It is difficult if not impossible to foresee future research results. I am sharing the belief with many other colleagues that grant applications are largely a waste of time (in particular if most applications fail). A recent correspondence letter in Nature applauds Continue reading How to predict good research
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The road not taken
When discussing the problem of inducing allergy by rickets prophylaxis I have argumented earlier that there are many alternatives:
- abandon daily oral prophylaxis in the general population (attn risk of t1d, rickets, pneumonia)
- reduce daily oral dose with on demand therapy
- use only 1-3 single oral shots as in former East Germany
- exchange water-soluble by oily form
- use chemically modified isomeres
- co-application with “physiological” substances also in liver cod oil like Ca2+, P, vitamin A…
- co-application with “non-physiological” Cpg ODN…
- switch to parenteral application
There is even another option that I missed so far – the parental application. Supplementation of the mother might work if given ~6000 IU/die to the mother as been nicely shown in a new study.
The principle is not very new – probably known since 1927. RCTs are urgently needed comparing all these treatment options while a direct oral exposure of the gut mucosa by allergen and vitamin D should be avoided.
BTW “The road not taken” is a by Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.
3/9/2007
Rolf Zinkernagel made an interesting proposal last Saturday here in Munich – desenzitiation not by intradermal injection but by ultrasound directed lymphnode application.
Just so stories
The recent ATS congress in San Francisco had a nice session of “Just so stories“. The stories written by Rudyard Kipling three years after the death of his six year old child from pneumonia these are still some of the best questions ever asked. Answers at the ATS were by provided (by Powel) “How the birds got air sacs”, (by Loring) “How the elephant lost his pleural space” and (by Sieck) “How the diphragm got its dome”. The best session at the ATS!, yea, yea.
Enlightening
A new study reports a rather expected finding – young Finnish men in a military base ;-)
… conditions with respect to physical activity, nutrition, clohting, living quarters, and exposure to sunlight were homgenous
had twice as many respiratory infections if having serum vitamin D concentrations <40 nmol/L. The discussion, however, misses the point that there are many studies showing the same effect in children with rickets (references 82-86) eventually leading to pneumonia leading to death. “Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppression of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day” (Thomas Jefferson?)
Outside fence
Have you ever wondered why Google Scholar gets so many more scientific PDFs than you? The reasons is that journal webmasters allow spider with legitimate names and/or legitimate IPs to enter their site. So you are outside fence if you have the wrong “User Agent” set in your browser, yea, yea.
German science
The German portal academics has a rather long narrative about the failure of German science – and an excerpt from “Richard Münch, Die akademische Elite. Zur sozialen Konstruktion wissenschaftlicher Exzellenz, Frankfurt a.M.: Edition Suhrkamp, 2007”. Continue reading German science
10 simple rules
This is just to promote the 10 simple rules collection. Rule #1 for reviewers “Do Not Accept a Review Assignment unless You Can Accomplish the Task in the Requested Timeframe—Learn to Say No” is what I have learned only recently. The most important one is “Write Reviews You Would Be Satisfied with as an Author”.
Tonk, Plonk and Plink
I have now used the PLINK software package also for analysing family data. Again it is an excellent program that allows many new views on old data. I could run >20 traits all together on ~1000 SNPs in just a few seconds. There are only a few tweaks that I have already emailed to the author Continue reading Tonk, Plonk and Plink
Time to give Blackley the credit he deserves
I am currently doing some historical studies if the vitamin hypothesis fits also the temporal relationship of allergy prevalence. While ordering RKI files for my next trip to the Berlin document center, I found that farming and lower allergy sensitization is known much longer than I anticipated. Continue reading Time to give Blackley the credit he deserves
In consideration of
In case you have never read at full consciousness the copyright statements that some journals want to you to sign, here is one:
In consideration of the expenses of editing and publishing and the professional benefits relating to publication of my article or other written work, as specified above, I assign exclusively to the XXXX Society all right, title, and interest to my article or other written work, as specified above, and any ….
In consideration of the cumbersome training of a MD/PhD student I want 50% of their future salary ;-) yea, yea.
Castrated data
Nature had some good recommendations —
… there are challenges to making data on individual research participants available to other investigators, every effort should be made to provide researchers with an opportunity to reproduce the reported results and to investigate new hypotheses and methods.
accompanied by a bullet list
* Statement on availability of results and data so that, as far as possible, others can analyse them independently
The new expression paper published 3 days ago, however, ignores that largely Continue reading Castrated data
A denial of service attack
The ever proliferating number of review requests comes like a denial of service attack – just like hacking attacks to high-profile web servers.
Best of all – however – it is a self limiting process. There is no more editor on the phone Continue reading A denial of service attack
Thunderbird security improved
A new plugin lets you immediately verify the sender by comparing the From: line and sending IP of emails against the published Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DNS-based reputation lists. Verifying addresses Continue reading Thunderbird security improved
Avoid boring people
I have always been amused by the fact being listed at the HUGO meetings immediately after a Nobel winner as WJ–ST follows WA–TSON. Not so amused by his many ignorant, Continue reading Avoid boring people
First individual human genome
courtesy of Craig Venter – whom else? It is also one half of the genome of his only son (the individual denoted 3.5 Continue reading First individual human genome