A friend of my son’s was visiting us lately and told a story about a friend of her family’s in Connecticut who has inappropriate intense emotional responses: a car speeding ahead on the highway and then turning back into his lane too soon, or someone unexpectedly pulling out of a side road, but not dangerously so. His response is so extreme that he often has to pull over to the side of the road to calm down. He compares the experience to what he went through back in the Vietnamese War when he feared for his life under fire in the jungle or to his horror when a soldier standing next to him, his friend, was instantly killed by a sniper’s bullet to the face. The experience of this Vietnam vet is increasingly being encountered by soldiers returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and a great deal of effort has been extended in understanding its causes.

            The United States National Institutes of Health describes “post traumatic stress disorder,” PTSD, as a chronic anxiety leading to persistently reliving a traumatic experience through nightmares and flashbacks that may seem real. These experiences can certainly arise from being in battle but also can find their source in other traumatic events such as assault, rape, child abuse and even traffic accidents. What we today term PTSD had been known by other names. It was called Soldier’s Heart in the US Civil War and since then, has gone by such names as Shell Shock, Battle Fatigue and Post-Vietnam Syndrome.

            When I was a kid, people used to put down trouble-causing-feelings by saying “it’s all in your head” - meaning get rid of it - get over it - stop being so weak. Many still feel that way but science has advanced with machines that can carry out brain imaging, brain scans, which actually see what is going on in your head, and the results have much to say about PTSD. It turns out that “it’s all in your head” is accurate but just as a broken leg can not be healed by simply wishing it away or by simply coming up with the will power to overcome the break, brain imaging shows that PTSD is just as much a physical phenomenon. The web site of “National Defense and the Canadian Forces” puts it this way: “PTSD, one of the operational stress injuries, is a legitimate medical condition, like any other affecting the human body.”

            Brain scans reveal a great deal. Here’s just one example. Of almost two hundred and fifty Vietnam vets, some of whom had sustained brain injuries, researchers found that PTSD did not occur in vets who had certain kinds of brain injuries, specifically to the amygdala, an almond shaped region buried deep in the brain that is “critically involved in computing the emotional significance of events.” Another part of the brain, which if damaged, reduces suffering from PTSD sits right over your forehead, the prefrontal cortex, which “is involved in “executive functions,” such as working memory, decision-making, planning and judgment.” So we have between these two regions the connection between the rational, seeing what has happened and what to do about it, and the emotional, figuring out how to feel about what is happening. Damage the amygdala or prefrontal cortex regions and you do quite a bit of damage to a person’s personality with the “advantage” of also damaging the intense feelings called up in the PTSD syndrome or even averting PTSD entirely if the amygdala takes the hit.

            The amygdala and prefrontal cortex regions, apparently of great importance to the suffering of too many soldiers returning from war, have turned out to have a great deal to do with teenage behavior. The same kinds of brain scans used to study PTSD have revealed that the teenage brain is very much a work in progress. As any parent can tell you, teenagers are a difficult bunch; undergoing changes in their behavior as they grow older that are very complicated and not easily understood. Among these changes is increased maturation and growth of the prefrontal cortex, which doesn’t gain its full power over behavior until early adulthood, 23-30 years old. In the teenage years more importance is given to the amygdala, which grows in size and becomes more active, leading to rash and emotional behavior, giving less importance to the monitoring functions, the supervision of the prefrontal cortex.

            From what we just learned about PTSD and teenage brain development, it seems possible that what would normally be nothing much, a bump in life’s path, may remind us of horrifying wartime experiences causing our behavior to spin out of control. We come under the influence of that over stimulated almond shaped region deep within our brains, to the unmonitored emotional outbursts sometimes exhibited by teenagers. We are wounded but without appearing to be damaged by the bombs and bullets and death, which once surrounded us in war.

Mark M. Green (w12thstreet@gmail.com) is a member of the Canadian Science Writers Association who lives in New York City and South West Margaree. Earlier columns can be found at http://blogs.poly.edu/markgreen. 

            One -When something about the environment appears in Chemical and Engineering News, the trade magazine of the American Chemical Society, and also gets a segment on the McNeil-Lehr News-Hour on public television, the most respected news source in the USA, you can figure this is potentially serious. It turns out that traces of the pharmaceuticals we use to treat our various maladies, both physical and mental, end up in our water supplies. The amounts are minute, in the level of parts per trillion, that is, in a gross approximation, for every trillion water molecules there may be several molecules of each kind of drug.  Sounds like not much but I gave the problem to my high school-age going daughter who figured out that this amounts to approximately several drug molecules in every 8×10^-10 ounces of water, which is 0.0000000008 ounces of water or anything made of water such as beer, or you name it. What drugs are they talking about: 17α-ethinylestradiol (birth control); carbamazepine (anticonvulsant and mood stabilizer); diclofenac (analgesic directed to reducing pain from arthritis and menstrual cramps); fluoxetine (Prozac, which is an antidepressant or mood elevator), are only a few of many examples of what has been found.

            Well, why worry about such small amounts until, among other scientists, Karen Kidd, a professor at the Canadian Rivers Institute at the University of New Brunswick, started conducting experiments on what minute amounts of one of the drugs listed above, the birth control drug, do to fish. Apparently male fathead minnows become feminized and, in a manner of speaking, lose interest in female fish and even start producing eggs themselves and, over a short period of time, the fish all but disappeared from a lake with a concentration of the 17α-ethinylestradiol in the range of a few parts per trillion. This is only one example among many species, other than fish, gathered by scientists increasingly interested in this area of research.

            It turns out that science knows almost nothing about the effect of such small amounts of drugs on human beings. Some, but not I, may be reassured by the words of a senior vice president with the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, Ken Johnson, quoted in a balanced article on the subject in the February 25, 2008 issue of Chemical and Engineering News: “Studies conducted to date suggest that it is highly unlikely that the quantities of pharmaceuticals detected in the environment would be harmful to human health.”  While this view may not be justified, you can’t blame the drug industry for the problem. The stuff gets in the water after passing through our bodies or when we carelessly discard the contents of old bottles of drugs in the toilet or down the drain.

            The connection to what has been called “drug pollution,” has an interesting connection to homeopathic medicine, in which physiologically active substances are diluted so that a patient gets only minute amounts, which are then claimed to affect bodily functions and disease. I typed in Homeopathy on Google and got 5, 890, 000 hits with claims ranging from calling homeopathy complete nonsense to claims that it is a unique and revolutionary alternative medicine. My wife strongly believes in it as do a significant percentage of MDs in Europe. If the homeopathic method of using microdoses is actually efficacious, then we certainly should begin to worry about all the physiologically active substances increasingly found in our water supplies at concentrations similar to homeopathic drugs.

            Two - Let’s now turn to a more cheerful subject - how to be healthy. According to research at the University of Michigan, if both people in a married couple suppress their anger, even if they are angry for justifiable reasons, their mortality rate is far higher than people who do not, as we say, bottle it up. Another researcher is quoted in the February 1, 2008 issue of Science magazine as saying: “the data add weight to the growing evidence that poor emotional housecleaning has health consequences in marriage.” This view is reinforced by a web headline from a research finding published in Science in December, 2005: “Love is an Open Wound,” expressing the research finding that physical injuries of the couples in unhappy marriages take longer to heal.  I remember many years ago, around the time I proposed marriage, hearing that married men lived longer. I didn’t realize the chance I was taking in not being able to know ahead of time how happy my marriage had to be.

            Three - Now how about a little politics: in work that is highly regarded by public policy experts, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University after gathering data on 15,000 college students has concluded that self-described liberals and conservatives although measuring identically on grades and other characteristics of their studies, nevertheless differ in one key measure. While the conservative leaning students “are more oriented toward raising families and making money,” the liberal leaning students were far more likely to pursue Ph.D. degrees with the claim that liberals “placed higher values on creativity.” I wonder what Bill Gates’ politics are? He dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft.

Mark M. Green (w12thstreet@gmail.com) is a member of the Canadian Science Writers Association who lives in New York City and South West Margaree. Earlier columns can be found at http://blogs.poly.edu/markgreen. 

Most of us live on the electric grid and simply plug in and pay the fare. Some of us live off the grid and have waterfalls nearby to turn our own turbines and make our own power. Some of us, however, live near the tops of mountains, also off the grid but far from waterfalls. You have the choice of hauling buckets of loonies to the nearest gas station and returning with buckets of gasoline to your mountain lair to burn up in order to run a generator. On the other hand you could take a lesson from those very few who ever spent time in a space ship, maybe a satellite orbiting the earth or on the way to the moon or perhaps to a space station. Although there are no water falls or fossil fuels to make electricity, there is plenty of sunshine. No clouds or light scattering pollution around to stop that copious flow of photons, which carry the sunlight’s energy. It was in outer space that people first got serious about getting electricity from light.

Sun light ranges in wavelengths from the ultra-violet, which causes our skin to darken, through the visible region, which give us our sight, and on to the infra-red, the wavelengths that warm the earth. Everything we eat has its source in the ability of plants to use some of the wavelengths of sunlight to capture carbon dioxide and water to make glucose. The critical step in this process, called photosynthesis, uses light from the sun, through a series of complex biochemical steps, to remove electrons from water. These electrons allow the capture of the carbon dioxide to synthesize glucose. Sunlight + 6CO₂ + 6H₂O = C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂.

Electrons are the stuff of electricity, hence the name. And electrons are also what the world is made of. Every grain of sand is full of electrons. Everything is made of electrons together with other unimaginably small particles, which together constitute all the elements in that periodic table you learned about in school. But it’s that grain of sand that’s going to save the guy on the mountain from hauling all those loonies to town to trade for gasoline. Sand is made from the elements silicon and oxygen. In fact most of the crust of the earth is made from silicon and oxygen. Silicon, symbol Si, exists in sand in a network of atoms in which each Si is surrounded by four oxygen atoms, so that the general formula for sand is SiO₂. If we could use some of those electrons in sand to make electricity a great deal of work could be done. But the elements in sand hold their electrons too tightly to be wrenched free by the sun’s energy. However, if the oxygen is removed from sand to obtain pure silicon, which can be accomplished by heating sand to very high temperatures with charcoal, then we have a substance in which the electrons can be made into electricity using sunlight.

Electrons belong to the world of quantum mechanics, a world sort of like “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Both the book and the physics were created around the same time, in the late nineteenth century and in both nothing is what it seems. Although electrons, which are estimated to weigh about 10^-31 kilograms each, cannot be described in terms that make sense to the world we are familiar with, we know how many of them there are in each kind of chemical element. Each silicon atom, if it be in sand or pure silicon, has fourteen electrons surrounding the nucleus of the atom, four of which are involved in connecting the Si atoms to four surrounding oxygen atoms in sand or to four surrounding silicon atoms in the network of pure silicon.

But the electrons in pure silicon are still held too tightly to use the sun’s energy to get them to make electricity. To accomplish the objective, a trick is used called doping. Whereas silicon has four electrons available for its connections to other atoms, phosphorus has five electrons. When phosphorus is added in small amounts to the otherwise pure silicon only four of phosphorus’ five electrons are used to fit into the silicon network. Boron atoms on the contrary only have three electrons available for connections to other atoms so that when boron atoms are added to pure silicon they make holes where electrons are missing. These so-called holes in the boron doped area then allow some of the extra electrons in the phosphorus doped area to move about causing adjacent areas of the silicon network to be positively and negatively charged, like a battery. Movement of electrons stops at this point until light shines on the silicon network, which energizes the electrons to continue to jump from one kind of doped region to another. With the proper conducting wires attached an electric current is generated creating a solar cell.

Solar cells are serious business not only for the man on the mountain or others off the grid but as well for the energy needs of the world. Sun generated electricity, photovoltaics, is becoming a very important enterprise with large corporations created to advance the field. Huge amounts of money are pouring into this technology causing an inexorable march for solar generated electricity to become as cost efficient as electricity generated from fossil fuels. These corporations want to collect from us when we plug into their grid or sell us solar cells for our homes to reduce the fare we pay to the grid. Check the web and the stock market for “First Solar” for the high end of the business and the web under “Konarka” for the innovative new ideas.

What I’ll have to save for another column is the irony that modern gasoline could not be produced without also using a silicon based material. But that’s another story about silicon, the second most abundant element in the earth’s crust after oxygen.

Mark M. Green (w12thstreet@gmail.com) is a member of the Canadian Science Writers Association who lives in New York City and South West Margaree. Earlier columns can be found at http://blogs.poly.edu/markgreen.

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            Imagine secret police, working in pairs as they always do, telling you that if you did not spy on a neighbor, about whom they were suspicious, and report the neighbors activities, that you would be considered to have antigovernment views meaning that you could not raise your two children in a proper socialist manner. Imagine you have heard of parents who had been sent to labor camps and to work in mines, their children taken from them - you might well take such threats seriously.

            Arnost and Ruth Reiser had long been under suspicion by the Czechoslovak authorities. Although not a victim of the several purges in the early 1950s, Professor Reiser was known to have been friends with several people who had been purged and moreover, although given the opportunity, he had never joined the “Party.”  The Reisers were suspected of harboring dangerous views. Perhaps the secret police even imagined that Arnost and Ruth’s escaping from the gas chambers in Auschwitz during World War II was not because they were useful (slave) laborers to their captors, which they were. In the twisted minds of these secret police they might have imagined that Ruth and Arnost, who had met in the camps, somehow held anticommunist views, and therefore were looked on favorably by the Nazis.  

                Remarkably in the face of this suspicion by the authorities, but likely helped by the incompetence of the Soviet enforced regime in Czechoslovakia, Arnost and Ruth were able to pass through a sieve of multiple assurances by all kinds of “authentic” communist authorities and neighborhood groups and police, meant to filter out people such as themselves. Passing through this multiple filtering process, they were given papers allowing them to take a vacation trip out of the country. The first phase of their plan to escape was in place.

            The last words Arnost Reiser heard while he was still under communist control and after watching Ruth and his son Jan, a moment before, jump from the East German vacation ship “Seebad Albeck,” was “Ja was ist den de los.” Arnost then twisted away from the man suddenly grabbing his jacket and he, holding his infant son Paul, jumped into the cold North Sea. Paul was awakened suddenly by the shock of the cold ocean water and the baby’s shriek was the only sound heard as everyone on the ship was startled into silence. Arnost, with his infant son in his arms, seeing Ruth and Jan ahead of him approaching the dock at Gedser, began swimming the one hundred meters to freedom. The East German guards were hesitant to fire their weapons, perhaps from their humanity, but maybe also because the ship was in Danish waters and that Danes were watching all this on the nearby dock, looking directly at them and their weapons.

            Arnost Reiser had been professor of physical chemistry in the Technical University in Prague and was known by certain influential scientists in England. In this way the family was able to immigrate from their refugee status in Denmark to eventually become English citizens. Shortly after arriving in England in 1960, Dr Reiser was hired at the Eastman Kodak Company working on imaging technology where he remained for many years, rising to a distinguished position for his accomplishments. On retiring from Kodak, nearly 25 years ago, he moved to the United States accepting an offer to organize an institute for exploring the chemistry responsible for microlithography. Lithography is a rather important technology. Google the word and come up with over two and one half million hits. I recommend the Wikipedia web site for an overview of lithography, and to discover that this basic printing technology in a microscopic form, microlithography, is responsible for the manufacture of the chips in our computers - important stuff.

            The original chemical process that has evolved to produce computer chips started in the 1950s at a chemical company in Wiesbaden, Germany with an accidental observation of what happened to a chemical mixture on exposure to sunlight. The areas on a specially made film exposed to the light could be dissolved away (become soluble) from the rest of the film, which would not be affected. An image could therefore be formed by controlling the parts of the film to be exposed, just as an image is formed in photography by exposing silver salts to light, which are then changed while leaving the rest of the film unaffected. But this new process allowed imaging technologies not possible with photography.  

            For forty years, until Professor Reiser’s investigations, the light in this new process was thought to cause a chemical reaction that released an acid substance, which was thought to be responsible for making the light-exposed film soluble. Gradually, it was discovered that controlling, with great precision, where the light shone on the film one could form the microscopic lines on a chip, which directs the flow of electrons that control a computer.

            Reiser’s investigations showed that the long believed mechanism of what the light was doing could not be correct. Instead he realized that the area exposed to the light underwent a chemical reaction that gave off a great deal of heat, and it was the heat that caused the film to become soluble. He showed that the reason behind the solubility was that the heat disrupted a kind of chemical interaction that is the most important in the molecules that are responsible for life - but here encountered in a system that has nothing to do with biology. How beautiful.

            Professor Reiser published his results showing that the film production could be made simpler by allowing the light to bring in the necessary heat directly - using lasers and infra-red light, the light that carries the warmth of the sun’s rays.  Large corporations, Kodak-Polychrome, Agfa, Fuji and Mitsubishi, immediately jumped on the discovery and fought each other in their claim to priority. This new method of lithography is now a multibillion dollar industry while this mild mannered soon to be eighty eight year-old scientist sits quietly in the office at the Polytechnic University among his books thinking of new wonders beyond the imagination of the rest of us, that is, until he returns home to Ruth’s dinners - those remarkable Reisers.

Mark M. Green (w12thstreet@gmail.com) is a member of the Canadian Science Writers Association who lives in New York City and South West Margaree. Earlier columns can be found at http://blogs.poly.edu/markgreen.

I love Inverness, I love her bones, her beautiful sea shore and small homes strung along the streets rising from the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. I love her resurrection from the coal blackened town I never knew but easily imagine from Frank MacDonald’s “Forest for Calum.” I love that boardwalk. I love the sandy beaches, the shallow, safe gulf waters, surprisingly warm for a place so far north. I love the potential in this town. So what’s my problem because there has to be a problem, otherwise why write this piece? There’s no news in happiness, as Tolstoy taught us in Anna Karenina with his famous opening shot: “Happy families are all alike.” Last night was not the first time I was reminded Inverness and I were not a happy family, that I have a problem with Inverness. Three of us rode into Inverness on 19 from the direction of Mabou, from one of those parties filled with the poetry of a home full of musicians and a roaring fire made of all that wood cleared during the previous summer and fall. The warmth of Cape Breton filled us with a feeling that all is well in the world on such a snow capped winter night, still with stars to be shortly covered over by yet another storm covering us with more of that beautiful whiteness. What could be wrong? The answer for me is street lights.

Did you know that a Wikipedia web site looked up under “Street Lighting” on Google informs its readers that street lights were first introduced in the Arab Empire, by Saracens? I didn’t. If you have a scholarly bent you can find some interesting stuff on that site but here’s something I found, which I think is directed to Inverness and that caused a rueful nodding of my head and a quiet yes o’ yes: “A misconception is that installing street lights will automatically make streets safer and reduce crime, so political pressure can be a major factor in installation of street lights. Untrained officials often assume that if some is good, more must be better, and install the brightest lights possible.”

Now, I’m a from away so what do I know of local politics, much less local political pressure but I have my suspicions about that quote from Wikipedia connecting politics and street lighting. It may be right on the mark. Do I need to put it in bold caps to say that the street lights in Inverness are ugly and dangerous. Riding into town with those street lights on gives a feeling of entering a zone where the brightest possible lights were necessary to illuminate a potential prison break. Maybe that’s a good idea but prison lights are designed for the use of guards who stand in towers high off the ground and anyway, are people really going to be stopped from escaping to Alberta this way. The lights are blinding when you drive around in Inverness at night. All one can see are the lights and as soon as your eye goes back to the road or the sidewalk it is impossible to adjust and all is black. Watch out pedestrian; be aware that the drivers of those cars coming down the main street of Inverness are temporarily blinded. It’s time for another quote from that Wikipedia site about the danger of street lights: “The loss of night vision because of the accommodation reflex of drivers’ eyes is the greatest danger. As drivers emerge from an unlighted area into a pool of light from a street light their pupils quickly constrict to adjust to the brighter light, but as they leave the pool of light the dilation of their pupils to adjust to the dimmer light is much slower, so they are driving with impaired vision. As a person gets older the eye’s recovery speed gets slower, so driving time and distance under impaired vision increases.” I couldn’t say it better. That is what happened to me last night and happens every time I have entered Inverness since those wretched lights (in my opinion) were installed.

So how about it local politicians, how about turning down the wattage and maybe even considering some color variation. It might be worth finding out how people feel about living in a nightly prison of light.

Mark M. Green (w12thstreet@gmail.com) is a member of the Canadian Science Writers Association who lives in New York City and South West Margaree. Earlier “Science from Away” columns can be found at http://blogs.poly.edu/markgreen

There is a large separation between intelligence and wisdom, between the power given by scientific research and the use of this power. Bacterial infections have been a never ending scourge of human existence, a scourge that science gave us the power to greatly reduce with the discovery of the fact that bacteria produce chemicals that can kill each other. I remember as a young chemist just out of college, in my first job in 1958, on Flushing Avenue in Brooklyn, New York City, at Pfizer (the company that played a critical role in large scale production of penicillin during and after World War II) hearing of the soil samples brought back from all around the world. Anyone who worked for the company or was related to someone who worked for the company and who traveled to far off places was asked to bring back soil. The soil was investigated for any antibiotics produced by the huge numbers of bacterial species present - more bacteria in a gram of soil than all the people on earth. It made sense that the struggle in this crowded corner of life must produce some way for the bacteria to survive, one bacterial species against another - chemical warfare among the microbes.

Many important antibiotics have been discovered by investigation of bacteria in soil including streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis. This accomplishment, and in fact the very word antibiotic was coined by a Nobel Prize winning scientist who was born in Ukraine in 1888, Selman Abraham Waksman, who wrote in his autobiography talking about Ukraine, “The odor of the black soil so filled my lungs I could never forget it.” Waksman’s grave stone in Woods Hole, Massachusetts bore the inscription, from the Old Testament Book of Isaiah, carved in both Hebrew and English stating, “The earth will open and bring forth salvation”. Waksman wrote a book while still in his 30s, “Principles of Soil Microbiology,” dedicated to the fecundity of soil. Many important antibiotics were discovered in Waksman’s own laboratory at Rutgers University and in the pharmaceutical companies that followed his ideas about the importance of investigating soil.

A revolution in the treatment of disease was taking place in the 1940s. At the same time as Waksman’s work, Fleming, Florey and Chain were transforming Fleming’s observations about a bacteria killing mold into the miracle of penicillin. The brilliant scientific efforts pioneered by Alexander Fleming and Selman Waksman, demonstrating the ability to fight off bacterial infections using nature’s own combative mechanisms against bacteria, opened a new realm in the battle against bacterial disease. But this is a battle that we are now in danger of losing by not taking account of the warning of many scientists, expressed by Fleming in 1945. He warned that misuse of penicillin could lead to the propagation of mutant forms of bacteria that would resist the new miracle drug and by extension, all antibiotics. The truth of this insight was seen immediately in pathogenic bacteria resistant to penicillin, which appeared in the 1940s soon after penicillin was introduced. One statistic I saw was that by 1952 three fifths of all staph infections were resistant to penicillin! Let’s see now what has gone wrong - how have we not had the wisdom to follow the great man’s sage advice.

Fleming was advising all of us to use antibiotics only when necessary to fight bacterial infection - simple, obvious, but very difficult advice to follow. Many of us are guilty when we demand an antibiotic from our doctor without knowing if a bacterial infection is involved. Dosing ourselves and our children with antibiotics sets up biological experiments to discover bacteria that are resistant to the antibiotic, bacteria that even if not disease causing can pass on their resistance to other bacteria that are dangerous. Statistics show that 31 million Americans visit doctors for sinus infections with many receiving antibiotics although these infections are often caused by viral infections, which are not treatable with antibiotics. Even those sinus infections caused by bacteria are often not susceptible to antibiotics because the drug cannot reach the site of infection. Recent experiments in England show that administering antibiotics or not as evidenced by control experiments leads to no faster relief from acute sinusitis.

One of the most distinguished medical facilities in the world, the Mayo Clinic, informs us that antibiotic resistance “is the result of decades of excessive and unnecessary antibiotic use in humans.” They go on to say that “every year in the United States, doctors write an estimated 50 million antibiotic prescriptions for viral illnesses for which antibiotics offer no benefit.” And even when antibiotics are called for by a bacterial infection, how many of us have not used the entire prescription once the symptoms abate, saving some for a later day, leaving the most resistant bacteria to live and pass on their resistance to their progeny and to other species of bacteria.

This is only the top of the iceberg of misuse of antibiotics. All over the world, antibiotics are available without a prescription. In China I can testify that antibiotics are available on the shelf of the college store at Peking University - a situation I have learned also exists in many stores in the United States. Type into Google: antibiotics without prescription. I got 222,000 hits. Though I only looked into a handful of them, it is clear that antibiotics without prescriptions are readily available on the web.

Science gave us the power to conquer bacterial disease. But we, meaning the medical profession, their patients, and commerce profiting from antibiotics, have not used that power in a wise manner. We’ll see more about this in the use of antibiotics in sub-therapeutic amounts for farm animals - a battle some ascribe to the conflict between money, politics and science. Let’s keep that for next month, part 3 on antibiotic resistance.

Mark M. Green (w12thstreet@gmail.com) is a member of the Canadian Science Writers Association who lives in New York City and South West Margaree. Earlier “Science from Away” columns can be found at http://blogs.poly.edu/markgreen

The ability to defeat disease causing bacteria began in earnest with sulfur-based antimicrobial drugs introduced in 1935 based on work carried out by industrial chemists in Germany. The best demonstration of the advent of this new weapon against disease was demonstrated by the change in maternal mortality in the mid-1930s. Historically, in the range of 500 mothers died for every 100,000 births. And this does not include a critical footnote to this statistic in the mid-nineteenth century. Of those women who gave birth in hospitals, about 30% died from what was called child-bed fever, puerperal fever. A Hungarian physician, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, working in Germany in the mid-1800s noticed that the death rate was much higher in maternity wards where medical students worked than where mid-wives worked and he correctly associated what he saw with the dirty hands of the medical students, hands that had worked in dissecting rooms on corpses. Dr. Semmelweis, who is now regarded as a prophet in medical schools, was called a charlatan for advising doctors to wash their hands. Eventually, but ironically, only after his own death from bacterial infection, did his views become widely accepted, views said to have influenced Joseph Lister (Oran, September 26, 2007). Still, even with the accepted antiseptic methods, too many died.

You can’t entirely get rid of dangerous bacteria just by using clean methods. It took the invention of the sulfur drugs to bring the rate of maternal deaths way down from those 500 deaths to about 6 for every 100,000 births. But bacterial infections arising during child birth are only one of many bacterial assaults that have threatened the health of human beings over the millennia. There are infections of our respiratory tract, like pneumonia among others, and of the digestive tract, such as bacterial derived food poisoning, and even bacterial sources contributing to ulcers. There are urinary tract infections and nervous system infections, such as meningitis. And then there is sepsis, related to blood poisoning, arising from bacteria in the blood, which readily leads to death.

A much larger stride forward, a definitive blow in the battle against disease- causing bacteria arose in that same era with a discovery in 1928 by a Scottish bacteriologist, Alexander Fleming. Fleming noticed that bacteria were killed by a mold which had accidentally contaminated an experiment in his laboratory. Although Fleming realized the importance of his discovery nothing practical could come out it until he was joined in the late 1930s by an Australian, Howard Florey, a medical researcher who had come to England as a student after winning a Rhodes Scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, and a Jewish chemist, Ernst Chain, who was in England as a refugee from Nazi Germany. Working together, penicillin was isolated and identified so that amounts could be made to treat large numbers of people including soldiers wounded in the world war raging at that time who otherwise would have died from their infected wounds.

The story now brings us back to something said by Sir Alexander Fleming when he was interviewed by the New York Times in 1945 after he and Chain and Florey won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their work on penicillin. Fleming warned that misuse of penicillin could lead to the propagation of mutant forms of bacteria that would resist the new miracle drug. Is that headline in the New York Post the so-called tip of the iceberg? In other words was the remark by Fleming prescient - a look into the future, a future that is now beginning?

The answer appears to be yes. According to recent estimates, there are now, in the United States alone, nearly 100,000 cases of the same bacterial infection that killed the twelve year old boy whose picture was on the cover of the New York Post and of these there were over 18,000 deaths every year. Although most of these deaths, 85%, occurred in health care settings, hospitals and nursing homes, where overuse of antibiotics is a well known problem, the remainder occurred in settings in the community that could not be precisely defined. When Fleming warned about misuse he was really talking about overuse of penicillin. Although in 1945 the biochemistry of bacteria was not advanced enough to understand how resistant bacteria could arise, Fleming’s fear was based on his understanding of Darwinian evolution and his knowledge that bacteria reproduce with alarming speed. Overuse of an antibiotic might kill off only the most susceptible bacteria, while not affecting those that found a way to resist the killing effect of the antibiotic, in other words, survival of the fittest bacteria. And what makes the problem even worse, in a way that Fleming may not have imagined, is that these surviving bacteria can then spread the defensive power they learned to other bacteria, even of other species, that have never been exposed to the antibiotic. Fleming was prescient.

Next month we’ll look into the raging arguments about the misuse of antibiotics, which if we do not change our ways, may be leading us into a world where bacterial infections could return with a force seen only by the oldest among us.

Mark M. Green (w12thstreet@gmail.com) lives in New York City and S.W. Margaree and is a member of the Canadian Science Writers Association. Please use e-mail for requests for earlier columns.

Mark M. Green who lives in South West Margaree and New York City is a member of the Canadian Science Writers’ Association.

Mark M. Green who lives in South West Margaree and New York City is a member of the Canadian Science Writers’ Association.

            George Tenet, the former director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (the CIA) wrote a book, just published, where he tells all about the Bush administration’s failure to consider the consequences of the invasion of Iraq. It’s good to get an inside view but really we all knew it already not only from what is going on, the so-called mismanagement of the war, but from so many other inside stories saying the same thing. There’s little doubt that September 11 was just what many in power were waiting for, a situation to make it impossible to resist the call for the invasion of Iraq. So many dead, so much destruction, so many lives changed for the worse. You can pick your reasons for the desire to go to war. I personally think Jarecki had it right in his documentary, “Why We Fight,” which I wrote about in a column published in the Oran on 23rd of August last year. The United States is so bulked up with weapons that the country can’t help but always be looking for a fight.

            Tenet was interviewed by Jim Lehrer on NewsHour on Public Television last week. Lehrer is greatly respected for fairness and the NewsHour is where Americans can still turn for the truth and get it in depth. Lehrer asked Tenet a lot of questions among which there was one that interested me most. Why has America not been attacked since 2001 but other countries have? That’s on all of our minds. We all know it is not because our politicians have put such powerful defenses in place. Save me from that nonsense.

            Tenet had an answer that made sense, an answer you know is the truth as soon as you hear it, and an answer that is frightening, terrifying is the better word. He said that America is the brass ring for al-Qaeda and that this very patient organization, thinking not in weeks or months but in years and even in decades, is only interested in the most devastating attack on the United States, a nuclear attack, the biggest possible show, an attack for which America’s nuclear weapons stockpile would be neutralized - for which no response would be possible. Against whom would America retaliate?

            Can we be hearing right? Is this is a man, former head of the CIA, being interviewed by the most respected journalist in America, talking about doomsday? Really? I’m afraid so. I sat in front of the television in my living room as did of millions of other Americans that night and we all saw the same thing and then went about our business. How can you do otherwise? How can one respond to hearing such things or to reading in the latest “Economist,” a highly respected British based news magazine, dated May 5, a feature article titled, “Waiting for al-Qaeda’s next bomb.” The article takes the view that al-Qaeda is growing stronger.

            I remember reading that bin Laden was criticized by religious leaders of Islam; they were disappointed that he had not warned America about the attack of September 11, had not given America the chance to convert to Islam to stop the attack. Perhaps bin Laden has taken this criticism to heart, which could have led to that seemingly ridiculous statement from bin Laden and al-Zawahiri a year or so ago for all of us to save ourselves by converting quickly to Islam and that bin Laden would be Bush’s personal guide to his new faith. Take a deep breath. Are these guys kidding? Do they really mean it?

            Here is a quote from the former head of the CIA unit devoted to bin Laden, Michael Scheuer: “bin Laden has been given permission by a young cleric in Saudi Arabia authorizing al Qaeda to use nuclear weapons against the United States … capping the casualties at 10 million.”

            The Bible tells us “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” and an anthology of Chinese sayings from the fourth century B.C. informs us that the “weak shall inherit the earth.” Here I am in New York, a city that is neither meek nor weak. Are we about to experience the truth known to our ancients and if so who are the weak and the meek - certainly not Bush and his cohorts. Nor are they wise, but perhaps stupid is the best description for not realizing that al Qaeda’s increasing strength arises from the attack on Iraq. bin Laden must have received that news with a whoop and a jump for joy.

Mark M. Green (w12thstreet@gmail.com) lives in New York City and S.W. Margaree and is a member of the Canadian Science Writers Association.