added a comment that this “some ingenious gentleman” was Whewell himself, without giving the reason for the identification. Ross 1962, p.72.”
Even if, by some very slim chance, the “ingenious gentleman” was not Whewell himself, Whewell did propose the term scientist in a more formal manner six years later in 1840 bringing more than just linguistic justifications, like the diversity of those engaged in scientific endeavors and how they don’t call themselves natural philosophers anymore.
By Neuronicus, 9 August 2016
Today we celebrate the first instance the humankind stepped on the Moon. I thought only fitted to remind you of the last human there, too. As a bitter-sweet reminder that NASA is not something where budgetary concerns should lie.
Links: NASA Apollo 11 Mission | NASA Apollo 17 Mission | Apollo 11 Patch to Mars 1 | Buzz Aldrin punching a conspiracy theorist that doubted the moon landing
By Neuronicus, 20 July 2016
Reference: Flegr J, Prandota J, Sovickova M, Israili ZH (2014). Toxoplasmosis – A Global Threat. Correlation of Latent Toxoplasmosis with Specific Disease Burden in a Set of 88 Countries. PLoS ONE, 9(3): e90203. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0090203. Article | FREE fulltext PDF
By Neuronicus, 22 March 2016
Reference: Deshpande DA, Wang WC, McIlmoyle EL, Robinett KS, Schillinger RM, An SS, Sham JS, & Liggett SB. (Nov 2010, Epub 24 Oct 2010). Bitter taste receptors on airway smooth muscle bronchodilate by localized calcium signaling and reverse obstruction. Nature Medicine, 16(11):1299-304. PMID: 20972434, PMCID: PMC3066567, DOI: 10.1038/nm.2237. Article | FREE FULLTEXT PDF
Reference: Dick, L. (Writer), & Yaitanes, G. (Director). (2007). The Right Stuff. [Season 4 Episode 2]. In P. Attanasio (Executive producer), House, M.D. Los Angeles, CA: Fox Broadcasting.
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