Fascinating Fact #2: Vaccine

Did you know that vaccine derives from the Latin for cow? This is because the first vaccine was derived from "cowpox" to immunize humans against smallpox. Humans were treated with the cow (vacca) antibodies and they didn't get smallpox*.

Fascinating!

Vaccine, however, has nothing to do with vacation, which I am now on.

(Nota bene: not all fascinating facts will be about bacteria, but bacteria have been occupying my mind lately due to what I thought was the return of a hated sinus infection.)

*(Funny I originally typed "small box" there. Funny, that.)

Fascinating fact #1

Do you know how sulfa drugs (one of the first antibiotics) work? Well apparently certain cavorting wee beasties (also known as bacteria) need a vitamin that is similar in chemical construction to the sulfa drugs in order to survive. When sulfa is applied, the wee beasties think it is Thanksgiving and gorge themselves on the pseudo-food. As it turns out, bad luck for them, the sulfa compounds do not provide anything for the reproductive cycle and the bacteria end up childless and condemned to a lonely life in the bacterial equivalent of the old folks home and the grim reaper (in this case white blood cells), takes care of the rest. Therefore, no offspring: no infection.

Fascinating!

Radio Lab

This week's This American Life podcast featured an excerpt from Radio Lab a cool show out of WNYC. Radio Lab has some very unique production methods such as narration that talks over interviews. The production tends to make the show engaging, but the content is the thing, of course, that makes at least the current episode stellar. The current episode is on morality, and how a moral sense is most likely ingrained in our our brain structures as well as in the brains of some other animals. As a research scientist Dr. Joshua Greene states of a genetic disposition to morality: "We think of basic human morality as being handed down from on high, and it is probably better to say that it was handed up from below--that our most basic, core, moral values are not the things that we humans have invented, but the things that we've actually inherited from other people. The stuff that we humans have invented are the things that seem more peripheral and variable" (Radio Lab, "Morality," 12:28-12:48).

Fascinating stuff.