Did not realize that NOVA, the PBS science show, had introduced a new version. It’s called NOVA ScienceNOW, and this first episode I saw was eye-popping.

Did you know that a woman named Bonnie Bassler discovered some years ago that certain bacteria tend to cluster together and then when–and only when–they get enough of each other together, they do something extraordinary. In the case of the bacteria she first studied, they become luminescent–they glow in the dark.

Other scientists poo-poohed her. Oh, well, they said, those aren’t important bacteria. They don’t have anything to do with human disease. Well, she kept on working and experimenting and studying, and eventually she found that indeed, many types of bacteria do this–Bassler calls it quorum sensing–and that this community-bonding is done by direct communication. And that bacteria clearly communicate with each other across species.

The implications are limitless for finding new methods of treating diseases like cancer that have everything to do with cell growth. And this incredible stuff most likely made the news at some point, but I’m grateful that NOVA ScienceNOW brought it round again so I could see it tonight.

The joke goes that one of the headlines in the year 2029 will be “Massive $10-billion study reveals: Diet and exercise the keys to weight loss!”

This study confirms it–Americans’ ongoing struggles with weight aren’t about knowing what to do or who counsels us while we diet. They’re the result of a myriad of other factors, including stress, loneliness, sexual dissatisfaction or deprivation, poor self-esteem, fear of success, boredom, and a hundred other emotional reasons why people overeat.

Add to that the country’s obsession with advertising food and drink on television and elsewhere, the easy availability of millions of food choices in our grocery stores, the comfort and easy access of so many dining-out options, the suburban mindset of “gotta go everywhere in a car,” and fashion’s focus on thin-is-beautiful, we have a perfect recipe for a war on weight.

Let’s face it. As the commercial suggests with the the lady who’s remarking on the “20-pound baked good” provided at the office to celebrate nothing but the beginning of the third quarter–but offers another snack instead–we sabotage ourselves.

The US position on state sovereignty can create messy situations. Recent government administrations have taken oppposite sides of this thorny one (Clinton’s for, Bush’s against)–does federal approval of medical devices shield manufacturers from product liability lawsuits in state courts. So far, according to this AP story, most federal appeals courts have said, yes, indeed, if your FDA-approved device fails during my operation, I can sue you anyway in state court.

Given the maze of legislative entanglements device manufacturers face anyway–federal regs in the US and, heck, there’s even a Journal of Medical Device Regulations–a decisive ruling here will be welcome. It’s always a delicate balance between getting new technology out to the public and making sure safety and effectiveness are kept in balance.

If you’ve got some time to kill, here’s the US government’s stuff on the topic of medical device safety.

Genes aren’t the discrete little self-contained dots of biological information they were thought to be, says a worldwide study of human DNA. Scientists all over the world have for three years been digging deeper into the genome, and BIG stuff is afoot in the bioscience field.

This report in the Washington Post says results of this study label previous conclusions about human genetic material as simplistic. “DNA letters revealed to great fanfare by the $3 billion Human Genome Project in 2003 was but a skeletal version of the human construction manual.”

The new efforts reveal that all kinds of molecular code previously thought to be “junk” isn’t extraneous at all but is instead actively interacting in the form of ordering, splicing, and silencing mechanisms. They think, now, that a predisposition to disease may not be in the genes themselves but in the stuff in between.

Good. This study comes just in time to derail the looming ghoulish specter of humans using genetic engineering to justify killing off people when their individual genes look broken. So now we know it’s not that simple.

But wait a minute… Later in the story we read this:

“The expectation was that many of the most active DNA sequences in humans
would be prevalent in other mammals, too, because evolution tends to save and
reuse what works best. But more than half were not found in other creatures,
which suggests they may not be that important in people, either…”

Huh? Because other creatures don’t have this material means it’s useless? Isn’t this whole study about how we completely overlooked massive amounts of information in our 2003 “definitive” map of the 3 billion pieces of code in the genome?

Instead of concluding that what we don’t understand means nothing, we need to find the same humility that quantum physicists come to when they admit that they can find nothing but air between the smallest non-observable particles they’ve discovered and no explanation for the “miraculous” automatic mirror actions of pairs that are huge distances apart.

Like a tiny baby in a crib, we can see the mattress, the bars, the walls and floor of the room we inhabit, and we can glimpse the hall through the doorway. Until we get beyond that space, though, we tend to believe that all we see is all there is. But once we see other doorways, we rightly begin to imagine the world of possibilities beyond.

Boy, we’re basically just stumbling around–albeit in an educated manner–when we’re researching the cures to illness. This study, conducted an an engineered mouse with an engineered molecule finds that brain inflammation may not be such a bad guy after all in Alzheimer’s patients.

Finding high levels of such markers in Alzheimer’s patients who died, led scientists to believe inflammation played a major role in causing or worsening the condition. Now, by manipulating in this engineered mouse the signaling molecule (IL-1 beta) that promotes inflammation, the researchers found increasing this signal (and thus inflammation) they dramatically reduced the number of amyloid plaques that are the hallmark of the disease. This mouse who was engineered to develop Alzheimer’s, had 50% fewer plaques than the controls.

So, even though this is a tiny experiment and it’s only on a mouse, it’s leading us down that moderation path that we see with so many other substances in the human body. Just like nitric oxide, that wonderful stuff that performs miracles in our blood vessels gets toxic if there’s too much of it, inflammation may need to be balanced as well. Is that like when our muscles become inflamed from too much work or working out in order to a) tell us to stop, and b) make us rest so we’ll heal.

Not surprisingly, this study reveals that hospitals with understaffed ICU units have higher incidences of infection and patient mortality. What a perfect metaphor for businesses of all kinds–when you overwork your employees to the point of stress, the results for your customers suffer. The Deming quality studies from decades ago confirmed this understanding, yet we continue to disregard it in our organizational imperatives.

Why is there such a severe nursing shortage? No doubt lots of factors count, but clearly these are biggies: nurses are consistently overworked and, compared to medical doctors, underpaid, and women now have other options where they can count on receiving a) similar or better money, b) far less stressful working conditions, c) get more respect from employers and have more opportunities for pleasant interactions with coworkers (being around disease and illness is taxing), and d) not have to work excessive overtime.

So it seems reasonable to conclude that we don’t necessarily have fewer people who care about nursing. Seems more like the practitioners don’t get the respect they deserve. And it’s the patients–that’s you and me–who pay the price.

I have been waiting for this. Yes, okay, I’m a skeptic about taking fake versions of vitamins and minerals instead of getting them from our diets. So here’s this study–not massive, of course–that indicates calcium from natural substances affects estrogen metabolism in a way that may more thoroughly promote bone mineral density.

I predict we will see a lot more of these studies as we discover ever more substances to analyze, and as our ability to measure them becomes ever more sophisticated. It’s been well documented for some time that our vegetables have lost significant amounts of nutrition. And now as continue to investigate how important it is to get our nutrition from food, we will begin to see more and stronger connections in how our artificially enhanced soil, chemicals, and other abuses of nature are contributing to our ill health.

This can only be a good thing.

Inflammation is the culprit in so much of what goes wrong in the human body, including congestive heart failure caused by infection, disease or defect. Researchers have invented a new machine that filters out markers in the blood caused by inflammation to try to improve heart function. The procedure, called plasmaepheresis, is still theoretical at this point. Initial efforts resulted in also filtering out other important immune response chemicals and some patients needed antibiotics after the treatments.

Well, I guess it’s one of those good ideas we discover, though the patients we use it with first are really just letting us experiment. The hope is that down the road the process can be perfected and used as a supplemental therapy to help people feel better while we work on finding more lasting solutions to the real problem that we’ll never fully get over–dying.

Yes, we all know that exercise is good for us. But the ubiquitous “they” don’t usually tell us specifically why. Now they’re starting to be able to do that. First, they’ve recently discovered that excess fat (especially in the abdominal area) can lead to chronic inflammation throughout the system.

In a test done with a small group of healthy volunteers (20-45) they subjected their blood samples both before and after exercise with an infectious agent and then analyzed the blood for a substance called “tumor necrosis factor” (TNF). Sounds kind of like a monster in a sci-fi thriller, doesn’t it? Anyway, the levels of this little TNF monster were significantly lower after exercise than before–and TNF is considered the first step in the inflammation process.

So if you’re one of the many who’ve said, “Oh, so what about exercise,” maybe being able to name a specific and icky-sounding culprit will help you fight your urge to consistently choose the couch over the aerobic crunch.

The FDA has decided to fast track a medical device that will help prevent limb amputation for U.S. soldiers

“The device works by connecting the ends of a severed blood vessel, providing a bridge or shunt around the damaged area and restoring blood flow to the injured limb. It can be implanted on the battlefield and other remote areas to bypass damaged blood vessels and temporarily maintain blood flow to the injured limb until the patient can be transported to a surgical facility.”

Why are they rushing this through? Because official numbers are that 6% of the 14,120 soldiers injured in Iraq between March 2003 and August 2005 — equivalent to 28 soldiers per month – had arm or leg amputations (from the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies in Washington. So with this new Scottish-made (Japanese parent company) “Temporary Limb Salvage Shunt” they’ll try to save an arm or leg on one or two soldiers a week. Five hundred-plus soldiers have already lost limbs.