Wednesday, February 19, 2014

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...

Sunday, February 16, 2014

"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