When grapefruit juice can kill
Plus losing against superbugs, why you might not be a slow thinker, why viruses are everywhere, and how plastic was supposed to save elephants
It’s been exactly a year since COVID-19: Separating Fact from Fiction was published, so I’d like to start off by thanking everyone for their kind support and words of encouragement. There was a lot we didn’t know about the virus and the trajectory of the pandemic at the time, but the exit ramp from the pandemic for much of the world looks much clearer than it’s been in a while now.
I was very pleased to see that the Washington D.C. public library system had recently procured the book.
And you can too, if you’ve not read it yet. I won’t judge too harshly. ;-)
Viruses are everywhere.
In the past few months, new research studies have discovered hundreds of thousands of new viruses both inside and outside the body. These viruses were discovered from genetic sequence data. Viruses really are the "dark matter" of biology.
Last year, as reported in Cell, scientists found over 142,000 viruses (around half of which were unknown at the time) that reside inside the human gut. In January, a paper in Nature described around 132,000 RNA viruses including nine new coronaviruses.
I wrote about this for The Hindustan Times a few weeks ago —
There are more viruses on the planet than any other biological entity. We don’t accurately have a handle on how many actually exist, but it is estimated that there are more viruses on Earth than there are stars in the universe.
When grapefruit juice is fatal.
I also wrote a column on how drugs work and why some should never be taken with grapefruit juice. I described the remarkable story of how the worst food-drug interaction ever was discovered. There’s a lot here, but the accidental discovery of the effects of grapefruit juice is worth recounting here for those who missed it.
In 1989, a Canadian pharmacologist, David Bailey, made an accidental discovery that changed the way certain drugs are administered. He found that grapefruit and its juice can increase the effect of many prescription drugs to dangerous levels. This toxicity can lead to cardiac effects, kidney failure, and even death.
Bailey was testing the effect of alcohol on a common blood pressure medicine, felodipine. He needed to mask the taste of alcohol so that participants didn’t know if they were in the experimental group or in the control. He tried using grape, lime, and orange juice, but none of them could hide the taste of alcohol. All the participants could still taste the alcohol when mixed with those juices.
It is then that Bailey turned to grapefruit juice. He gave some participants grapefruit juice with felodipine; and others grapefruit juice and alcohol with the drug. To his shock, he found that all the participants of the clinical trial had very high levels of the drug in their blood regardless of whether they had received grapefruit juice with alcohol or just grapefruit juice.
This raised the possibility that the drug wasn’t interacting with alcohol, but rather with the grapefruit juice that had been used to mask its taste.
To test the effects of grapefruit juice, Bailey, a former Olympic athlete, decided to run an experiment on himself. After receiving permission from his institution, he took the drug felodipine along with grapefruit juice. He found that drug levels in his blood were five times higher when he took the drug with grapefruit juice compared to when he took it with water. In other words, they were the same as if he had taken five pills.
Speaking to Toronto Star decades later, Bailey reflected, “It was one of the biggest food-drug interaction findings ever.”
The first plastic was touted as saving elephants from extinction.
Whether it's what we eat, the kind of bags we use, or cars we drive, everything has an environmental impact. Even solar panels. We have to assess impact on long timescales and compare to the alternatives. Often, the best choice is the least palatable- less consumption and waste.
I wrote about the cautionary tale of how the first industrial plastic was created and how it ostensibly saved elephants from extinction —
Celluloid was patented in 1869 by a young printer, John Wesley Hyatt, to meet the insatiable demand for billiards.
The story goes something like this. In the 1800s, billiards was exceptionally popular in the United States, but billiard balls were made from ivory. To satisfy the need for balls, elephants were slaughtered in large numbers for their tusks. Around two animals had to be killed for a set of balls. By the middle of the century, the world used up more than one million pounds of ivory a year.
Celluloid was touted as saving elephants from extinction. It was cheap, though due to its volatile nature, sometimes the collision of two balls caused a loud explosion.
Celluloid was also used in cinematographic film. Motion pictures are still colloquially called “celluloid films” though the material is no longer used for this purpose. Celluloid soon gave way to other plastics that were also cheap and could be moulded into any shape or form.
The creators of the first plastics could not have foreseen the world we live in today.
We are losing against superbugs.
Nearly five millions people died in cases where antibiotic-resistant infections were a factor the year before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. How did we ruin antibiotics? How are antibiotics “managed” in nature? Will we find new ones? I wrote about this at The Morning Context this month.
Superbugs today are causing more deaths than HIV/AIDS or malaria. The next pandemic is already here, and unless we act decisively now, things will only get worse.
Slower responses don't mean slower thinking.
This new study is one of the most fascinating scientific papers published this month.
It's widely accepted that mental speed declines from the twenties, but it turns out that this might not actually be the case. As people get older they're more cautious, not slower. This holds up until about 60.
How did so many scientists and the general public get this wrong for so long? They assumed that faster decision-making can be equated to faster mental skills. But more deliberate decision-making requires more mental processing and actually results in fewer errors.
I love this paper because I'm a deliberate speaker and usually slow to respond myself. I used to call myself a "slow thinker" because I like to think things though.
It’s good to know decision caution isn't a difference in mental speed.
What else I’m reading
Skylar Tibbits’ Things Fall Together is a spectacular book about programmable materials, self-assembly, and future design. The title is top-notch and the cover is superb. Highly recommended.
As you can see, I’ve really been very busy. :-)
That’s all for now.