Re: history books

[Guest guest]

Thanks for the book reviews. I may take a look at the good ones. I

just read a brief history of Oldstone's work, written by himself:

http://tinyurl.com/2vjcco

He's a legend in viral immunology. He said he'd been inspired by

Microbe Hunters and Rats, Lice and History. I read the latter years

ago and liked it a lot. I'll avoid Microbe Hunters, since you gave

it a thumbs down.

Oldstone's brief autobiography above is interesting in places. He's

worked with LCMV. When mice are infected in utero or neonatally,

the virus sets up a persistent infection and for a time

(historically) it appeared that the virus managed not to provoke a

humoral response. Oldstone showed however that antibodies were

produced, but they are complexed with the virus. I've wondered

about this, and why other infections, by contrast, can be detected

by ELISA. Unfortunately, he doesn't discuss the factors that

influence this. Some LLMDs claim that anti-borrelia antibodies are

difficult to detect because they are complexed with borrelia and I'm

pretty sure that that rationale can be ultimately traced back to

Oldstone's work. The Ab-LCMV complexes cause glomerular nephritis

and arteritis in these persitantly infected mice--which I did not

know. He says these findings can be extended to other pathogens,

like HBV, HIV, CMV and EBV, though he didn't give citations for

this, and commercial ELISAs are available to detect anti-HIV and

anti-HBV antibodies (if not the others), so I'm not sure if the

pathogen-detectors are adding some sort of detergent to their

cocktails to circumvent this problem, or what.

Another interesting aspect of LCMV that he describes is the

inoculation of in utero or neonatal mice with a strain that adult

mice can clear after an acute phase. The young mice grow up to

tolerate the virus for the most part--a persistent infection. Virus

isolated from the brain retain the parental phenotype, but virus

recovered from the lymphoid organs is different--it's mutated.

Apparently when adult mice are challenged with the mutated virus,

the virus establishes a persistent infection, even though the parent

virus can only establish an acute infection.

Relating to your post on TGFb, with a reference to IL-10, he says

that in the mice infected as neonates or in utero, the mutant

viruses that arise in the lymphoid organs manage to infect about

~70% of the DCs, up from ~8% with the parent strain. The virus

appears to pervert the DCs, coercing them into pumping out IL-10,

which probably explains why the anti-LCMV T cells are

phenotypically " exhausted " (sitting down on the job). When such

mice are treated with antibody against IL-10, the T cells become

responsive, and the mice clear the virus. What I'd like to know is

if the LCMV-infected, IL-10-producing DCs make the mice vulnerable

to coinfection.

Viral immunology doesn't get more mainstream than Dr. Oldstone. But

just try to find an appreciation for, or interest in, such pathogen

Judo in the clinic.

Matt

>

> I recently read some books on the history of medicine and research.

[Guest guest]

On Sun, Mar 25, 2007 at 03:33:02PM -0000, wrote:

>_The white death: a history of tuberculosis_. This is the best history

>of anything I've ever read. It's impossibly exploratory and well

>researched, nicely written, and devoid of any repetition or hazy

>abstraction. It has a fair amount to teach about the history of

>medicine and research that really helps put the modern scene in

>perspective. I also learned some new stuff about TB, not surprisingly.

>Dormandy has some other books out too. He's clearly awesome.

I've just finished reading this book. I'm not going to go as far as

in calling it " the best history of anything I've ever read " -- for me

that's still Macaulay's _History of England_ -- but it's quite good. It

had never crossed my mind that so many authors of dismal, boring books

(which are nevertheless widely renowned, and often inflicted on students)

actually might have a good excuse for writing as they did -- an excuse

like, say, being in the process of dying from tuberculosis. But that was

exactly the case for many of them: Chekhov, Kafka, Orwell... I started

out wondering what the author meant by calling people's writings

" tuberculous " -- it seemed almost a joke -- but by the end of the book it

was all too clear.

--

Norman Yarvin http://yarchive.net

[Guest guest]

> I've just finished reading this book. I'm not going to go as far

as

> in calling it " the best history of anything I've ever read " -- for

Well you know me... a little labile... ... never read MacCauley

myself.

I've also never read those three artists (except for _Animal Farm_ in

a middle school class). Nor have I really been attracted to read much

of Keats or any other english Romantics (I'll take Blake instead).

But I love Nietzsche, who was clearly very ill with something

(syphilis?), and Kierkegaard, who probably was markedly OCD and

depressed. They still managed to write exalting stuff. If you read

Nietzsche's letters though, all he did was moan about lonliness,

depression, and illness, at least up through the mid 1880s, I forget

exactly when, by which time he might already have been coming loose.

So he managed his best stuff (Book IV of Gay Science, at least, and

maybe Beyond Good and Evil) while apparantly very sick and morose at

most times.

I'd also never run into the tubercular painters Dormandy reveres,

Modigliani and Kirchner. I googled a few dozen Modiglianis and liked

a handful, but most of them seemed like defeatist bunk; likewise all

the Kirchners I found... my reaction was apparantly something like

yours to Kafka and Checkov. My favorite painter, Kokoschka, did some

pretty cool portraits at a TB sanatorium, but appears to have been

pretty well himself as far as I know.

Dormandy buys the whole spes phthisica idea along with associated

inspiration and insight - which I call secret hectic penetrating

energy, and only believe in after drinking a beer or during a little

manic kick. IMO, it's hard to know whether that really exists so

much. Illness is isolating, forcing people to focus on intellectual

and artistic activity even more than they would have wanted to

already, as Nietzsche noted. This non-elective discipline could be

more important than any febrile/hectic nexuses or epiphanies that

could procede from illness in a direct phsyiological way. Did mental

illness actually reveal the starry night to Van Gogh directly, or

just make him too sullen to carouse, such that when the starry night

showed up he happened to be the guy sitting around at home to see it

in a receptive solitude?

That said, I do suspect that aspects of inflammatory illness,

particularly bipolarity (frank or subclinical), can turn people

towards art or philosophy in another way - they know from their own

physiological experiences that a more exalted world really can exist,

but is usually inaccessible except by memory and representation, so

they turn more toward the imagination. And third, maybe I do really

believe in a *little bit* of secret hectic penetrating energy...

Interestingly and semi-relatedly, Nietzsche believed that

even " medically normal " people had widely varying degrees of

*phsyiological* vigor. Underconcerned with evidence and argumentation

as usual, Nietzsche didn't offer any for the idea, and there isn't

much objective evidence for it today... but it's striking that in the

post-Freudian world this idea doesn't even seem to really be even

considered in the first place. (Except in certain limited ways, such

as the growing acknowledgement that addiction might often stem

substantially from phsyiology.)

Not that you can *fully* distinguish psyche from physiology without

solving the philosophical mind-body problem (...which you can't), and

also knowing all about the scientifically-explorable connections and

causalities running from one's thought/experience to one's

neurophysiology.

[Guest guest]

On Tue, May 01, 2007 at 04:16:01PM -0000, wrote:

>

>

>> I've just finished reading this book. I'm not going to go as far as

>> in calling it " the best history of anything I've ever read " -- for

>

>Well you know me... a little labile... ... never read MacCauley

>myself.

Few people have, these days. It's far too positive a book to resonate

much with today's attitudes.

>I've also never read those three artists (except for _Animal Farm_ in

>a middle school class).

Orwell's _The Road to Wigan Pier_ is not bad. But it was written before

he became seriously ill. And even in that book, he's trying to do what

Dormandy correctly says is not a good idea: to write about the condition

of the lower classes without mentioning tuberculosis.

>Dormandy buys the whole spes phthisica idea along with associated

>inspiration and insight - which I call secret hectic penetrating

>energy, and only believe in after drinking a beer or during a little

>manic kick. IMO, it's hard to know whether that really exists so

>much.

I've seen much worse versions of that than Dormandy's. Dormandy doesn't

try to push the claim that these people were better writers (or painters

or poets) with tuberculosis than they would have been without it. Even

though I generally dislike their products, I'm partly willing to buy into

the idea that if they could do such things while seriously ill, they'd

have been capable of real greatness if healthy. (But partly I think

these tuberculous artists and writers are just overrated, since they had

an advantage when it came to criticism: the advantage of being dead.

It's easier to praise the dead than to praise the living.)

As for inspiration, Edison had it right: innovation is 1% inspiration and

99% perspiration. The trouble with bright ideas is that most of them

don't work out. But a desperately ill intellectual is likely to ignore

that, and just inflict his bright ideas on the world without testing them

first.