Medicine

The Kids Are (Mostly) All Right… It’s The Adults I Worry About

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 4 Comments

My social algorithm may be broken. Lately I’ve been seeing a flood of sentimental posts lamenting how “kids these days” wouldn’t survive back in my day. Depending on the author, “my day” ranges anywhere from the 1950s to the 1990s, but the punchline is always the same: We were tough. Today’s kids are soft.

Those posts got me thinking about my own childhood in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One photo in particular comes to mind, taken when I was maybe three or five years old. We didn’t have a pool, so in the heat of a Northeastern summer, my parents would fill a five-gallon bucket with water and plop me in. Submerged up to my neck, surveying the backyard from my makeshift infinity pool, I felt like I was living in peak suburban luxury.

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Soft Pretzels and the Quantified Life

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 2 Comments

Some of my earliest memories are of having my foot measured at a shoe store in suburban New Jersey. I’m a little unclear as to why this memory is so vivid, but it might have something to do with those visits also being paired with a soft pretzel. I can still remember my mother scraping comically large salt grains into the trash before I could get a bite of strip-mall, de-salted pretzel. Salt wasn’t something I was allowed to have much of as a kid, so opportunities didn’t come along often. While most of that salty goodness ended up in the Meadowlands, the residual salt was more than enough to keep me happy before my mother needed to duck into Macy’s to discover the latest that early-1990s office-core had to offer.

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The Turn-On Test

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 1 Comment

The topic of sex remains a taboo in some corners of society, but evidence of our interest in sex abounds:

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The Curious Journey from Heart Transplants to Pig Lungs

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / Leave a comment

Today, while cruising my Facebook feed, I encountered a truly incredible story. Science ran with the provocative title “In a first, pig lung survives and functions—briefly—in a person.” This covered the most recent study from Nature Medicine by the surgeon Jianxing He and his colleagues. The patient, was 39 year old male who had suffered an intracranial hemorrhage which had resulted in brain death.

In short, a genetically engineered pig lung, designed to survive in humans, was transplanted into this brain-dead patient. Instead of dying in hours these genetic modifications allowed the patient to stay alive with functioning lungs for 9 days. The patient was seen to be delivering oxygen and clearing CO₂. Eventually, after a problematic immune response, the lungs were removed for further study. The man was ultimately taken off life support in accordance with his families wishes.

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Uranium: The Brightest Bad Idea in Diabetes Care

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 1 Comment

The use of radioactive compounds as medicines is starting to have it’s moment in the sun. Currently over 60 of these radiopharmaceuticals are approved worldwide, primarily for the purpose of diagnosing and treating cancer. Billion dollar acquisitions have a funny way of getting investors excited, though the specialized nature of these compounds leaves many companies struggling to fill a “significant talent shortage.” Of course, the story of radioactivity in medicine didn’t begin with billion-dollar deals, it began with the curious case of uranium.

Our story begins in 1789, when the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth decided to take a deeper look at what was essentially mining waste. A self taught expert in mineral analysis, Klaproth was busy doing analytical chemistry before it was cool. The hipsters among us may know him for his work on zirconium, but his early work on uranium is definitely one of his greatest hits. Klaproth had started some early work on the mineral torbernite, but eventually switched to working on a mineral that gold and silver miners knew well: pitchblende. This black substance typically meant that the gold and silver had been exhausted and that it was time to move elsewhere.

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My elephant’s drug dealer.

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 3 Comments

I’ve never done LSD.  It’s not that I haven’t had the time, it’s just I’ve never really had a desire to have hallucinations.  I have enough trouble keeping track of what size bed sheets I need to buy.  I am pretty sure auditory and visual hallucinations would just induce me to buy extra king sized sheets for my queen sized bed.

Despite my reluctance, there is definitely a market for psychedelic drugs.  There is even a recent trend to write articles about how taking low doses of LSD might enhance work performance, make you more creative, and save your marriage.  To be perfectly honest Continue reading →