Author: andy

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Hootie Was Right

Last Wednesday night, Meg went to bed as she normally does: takes a milk bottle (8 oz, usually), goes to sleep within 15-20 min, and we are out of the room within 30 min.  She woke up around 10:30 and had more milk, and had to be rocked to sleep again.  If I remember correctly, she woke up again in the 1:00 hour and had to be rocked to sleep yet again.

3:30 am rolls around, and she won’t go back down.  She will fall asleep, but we can’t lay her back in the crib without her waking up.  We finally bring her to bed with us, causing me to stay in bed and skip an hour of work.  Brooke, luckily, was on spring break, so she didn’t have to be at work at 7:30 am.

Meg really hadn’t slept through the night but for a handful of times since last November when she had strep.  Sometimes, she’d wake up once per night, sometimes two.  This past week or so, it had gone up to 3 or 4 times a night.  Wednesday night was the last straw.  3:30 am until 6:00 am is simply ridiculous when you have a one-year-old that doesn’t have an ear infection, and whose teeth aren’t causing that much pain: she’d been given Orajel and a few doses of Tylenol throughout the night.

Granted, Meg has battled various sicknesses and multiple ear infections, and the teething has been an issue more recently.  But to our knowledge, nothing was physically wrong with her now.  She was just escalating the times she’d wake up in the middle of the night, and simply would not go back to sleep on her own.

Brooke did some research, posted a plea for help on Facebook, and went to the library on Friday to see what books she could find.  She settled on “The Happiest Toddler On The Block,” by Harvey Karp.  Mostly, we used the book for the sleeping portion, although I’m sure Brooke will read the rest of it for other interesting tidbits.

Basically, there were a few possibilities outlined in the book to try with your kid, and I will briefly summarize them here:

  1. Immediately when your child starts crying, go into their room, pick them up, soothe them until they stop crying, and then put them down again in the crib.  If the start crying again, pick them up and do it again.  And again and again.  This can take 20-50 times when you first try it, though it will decrease each time you do it.
  2. Let your child cry for 3 minutes, then open their door, look to make sure they haven’t thrown up or injured themselves, then say “I love you, it is time for you to go to sleep, goodnight,” and then close the door again.  As they will undoubtably continue crying, go back in 5 minutes and do it again, then go back in 10 minutes and do it again, and finally go back every 15 minutes thereafter until they go to sleep, constantly reminding you that you’re there, even though they can’t see you. This method could take up to 5 nights, with the third night being the worst.  The crying could last an hour, easily, especially for the first few nights.

We chose the second option, as the first one never seemed to work in the past (or any portion of the method).

As we really didn’t want to risk a repeat of Wednesday night, we went ahead and decided to start Friday night.  We went out to dinner at the Starlight Room (very good!), and got ice cream at Dairy Queen.  We had a very pleasant Friday night, in preparation for what was to come…

Meg went down by 7:30 just as she normally does, and then she woke up around 10:30.  Brooke was already in bed, and as it was Friday night and I was staying up gaming anyway, I took the first shift.  I did exactly as the book prescribed, and used the stopwatch on my phone to make sure I went in at 3 min, 5 min, 10 min, etc.  Brooke stayed in bed and listened, just in case Meg started doing something unhealthy (aside from screaming at the tip-toppest of her lungs).  She also gave me a few pointers, as I wasn’t being “soothing enough” the first two times I poked my head in… 😛

It was around midnight when she finally stopped.  I think it was 11:45, the last time I actually went into the room, but I stayed up later to make sure she didn’t cry for the next 20-30 min.

She was likely tired out after that ordeal that she didn’t wake up again until around 4:00 am.  Brooke got up that time and went in, but she only had to once.  Meg fell asleep after Brooke went in and went through the routine.

Meg slept until 7:00 then.  Not bad for the first night!

The second night, Meg woke up multiple times, but never cried up until the 3 min line, so we never poked our heads in.  Never got up.  Not bad for the second night.

And last night?

Not a peep.

Not one, aside from a little coughing here and there.

Yes, on the third night, Meg slept from 7:00 pm until 7:00 am.  No crying.

Obviously, we’ll see how this translates into Night #4.  We’re off to a good start, certainly.  Because we have started this, we are also being more cognizant of giving her a sippy cup to use throughout the day, for both milk and apple juice.  It was good that we started this on a weekend so we could monitor how much she was drinking.  Yesterday, she had 4 sippy cups-worth of fluids, so she was certainly getting enough out of it.  Since she isn’t drinking as much (or at all) during the night, she transferred most of her fluids to the daytime.  So long as this continues while she’s at daycare, we should be good to go.

I’m sure we’ll still have some bad nights ahead of us, as the teething hasn’t stopped and she will surely get another ear infection or two, but at least now we have a plan and solid footing for a workable sleep schedule: for the whole family.

“Let Her Cry,” indeed.

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Asplode!

Brooke and I were watching “House, M.D.” on Friday night in the office after Meg went to bed when we heard a loud “pop.” Not so much a “pop” as much as a “who’s shooting at us?!”

Well, turns out one of Brooke’s Hard Apple Cider bottles continued fermenting to the point where it generated enough CO2 to explode all over our dining room.  It sent glass flying across the room, including 8 ft in the air where it caught a nice, large shard in the curtains (pictured above).  We found small bits of glass spread throughout the room.

The Cider is now sitting outside in our metal trash can (sans trash, of course), where it will be a bit…safer…for everyone involved.  🙂

We had opened up some of the stuff last Wednesday night and I noted that it had lost some of the sweetness it had a few weeks ago, and the carbonation had increased.  The champagne yeast, apparently, is more hearty than we’d initially thought.  That, or the brown sugar Brooke added to “prime” the cider for bottling ended up being more than was necessary.

Either way, if you have a bottle of our cider sitting in your fridge, I’d recommend you open it and drink it immediately.  And do it over a sink.  It can get messy. 🙂

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Lonely In The Middle

The last few weeks have presented a variety of issues within the American national discourse that warrant commentary, but I’ll let that aside right now and focus on something a bit more “meta” to the situation: how, exactly, we as members of society communicate with each other.

A few weeks ago, I posted on Facebook on two unrelated subjects.  On the first, I stated the following:

Andy Linsenbardt wants help with a list of bands or groups worse than Coldplay. The only one I can come up with so far is LFO.

That status update started a discussion spanning 96 comments across 10 or so people.  I followed it up with this:

For those that don’t want to read through the 89 comments in my previous status posting, the following was decided, after much deliberation: ICP < Nickelback < Creed < Coldplay.

On the other side of the coin, for a completely separate issue, I posted a story published by the Des Moines Register regarding abortion laws in Nebraska and how a particular couple were forced to do something they didn’t want to.  The feed this post spawned went for 51 comments across 7 or 8 people.

In both of these unrelated discussions, involving many individuals of completely different ideologies, we were able to “hold it together” and not get (too) personal.  We were completely capable of providing opinions without the need to tell each other that we were bad people or completely wrong (well, aside from the occasional sarcastic comment in that first thread…).  For the most part, it was a respectful discussion from ranging viewpoints.  On the latter discussion, I don’t think we came to anything close to a consensus, yet I feel we left more informed on the opposing viewpoints.

While the first status update was largely a “dig” at Coldplay (much-deserved…), I wasn’t thinking that I’d get nearly that many comments.

On the latter one, I kinda did, which brings me to the following point:

I think the thing missing most from the national discourse today is honesty and openness, especially from those positioned in The Middle.  There are quite a few folks out there on the political ultra-right or ultra-left that have their signs waving on the picket line, the so-called “activists” you could say.  These people are being very successful in pulling their ranks further and further from each other, making it appear that there is only a very distant “middle-ground” left between them.

It’s just sad when Facebook is the last bastion of reasonable discourse.

I won’t get into the abortion debate here or anything, but it’s safe to say that, aside from the folks out there with “Pro-Choice” and “Pro-Life” signs going on marches, the issue is frequently ignored in the middle.  I think it’s mostly out of fear, as those in the middle are afraid of being labeled one or the other, and what that may mean.  It’s the kind of issue we frequently ignore in schools.  Going to Lutheran and Methodist churches all my life, it’s an issue that’s frequently ignored there, as well.  It just seems as if there isn’t really a middle ground in that particular debate, let alone a variety of others.  People are afraid of the subject.  They keep it locked away.

In a related fashion, all too often, I hear of people not wanting to say anything about politics, or about religion, or about culture, because they are afraid of offending friends of theirs, or of “getting into it” to the point where they may not end up speaking with someone for a few days (or weeks…or ever again…).  These are people that don’t want to bring it up around the dinner table with their spouse, or with other family members.  Those that don’t want to bring it up at work so they don’t end up getting into some kind of long argument with their co-workers.  And most relevant to this particular post, those that don’t want to post anything on Facebook or other social networking sites so their friends (or future employers…) can’t see what they think about various issues.

And therein lies the problem.  If people aren’t willing to defend their positions, with intelligence and respect, then those on the ultra-left and those on the ultra-right with their signs will have effectively won.  They will have won by scaring those in the middle away from getting into the debate in the first place.  By causing them to hide from the discussion, keeping the issue from ever reaching any kind of moderate consensus.  Without a voice firmly planted in The Middle, then the opposing sides continue to pull apart with little to hold them together.

The problem is nothing new, and it exists in other instances.  Case in point: Years ago, at a Wesley House float trip, I had a great conversation with a Methodist pastor I greatly respect.  We were lamenting the decreasing population of Methodist campus ministries, while others were increasing in number.  In his view, the other ministries were offering a more “black and white” interpretation of the world, and the Bible, while Methodists (and ELCA, and others…) were allowing for the fact that there are “greys:” that black and white weren’t the only options.  The people we were trying to provide a service for weren’t interested in The Middle: they chose their extremes, likely because they wanted to be told what to think  The Middle, to them, was a scary place to be, a place where you may have to question things, have to think about the world, and have to make decisions.  Picking an extreme, there’s a clear-cut answer: you accept it and move on.

On a political spectrum, I technically fall center-left.  I’m a Moderate, by most interpretations.  But my thoughts on a variety of subjects, to some, would paint me as an ultra-leftist (because “The Middle” has been pulled more and more toward the Conservative side of the spectrum, but that’s another issue altogether…).

You can position yourself in the middle of an argument and still have strong feelings about it.  It’s possible.  And I try to do it all the time.

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Accepting Religious Curiosity in Context

I was catching up on NPR’s “On Point” from February 16th, where Tom Ashbrook was interviewing Richard Watts, author of various books, the most recent of which is “Hungers of the Heart: Spirituality and Religion for the 21st Century.” The entire podcast is worth listening to, but toward the end, Watts and Ashbrook got into some interesting territory.  In general, Watts is very interested in “the historical Jesus,” looking at the man and historical record and the context in which the Bible was written, as opposed to focusing on what could be considered the more “mystical” aspects of the Bible.  We pick up this transcript as Tom Ashbrook is reading a comment off the internet:

Ashbrook: “…but then here’s Elmridge who says of you ‘but he is denying the divinity of Jesus.’  What about that, Rev. Watts?”

Watts: “Well, one of the things we need to do is we always need to read texts in context.  When we don’t do that we get into big trouble.  Now, for example, if I tell you that there’s…that I know someone in the first century that’s called ‘divine,’ ‘the son of god,’ and ‘the savior,’ you know, who do you suppose I’m talking about?  Well, most people would say you’re talking about Jesus.  No, I’m talking about Caesar Augustus.  Caesar Augustus received all of those divine titles, and so when Christians talked about Jesus and what they had encountered in his life, they used titles which were very counter-cultural, they were saying, look, if you want to know what life is about, if you want to know what real power is, if you want to know where divinity is, look at this peasant going around talking about creating a new community of compassion and love.  Don’t look for the seat of power for the emperor in Rome.”

…

Watts: “Christianity in the very beginning, before it was called ‘Christianity,’ Tom [Ashbrook], it was called ‘The Way.’  And it was a way of life.  It was a lifestyle.  It doesn’t mean that lifestyle was devoid of a basis of belief, of course it was, but it was a lifestyle long before it was a creed, and I think we need to get over our hang-up with absolute creeds and get back to the lifestyle, a lifestyle which is non-violent, which is compassionate, which is inclusive, which creates community rather than holding people off at arm’s length.”

There was another interesting exchange later in the podcast.

Ashbrook: “You know very well, as do many other preachers, that the kind of mainline protestant churches that you’re describing that may be most open to this kind of open-minded, liberal conversation, are the ones that have seen their attendance just go through the floor in the last decade.  Now why is that?”

Watts: “Part of that, that’s a great question, and part of the problem is, that, I have to lay at the feet of clergy.  It seems to me that an awful lot of clergy don’t bother to teach the people what they themselves have learned.  And so, people are sort of fundamentalist by default because they, these sorts of questions that you and I are talking about today are not often raised and I know that in mainline churches there are all kinds of people sitting there never receiving permission to raise their questions, never having the opportunity to engage in give-and-take about what their life experience has taught them, or what their life experience has asked them.

Let me tell you a very brief story.  There was a scholar in the Jesus Seminar, which works to uncover the facts about the historical Jesus, that was giving a talk to a group of Missouri Synod Lutherans, a very conservative denomination, and he was talking about New Testament documents, and the document “Q,” which is a lost document of the sayings of Jesus.  And then came time for the question period and he wondered, he felt like Daniel in the lion’s den, and a woman stood up and, instead of addressing the speaker, she turned around to address her preacher in the pew behind her and she said to him, ‘did you know about Q?’ And he said, ‘well, yeah.’  And she said, ‘why didn’t you tell us?’  And I think that’s a very powerful parable, that our churches are full of people that are questioning, who are curious, but who aren’t being adequately taught…”

I won’t write much about this, as the post is already long enough with these transcripts included.  I just wanted to say that this is the kind of thing I like to hear about, the historical context in which the Bible was written, and how that context can help inform what we know and what we don’t know about religion.  Moreover, I think that if there was more of this being taught in our churches today, there would be fewer “black and white” interpretations of what the Bible tells us, and we would all be more accepting of each other.

It’s a shame when pastors and educators shut down the intellectually curious.  We should all be fostering curiosity in ourselves and in our kids in order to better understand where we come from and who we are, rather than asking someone to tell us, and then accepting that information blindly.

Questioning and thoughtful investigation is the way of science.  It should be the way of religion, too.

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A Lesson in Customer Service

Brooke signed us up for Amazon Prime last year, a $79/yr service that grants you various benefits at Amazon.com.  The most well-known service is free 2-day shipping on anything you purchase.  As we now live, for all intents an purposes, in the middle-of-nowhere, we figured it would be a useful service to take advantage of.  Typically, we can wait 2 days for an item, and now that we both have Android smartphones, we can shop for stuff in town, scan the barcode of the item with our phone, and see if we can get it cheaper from Amazon.com.

As I was shopping for components for my new web server box (which this site is now running on!), I was looking at Newegg.com, the computer company I typically buy components from.  I have no problem with Newegg, of course, and they tend to provide a wealth of details on each component, something Amazon doesn’t do very well, yet I still checked with Amazon to see if I could get the same thing(s) from them instead.  Turned out I could, and because we already had Amazon Prime, that meant I could get the same things for almost the same price, but not have to pay $13 in shipping.  And the $13 in shipping would have been regular Ground shipping.  In order to get the same, 2-day shipping through UPS, the same items would have cost $38.  Through FedEx, for some reason, it would have been $59.

So yeah, almost in a single purchase, Amazon Prime justified itself.

I started assembling the system last Thursday night, inbetween various baby duties.  Unfortunately, the thing wouldn’t turn on.  I had the components installed in the box, tried a few things, re-seated various wires and jumpers, and couldn’t get the monitor to turn on.  This, obviously, did not please me.  It could have been a few different things, but I eventually tracked it down: the power supply was, likely, not working properly (as another power supply I had booted the new motherboard just fine), and the RAM seemed like it had problems (as the BIOS screen would only work with one stick in, and it was a specific stick).

I did a bit more research on Friday on the interwebs and brought my multi-meter home from work, in order to try checking the output of the power supply.  Some folks online that had written in about the case I bought, which came with the power supply, had said that their power supply was “dead on arrival,” so they had to get replacements.  There was one poster, however, that said they had to “turn it on and off a few times, and eventually it worked.”  Therefore, I didn’t want to write off the power supply until I’d let it sit overnight.  The multi-meter would tell me definitively whether it was generating any power or not for the system.

Long-story-short, I tried it again on Saturday morning.  The multi-meter said that the power supply was providing power to the motherboard.  I plugged it back in to the full system and the thing booted.  I dunno.

The RAM, on the other hand, is still presenting problems, which brings us to the “Customer Service” part of this story.  I bought two sticks of RAM for $40 from Amazon, but only one of them worked.  In order to return/exchange them, both sticks have to go back.  Annoying, ’cause I’d like to continue using one of them until the replacements arrive.  So I log in to Amazon, go to my “Orders,” and select “Return” to go through the process of exchanging the RAM.  In then end, Amazon had me print off a UPS slip that lets me return the RAM at no shipping charge to me, and I have 30 days to do it.  And along with that, they’re automatically shipping me an identical replacement.  The kicker to this story, though, is that they’re shipping me the identical replacement Next Day, so I’ll have it tomorrow.

So, in the end, I can wait until the replacement arrives before sending back the defective product, and they’re sending the replacement as quickly as they can at no additional charge to me, even though I used Two Day shipping the first time around.

That, I tell you, is customer service.

Good on you, Amazon.com.

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Upgrade Paths, Part 1

Thanks to our relatively hefty tax return, we have a bit of extra cash on hand for me to run an upgrade or two on the computers, upgrades that have been sorely needed for a bit now (though Brooke would probably dispute that…).  For the last few years, I’ve been using laptops as my primary Windows gaming machines, and then a dedicated Linux desktop to act as the server hosting this website.  This has worked out pretty well, however I’m getting to the point (and the age…) where a gaming-capable laptop is less and less necessary, while a gaming-capable desktop is more attractive.  A desktop can be upgraded, while a laptop really can’t to any reasonable degree.  Therefore, I can run reasonable upgrades more often if I have a gaming desktop, rather than a laptop.

My current server uses a dual-core Athlon 64 X2 3800+ with 2 GB of RAM.  The system has worked just fine for the past 5 years since I built it, and has been running almost non-stop since that point.  It’s honestly pretty impressive how well it has held up, considering how long it sits there running without any huge problems.

However, I’m going to use that box and put a different motherboard and processor in it, and will start to use it for gaming.  My laptop (a Core 2 Duo system with a 256 MB GeForce 8600 video card) is well out of warranty and is only barely able to play anything modern, so it’s about time I did something else.  That, however, will be “Part 2” of this particular upgrade.

Since I will use my current desktop computer case, I decided to go with a completely separate system for the new server.  Something smaller and low-wattage was ideal, as the computer doesn’t need to be that powerful to run a web site (as this site doesn’t generate 1000s of hits per day or anything…), and since it runs almost non-stop, something that doesn’t take much power is also a big plus.  The Intel Atom D525 processor fits the bill, as this is the processor found in many netbooks, amongst other devides.  It’s a dual-core 1.8 GHz system, so it will more than do the job, and this particular processor and chipset can utilize DDR3 memory (the current standard).  The box itself, pictured above, is somewhat tiny, only maybe 5″ tall, and will fit snugly wherever I want to stash it.  I’m also going to go ahead and max out its memory with 4 GB of RAM, mostly because they’re having a good sale ($40) on it right now.

In total, this upgrade is under $170.  I’m going to use one of my existing hard drives, and I’m not putting a disc drive in this particular system, so I’m saving some money there.  I am grabbing a new keyboard, however, because Brooke spilled soda in my 10-year-old wireless keyboard…so we may finally get rid of it…  But yeah, $170 for a new system ain’t bad, in my opinion, especially for a system that should be more than capable of running a website for the next 5+ years.

I’ll take care of Part 2 in the coming months.  This upgrade had to happen first, however, to move the website off of the existing computer so I can do other things to it (like…you know…turn it off…).

So hopefully the upgrade will be relatively painless.  If, however, this website is down for a few days, you can turn your ear toward Iowa and probably hear some faint grumbling…

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“I was in the prison, and you visited me…”

Brooke and Meg were out of town this past weekend, so I attended church alone.  We had a guest pastor in church, as our regular pastor was out of town.  Her name was Pastor Arnette Pint, and she was the first Associate Pastor for Shueyville UMC back in the late-90s.  Since that time, she has gone on to a few positions, but her most recent one is serving a congregation called Women at the Well, that she started at the Mitchellville, IA Women’s Correctional Facility, so she had some very interesting perspectives.

Pastor Arnette described a variety of statistics and anecdotal stories to help illustrate what she does and why it’s important.  First, she told us that this is a relatively new concept, having a church within a prison.  This is different than having churches visit prisons, as you end up getting a variety of groups coming through and not staying – no sense of permanence.  The United Methodist Church in Iowa felt the need to appoint a pastor specifically to this prison, as the system apparently works well in other states where it’s been implemented.  Pastor Arnette relayed a story of the pastor (whose name I can’t find) that started this movement and, effectively, “wrote the book” on doing this sort of thing.  He had been ministering to the men of a prison in South Dakota and he got the sense that they wanted an actual, regular, church service.  Something permanent.  Something they could depend on.  After he started a weekly service, the numbers of attendees grew, and their outlooks after prison improved.

The part of the story that hit me was that, supposedly, one inmate thanked him for starting the service, lamenting the endless parade of churches and groups coming through to preach to them.  The inmate said “We was tired of gettin’ saved.”  It was an interesting point to make, as these churches that were coming to the prison somehow felt as though, because they were prisoners, they must obviously not be Christians.  Because they were in prison, they obviously needed “saving.”

With this framework in mind, Pastor Arnette went through some statistics, saying that 60% of inmate in her prison have been diagnosed with a mental illness, though that number is surely higher.  Most of those diagnoses happened outside the prison system, as the ones that occur once you’re in the system can be difficult to interpret.  There are 600 women in the prison, while 30 years ago, in the same building, there were only 40-something women there.  It’s a crowded place, and there’s one psychologist to manage all of them.  They communicate over the internet with a psychiatrist in order to get any medications approved.  Pastor Arnette also said that, while the statistics aren’t solid on this, she thinks it’s somewhere between 80% and 90% of these women that have been abused in some fashion during their lives, and the majority of them have struggled with addiction at some time.  For many of them, addiction is the reason they are in prison at all.  She said that, while they have counselors at the prison to help the psychologist in their day-to-day routine, these counselors, more often than not, are prison guards that have ranked up high enough to get off the floor.

The United Methodist Church in Iowa also started a program to help provide clothing for women that are leaving prison.  Apparently, the State of Iowa doesn’t provide you with a change of clothes for your bus ride home, so there are women riding from Des Moines to all points of the State in their prison uniform.  Hardly the “right foot” to get started on.  So, the Methodist Church started collecting clothes from women across the state, asking them to donate their lightly-used clothes so that these women have something to start fresh with.  The church provides a set of casual clothes, as well as a set of clothes nice enough for “that first job interview.”  Certainly a nice gesture.

One of her larger points was with regards to the cost of building and operating prisons.  She pointed out that almost $180 million has been approved by the State of Iowa to help refurbish this current prison, as well as build another prison in the state (and that’s just to build, not to operate).  That’s $180+ million to help deal with all these women that have been coming in (remember, 40 women increased to 600 in this one building over 30 years, largely due to influx of methamphetamine and harsher drug laws).  She suggested that, maybe, that $180+ million would have been better spent on helping these women before they got into prison, by providing greater access to abuse and addiction counselors, or to even see a mental health professional.

At a time when state funding for mental health is declining drastically, our spending on new prison facilities is increasing.  “How does this make sense,” she asks.

The last point I’ll leave with you are some interesting statistics on recidivism (as in, the likelihood someone within the prison will come back to the prison one or more times).  The rate in Iowa is 60%, which is comparable to other states.  According to her, in studies that have looked into programs like hers, with churches that are actually based within a prison, the recidivism rate drops to 15% for those individuals.  If those individuals leave the prison and find a church home (as in, one they attend regularly, as opposed to “just visiting”), the rate drops to 2%.

It was an excellent sermon, and an eye-opening testament to what goes on in the prison system.  Thankfully, my family isn’t known for their prison stints, so I can’t say I have any experience with what it’s like to “go through the system.”  I hope I never do, but if anyone I know has to go through it, I hope they have someone like Pastor Arnette and a program like hers to help them see it through.

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Primer: Drug Discovery

These posts, tagged “Primer,” are posted for two reasons: 1). to help me get better at teaching non-scientists about science-related topics; and 2). to help non-scientists learn more about things they otherwise would not.  So, while I realize most people won’t read these, I’m going to write them anyway, partially for my own benefit, but mostly for yours.

There are a few ways to approach the general idea of drug discovery, but I’m going to try and tackle it from the historical treatment first, and maybe revisit it in a future Primer.  I am part of the Division of Medicinal and Natural Products Chemistry at the University of Iowa, and the two components of it, Medicinal Chemistry, and Natural Products, are both integral to the idea of developing new drugs.  Medicinal Chemistry is just as it sounds: the study of designing and synthesizing new drugs, using principles of chemistry, pharmacology and biology.  The idea of Natural Products, however, is a bit more interesting in that, just as it sounds, it studies chemical compounds “developed” in other organisms that may be useful as drugs.

The oldest records tend to cite the ancient Chinese, the Hindus and the Mayans as cultures that employed various products as medicinal agents.  Emperor Shen Nung, in 2735 BC, compiled what could be considered as the first pharmacopeia, including antimalarial drug ch’ang shang, and also ma huang, from which ephedrine was isolated.  Ipecacuanha root was used in Brazil for treatment of dysentery and diarrhea, as it contained emetine.  South American Indians chewed coca leaves (containing cocaine) and used mushrooms (containing tryptamine) as hallucinagens.  Many different examples of drug use in ancient, and more modern cultures, can be pointed to as early forerunners of today’s drug industry.

However, it was the 19th and 20th centuries that really kick-started the trend, as this is when modern chemical and biological techniques started to take hold.  It was in the 19th century when pharmacognosy, the science that deals with medicinal products of plant, animal, or mineral origin, was replaced by physiological chemistry.  Because of this shift, products like morphine, emetine, quinine, caffeine and colchicine were all isolated from the plants that produced them, allowing for much purer, and more effective, products to be produced.  Advances in organic chemistry at the time really helped with the isolation, so these discoveries wouldn’t have been possible previously.

In today’s world, there are a few ways you can go and discover a new drug:

  1. Random screening of plant compounds
  2. Selection of groups of organisms by Family or Genus (i.e. if you know one plant that makes a compound, look for more compounds in a related plant)
  3. Chemotaxonomic approach investigating secondary metabolites (i.e. Drug A functions in your body, then is metabolized in your liver to Drug B, which also happens to be functional)
  4. Collection of species selected by databases
  5. Selection by an ethnomedical approach

I think the latter two are the most interesting, especially with a historic perspective.  With the latter, we’re talking about going into cultures (a la the movie “Medicine Man“) and learning about the plants that they use to cure certain ailments, then getting samples of those plants and figuring out what makes them effective.  It has been estimated that of 122 drugs of this type used worldwide from 94 different species, 72% can be traced back to ethnic groups that used them for generations.

The discovery of new drugs of this type is actually somewhat worrisome as these cultures die out or become integrated into what we’d consider “modern society.”  These old “medicine men” and “shamans” die before imparting their knowledge to a new generation and these kinds of treatments are lost.

The collection of species and formation of databases is interesting, and only more useful in recent history due to the advent of computers that can actually store and access all the information.  With this process, we’re talking about going into a rain forest, for example, and collecting every plant and insect species you can find, then running various genetic and proteomic screens on the cells of each plant and insect to see whether they produce anything interesting or respond to anything.  This process can involve thousands of species across a single square mile in a rain forest, necessitating a great deal of storage space for the samples themselves, but also computing power to allow other researchers the ability to search for information on that given species.

An example of a “screen” that one could carry out would be to grow bacteria around your plant or insect samples.  If you ever heard the story of penicillin, you’ll know that Alexander Fleming (1928) noticed that his culture of Staphlococcus bacteria stopped growing around some bread mold that had found its way into the culture.  From that bread mold, penicillin, was developed as our first antibiotic.  The same kind of principle can be applied here: mix your samples together and “see what happens.”  If anything interesting happens, you then continue investigating that sample until you isolate the compound that is doing that interesting thing.

The isolation of that “interesting compound” can be very tricky, however.  In many cases, a particular anticancer agent or antibacterial agent may be housed inside the cells of our plant species.  Getting that compound out may be difficult, as it could be associated with the plant so tightly that you have to employ a variety of separation techniques.  And even after you apply those techniques, what you are left with may be nonfunctional, as the compound may require the action of that plant itself to work properly (i.e. the compound you want may still need other components to work).  Even after you isolate the compound you want, in order to make it a viable drug, you have to be able to synthesize it, or something like it, chemically in a lab setting.  Preferably, on a massive scale so you can sell it relatively cheaply as a drug to the masses.  These processes can be daunting and costly.

So basically, it can be fascinating to discover new drugs, especially ones that were actually “discovered” thousands of years ago by cultures that have long since died out.  However, you may find that “discovering” the drug may be the easy part – mass producing the drug could be the most challenging aspect of the ordeal.

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Choices

Last year, my phone was due for an upgrade, but since Brooke was doing quite a bit more traveling around Cedar Rapids at the time, we opted to give her my upgrade so she could get a smartphone, the HTC Aria (AT&T).  Thus far, she’s been quite happy with this little Android device, a phone that browses the internet, includes a GPS, and accesses WiFi in a variety of venues, obviating the need for a ridiculously expensive data plan (the stock 200 MB/mo plan is $15 extra per month).  Also, this phone was a shade smaller than the iPhone and was much more comfortable for her to deal with.

March 17th, however, Brooke’s phone number will be eligible for an upgrade, meaning that it’s my turn to get a new phone.  Thus, as I’m known for doing (like my father, before me…), I’ve been researching the various possibilities that AT&T has to offer with regards to phones.  For a few years now, the plan has been to go with an iPhone, as the iOS platform has the programs I want and the games I want to play.  For these past few years, Android just hasn’t been able to compete on the software front with the lead that Apple had built with their iPhone system.

This has begun to change.  Quickly.

Now, more and more programs and games are going Android at the same time they go iOS, and many of the original programs that ran on iOS have been or are being ported over to Android.  Thus, recently, I began to reconsider my plan to go with iPhone.

The other nail in the iPhone’s proverbial coffin for me is the fact that the iPhone 3GS is $50 (cool!) and the iPhone 4 is $200 (less cool?).  The iPhone 5 isn’t out, and technically hasn’t been announced, but surely won’t be available until this summer at the soonest.  So, do I get the iPhone 4 this March for $200?  Or do I wait until the iPhone 5 comes out and get it for $200?  Or once the iPhone 5 comes out, get the reduced-price iPhone 4 for $100?  Decisions, decisions, decisions!

The decision, I think, has been made for me, and it’s called the HTC Inspire 4G.

The HTC Inspire 4G just came out for AT&T early this month for $99 with a contract renewal.  It’s essentially a rebranding of Sprint’s Evo 4G, but doesn’t have a front-facing camera or a stand on the back of the phone (for holding it up while you watch videos).  It’s bigger than Brooke’s Aria, although it’s the same brand and is set up very similarly with the user interface and overall construction.  As the name implies, it’s also the first Android-based AT&T phone to get onto their quasi-“4G” network, technical HSPA+, at least wherever the network is available.  It will be capable of taking on the true-“4G” network when it launches later this year, so this phone is pretty well future-proofed for $99.  Not bad.

Brooke and I went by the AT&T Store today in Cedar Rapids to check one out.  I was quite pleased with it, talked with the sales dude about my options with regards to this phone as well as other, comparable phones, and I decided to go ahead and get it.  I was less than 30 days from the upgrade date, so they waived it and let me upgrade early.

I’ve been playing with the phone for most of the day, as I typically do with new toys.  I’ve been pretty happy with it thus far, but will learn more about what the Android platform is capable in the coming days.  I still need to grab some kind of protective case for it, but those aren’t too hard to find.  Otherwise, I think I’ve got the user interface set up the way I want it, but am now trying different apps to see which ones I like for doing the things I want.

Of course, one of the benefits of going Android is the fact that it syncs up quite well with your Google account, so it pulls down my mail, calendar, RSS feeds, etc. from the interwebs with the click of a button.  Very efficient and very helpful for my purposes.  One of the other neat features about this particular phone is the HTC Sense connectivity with HTC’s website, allowing you to not only turn your phone from “silent” to “loud” from the website (in the event that you lose your phone), but also it can remotely wipe your phone of it’s memory (in the event your phone is stolen).  Neat!

Needless to say, I’m having a good time.  🙂