Quantum mechanics stinks
Our sense of smell has been in the news recently, with some new research published into how our noses detect different substances’ odours. Our other senses – sight, touch, taste and hearing – are well understood, but the mechanism of smell is still a mystery.
Molecules all possess their own shapes: the more atoms in the molecule, the more complex the shapes can become. There are countless different possible shapes of molecules and it has generally been thought that these shapes dictate what substances smell of. We have a patch of receptors in our noses that match certain molecular shapes. When the right shaped molecule fits into the right receptor, like a key in a lock, a signal is sent to the brain to tell us what we are smelling.
However, Dr Luca Turin has published work on a more controversial theory for the mechanism of smell. He takes a different approach, using the vibrations of chemical bonds and quantum effects to describe how our smell receptors detect different molecules. Read more…
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One drug, multiple actions
A pill that claimed to target several areas of the body.
Drug discovery is a laborious process, often involving a significant degree of trial and error in a medicinal chemistry lab. Historically, many of the best drugs were discovered with an element of luck, but getting lucky is not a reliable strategy.
Today, drugs are designed. The aim is usually to target one critical protein in the body, and avoid affecting any others to minimise potential side-effects. Many new cancer drugs have been developed this way: monoclonal antibodies are designed to target one specific protein in order to destroy cancer cells. However, some of these drugs have more recently been found to target other proteins related to the target, which has – fortunately – helped them to block the cancer cells’ activity. The multiple action of these drugs suggest that designing drugs to target more than one protein could be extremely useful, not just in cancer but in other areas including psychiatry. Read more…
Above: One of the maps produced by the study. The map shows the distribution of HAT risk in Congo, with five deepening shades of colour representing five categories of risk from ‘very low’ to ‘very high’.
In the 1960s, we very nearly eliminated ‘Sleeping Sickness’, known today as Human African trypanosomiasis (HAT) (1). But in the latter half of the 20th Century there was a marked resurgence, and although cases are now falling once again, an estimated 70 million people are still thought to be at risk (2).
Knowing exactly how many people have the disease, or are at risk of contracting it, is difficult, as cases tend to be concentrated in areas with little or no access to health services. But researchers from the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations and Edinburgh University, have been working to map the levels of HAT risk in affected populations in sub-Saharan Africa. Their study, published in October 2012, provides both a striking visual representation of the reach of HAT and a mine of information for those working to eliminate the disease. Read more…
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February 2013 public engagement events
February is a month of cold, windy weather and waiting for spring to arrive. We’ve put together a summary of the Trust’s public engagement events this month to bring some excitement to the year’s shortest month.
When the weather is miserable, leaving the house is best avoided. Luckily, we’ve got the perfect excuse for an evening on the sofa. “How to build a bionic man” will be shown on Channel 4 on February 7 at 9pm as a special broadcast. The programme explores extraordinary advances in the understanding of the human body, showing how we can now construct new body parts, to save and improve lives. In the show, artificial body parts will be linked to create a humanoid made from equipment usually used to replace or replicate real biological functions. The challenge brings together research scientists, clinicians, engineers and materials experts, using funding from the Wellcome Trust, to create a unique “body” and provoke debates about cutting edge medicine. The Bionic Body is on display in the Science Museum’s Who am I gallery now. Read more…
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An illustration of the changes in articular cartilage that occur in osteoarthritis. Credit: Medical Art Service, Munich, Wellcome Images.
The tiny area of uncertainty that is inevitably left by circumstantial evidence – however compelling – poses a dilemma for scientists, as well as juries. At Guy’s Hospital in London, Dr Eileen Gentleman believes the gap between what has been proven as certain and what has to be inferred from contextual clues has been hampering progress in the field of tissue engineering.
For the past 15 years, researchers have been growing bone and cartilage in the laboratory. Biological texts show that these lab-grown tissues have the appearance, texture, and protein and mineral components of bone and cartilage. But once they are tested in an animal, these tissues simply don’t behave quite like the natural tissues they are supposed to replicate.
“When I got into this field, I saw paper after paper in which people described putting cells in a material like a polymer, creating a tissue that resembles cartilage, and testing it in an animal,” says Dr Gentleman. “The results are OK, but they’ve never been good enough to take forward to clinical trials with people.”
She believes the missing part of the equation is an engineering perspective. “Joints are remarkable feats of engineering, but efforts to grow them in the lab have focused mostly on their biology.” Read more…
Bridging the gap at a stroke
A tale of two halves
“The patient is a 62-year-old professor of anatomy who was suddenly taken ill during a lecture-trip abroad.”
‘The patient’ is also the author in this rather wonderful paper by Professor Alf Brodal, published in the journal Brain 40 years ago. It is called ‘Self-observations and neuro-anatomical considerations after a stroke’.
“The present illness started suddenly when the patient woke up and turned in his bed on the morning of April 12, 1972. In the course of a few minutes an initial heavy, but uncharacteristic, dizziness was followed by dysarthria, double vision and a marked paresis of the left arm and leg. There was no loss of consciousness, no headache or vomiting and no stiffness of the neck. In the very beginning there were paræsthesiæ of the left side of the head, especially the scalp.”
Brodal’s first-hand account was cited in a more recent contribution to the scientific literature from a group of researchers including Janet Eyre, some of whose work we featured in our Focus on stroke series last year. In ‘The myth of the ‘unaffected’ side after unilateral stroke: Is reorganisation of the non-infarcted corticospinal system to re-establish balance the price for recovery?’, Eyre and her co-authors are particularly interested in Brodal’s description of the effect of the stroke on his handwriting.
The right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa. Brodal’s stroke occurred in the right side of his brain so, being right-handed, he hadn’t expected his writing to be affected: “[I]t came as a surprise to the patient that there were clear-cut changes in his handwriting after the stroke…. Read more…
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World Cancer Day: Stories from the day hospice
Illustration by Marianne Dear
Today is World Cancer Day. This year’s campaign is about dispelling myths around cancer. Chrissie Giles, who ran a creative writing group in a hospice over the summer of 2012, reflects on her attempts to understand more about living with a terminal illness.
There are four myths in the sights of World Cancer Day this year. Namely: cancer is just a health issue; cancer is a disease of the wealthy, elderly and developed countries; cancer is a death sentence; and cancer is my fate.
Last summer I undertook a project in a hospice. I don’t think I’d ever been in a hospice until the bright morning I walked through the swishing automatic doors of Princess Alice Hospice, Esher. In my first few conversations there I learnt something of fundamental importance about the hospice movement: hospices are not just places where people go to die. Read more…
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Wellcome Film of the Month: Spot the midwife
The topic of childbirth appears in a large number of the films and videos in the Moving Image & Sound collection of the Wellcome Library (a list below). Although many of the titles show in some detail the process of giving birth, hardly any of these films were destined to be screened to mothers-to-be prior to the 1970s. They were almost exclusively made to show to the medical profession – whether trainee doctors, nurses, midwives or anaesthetists. There are many films that promote the medicalisation of childbirth due to any number of potential complications and the traditional midwife seems to melt away into the background, becoming practically invisible.
Currently airing in the UK on Sunday evenings is the popular BBC TV Series, Call the Midwife, based on the books written by Jennifer Worth. Critical reviews are mixed in terms of its “soft focus”, the nostalgic treatment of the 1950s, and the “schmaltzy” story lines (see Serena Davies’s review in the Telegraph). These comments are despite the depiction of the grittier aspects of living in East London and the series has proved hugely popular with audiences. In Episode 1, set in 1958, there were a number of storylines (wife battering, prostitution on a ship) as well as a story about the use of nitrous oxide (commonly known as laughing gas) for the relief of pain in childbirth. Nitrous oxide alone and in combination with other gases had been used in anaesthesia for some time in surgery and there are several films in our collection that detail this (see The Technique of Anaesthesia series from 1944). The problem with gas used either singly or in combination is that the levels of anaesthesia and analgesia have to be carefully calibrated as overdosing can depress respiration, cause anoxia, heart failure and even death. This meant that the task of administering these agents had to be performed by a specialist. Read more…
Opinion: Measure for measuring’s sake?
Can we assess the impact of research by simply counting outputs? We must avoid the temptation to reduce impact to things we can measure, says Liz Allen.
Learning about what works and what doesn’t is an important part of being a science funder. Take the Wellcome Trust, for example: we have multiple grant types spread over many different funding schemes and need to make sure our money is well spent. Evaluating what we fund helps us to learn about successes and failures and to identify the impacts of our funded research.
Progress reporting while a grant is underway is a core component of the evaluation process. Funders are increasingly taking this reporting to online platforms, which come with the ability to easily quantify outputs, compare funded work and identify trends.
As useful as these systems are, they come with an inherent danger: oversimplifying research impact and simply reducing it to things we can count. Read more…
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NTDs: The London Declaration, one year on
This time last year, a group of politicians, charities and pharmaceutical companies came to London to sign a pledge. They committed to either bring under control or eliminate ten diseases by 2020; ten diseases that currently cause enormous suffering and hardship across the developing world. The diseases in question are among the collection of infections gathered under the umbrella term of ‘neglected tropical diseases’ (NTDs), so it would seem imperative not to neglect the progress that has been made in tackling them in the past 12 months.
The group of organisations that came together last January, and the World Health Organization (WHO), whose roadmap of disease elimination targets they are committed to achieving, have each reported on their progress this month. Uniting to combat NTDs celebrate the provision of 1.12 billion treatments from the pharmaceutical industry to countries with endemic NTDs in 2012 – they report that every request for drugs needed to conduct mass drug administration programmes was met. This included 29 new countries receiving drugs free of charge to treat soil-transmitted helminth infections, raising the number of treatments from 46 million in 2011 to 238 million in 2012 (an increase of over 400 per cent).
It seems pretty clear that the supply of drugs will not be the rate-determining step when it comes to tackling those NTDs for which we have treatments. But at the same time that the supply of free or very low cost treatments enables mass drug administration programmes to expand, they must also be continually assessed with respect to the effect they are having on the ground. In her foreword to the WHO report, Margaret Chan, director-general of the WHO, says: “As more programmes approach their milestones and targets, new tools and protocols are needed to assess the intensity of transmission, support decision-making about when mass drug administration can be stopped, and then to verify interruption of transmission.”
Of course, what ultimately matters is how much closer we are to controlling the transmission of NTDs. Good news from the first year after the London Declaration is that Oman has become the first country to go from endemic trachoma to elimination. Hopefully more countries will follow and we will reach the WHO target of global elimination of trachoma by 2020.
Read more…
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Beyond the asylum: Looking back on mental health
Professor Barbara Taylor – a historian at Queen Mary, University of London – is best known for her work on the history of feminism. But in writing a new book to be published next year, she has been looking back on her time as an inpatient at Friern Hospital, then one of the largest mental health institutions in Europe, and the demise of mental asylums in Britain.
“I’d been holding myself together with sticking plasters, but then it all fell apart and by 1985 I was in really serious trouble.”
It’s hard to believe the person being described from nearly 30 years ago is the same Barbara Taylor, historian, author and professor being interviewed about her upcoming book. She seems happy and settled in her new role at Queen Mary, University of London, even if she hasn’t managed to unpack most of her boxes.
However, at the beginning of the 1980s, Taylor had a serious emotional breakdown and began a daily course of psychoanalysis soon after. She left her job, and her life quickly became centred on her psychological distress and the problems associated with it. “I got into a lot of trouble with booze and with the kind of psychotropics that in those days people got on repeat prescriptions,” she says.
In 1988 her life took a further turn for the worse when she lost her home and was admitted to one of the largest mental health hospitals in Europe: Friern Hospital. Friern began as the mental asylum Colney Hatch in 1851, and when Barbara moved in, it was still a grand Victorian building. Its main corridor was a third of a mile long, with gothic staircases leading to wards that housed scores of inpatients.
Ward 16 became Taylor’s home. The paint was peeling away from the walls and the ancient radiators rattled through the night. There was a day room, with a television high up on the wall “so nobody smashed it”, and a communal kitchen and dining room. Ward 16 was an acute admissions ward, which housed everyone from those with anorexia nervosa or alcohol addictions to those with severe psychosis. Taylor says, “You had every variety [of people] so it made for a very interesting, lively place to live, and sometimes very frightening.
“There was a fire set by a young woman in the middle of the night once, so we were all huddled off our ward [into a different ward]. And there we all were, ward 16, the ward 16 team. It’s very interesting that we had this odd sense of group solidarity.”
Taylor had three admissions to Friern, totalling some eight months. “This is what my life is going to look like,” she remembers thinking. “I was becoming what was called a revolving door mental patient.” During this time she continued with her psychoanalysis. After her last admission to Friern in 1989, she attended psychiatric day centres until her final discharge from the mental health system in early 1992. She carried on with psychoanalysis until 2003. Friern was neither the beginning nor the end of her mental health treatment. Read more…
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Postdoc Plan B – The elephant in the lab
Kathryn Lougheed on the difficult career choices facing postdoctoral scientists.
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and not necessarily those of the Wellcome Trust.
October was a milestone for me; a milestone that, in the darkest moments of failed experiments and contaminated cultures, feels as if it will be metaphorically tied around my scientific career and pushed off a bridge. This is because October marked the ten-year anniversary of starting my PhD and, simultaneously, the point at which scientific funders deem me too experienced to apply for a junior fellowship.
I’ve been a postdoc for six years and have known for some time now that, as much I love the freedom to focus on research without the pressure of writing grant applications or teaching undergraduates, this isn’t a permanent career option. A postdoc is meant to be a stepping stone on to bigger and better things – a fellowship, a lectureship, a lab of your own. But with less than 10 per cent of postdocs reaching this next stage, what happens to everyone else for whom the stepping stones run out? Read more…
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The Livingstone Legacy
David Livingstone and his followers on a boat, attacked by a hippopotamus.
From abolishing slavery in Africa to changing the face of tropical medicine, David Livingstone was an extraordinary man. Mike Barrett writes of his life and legacy.
A month today, the Wellcome Trust Centre for Molecular Parasitology at the University of Glasgow are hosting a symposium about David Livingstone and his legacy in tropical disease. February 25 marks the day in 1858 when Livingstone addressed the students at the University of Glasgow and 2013 is the bicentenary of his birth.
Livingstone was born at a millworks in Blantyre, 13 miles south of Glasgow on the banks of the river Clyde. His story became the epitome of the Victorian ideal. A boy born into poverty, through hard work and determination gained sufficient education to enter medical school and from there, through more selfless hard work and self-sacrifice, ended the slave trade in Africa. Read more…
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False coloured light micrograph of MRSA colonies. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a bacterium which is difficult to treat due to its resistance to common forms of antibiotics.
The latest WHO Global Health Histories seminar tackled the difficult subject of antimicrobial resistance. And the actions we take today can benefit from an appreciation of those in history, writes Alexander Medcalf.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has identified antimicrobial resistance as a major global problem. Organisms that are able to adapt to resist attack by antibiotics, antivirals, and antimalarials mean that standard treatments are becoming ineffective. For some, the pressing concern is that without urgent efforts, large parts of the world will be plunged into a ‘pre-antibiotic’ era. World Health Day 2011 underlined this hard reality of antimicrobial resistance; “no action today, no cure tomorrow.”
Since their discovery over seventy years ago, antibiotics have helped to revolutionise healthcare. But several factors now drive resistance, including the use of poor quality antimicrobials or when patients do not complete a full course of antibiotics as prescribed. The results are alarming. The WHO has reported that every year close to 440 000 new cases of drug-resistant tuberculosis emerge, resulting in approximately 150 000 deaths. In other instances the malaria parasite is developing resistance, and resistant strains causing gonorrhoea are restricting treatment choices. The WHO Director-General has warned that the world is on the brink of losing its miracle cures.
It was therefore fitting that on 11 January 2013 the first Global Health Histories seminar to be hosted outside of the WHO’s Geneva headquarters should deal with this significant and urgent subject. Held at the WHO Regional Office for Europe in Copenhagen, the speakers were both high-profile experts in their field – Professor Christoph Gradmann of the University of Oslo and Dr Danilo Lo Fo Wong, Senior Adviser on Antimicrobial Resistance at the WHO Regional Office for Europe. Read more…
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A distorted reflection of an eye
Since the ugly duckling first peered into the pond, we have always been fascinated by reflections. Now scientists researching how the brain processes visual information have used ‘specular’ (reflective) objects to gain an insight into 3D vision. The new research (1) by a team from Birmingham, Cambridge and Giessen, which was published online this week in PNAS, reveals how the brain checks the ‘usefulness’ of the signals it receives from the senses, and explains why we sometimes misperceive shapes and distances.
The ability of mirrored objects to trick and tease our perception is both intriguing and uncanny. And no wonder – although we may think that seeing is believing, research has shown that, when looking at a mirrored surface, a shiny doorknob for instance or a chrome bumper, we may misjudge the shape of the object.
When we look at an object we perceive a single image, but our eyes see the object from two different perspectives thanks to their differing horizontal positions on the head (close one eye, then the other, and you’ll see what I mean). Although we are not usually aware of it, having two viewpoints on the world is very useful – it gives us the ability to perceive depth. The brain receives two images of an object which place it in two slightly different locations and it uses this disparity between the two eyes’ views (termed the binocular disparity) to calculate depth – allowing us to accurately judge the position and shape of an object.
Unfortunately, specular surfaces throw a shiny spanner in the works. Ordinarily, although it may appear to shift, the location of an object does not actually move when you look at it through your left eye or your right. Reflections on the other hand, do. The location of a reflection on a curved glossy surface changes according to the observer’s viewpoint, so when the surface is viewed binocularly (with two eyes) each eye sees the reflection in a different location on the surface of the object. In such cases, the binocular disparity is abnormal and no longer an accurate indicator of depth, so we are liable to misjudge the shape of the object and the distance to its surface. Read more…
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Wellcome Image of the Month: Busting Bugs
The 31st of January is the first of three National Bug Busting Days this year, followed by 15 June and 31 October. Bug Busting days aim to increase awareness, detection and treatment of head lice and nits to reduce their spread in the community.
This scanning electron micrograph was created by Garry Hunter with David Randall at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Sussex, and forms part of his Small World series of work. It shows a head louse (coloured yellow) clinging onto three strands of human hair (coloured red). Adult head lice can be up to 4 mm in length which is roughly equivalent to the size of a sesame seed. To prepare the sample for imaging, the head louse was first pickled in various strengths of alcohol solution to prevent the exoskeleton from collapsing. It was then dried, sprayed with a fine gold dust, and imaged under vacuum by firing electrons through the sample at the required depth. This image received a 2005 Wellcome Image Award of Excellence.
Head lice or Pediculus humanus capitis are insects which live in close proximity to the human scalp and feed on human blood. They lay eggs (nits) which are white or yellow in colour and firmly attach to the hair shaft near the scalp. They do not have wings nor can they jump. Instead they are most commonly spread by close head to head contact. They are not known to spread disease. Head lice bites and secretions on the scalp can cause itchiness, and treatment is either with chemicals (to kill the lice) or using physical methods (to remove the lice) such as repeated combing with a fine-toothed comb.
Founded in 1988, Community Hygiene Concern is a not-for-profit charity that raises awareness of common parasites found in the UK.
Garry Hunter is now Director of Programming for First Weekends at Trinity Buoy Wharf in East London, where he commissions works that look at the links between art and science.
References and Further Information
Image credit: Garry Hunter, Wellcome Images
Wellcome Images is one of the world’s richest and most unusual collections, with themes ranging from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science. All our images are available in digital form so please click the link above if you would like to use the picture that features in this post, or to quickly find related ones. Many are free to use non-commercially under the terms of a Creative Commons licence and full details of the specific licence for each image are provided.
Above: Professor Roger Kneebone
You may find a surgeon in the theatre, but you do not usually expect to see one on the stage. Professor Roger Kneebone, however, seems equally at home with both. Professor Kneebone, a Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellow, brings surgery into the public domain, creating unique events that champion open communication between medicine, science and the public. Holly Story went to the Cheltenham Literature Festival to find out more.
From my place in the theatre audience I see the whole episode, from beginning to end.
In a busy auditorium, a woman collapses, clutching her chest. As she struggles to breathe, she manages to reach a phone and dials for an ambulance. I watch nervously as two paramedics arrive on the scene, giving her oxygen and taking her by ambulance to the emergency unit at the local hospital. There, she is whisked into surgery and a skilled surgeon performs a coronary angioplasty to remove a blockage in her artery and insert a stent, alleviating her pain and preventing cardiac arrest.
It is uncomfortable to watch, but the woman is not in any danger. This is the opening of Professor Roger Kneebone’s sell-out live performance at the 2012 Cheltenham Literature Festival. Read more…
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See the Big Picture at the Association for Science Education Annual Conference, 2013
This January, the Association for Science Education held its annual conference for teachers, technicians and educationalists. I was there to take in the sights, sounds and snakes.
It’s a conference, but there can’t be many others like it. There’s a snake in a crate, a spaghetti-tower building challenge, and the chance to win a prize for speed pipetting.
A quick walk around the exhibition marquee reveals that The Association for Science Education (ASE) Annual Conference draws together individuals and organisations with many and varied interests in education. Companies showcase everything from magnetic stirrers to software for marking exam questions. Science centres, learned societies and other charitable organizations enthusiastically promote new educational resources.
Staff at the Wellcome Trust stand are handing out educational resources and talking about our work. The latest issue of the Trust’s free educational magazine, Big Picture: Inside the Brain, is flying off the rack, no doubt helped by its arresting cover image of a live brain. Wellcome Image post cards are proving popular and teachers seem pleased to hear about our digital image library, which contains over 200 000 images that are free for educational use. There’s been a steady stream of sign-ups for our new Education and Learning email newsletter and the conference is causing quite a stir on Twitter.
Conversations are as varied as the visitors themselves. One minute we’re demonstrating the new Big Picture app that explores social and ethical questions about the human brain, the next minute we’re talking about our new code of governance for helping school governing bodies to hold senior school leaders to account.
There’s also a huge range of conference events, from scientists talking about their research to seminars on the latest ideas in education research and policy. Read more…
Hacking biomedical science in 30 hours
A volunteer tries Hackbox
On Sunday 10 December 2012 I had my first hackathon experience. A hackathon is essentially a computing marathon, in this case about 30 hours long, fuelled by pizza, sugar and caffeinated drinks with minimal time for sleep.
This first Wellcome Trust hackathon was a themed weekend around ‘open data’, exploring the vast array of biomedical data that is being collected about us all the time – in hospitals by clinicians but also by ourselves, online and through apps on our phones. These large datasets are potential goldmines of information for researchers and clinicians on everything from sleep patterns to exercise routines. Working with Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Fellow Kevin Fong and Rewired State, developers and designers were invited to develop web and mobile applications that would help make the scientific data interesting and understandable by the general public.
Some people worked alone, others formed teams – many formed ad hoc on the day. Some even did both! Similarly with project ideas, some came with an idea of what they want to work with, while others waited to see what emerged on the first day, piggybacking and collaborating on the fruits of the groups’ labour. Read more…
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Professor Ray Dolan
Congratulations to Professor Ray Dolan, Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL, who has been awarded the Klaus Joachim Zülch Prize for outstanding achievements in basic neurological research. He shares the award with Professor Wolfram Schultz of the University of Cambridge.
The prize is awarded by the Gertrud Reemtsma Foundation, which was established in 1989 by Gertrud Reemtsma in memory of her deceased brother, the neurologist Professor Dr Klaus Joachim Zülch. The prize is endowed with 50,000 Euro and has, since its launch in 1990, always been shared by two scientists. It will be formally awarded at a ceremony in Cologne in September 2013. Previous winners include Fred Gage, Karl Diesseroth, Robert Nussbaum, Charles Weissmann and Stanley Prusiner.
Professor Ray Dolan has been a researcher at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging since its foundation in 1994 and was appointed Director in 2006. He has published over 400 papers and is consistently ranked among the top 5 most cited neuroscientists in the world in the field of neuroscience and behaviour. His research group uses classical behavioural tools alongside neuroimaging methodologies, including fMRI and MEG, to study the influence of emotion on cognition, with a particular focus on human decision making.
Researchers from Professor Dolan’s Cognition, Emotion & Psychiatric Disorders Research Group are currently blogging about their work for ThInk, a new Wellcome Trust blog about the brain. You can read their posts at: http://thinkneuroscience.wordpress.com
