And the award goes to...

As a scientist, you are expected, to work long hours, in a quite uninspiring environment, usually on your own and with not much interaction with your colleagues or the outside world. Usually, very few people understand what are you doing and your family and friends remain pretty uninterested in your work struggles. So, receiving a lucrative prize from Benedict's Cumberbatch hands can only be a part of your daydreaming between lengthy experiments..or maybe not?

The Breakthrough Prizes is a relatively new constitution, with only two years of life, that have as a goal to celebrate scientific achievements and create excitement about science, focusing on the fields of life sciences, physics and mathematics. Founded by technology and Internet entrepreneurs Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Jack Ma and Cathy Zhang, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, the prizes are funded by grants from the Brin Wojcicki Foundation; Mark Zuckerberg's fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation; the Jack Ma Foundation; and the Milner Foundation. What I think is really interesting is that the committee that selects the winners is comprised by prior recipients of the prizes.

The 2nd Awards ceremony was equivalent of the Oscars (almost); produced and directed by Emmy Award-winning Don Mischer with several first-class actors presenting the awards and Christina Aguilera performing  "Beautiful"(!) .

This whole endeavour contradicts, of course, the away-of-the-spotlight attitude that the majority of the scientists traditionally have but I think any attempt to make the public aware of important scientific accomplishments should be mentioned in this blog.

Alim Louis Benabid, Joseph Fourier University, for the discovery and pioneering work on the development of high-frequency deep brain stimulation (DBS), which has revolutionized the treatment of Parkinson’s disease.

C David Allis, The Rockefeller University, for the discovery of covalent modifications of histone proteins and their critical roles in the regulation of gene expression and chromatin organization, advancing the understanding of diseases ranging from birth defects to cancer.

Victor Ambros, University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Gary Ruvkun, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, for the discovery of a new world of genetic regulation by microRNAs, a class of tiny RNA molecules that inhibit translation or destabilize complementary mRNA targets.

Jennifer Doudna, University of California, Berkeley, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, Helmholtz Center for Infection Research and Umeå University, for harnessing an ancient mechanism of bacterial immunity into a powerful and general technology for editing genomes, with wide-ranging implications across biology and medicine.

Simon Donaldson, Stony Brook University and Imperial College London, for the new revolutionary invariants of 4-dimensional manifolds.

Maxim Kontsevich, Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, for work making a deep impact in a vast variety of mathematical disciplines, including algebraic geometry, deformat.

Jacob Lurie, Harvard University, for his work on the foundations of higher category theory and derived algebraic geometry; for the classification of fully extended topological quantum field theories; and for providing a moduli-theoretic interpretation of elliptic cohomology.

Terence Tao, University of California, Los Angeles, for numerous breakthrough contributions to harmonic analysis, combinatorics, partial differential equations and analytic number theory.

Richard Taylor, Institute for Advanced Study, for numerous breakthrough results in the theory of automorphic forms, including the Taniyama-Weil conjecture, the local Langlands conjecture for general linear groups, and the Sato-Tate conjecture.

On cartography

Sometimes I learn about something that shakes my view of the world. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense and I feel a bit idiotic that I didn't think of that before but at that particular moment I get all flabbergasted. Last time I had such a moment was when I heard that there are a lot of areas of the world that remain unmapped. And I don't talk about the sub-lakes of Antartica or the Mount Mabu in Mozambique. I am talking about slums and rural areas where people live in.

Tomorrow a project called missing maps is being launched. It is a collaboration of  the Red Cross and Medecins sans Frontiers with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and it's vision is "to put the world's vulnerable people on the map". Data will be collected by volunteers, local and remote, and all maps will be open and free to all, and most importantly open sourced.

Project #699, mapping Ebola Treatment Centers by the Humanitarian OSM team.

It is a simple and ingenious idea and was created by the need of these humanitarian groups to be able to reach the areas where they are needed. Having detailed maps of an area will help with defining the epidemiological characteristics of a disease (like Ebola outbreak in West Africa the last few months or cholera outbreak in Haiti after the devastating earthquake in 2010) but they are expected to find more applications such as transit planning, waste removal or housing strategy. And they will definitely help the humanitarian help to reach faster the people in need.

The Open Street Map platform has been running since 2004 and thanks to the edits from volunteers a lot of communities acquired detailed maps such as Gueckedou, a town in southern Guinea with an estimated population of 221,715, which initially had 9 roads outlined on a map. Now a much more detailed map with hundreds of roads, buildings and streams is available to all.

A free digital map of  Liberia , thanks to the Humanitarian OSM Team

This map could then be used by different organizations like the global Red Cross network and MSF to create maps specific to their specialty in the treatment of Ebola. For example, the Red Cross volunteers use such maps to find communities where they are providing education on prevention, while MSF uses the maps to create data visualization of the spread of the disease and coordinate field teams.

This is a collective effort to put everyone on the map and, most importantly, with the maps remaining accessible to all!

Breaking fund

In November 2012, Ethan Perlstein secured about $25.000 funding via Crowdsourcing for a basic pharmacology project about the cellular distribution of amphetamines (yeah infamous methamphetamine or crystal meth is one of those) along with his collaborators Prof David Sulzer and Daniel Korostyshevsky. To entice more contributors, he promised rewards such as 3D-printed plastic models of a methamphetamine molecules for $25 donations. Daniel Korostyshevsky was the responsible of the amphetamines distribution project in the Sulzer lab.

I made a note of his name and went on to follow the progress of his project. One very good thing about the project was the open access to the data  via figshare (http://figshare.com/articles/search?q=perlstein&quick=1&x=0&y=0); although I haven't been able to find a report with the final findings- something like a paper. There were also frequent updates and open protocols. Since then Ethan Perlstein exited academia to become an "indie scientist and biotech entrepreneur" focused on orphan disease drug discovery.

This was the first time I came across this idea in science, which in my eyes didn't look all that bad. However, I found out very soon that Perlstein's initiative was not the only one of this kind. There are a lot of platforms where scientists can "advertise" research projects and ask for everyone's support.

Experiment is one of them that hosts willing-to-fund projects from several scientific fields such as biology, physics, paleontology, ecology but also economics, psycology or education. Usually, these projects demand small amounds and would be short-term projects that wouldn't find funding through the common routes such as funding bodies or governmental grants. For example, a very popular project that managed to concentrate 455% of its inital goal is a study of the optimal form of excersize based on our genetic material. The study undertaken by Linda Pescatello and her group in the university of Connecticut will use deep gene sequencing to a group of volunteer and they hope in the long run to manage to create personalized exercise prescriptions.

Another crowdfunding platform is Petridish. Their projects are more enviromental biology-orientated, I'd say, and range from saving fossil whales in Virginia's Carmel Church Quarry to using Kepler telescope data to search for the existence of exomoons. Apart from seeing a scientist project getting realised, the supporters can choose from a big array of rewards, such as field experiences, naming rights or personal talks.

And there are many more; more general Rockethub, healthcare-related MedStartr, sciflies.org and energy innovation focused eurekafund are all matchmaking needy scientists with willing donors.

A common characteristic of all the scientific crowdfunding projects is that they pledge open access for all to their data; something that goes completely against to how research has been contacted so far, behind closed doors and with absolute secrecy.

With crowdsourcing funding of science gaining a bigger and bigger momentum we've just to wait and see if it will help science to move forward, will provide some stress-relief to scientists struggling for funding and will make us get more and more involved with science since we are the ones now that are giving money to the projects that are of our interest.

BIO-scars

The 86th Academy Awards are creeping up on us but they are going to be boring for one more time as they have left out the most important category again; the most interesting science-related video!!!

Luckily, there is always the not_one_more_biostory team to fill in such gaps.


Here are five very cool videos of 2013.

Which is going to be the winner?!? Oh, what a nail-bitter!!!

Title: StemCellShorts
Writers: Ben Paylor, a PhD candidate in Experimental Medicine at the University of British Columbia
             Mike Long, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto
Animation: David Murawsky
Music: James Wallace
Playing (voices):
Dr. Jim Till, who, along with Dr. Ernest McCulloch, first identified stem cells from bone marrow in 1961.
Dr. Janet Rossant, Chief of Research at SickKids Hospital, Ontario, Canada
Dr. Mick Bhatia, Director of the McMaster Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institut, Ontario, Canada

Storyline: A series of short animation films giving answers to questions regarding stem cells.

Title: Celebrating Crystallography: An animated Adventure
Writers: Royal Institution
Animation:company 12foot6
Playing (narration):
Prof Stephen Curry, Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College Londo, UK

Storyline: The film explores the history of crystallography, a technique used to elucidate the three-dimensional structure of molecules.

Title: Chromosome and Kinetochore
Writers: Narrative of the textbook "E.O. Wilson's Life on Earth"
Animation: WEHI.TV/ Drew Berry

Storyline: The film depicts a reconstruction of the organisation and structural features of DNA inside a chromosome of a living cell

Title: Made Simple...Stephen Hawking's Big Idea
Writers: Alok Jha, Matt Hill, Paul Boyd/ The Guardian
Animation: Scriberia

Storyline: A film about black holes and their fate to shrink into nothingness and then explode with the energy of a million nuclear bombs. It rewinds to the big bang and the origin of the universe

Title: How Coffee affects your Brain
Writers (and Illustrated) by Dwayne Godwin and Jorge Cham
Animation: Jorge Cham
Playing (Narration) Meg Rosenburg

Storyline: How much coffee is too much coffee?

And the winner is...

"There are poisons that blind you, and poisons that open your eyes" *

From St James Chronicle newspaper

It is quite rare for an obituary to be written for an animal but this donkey has left a small footprint in human history-even if it was unintentionally. Wouralia was part of an experiment that helped us to understand how the Wourali poison, or more commonly known as curare, works and to open new horizons in medicine.

Curare had been used for centuries from the indigenous people of South America, such as the Macusi Indians, at hunting. They would coat their arrows with a mixture where curare was the main ingredient. The poison would paralyse the animals by not letting them breathe. However, it is not poisonous if indigested; so the indians could eat the meat without any negative effects on them. The properties of curare were so valuable that its recipe was held as a sacred possession.

Charles Waterton, an English naturalist and explorer, spent nearly 20 years in South America exploring the Amazonian rainforest. In 1813, he achieved to bring to Europe an amount of the poison big enough to perform several experiments. 

One experiment that helped to redefine the history of 20th century medicine is the one with Wouralia. Together with Professor William Sewell, the director of the Royal Veterinary College at that time, Waterton tested the effects of the poison to three donkeys. They injected the first one in the shoulder, which then died in twelve minutes. The second donkey had a tourniquet placed around the upper part of one leg and the curare was injected under it. The animal walked around normally for longer than an hour without dying. However, when the tourniquet was released the donkey died within 10 minutes. The third animal, Wouralia, was injected with the same dose as the previous two. As Waterton has described in his Essays "Wanderings in South America" in 1825: 

The earliest clinical use of curare in humans was to ameliorate the tortuous muscle spasms of infectious tetanus, in 1858. Treatment of epilepsy, rabies, parkinson-like rigidity was also attempted by using curare.

However, it took about 100 more years for curare to find its real use in medicine. In 1912, Arthur Lawen used curare in surgery as an anasthetic but his work was ignored for decades partly because the published report was written in German. In 1942, Harold Griffith, the then chief anesthesiologist of the Montreal Homeopathic Hospital, performed an appendectomy on a young man anesthetized with curare. Satisfactory abdominal relaxation was achieved and the surgery proceeded without incident. He went on and used curare in several more surgeries all with positive results. After Griffith's report of his work, the use of curare and other synthetic curare-related muscle relaxants became the standard practice for several surgical procedures.

Before 1942, the patients had to inhale large, dangerous amounts of ether or chloroform before they would undergo surgeries that needed muscle relaxation. Curare had a profound effect on the transformation of anasthesia. Sedated and paralyzed patients could now successfully undergo the major physiologic trespasses of several types of surgery. Curare has since been replaced with manufactured muscle relaxants, but it pointed the way to a new era of safety in the field of anesthesia.

A little bit of science: 
The skeletal muscles get stimulated by a chemical named acetylcholine. Acetylcholine molecules get released in junctions between nerves and muscles; curare attaches to this junction blocking the transmission of acetylcholine. Until curare disintegrates, the nerve cannot trigger the muscle to act and the muscle stays paralyzed.

It is needless to say that there were several more scientists that studied the function of curare and helped to shape the science of anesthesia as we know it today that are not mentionned in this post.

*August Strindberg, The Ghost Sonata

Further reading:
1. Waterton and Wouralia, AT Birmingham, Br J Pharmacol, 1999 April; 126(8): 1685-1690
2. Curare and a Canadian connection, Charles Czarnowski, Can Fam Physician, 2007 September; 53(9): 1531-1532
3. Wanderings in South America, the North-West of the United States, and the Antilles, in the years 1812, 1816, 1820 and 1824: with original instructions for the perfect preservation of birds, &c for Cabinets of Natural History, Charles Waterton, 1825, London: J.Mawman