Patient Zero

If you saw contagion, if you remember me mentioning Typhoid Mary in class, if you are curious as to the origin of HIV, if you are interested in more epidemiology, or if you wonder how an idea might spread....take a listen to this week's Radiolab. Add Radiolab to your podcasts on your smart phone, it's always interesting, really!

http://www.radiolab.org/2011/nov/14/

Maybe there will be extra credit on the final......

Malaria vaccine on the horizon?

I've said many times, and hopefully showed several examples, of how important cell surface chemistry is. Here is another example! Please note the phrase in the article, "a single receptor for a protein that is critical for the parasite to gain entry into red blood cells".

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/11/10/malaria-finding-points-to-possible-new-vaccine/

Here is an article about the GlaxoSmithkline vaccine also mentioned in the above article.

http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-18/glaxo-vaccine-cuts-malaria-in-african-children-by-more-than-half

I think these advances are very promising. They seem to be the most progress made in a very long time against malaria. If the vaccines are successful, what might some continuing issues be in order to rid the world of Malaria?

Cheatobiotics: how can we use them?

http://www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/group/gardner/media/NewScientist_Oct_2011.pdf


This article is SO interesting and provocative. It was found and contributed by one of your classmates (Danielle J., yes extra credit for being chosen for the blog!). By all means read it (you won't regret it), and think about the way that the article proposes we exploit these lazy, cheating, bacteria. Make a list of the vocabulary in the article that you have learned already in this course. Would you have understood this article in the same way last August as you hopefully do now? What do you think--about the social behavior aspects of the article, about potential benefits, what could be some of the problems with the proposed therapy (think horizontal gene transfer, among other things), microbial evolution, can you relate bacterial behavior to successful human behaviors? Oh, so many things to think about. Share what you are thinking!