I WANT TO TOLERIZE ALL NIGHT (AND LIGATE EVERY DAY)

In preparation for the start of my MPH program (specialty: infectious disease), I've been brushing up on various subjects for which I lack formal academic training, in particular parasitology, virology, and immunology. The latter is probably my weakest subject, and so I'm studying intensely to make up for lost time. I'm quickly finding that immunology is incredibly fascinating, and had I known the subject possessed so much intrigue, I might have pursued it as an undergraduate. I'm astounded by the complexity with which our immune systems function, and the armchair military historian in me is impressed by the multiform stratagems our bodies have evolved to battle invaders.

To achieve a firm grasp on the fundamentals of immunology, I'm drawing from two textbooks:

- The University of South Carolina School of Medicine's online Microbiology and Immunology

(a thorough, excellent resource available at http://pathmicro.med.sc.edu/ghaffar/innate.htm)     

and

- How the Immune System Works (3rd Ed., Lauren Sompayrac). This slim text is brilliant. It reads like a collection of lectures, meant to be completed in the course of a few days. The author breaks the material down into easily-digestible chunks, replete with helpful illustrations, and yet still imparts enough solid information to build a sound foundational knowledge of immunology.

In addition to textual sources, I'm utilizing a wide array of freely-available animated content.
McGraw-Hill's online components for its Human Anatomy textbook include many useful explanatory animations, like this one on phagocytosis.   

YouTube also has an abundance of material, like this video detailing respiratory burst:

Animation is a wonderful tool for the immunology student, as it so easily and clearly conveys what are otherwise complex and recondite processes. It is simple to understand how C3b or IgG works when you see it modeled in action, when on paper the fundament can be lost in a sea of associations and interactions with endless other acronyms. 

POX

I'm through about 25% of Deborah Hayden's book, POX: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis. Thus far, the work is riveting. Competing theories on the biological evolution and epidemiology of syphilis are weaved throughout a cogent narrative, flavored with notable excerpts from historical records. Apart from the Great Mortality, I can't think of another disease which was so widely personified by poetic mythos and dark imagination as was syphilis. Consider this lurid description by 19th Century French poet Théophile Gautier:

"There is a splendid American pox here, as pure as at the time of Francis I. The entire French army has been laid up with it; boils are exploding in groins like shells, and purulent jets of clap vie with the fountains in the Piazza Navona . . . tibias are exfoliating in extoses like ancient columns of greenery in a Roman ruin . . . lieutenants walking in the streets look like leopards, they are so dotted and speckled with roseola, freckles, coffee-colored marks, warty excrescences, horny and cryptogamic verruccae and other secondary and tertiary manifestations which appear here after a fortnight." [1]

1. Hayden, Deborah. Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis. Basic Books, New York: 2003. Quoting Claude Quétel: History of Syphilis (1990).

SMALLPOX IS SUCH A BORING BREAKFAST...

Who hasn't wondered what it would be like to work as a plague doctor -- that secretive scientist who tampers with the biological dark arts, manipulating viral agents to discover new ways of improving delivery, rendering a strain impervious to traditional responses, or selectively tweaking a bug's lethality? It wouldn't be a job for the faint of heart, and I can imagine the paranoia and guilt which accompanied nuclear scientists in the Forties and Fifties might pale in comparison. 

I'm not sure if there will ever be a point where human curiosity is trumped by legitimate danger--a threshold that, being too dangerous to cross, incurs a general consensus response of "screw that!" If such an occassion ever does arise, I suspect it will be rooted in the microscopic. The most dangerous things are invariably very small: a split atom, a bundle of seven structural proteins, a stubbornly self-replicating nanobot with a penchant for ecophagy.     

Certainly, the plague doctors toe this precipice daily, and for them it's business as usual. I'm not sure I'd have the balls to engage in such work, even if I were to pretend I possessed any inclination for it.

"One scientist from Sandakchiev's Vector Laboratories, Deputy Director Sergei Netesov, appeared one day in 1987 at Obolensk with a new idea for plague: he proposed taking the entire viral genome of Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis (VEE), perforating the plague cell membrane, and planting the virus inside plague cells like another plasmid. At Vector, Netesov had made a career of proposing such devices. Popov, quoting Alibek, identifies Netesov as the originator of the whole concept of chimeras: genetically engineered viruses made of two component parts---smallpox and VEE, smallpox and ebola. Apparently on the strength of these novelties, Netesov had been promoted to deputy director of Vector at Novosibirsk. The name of the program he directed was Okhotnik---Hunter. His proposed plague-VEE chimera, fiendishly simple in design, but ferocious in concept, is probably the first time anyone had proposed putting together a bacterium and a virus. A victim of this chimera would be treated for plague with the appropriate antibiotics, which would kill the plague bacteria. But shattering the bacterial cell walls would release VEE into the lymph or the bloodstream; the invading virus would have already bypassed much of the immune system, and it would make straight for the brain. Within a week or ten days, the victim would be dead of encephalitis." [1]

 1. Orent, Wendy. Plague: the Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease. Free Press, New York: 2004.

MY FRIEND DAHMER

Cleveland's own Derf Backderf has penned a new graphic novel which is certain to draw the interest of those fascinated by psychology and serial killers alike. My Friend Dahmer reflects upon Derf's own interactions with an adolescent Jeffrey Dahmer, the latter's growing pains, and the horrific consequences of human frailty. 

"MY FRIEND DAHMER is the haunting, new graphic novel by Derf Backderf, an award-winning cartoonist and comix creator. In these pages, Backderf tries to make sense of the iconic monster who he shared the same school hallways, cafeterias, libraries, and compulsive car rides. What emerges is a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a disturbed young man struggling helplessly against the ghastly urges bubbling up from the deep recesses of his psyche. The Dahmer recounted here, universally regarded as an inhuman monster by the rest of the world, is a lonely oddball who, in reality, is all too human. A shy kid who is sucked inexorably into madness while the adults in his life fail to notice. 

 We all know what Dahmer did, but in MY FRIEND DAHMER, Backderf provides, from his unique vantage point, profound (and at times, even strangely comic) insight into how, and more importantly, why Jeffrey Dahmer transformed from a high school nerd into a depraved fiend as notorious as Jack the Ripper. 

In MY FRIEND DAHMER, Derf comes as close as anyone yet has to explaining the seemingly unexplainable phenomenon of one Jeffrey Dahmer, Revere High School, Class of 1978."

You can pre-order a copy HERE.

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