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You are quite naive, Sir. There is a finite amount of reserch facilities and personell available, not to mention top scientific talent. If you put them to work on viagras of the world, very few remain to do anything else.

Speaking as research pharmacologist who sits on the admissions committee of an academic Pharmacology Dept., this is nonsense. We are nowhere close to depleting the worldwide reserves of talented people interested in doing biomedical research. If you fund it, they will come.

You mean in marketing? Yes, Pfizer does research but its research budget is but a fraction of its marketing budget. Just like most drug companies. The point is that Pfizer and the rest of them are ill equipped and have too many conflicts of interest to be allowed to be in charge of such critical thing like medical research.

Think about this for a moment. Do you really imagine that companies invest in marketing to throw money away? Marketing makes money, by increasing sales. That's why they do it. More sales means more money to invest in research.

It is not frivolous for what it cures. It is frivolous for the amount of resources (from Pfizer and all the competitors in mad rush to replicate something like it) that it consumes when compared to the severity of the ills that it addresses. It is an example of profit motive being superior to anything else.

No, it is an example of the profit motive leading people to serve the public interest in spite of themselves. Because the fundamental vascular and biochemical mechanisms that make Viagra work turn out to be critical for understanding things like heart disease and stroke .

NIH Proposal

The public comment link is at the bottom. I won't post it because I hope everyone reads the release before they spout off. :)

-Ian

Um, NIH already has a well developed infrastructure for this: PubMed Central. The problem is that not many journals are contributing full text to it right now. NIH does provide the abstracts only for just about every medical journal article in existence, as well as lots of other stuff through Entrez .

As far as the NIH funded research is concerned, anyone can look up a topic on PubMed read the text of an abstract, obtain an author's e-mail and receive a reprint or pdf of any publication. Most researchers are eager to send along copies of their published work ...

...NIH seems to be the National Institutes of Health.

The colon responds strongly to stimuli (for example, foods or stress) that would not bother most people...

In people with IBS, stress and emotions can strongly affect the colon...

The following have been associated with a worsening of IBS symptoms... drinks with caffeine, such as coffee, tea, or colas; stress, conflict, or emotional upsets

http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov/ddiseases/pubs/ibs/ #whatcauses

PS: As most of you know, you can't get any real work done in an atmosphere of "hypertasking," i.e. if you're trying to do physics, math, or symbolic logic, then get yourself a cabin in the mountains.

For those who don't know, BLAST is a genetic sequencing database that allows for comparison with an extracted gene (retrived through polymerase chain reaction) with a known, sequenced gene in their database.

Nitpicking, but BLAST is not a database, it is a set of programs/algorithms for searching genomic databases (for more info). But indeed such a machine should be ideal for doing BLAST searches.

No, but we can conclude that high velocity bullet impacts don't cause cancer, because they can't corrupt DNA in the way required.

Directly, yes. But we couldn't conclude that that people who are shot wouldn't be at an increased cancer risk from indirect means.

(Which is not to say that such a link exists. But, given some possible links between physical trauma and and increased risk of breast cancer, it's not an unreasonable hypothesis to explore. Of course, others claim such a link is a myth. The body is complicated, and statistical evidence can take decades to accumulate.)

I just skimmed over Gueorguieva's references (read abstracts of recent citations) and didn't find anything that suggest that after accounting for factors outside of age (income, education, pre-natal), there may be a benifit to having children young. I think the closest to what you are talking about is this.

This appears to be the PubMed reference.

It's called dysgraphia. You'll note that about halfway down the page is "Some physicians recommend that individuals with dysgraphia use computers to avoid the problems of handwriting."

And his website seems to think that elevated 1,25-dihdroxycholecalciferol causes chronic fatigue. "scientific proof for chronic fatigue".

The reason CFS patients have more of the active form of Vitamin D is that they sit around on their arses doing nothing while their bones fall to bits.

This is not news. It is basic physiology. Active vitamin D promotes calcium absorption from the gut to replace that lost by inactivity.

If you want a cause, there a pretty plausable one here.

Why don't they get well? They don't get well if it is better to be ill. Simple really.

CFS is not very well understood, but the CDC does have some criteria that can be used to diagnose CFS.

There is some recent research (International Journal of Epidemiology, 2004 Jul 15) that indicates that at least some folks with MCS may have a genetic predisposition -- certain genes help regulate how the body inactivates toxins, and a correlation was detected between folks with MCS and those with certain PON* and NAT* genotypes (or whatever -- I'm a geek, not a geneticist!). That gives a good explanation why some folks' bodies just can't deal with what the rest of us shrug off.

One explanation for the effect this has that you can find on the web is that with CFS, the immune system is hyperactive, so when you get exposed to something like a very fragrant shampoo :), your body kicks in, and it's like you have the flu -- lethargy, muscle and body pain, etc. If I'm remembering right, it's similar to how allergies work -- your body starts producing histamines to counter what it sees as an invader, but overdoes it, causing congestion/sneezing/headaches/etc., and causing some great financial results for the makers of Allegra, Sudafed, etc.

My wife got a skin rash last weekend from some fragrance-laced (saturated!) water that got spilled on a restroom countertop -- that's not hypochondria! And my toddler son gets hives (little red bumps on his skin) if he eats wheat products. (We've carefully done numerous experiments to prove, to my engineering satisfaction, that wheat is the key. This isn't a one-time occurrence, but a proven pattern.) I don't know of anyone who can use their brain, consciously or unconsciously, to make these kinds of physical manifestations occur.

So while I can't speak about whether your relatives are nuts :), I can say that there are at least some folks who aren't nuts, and there are at least some folks (but not very many) in the medical community that are working on helping these folks.

BTW, the Seabiscuit book author has CFS as well -- if she's a hypochondriac, she's managed to fool quite a lot of people.

Is there some connection between multiple environmental sensitivies and chronic fatigue? It would be odd for you to have two rare diseases.

Actually it's a pretty well studied connection.

I am assuming that you mean "dermatitis."

There are multiple causes and each has different treatments. Many forms are actually very difficult to treat, but luckily we have several new medications that are more effective.

Here's a good place to start reading

Do yourself a favor a see a good allergy or derm doc... dermatitis can be very tough on a person in multiple ways--including their social life. Getting it under control will really change your life.

Yes, people with asthma are sensitive to a whole range of smells and chemicals that most people are not... there is no doubt about that.

However, the majority of patients can tolerate those smells without any issues if their asthma is well treated.

btw, searching all the medical journals with pubmed for Sensibility to volatile compounds gives no responses.

Or, for a more partisan spin, take this quiz.

Perhaps you enjoy eating more, buying more, and living longer than your ancestors. However, I may not choose the same metric as you. Perhaps I would like to work less time, spend less money, and spend more time with my family and friends. Please don't assume that we share the same values.

I agree with you that things tend to get better. However, this is only because some people have actively fought to improve the conditions around them. Just like your bedroom, if you do not put in the effort to keep it clean, it will become dirty.

And of course if you're talking about magnetic fields there's plenty of proven effects, both in low field strength (is Michael Persinger still publishing?) and high (the kinder gentler ECT uses magnetic fields).

For more information on ELF and melatonin go to PubMed and query for "melatonin electromagnetic", or just browse the past year or two of Bioelectromagnetics and enjoy the debate.

As for mechanisms, a current favorite is that low-frequency RF -- or the magnetic component thereof -- can affect certain chemical reactions (this is also the current favorite on how many birds sense the Earth's magnetic field). Translating that into health effects usually involves some degree of handwaving about melatonin's effect on cancer growth, stress hormones, susceptible subpopulations, etc.

Whether low-frequency RF has measurable effects on humans, and whether RF causes cancer, are two entirely different questions. Frankly, I don't find much support for assertions of the latter (I'm not saying it's false, only that I'm not convinced). On the other hand, I think it's arrogant to assume that we know so much about biochemistry that we can rule on the latter question solely on the basis of the former.

with a link existing between liver cancer and excessive alcohol consumption (although not entirely conclusive), i'd feel less willing to donate a part of my body to someone who failed to take care of theirs.

Someone who has it appears to have parkinson's disease. TD is a "motion disorder" where one has involuntary, repetitive movements of some part of the body.

It's a form of brain damage that is presently incurable, and can put you in a wheelchair.

As I mentioned in a comment below, I take Risperdal, and since increasing my dose my psychiatrist has recommended I take another antipsychotic that has less likelihood to cause TD than risperdal. Most likely I will try seroquel, but am considering just staying on my present dose of risperdal because I'm doing so well these days.

I don't know what would be worse - having TD or having the symptoms that the risperdal treats. Being crippled would be no fun at all but neither is seeing the police everywhere, even when no police are present.

Hi!

Interesting themes. The answer is in 3 parts. I'm a past library abuser, present heavy user, and I've designed corporate "desks". I'd like to talk about my current usage first, my past abuse, and then my past design experience, in that order.

First, Bruce Sterling delivered an excellent speech before the library association entitled "Cyberpunk Librarians". Go read it.

I'm in Fountain Hills, AZ, and the library system is part of an associating out outlaying areas that either poorer areas and get lots of government money for libraries (mostly indian reserverations) and wealthier areas. It's a small town of only a few ten thousand, but there are 40 desktop machines running Windows XP. These machines have smartcard readers in their keyboards, and they're locked down. I don't know with what - I bring my own computer and Internet (GPRS) with me these days. I know they're locked down because I see the kids playing Flash and Java games on them. RuneScape is very popular. The kids are allowed to play games but only for an hour at a time - then they're off to the end of the line. This blows my mind that they permit undirected use, and after the initial "damn kids" reaction, I realized that they've developed a computer-lab culture right there in library - kids were learning from other kids, and knowledge was trickling down. One would find a neat game and show the others. Games are the obvious and most interesting thing, but they're searching the net for their reports, too, and generally learning about things and how to do things from all kinds of sites. It's naive to think that kids only learn from doing serious things - any anthropoligist will tell you that play in any animal is survival mechanism, where life-skills are practised in a non-hostile environment. The kids are litteraly learning to learn, finding their away around information that will help them navigate, and building confidence relating the vast amount of knowledge out there. This takes years and cannot be underestimated. It is lack of this that 70-year old first time computer users lack that makes them so helpless - they never _played_ in this arena. Bruce Sterling envisioned librarians are gatekeepers to informations, worthy and rightous directors rather than distractors of attention, and simply providing kids and adults with 'net access is a huge step there. Just short of 10% of machines are down for one reason or another at any given time, and the staff is not qualified to administrate the machines nor to coach kids on using them. Being open to general 'net surfing, I'm told that they're infested with spyware and worms.

I can make these assertions because play was my first love, too. I wanted to write games. Then I discovered the net, and MUDs (Multiuser Online Dungeons). Problem was, it was 1990, and Internet access wasn't for sale to the general public. It wasn't for sale to the general public. It wasn't for 3 more years that a few isolated areas had tiny mom and pop ISPs pop up. Universities would sell access - but charged for VAX CPU time, connect time, and data transfered, for a cost to MUD of about $40/hour. Originally I abused a terminal server at a University - a trick I'd come back to later. It used to be that you'd dial the University modem pool, get a prompt that would reconnect you to any other machine on campus, and you could eventually find a machine with a guest account or something similar. Or a library computer with a public login that used lynx as the shell, "locked down" to connect only to the library catalog webserver (but if you could navigate to a gopher server by way of a more permissive Universities catalog that was linked to, you could go free and even create telnet:// links for yourself). One of these systems had an option to connect to another University's shell, and I would go to the library, go to the fourth floor, find a remote corner (actually, I did this in many libraries), sit down on a hard wood chair, and MU

Would you imprison a two year old for, well, anything? Why not? Of course because they are incapable of realising that if they stick a hairpin into a power outlet (ie "investigating their world" aka "trying shit out") they might start a fire that burns down their house.

Similarly teenagers are literally incapable of realising that there are consequences to their actions- the part of the brain required to do so simply does not develop until they are in their early twenties. Simple. Scientific. Fact. They might look like adults but they do not think like adults.

Now, how about this lynch mob turn around and go home.

Imagine you are a small hospital, one with a 10 bed ICU. You have 10 patients.

First, a 10 bed ICU is not small. It is average
Your hypothetical 750 bed unit does not exist.

Can you afford to have someone near enough to each heart monitor to hear when it has an irregular heartbeart? Can you even detect a slightly altered heart-rate just by a casual listen/look every now and then? What about all the other funny intrumentation? Of course not. It would take one RN/CNA/Med. Tech per ICU patient per shift.

We are talking about an ICU, as in intensive care unit. What do you suppose that means?
I will give you a clue: it means intensive care, typically about two patients per RN. As far as CNAs and Med. Techs go, they don't really have any medical training and are not the ones watching the monitors.

why does the whole hospital network need to be left attached to the public Internet? Have a few stand-alone surf-stations available in the building so they can go look up stuff they need to. Though really, if my doctor *has* to go check something on the internet before he can figure out what to do with me, I'll just stay home

I'm married to a doctor. Doctors look stuff up through the internet all the time and you should be glad they do. Resources like Pub-Med are indespensible and far more convenient to access through the internet. Would you prefer your doctor take a trip to the library every time he has a question about some rare medicine he's thinking of prescribing? Wouldn't you agree that getting this information from sources like the CDC through the internet is a much better use of his/her time? There's nothing wrong, weird or unusual about a doctor needing to use the internet to access reliable sources of data.

The human body is a complicated thing and even the best doctors need to consult references fairly often. Not to mention for things like checking the latest research, communicating with peers for research, and a host of other uses. Doctor's don't use some random blog they found through google as a source of information. They aren't stupid nor are they careless. The internet is a very useful tool to them, and they know it even if you don't.

It is certainly not a trivial task to produce an online journal. It is even more complicated when the materials are being deposited from a variety of sources. PubMed Central does quite an impressive job of organizing current data submissions. They have even developed a free-access archiving DTD that is pretty comprehensive.

The problem I see is that journals that are unwilling to comply with the spirit of the law will most likely dump their data in an unusable format. This could overwhelm the current system in place.

I do not know what the specifications will be for depositing information will be, but I do sincerely hope that Congress does not leave it open to interpretation...

It is certainly not a trivial task to produce an online journal. It is even more complicated when the materials are being deposited from a variety of sources. PubMed Central does quite an impressive job of organizing current data submissions. They have even developed a free-access archiving DTD that is pretty comprehensive.

The problem I see is that journals that are unwilling to comply with the spirit of the law will most likely dump their data in an unusable format. This could overwhelm the current system in place.

I do not know what the specifications will be for depositing information will be, but I do sincerely hope that Congress does not leave it open to interpretation...

This is commonly referred to as orthokeratology. The FDA just approved a form of this called CRT, or corneal refractive therapy. Note that the procedure is not that new, it is the FDA approval that is new. You can search pubmed to find relevant literature on these techniques(searching for "orthokeratology" will provide you with plenty of results).

Other experiments have included using the tweezers to pull a protein or DNA molecule apart and observe how it folds back up. This can be applied to study the kinetics of protein folding, and also elucidate the mechanisms of protein machinery such as chromatin organizing complexes.

There's actually quite a bit of work being done with single-molecule studies, and laser tweezers are just one of several methods. One paper I read involved watching a single DNA helicase unwind a fluorescently labelled DNA molecule: the researchers watched the end of the DNA helix fray open as the helicase moved down it.

The coolest of these experiments in my opinion, though, is this one and a number of followups. These are probably among the most awesome accomplishments in biology in the past decade.

The other problem is that for either technique, you need anti-coagulation, which leads to a need for replacing red blood cells, platelets, and various coagulation cascade regulation factors. This study suggests that the replacement requirements for ECMO are much greater than that of ventricular assist, and, let me tell you, platelets aren't cheap, not to mention anti-thrombin III.

1. Continuous flow pumps seem to favor stasis of blood distal to atherosclerotic lesions, which in turn favors thrombogenesis. So let's say you have carotid stenosis because of all those McDonald's hamburgers you've been eating. Unless they do a carotid endarterectomy on you, continuous flow will cause blood to pool distal to the blockages, which will generate blood clots, which will get propelled into your brain, likely causing multiple massive strokes.
2. If you happen to have an arteriovenous malformation in your GI tract (which, while not common, is not rare either), they noticed that with continuous flow pumps, you would tend to bleed more, for reasons not yet ascertained.
3. Continuous flow is not as good as pulsatile flow when it comes to compensating for increases in systemic vascular resistance such as, for example, when you decide to stand up, when you get dehydrated, or when your adrenals decide to dump epinephrine into your bloodstream. Flow drops precipitously, and is guaranteed to cause ischemia or infarction in target organs. Raise your blood pressure and you might just stroke out or cause your kidney to fail.

Of course, this is just one study, and most of the subjects had other pathologies besides just heart failure. It would be interesting to see what happens in trauma patients who are otherwise healthy. But I think these particular findings would be relevant even if you were replacing the heart rather than just assisting it.

Here is a description of Kuru, a brain wasting disease in humans transmitted by the traditional eating the brains of the deceased.

I am a biologist and I remember researching this when I was an undergrad:

Studying Kuru is much easier for researchers, because they can simply ask people who were involved in the tradition about symptoms and the spread of the disease. They were able to figure out that there are several different alleles in the wild (sections of DNA that code for proteins; each human has 2 copies of DNA for each protein). They found some of the alleles encoded a protein that was more resistant to corruption by the prions than others. They also found that people who were heterozygous (have 2 different copies of the protein) would take much longer to die of the disease than those who were homozygous (have 2 of the same copies).

Heterozygousity levels were high, as expected for those who had taken part and survived the old-fashioned (and now outlawed) practice of eating your dead relative's brains, because homozygotes were very susceptable to dying from this practice, and their levels would be somewhat lower due to selective pressure (ie death) in the past (but via genetics there would always be some homozygotes in each generation).

This is all well and good, but the real slammer here is this:

heterozygousity levels were also abnormally high in the general population around the world for this protein. This could have several meanings (i'll go into 2):
1. We are the descendents of cannibals.
2. Everyone dies of alzheimer's if they live to be old enough (ie they don't die of something else first).

Cannibalism could explain the abnormally high rate of heterozygousity for this protein. Supposedly, archaeologists and those types have uncovered widespread (ie global) evidence of cannibalism, but also found that is relatively rare at any one time. If people were eating other people on a large enough scale, this could cause selection against homozygotes in the long run.

Because of human family structure, old people (past breeding age) can still positively influence the fitness (reproductive cabability) of younger family members. This theoretically would produce selective pressure against homozygotes, although other factors might render it insignificant.

In any case it is clear that brains are not quite perfect as of the latest release. Some other interesting tidbits are that heavy smokers and drinkers have a slightly lower incidence of alzheimer's. This could be because they die of other health problems earlier, but I believe the study adjusted for details like that. The mechanism for this could be the higher incidence of "shock proteins" and "chaperone proteins" in cells that are more used to being stressed by the nasty destructive chemicals in ciggarettes and booze.

*takes a swig of beer*

These chaperone proteins help to fold newly-made proteins the proper way. Shock proteins help to
keep your proteins from getting messed up from exposure to heat, chemicals, other proteins, etc.

Whew..there is some much to explain, I can't give much more than a brief overview. any questions?

Kuru is a rare and fatal brain disorder that occurred at epidemic levels during the 1950s-60s among the Fore people in the highlands of New Guinea. The disease was the result of the practice of ritualistic cannibalism among the Fore, in which relatives prepared and consumed the tissues (including brain) of deceased family members. Brain tissue from individuals with kuru was highly infectious, and the disease was transmitted either through eating or by contact with open sores or wounds. Government discouragement of the practice of cannibalism led to a continuing decline in the disease, which has now mostly disappeared.

I don't know too much about molecular biology, but this abstract looked interesting:

Four-stranded DNA structure stabilized by a novel G:C:A:T tetrad

The sleep chemical would be melatonin.

It's not clear from the grandparent post, but melatonin is present during sleepiness and is reduced during wakefulness.

When I was having similar problems I found the following studies helpful:

Melatonin in patients with reduced REM sleep duration: two randomized controlled trials.
Melatonin administration to blind people: phase advances and entrainment.
Entrainment of free-running circadian rhythms by melatonin in blind people.

The neat thing about studies on blind people is they isolate any light-to-the-optic-nerve variables. Skin-light exposure may still be uncontrolled. If you're not blind it's obviously not directly applicable to you.

Interestingly, at WalMart you can get 1mg and .2mg tablets for exactly the same price, about $6/100.

The sleep chemical would be melatonin.

It's not clear from the grandparent post, but melatonin is present during sleepiness and is reduced during wakefulness.

When I was having similar problems I found the following studies helpful:

Melatonin in patients with reduced REM sleep duration: two randomized controlled trials.
Melatonin administration to blind people: phase advances and entrainment.
Entrainment of free-running circadian rhythms by melatonin in blind people.

The neat thing about studies on blind people is they isolate any light-to-the-optic-nerve variables. Skin-light exposure may still be uncontrolled. If you're not blind it's obviously not directly applicable to you.

Interestingly, at WalMart you can get 1mg and .2mg tablets for exactly the same price, about $6/100.

The sleep chemical would be melatonin.

It's not clear from the grandparent post, but melatonin is present during sleepiness and is reduced during wakefulness.

When I was having similar problems I found the following studies helpful:

Melatonin in patients with reduced REM sleep duration: two randomized controlled trials.
Melatonin administration to blind people: phase advances and entrainment.
Entrainment of free-running circadian rhythms by melatonin in blind people.

The neat thing about studies on blind people is they isolate any light-to-the-optic-nerve variables. Skin-light exposure may still be uncontrolled. If you're not blind it's obviously not directly applicable to you.

Interestingly, at WalMart you can get 1mg and .2mg tablets for exactly the same price, about $6/100.

That's odd, because I'm left with the impression that 120/80 is actually an optimal BP.

It used to be, but they changed the standard.

In November 1997, the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation and Treatment of High Blood Pressure (JNC) issued the report that classified 120/80 and below as "optimal", which is a standard that many are familiar with.

However, after further research, the JNC concluded that the risks are greater than previously realized. On May 21, 2003, they published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that set new standards. This article is commonly called JNC7.

The new standards classify anything below 120/80 as normal, but at or above that as prehypertension. Hypertension is still at 140/90 and above.

References:

• NIH press release discussing the JNC7 report
• A chart comparing the old standard vs the new one
• The JNC7 report, and related materials

Personally, I generally would tend to question a standard which classifies 22% of the American adult population as diseased. Still, given how many deaths are attributable to heart disease (29% in 2001, according to the CDC), I'll go with the more conservative figures.

That's odd, because I'm left with the impression that 120/80 is actually an optimal BP.

It used to be, but they changed the standard.

In November 1997, the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation and Treatment of High Blood Pressure (JNC) issued the report that classified 120/80 and below as "optimal", which is a standard that many are familiar with.

However, after further research, the JNC concluded that the risks are greater than previously realized. On May 21, 2003, they published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that set new standards. This article is commonly called JNC7.

The new standards classify anything below 120/80 as normal, but at or above that as prehypertension. Hypertension is still at 140/90 and above.

References:

• NIH press release discussing the JNC7 report
• A chart comparing the old standard vs the new one
• The JNC7 report, and related materials

Personally, I generally would tend to question a standard which classifies 22% of the American adult population as diseased. Still, given how many deaths are attributable to heart disease (29% in 2001, according to the CDC), I'll go with the more conservative figures.

I agree with the glass of wine or beer suggestion, but don't take it as license to go nuts. From what I remember from class, alcohol inhibits the body's ability to enter the more important phases of the sleep cycle. Sleep apneas are also more prevalent. Sort of explains why you feel tired after sleeping till 2 on Saturday after going out and drinking the night before.

As was pointed out in some replies to my (parent) post, the genomes Venter finds will be available to the public. I was overreacting to Venter's past actions, which are now harder to justify with consistency. But we can all applaud his work on our behalf, harvesting the info from the sea for anyone's use. In fact, it certainly justifies his publicity-seeking career, and might even justify some of his privatizing other genome "discoveries", to fund and promote this purely scientific mission.

Read the original paper, and note that two of the assembled genomes (and therefore two of the the most abundant sampled organisms) are probably contaminants - neither Burkholderia nor Shewanella have been found in earlier 16s rRNA surveys of the Sargasso Sea in significant numbers.

This sort of mistake is not one that a great scientist would allow to waste resources or to be published without pointing out. If Venter would be more careful and critical, or simply have less of an ego, this mis-direction of resources would not occur.

The original paper, only available with a subscription (go to a real-world library if you don't have one). Or read a overview

And yes, IAABEM (I am a bioinformatic environmental microbiologist).

Your model for an oversight body is counter-intuitive to me in the analogy. In the human body the reason that the immune system works is because it is distributed, not centralized. Each area has the ability to respond to localized threats, and can contribute to combating holistic problems as well.

Actually, the human body DOES have a centralized clearing authority that approves new immune functions -- the thymus. It has the job of testing new white blood cells to make sure they'll fit in with the rest of the body. When the thymus fails or makes a mistake, the result is an autoimmune disorder.

What will Venter do with the genomes he sequences? Put them in the public domain?

Basically -- the data goes in GenBank, a publicly available database. The Sargasso data is already there. Records in Genbank are freely available but aren't "public domain" in a technical sense. Since you are supposed to keep the attribution data, I suppose it's closer to one of the Creative Commons licenses.

Here's an example of a GenBank record. For the Sargasso Sea data, there's over 50,000 of them.

Most of Ventner's work is done under the auspices of the National Institute of Health, and is therefore in the public domain. I should know, I maintain several genomic databases at the NIH.

Most of Ventner's work is done under the auspices of the National Institute of Health, and is therefore in the public domain. I should know, I maintain several genomic databases at the NIH.

Most of Ventner's work is done under the auspices of the National Institute of Health, and is therefore in the public domain. I should know, I maintain several genomic databases at the NIH.

Most of Ventner's work is done under the auspices of the National Institute of Health, and is therefore in the public domain. I should know, I maintain several genomic databases at the NIH.

NCBI has the "Sargasso Sea" here : BLAST the Environmental Samples data

Of course, another stop for any health-related concern should be MedLine Plus, which offers information both for health providers and for patients, along with links to current research. It's a fabulous resource, and you can pursue just about anything to any level of detail you like. Good luck.

Incidentally, though it doesn't cover very rare diseases, Family Practice Notebook is a website geared to family docs who just need a quick refresher on a disease in the middle of the day. It's often one of the clearest sources of quick summary info on diseases; I've used it innumerable times to read up on patients' diseases when short on time.

The real "love bug" beginning with those letters...