• mix of 1 box of baking soda (NaHCO₃) and vinegar (HOAc) – produces carbon dioxide (CO₂) and a lot of frothing
• aggressively mix one bottle of hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) with baker’s yeast – causes the H₂O₂ to disproportionate into water (H₂O) and oxygen (O₂) which foams out of the mixture
• add one role of mint Mentos “the Fresh Maker” into 2 liters of Diet Coke – cases the carbonic acid (HCO₂H) in the Diet Coke to quickly disproportionate into H₂O and CO₂ making the famous Mentos/Diet Coke geyser

All of these experiments are safe.  All of them can be done at home if you’re willing to go into Walmart beforehand and spend ~$10 on “reagents.”  All experiments teach kids that when chemical reactions rapidly make gases, the gaseous form of matter takes up much more space than solids or liquids.  The gas takes up a lot of space as it’s produced, it has to go somewhere and voila – you get the shooting, foaming, bubbling fun.

Here a few photos including one where I’m being assisted by a young scientist who refers to me these days as Mr. Dad…

It strikes me how little of this type of demonstration is part of the school curriculum these days.  This stuff is fun, gets kids to think a bit and will hopefully get them excited to about some chemistry.  I’ve seen a couple of my son’s friends since I did the demo and they’ve asked me more about rapidly expanding gases.  Most of their questions are about explosives which indeed partially work by rapid expansion of produced gases.  See – those kids are thinking and they’re interested (or they are looking to become young criminals)!

I was also struck by how long it took me to get a time slot to come in and do this demo.  I asked about doing this in the fall and only really got an enthusiastic response to come in now.  The teachers in CT spend most of the year preparing their students for Connecticut Mastery Tests (CMTs) which are yearly standardized tests.  The CMTs evaluate the kid’s mastery of material for their grade level, but they also evaluate the school district (the higher the CMT scores, “the better the school district.”

I know my son is learning, but I worry that there is too much of a push to do well on the tests.  They do lots of reading, writing, math before the CMTs – only now are they doing social studies and allowing a crazy father to come in and make a mess with some household chemicals.  Does it really need to be this way?

This article has been evaluated by F1000 Faculty Member:

Jane Holmes Bernstein, Children’s Hospital Boston

To find out more about this exciting new study, click here to read the Faculty of 1000 evaluations of this article.

Wall DP, Kosmicki J, DeLuca DF, Harstad E, Fusaro VA.

Transl Psychiatry. 2012; 2:e100

Abstract

The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-Generic (ADOS) is one of the most widely used instruments for behavioral evaluation of autism spectrum disorders. It is composed of four modules, each tailored for a specific group of individuals based on their language and developmental level. On average, a module takes between 30 and 60 min to deliver. We used a series of machine-learning algorithms to study the complete set of scores from Module 1 of the ADOS available at the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange (AGRE) for 612 individuals with a classification of autism and 15 non-spectrum individuals from both AGRE and the Boston Autism Consortium (AC). Our analysis indicated that 8 of the 29 items contained in Module 1 of the ADOS were sufficient to classify autism with 100% accuracy. We further validated the accuracy of this eight-item classifier against complete sets of scores from two independent sources, a collection of 110 individuals with autism from AC and a collection of 336 individuals with autism from the Simons Foundation. In both cases, our classifier performed with nearly 100% sensitivity, correctly classifying all but two of the individuals from these two resources with a diagnosis of autism, and with 94% specificity on a collection of observed and simulated non-spectrum controls. The classifier contained several elements found in the ADOS algorithm, demonstrating high test validity, and also resulted in a quantitative score that measures classification confidence and extremeness of the phenotype. With incidence rates rising, the ability to classify autism effectively and quickly requires careful design of assessment and diagnostic tools. Given the brevity, accuracy and quantitative nature of the classifier, results from this study may prove valuable in the development of mobile tools for preliminary evaluation and clinical prioritization—in particular those focused on assessment of short home videos of children—that speed the pace of initial evaluation and broaden the reach to a significantly larger percentage of the population at risk.

In my struggle to accept what has happened, in my desperate need to try to make sense of it all ( how can the life of a presumably healthy person in his early thirties just cease in a matter of minutes? why with all the world’s medical advances and state-of-the-art technology were they unable  to revive him?) I can’t help but question why we do what we do. Will we ever be able to win our battle against a disease we may not have even know exists?

And yet, if I know one thing for sure about the last year of this exemplary man’s life, it was that he dedicated himself heart and soul to taking Pfizer CTI from a vision on paper to a glass and metal reality. CTI (Centers for Therapeutic Innovation) is Pfizer’s initiative aimed at bringing new targets and scientific breakthroughs into our portfolio by actively partnering with academic medical centers. Click here to see my past blog on this initiative.

When speaking about our colleague who had passed, a senior leader commented that we would not be where are today if it wasn’t for him. So I must find a way to channel my anger and my grief into the work that he believed so strongly in. I must find a way to turn the vision that he helped shape into a reality. The essence of CTI is collaboration-  a process that requires negotiation, trust and cooperation in equal measure. He was the very personification of these attributes, the “soul of CTI” as described by many and there is perhaps no better way.

Having returned from work to a beautiful spring evening, I decided to go for a run. I have always liked the idea of running but, in reality, I have always been more suited to covering distances in the water. Much more at home as a swimmer. Still, the lure of a nice leisurely run along country lanes bordered with stunning scenery, had gripped me, and with the kids ready for bed, and happily reading with my wife, I donned the gear. It didn’t take long for me to remember why my natural tendency is to all things aquatic.

I ran against a vast backdrop of rapeseed, which, as an asthmatic hay fever sufferer is probably not advisable, but from a landscape perspective was simply spectacular. Manoeuvring expertly through the field was, not me (!), but a huge harvesting machine with what looked, through my layman eyes, like wings, and with this new experience I quickly realised I knew very little about this yellow blanket of crop that surrounds my house at this time of year.

Upon returning to home, and after some much needed nourishment, I did some reading about rapeseed, which was fascinating, and by virtue of this I enriched my outlook on life, all courtesy of this new post-work running experience. Did something different, thought differently, learned something! Well, I actually learned (or perhaps more accurately, remembered) something else too; I’m not all that fond of running, and with that very firmly in mind, my next exercise endeavour will definitely be in the swimming pool!

Earlier that very same day, I had decided not to wait until the weekend to visit the bank and therefore, prior to work, I did something different. I ventured into Canterbury, England, en route to Discovery Park, Sandwich. I was a little early, with ten minutes to spare, and decided to spend my time wisely in a coffee shop. Having bought a coffee, and spied a copy of The Times, I flipped the paper over to start reading the sport section, which is always a default newspaper approach for me.

After a few minutes, something caught my eye. It was a picture of, amongst a few other famous people, Professor Robert Winston, forming part of an advert for the Cheltenham Science Festival to be held, in association with Pfizer, in June this year. I subsequently recalled reading a blog post from Jack Watters about last year’s festival, and following a perusal of the event listing for this year, I have opted to visit the festival (for the first time!) whereby I will almost certainly learn new things and hope to share my experience with you through Think Science Now.

Would I have been fated to this chance occurrence had I stalled and gone to the bank on Saturday? Probably not, but by thwarting Jon’s convention, I will fully embrace a brand new experience and see a myriad of prospects awaiting me. Carpe diem!

What the events of this particular day had taught me was that change is good. It is necessary. Doing things differently or doing different things, broadens your outlook and perspective and can, ultimately, lead to opportunity. There’s a lot to be said for routine and its application thereupon, and from a productivity and compliance perspective, clear benefits to doing certain things the same way, repeatedly.

However, when you also need to complement this approach with differentiating innovation to continue to succeed, and set yourself apart from the pack, doing and thinking differently, will promote learning. This, in turn, will carve the requisite, albeit perhaps unexpected, excitingly novel openings to potentially capitalise upon. Bob Chapin is blogging about serendipity currently, and there’s almost a slight element of that here, I think…

We all have most likely known someone with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. I have known family members stricken by the disease and I’ve seen them and their loved ones affected by its stigma and devastation.

I’ve written about how the arts help us learn, live and age better. In particular, I’d like to talk about music and Alzheimer’s and how it may help both patients and caregivers. The Alzheimer’s Foundation discusses art and music therapy  and their potential benefits on their web site.

Further, a video called Alive Inside produced by Music & Memory describing the impact of music on Alzheimer’s disease patients recently went viral. The idea of the benefits of music in healthcare is resonating.

Freda Lewis Hall, Pfizer’s Chief Medical Officer, talked about Alzheimer’s on a recent episode of The Doctors advising that caregivers watch for depression, poor nutrition and drug interactions when caring for their loved ones. She also advises caregivers to keep an eye on their own health, as depression and diabetes can affect us due to the stress of our loved one’s disease. Can music be a support for caregivers too?

I certainly see the connection and believe that music can help both patients and caregivers.

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HumanTECH: Connecting People with Science

Two stories today. The first is about high-density polyethylene. In the early 1950’s, Karl Ziegler was trying to polymerize ethylene using various organometal (like lithium alkyls) and to have the reaction run at reasonable temperatures and pressures. One day an experiment produced no polymers at all, but only monomers of ethylene. The result was sufficiently weird that Ziegler’s group spent a couple of weeks tracking down what had been done to that vessel earlier.

It turns out that it contained some leftover nickel compound from a reaction run several weeks previously. This launched a systematic analysis of the involvement and behavior nickel and other metals in the inhibition of the polymerization, and (conversely) the catalysis of that polymerization. They eventually found that various metal chlorides plus some organic aluminum compounds made very effective catalysts for the production of linear, very high molecular weight (and melting point) polyethylene.

These polymers immediately found tremendous use; >8 billion pounds of this were produced in 1987 (the year before the publication of my source book). Zeigler shared a Nobel Prize for this work. Of him it was said that his guiding principle was that “it is not possible to anticipate something that is really new; this can only be discovered by experiment.” Another was to “keep an eye open for unexpected developments and not to neglect new phenomena as irrelevant to the main project.”

The last one to highlight is Teflon. In 1938, a newly-minted PhD named Roy Plunkett was working for DuPont on new refrigerants. He opened the valve on a tank of gaseous tetrafluoroethylene, but nothing came out. He ran a wire into the valve to clear it… still nothing came out. So he (get this!) sawed through the tank to see what had happened.

Inside was a waxy white powder. He instantly understood that the gas must have polymerized. This had never been observed with this particular compound before, and since DuPont was a polymer company, he explored its properties. His group played around and found a way to make it polymerize on demand. Then they explored its properties, and found that it was more inert than sand, and was resistant to anything they threw at it, but unlike sand, it was quite slippery.

Now, had this happened in peacetime, it might have lain untouched for a long time. But the Manhattan Project needed some protections for the plumbing that was handling the highly corrosive gas uranium hexafluoride, and in a chance meeting between Gen. Leslie Groves (who was leading the atomic bomb project) and some DuPont colleagues, the DuPont folks happened to mention this unique inert material they had found.

Groves was immediately interested; this led to Teflon being used to coat and protect the hardware used to make the atomic bomb. The public didn’t learn about this material until after the war, when it was used to insulate cables or to coat body part replacements (aortas, hip joints, pacemakers, various other bony parts or parts of external ears, tracheas, heart valves, etc., etc.). Another occasion of a chance discovery finding a real use because the discoverers were on the lookout for novelty.

This is the theme that runs through these descriptions of serendipity: there is lots of happenstance and random chance, but in every case there is a human who is looking for something new, or knows the landscape of need, sees the peculiarity and thinks “Now, that’s funny,” and investigates enough to understand what s/he has found, and what might be done with it. How can we foster this sort of surprise here?? By structuring our experiments to allow for some “wrong” answers… let’s allow Nature to surprise us.

And just maybe, crossing our fingers wouldn’t hurt, either

Where do you go from playing a critical role in an historical event? Far from being banished to the annals, so-to-speak, then one could perhaps surmise that with some lateral thinking, as well as a niche market opportunity to exploit, the potential to reinvent for a different purpose could, indeed, be capitalised upon. Generally speaking, it makes absolute and resourceful business sense; maximise the asset and customer-base, returning more capital than was (originally) and is (now), deployed to the asset. Additionally, the logical corollary is enhanced benefit, relative to the original intent.

I have been fortunate, within my career, to play an operational role in clinical trials for an indication different to that for which the drug was originally intended, as well as a different indication to that for which it was originally licensed. It was a wonderfully challenging and rewarding experience, ultimately increasing the diversity of the customer (patient)-base, as well as the asset value. Some frame this as recycling, others repurposing, and others still, repositioning. I’m sure there are other variations thereupon.

Either way, it is a strategic business imperative that many companies, and not exclusively those within healthcare, leverage to help overcome innate problems in their value proposition. Specifically for the pharmaceutical industry, it is well regarded that it is now, relatively speaking, more difficult to find a novel target and develop a new drug, and when you couple that with, for example, attrition, it augments the inherent business risk.

And so, inspired minds leverage their creativity in an environment that is increasingly crafted to effectively nurture such entrepreneurially resourceful spirit, whilst thoughtfully mitigating the previously alluded to risk. I feel privileged to be a part of that, and see untapped potential within my role at Pfizer to further contribute to asset value. And with that said, perhaps I’ll revisit this blog in due course and furnish you with an update…

We all know about penicillin, of course (Alexander Fleming made the original observation, but it took several others and several years to turn it into a workable product). Did you know that Humphry Davy was appointed at the age of 20, in 1798, to lead the Pneumatic Institute in Bristol, England, with the goal of investigating medical uses for gasses? He discovered that prolonged inhalation of nitrous oxide produced unconsciousness, and actually suggested its use in medical procedures, a suggestion which fell on unprepared minds and was not taken up.

Nitrous oxide found wide use as a form of parlor entertainment. In 1844, a demonstration was held in the progressive city of Hartford CT, and the leader called for volunteers from the audience. A young Samuel Cooley inhaled the gas, became violent, scuffled with others, tripped and fell. The fall subdued him, and he resumed his seat. Later, someone noticed a pool of blood beneath Cooley’s seat, which was found to be coming from a deep cut on his leg, which Cooley did not feel until some time later when the gas wore off. His friend, Horace Wells, was a dentist who immediately recognized the value of this for dental procedures, and tested it immediately on himself, asking a fellow dentist to extract one of Wells’ decayed molars after Wells had inhaled nitrous. The procedure went smoothly on the unconscious Wells, who later reported having been completely unaware of the operation.

Our second example comes from astronomy. James Christy was studying the orbit of Pluto. He went to place a photographic image of Pluto on a machine called the Star Scan. As he did so, he noticed that the image was elongated, not spherical. He was about to discard the image when the machine malfunctioned right at that moment. He called in a technician to fix the machine, who asked that Christy stand by to help. While waiting for the technician, Christy studied the photo he thought was in error. He decided to search for earlier photos of Pluto. He first one he came upon was labeled “Pluto image. Elongated. Plate no good. Reject”. Continued archive searching turned up 6 more recent images, all showing the same bulge. He studied this some more and later discovered that Pluto had a moon, whose nearness to Pluto prevented a clear separation. Without the broken Star Machine and subsequent extra time to consider the image, the discovery of Pluto’s moon would have happened much later.

Velcro (modeled on cockleburs), Teflon (created initially because of a leaky gas valve), vulcanized rubber (the result of accidentally placing a glob of sulfured rubber on a wood stove), the Pap smear and the relation of abnormal nuclear structure to cancer, the discovery of aspartame by James Schlatter and his accidental licking of his hand (!!), and the development of safety glass by Edouard Benedictus after a reaction vessel with a dried film of collodion on the inside refused to shatter when broken… these are a few of the examples of chance playing a role in the discovery of what became a useful and important product or insight. We’ll look at a few more in the next posting.

I’ve had numerous serendipitous experiences, but here’s my fave: in the 1980’s I was working with some academics at Duke University studying the testicular toxicity of a neurotoxicant, tri-o-cresyl phosphate. This compound also was toxic to the seminiferous tubules in the testis. My collaborators were puzzled by the elevated levels of a relatively unstable active metabolite in the testis. When I found out that this metabolite was produced by cytochrome P450 in the liver, I immediately suspected that the steroidogenic P450 in the testicular Leydig cells were creating this metabolite and poisoning the adjacent seminiferous tubules. There was no precedent for this at that time.

It took almost 2 years’ worth of work to prove this hypothesis, but we did, and it became one of the first examples of toxicant activation in the testes. The key to that insight was being around folks who knew about this compound and its metabolism, and bringing my knowledge of unique testis biology, which they lacked.

So let me hear from you: do you have an example of serendipity in your past? A chance meeting in a public place which led to a happy marriage?, an off-the-cuff remark at a meeting which led to experiments which led to an improvement or a product (or a better job!)?, a mistake in the lab which was not discarded but analyzed and proved to be useful in some other reactions?, or perhaps a broken piece of machinery or equipment which led to something good. Wouldn’t it be fun if we could create a serendipity-enhancing environment here??

Data already collected on these drugs will be handed over to the researchers who will be able to begin rapidly testing them in human trials since safety studies have already been undertaken.  The end goal is to speed the pace at which drug discoveries are converted into better health outcomes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/collaboration-seeks-to-find-new-uses-for-failed-drugs/2012/05/03/gIQAA81D0T_story.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303877604577382392599422600.html?mod=ITP_pageone_1

I’ve long been a proponent of keeping a personal health record (PHR). A while back, I wrote about health information and also about mobile health technology, but a personal health record is different. It’s the word personal. So personal — that it’s important to keep it confidential. Yet we must be willing to share it with our health care providers and caregivers in order to truly improve our quality of life and healthcare outcomes.

According to the Markle Foundation, PHRs “…enable people to collect, view, manage, or share copies of their health information or transactions electronically.” We focus on you, the human being empowered to make decisions about you or your loved one’s healthcare.

In the California Healthcare Foundation’s ihealth report Perspectives on the Future of Personal Health Records several perspectives are considered. In particular, I was intrigued by the consumer point of view. David Lansky PhD, having experienced health issues with a need for continual monitoring, outlines the following preferred attributes of a personal health record:

1. Include personal health information that a clinician would need in order to provide treatment, including medical history, medications, past treatments, allergies, and advance directives (e.g. living will, healthcare proxy, etc.)
2. A way to monitor health status, such as exercise habits and biological indicators. This would include cholesterol level, weight, and blood pressure
3. Reduce the burdensome paperwork when utilizing the healthcare system, meaning information is at hand and could interact electronically with the health care provider
4. Able to help evaluate physicians based on personal philosophies and preferences. Lansky would like a PHR that can “talk to the internet and help me find the right providers”.
5. Inform about costs, expenses and insurance reimbursements, and
6. Keep information private and secure, yet be able to port this information to the health care providers he trusts.

Not all of these attributes are currently available, but we really must work towards achieving them if we are to make a difference in health care delivery. We really cannot solely rely on our current healthcare providers to keep track of all our medications, which vaccines we’ve received, and what sicknesses we’ve had. Empowered patients and caregivers making their healthcare decisions together with their doctors is the key to tipping the needle in improving outcomes and quality of care. A PHR is an important component to help enable this.

Who better to know what’s important for our own healthcare, but us? It’s personal.  For more information please visit www.myPHR.com

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HumanTECH: Connecting People with Science