Renae's first newsletter
Welcome. This one includes my first biochemistry piece published post-MPhil! I'll cover: pieces of pottery, bodily fluids, plant lips, Covid tips, and literature. There's also a bird.
So happy to see you here. Thank you!
There are three stories behind the story that I'll share in this newsletter.
The first story is that, days before I packed up the last of my lab desk at HKUST, MPhil in hand, I saw this Tweet.
Very thankful for @akshatsharma’s kindness, which is the reason why I now contribute writing to the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
The second story is that, on a gut feeling I signed up to write an 'In Memoriam' for William Whelan. And I wanted to do a good job, so I looked up "best obituaries ever," or something like that, and tried to make it so, for the family and the people reading it. My editor showed it to her boss and their boss, and on its publication I received an email from a biochemistry professor at a university in Florida, who knew Whelan and wrote to say thanks <3
The third story is as follows. I was reading a book of songs (Psalms) with friends, and one featured the phrase, "dry as a potsherd." We found out what a potsherd is - a broken piece of often ancient pottery - and then my friend needed some eye drops because her eyes were so dry, and I said, "dry as a potsherd.” The next day I started this piece, and… "dry as a potsherd" fit. So, I am pleased to say that the phrase is in print in now two places.
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Here's the piece.
Laurel Oldach, science writer, says of it, “You will not be sorry you read this marvelous In Memoriam by @renaecrossing on Bill Whelan and how sometimes life imitates enzymes.”
In Memoriam: William Whelan
William “Bill” Joseph Whelan, a renowned biochemist who embodied his own discovery (he was, by nature, a primer), died at his Miami home on June 5. He was 96.
Whelan was born in Salford, in Lancashire, England, on Nov. 14, 1924. His mother was a homemaker and his father, from Ireland, made skins for sausages.
With a teacher encouraging his interest in biochemistry, Whelan was the first in his family to go to university; he earned three degrees at the University of Birmingham and was appointed as faculty while a graduate student. He then joined the University of North Wales, the University of London Lister Institute, and later the Royal Free Hospital.
Sometimes an organization is transformed with the leadership of someone who’s not from around here. Whelan moved to the then 15-year-old Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami in 1967, remaining its chair of biochemistry until 1991 and retiring as one of its longest-serving faculty in 2019.
Whelan worked on important storage molecules in animals and plants, glycogen and starch, respectively. When your stomach is empty, you check the body’s metaphorical cupboards, where you can thank glycogenin for putting aside a condensed form of glucose for just such a time.
But catalyzing requires raw materials. In the late 1980s when Whelan’s crop of graduate students was leaving, and funding was dry as a potsherd, his wife, Margaret, replaced her usual question (“Discover anything nice today?”) with a suggestion to use a newly released pension from his UK faculty positions. Earlier stores save the day when levels are low. Whelan expanded his lab and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1992 (a year before Margaret died) in part due to a discovery of how to make use of glycogen stores — by glucosyltransferase reactions, in case you were wondering.
Glycogenin, which Whelan is credited with discovering, is known for drawing things together. Knowing the draw of Florida in winter, he launched a winter conference attracting Nobel laureates, now enjoying its 53rd year. Glycogenin fast-tracks; it is a catalyst. Whelan started an acclaimed program in response to medical shortages, giving Ph.D. students — like glycogen itself — condensed coursework to complete an M.D. faster. And glycogenin is a self-starter; it self-phosphorylates. So, too, was Whelan; he started the journals Trends in Biomedical Science and Federation of European Biochemical Society Letters, and he remained an editor in chief of the journal IUBMB Life (also president of the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) until 2020, stating he wanted biochemistry to be presented in “crystalline prose.”
Describing glycogenin as a catalyst for synthesizing glycogen is the truth but not all of it; glycogen joins the first few molecules, and then other enzymes continue the good work it started. Whelan’s research is now in biochemistry textbooks, and the work of others that he elevated in journals is a rich store for those who draw energy from biochemistry. His work continues to give.
Whelan is survived by his wife, Alina, and his family in England.
The story was published here: https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/people/101121/in-memoriam-william-whelan and then was retweeted by the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Biological Chemistry! I am star-struck.
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What am I working on?
My collaborator at Clear Water Science Consulting is great. We write posts like this. It turns out blood carries some things that reveal which parts of the body have been damaged by Covid or other diseases.
Coming up, I'm writing about fats and fasting and proteins and, specifically, how we think about them. Fats are better than you think, fasting is better (re: aging) than you think, and proteins are more varied than you think. Let's leave it at that for now. And a piece from a couple of scientists at Harvard that I had the pleasure of interviewing, will be out in Nov or Dec! Another piece, which came from that, is a surprise… I am excited about it.
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A couple of things I think you want to see
Out this week in a preprint (needs peer review yet), *if* you happen to get an infection (which you are at 5x less likely to once vaccinated), the margins of error are such that you could still have a decent chance of getting “long Covid.” Your symptoms might just be marginally better. A piece on long Covid from last year was one of the two most pivotal things I read this entire pandemic. The other was this thread on the morality of masks. The first changed my mind about resting on likely being relatively okay if I got Covid; lots of young people, previously healthy, get long Covid. It's not uncommon: about 1 in 20 cases overall, and in 2% of cases in children, estimates in the UK are now. The second was a beautiful synthesis of what I'd been reading for months and couldn't quite find the words for.
A glimmer of hope is that some people report an improvement in symptoms after their next dose or booster. Remember, though: you are less likely to get Covid in the first place (and therefore long Covid) if you are vaccinated; just *if* you get a breakthrough case, we can’t say that your chance of long Covid is greatly reduced.
From the authors of the pre-print:
The findings… should not obscure the fact that vaccination remains an important protective factor against these outcomes at the population level, since the best way to prevent those outcomes is to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first place. This is also the case in those ≥ 60 years-old. However... notably long-COVID presentations… are likely to persist even after successful vaccination of the population, so long as breakthrough infections occur. These findings… underline the urgency to identify other preventive or curative interventions to mitigate the impact of such COVID-19.
If peer review finds these results change or the conclusions need clarification, I will update you.
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Small science thing
Plants have lips. Or, at least, I think they should be called plant lips. They open and close, just like our lips, and gases come in and out, and people who actually study plants (unlike me; I am but an enthusiast) also say they look like small mouths. So, too, thought the Greeks; stomata means "mouth." Scientists here decided to SCREAM about it. One could ask, what’s stomata with them? :)
The lips are on the underside of a leaf, and you can see them with an ordinary light microscope. Some people like to use sticky tape and/or nail polish to place on the leaf's bottom for a bit, then peel back.
But, accuracy is important; the lips themselves are called guard cells, and the stoma is the gap in the middle where the gases come in and out.
Speaking of gases… Covid spreads by aerosols. Not really droplets. Not really surfaces. This article, summarised in the thread below, describes how cholera was prolonged in Europe for so long, until people finally got specific about how it spread: we needed sanitation. In the case of Covid, we need ventilation and indoor masks when Covid is in your city, vaccinated or not. Don’t believe me? The UK right now is in a bad way, with higher levels of hospital admissions than in February. (There's still resistance. Everyone in the chamber now needs to wear a mask, but not MPs, because MPs know each other, and the virus famously doesn't spread between people who know each other.) Europe’s not great, and the US has high spread and its consequences across the board. Vaccines alone cannot be where we finish.
This professor reminds me regularly that #CovidIsAirborne, and the scientists whose work I am reading are saying that the message and its implications are not getting out there enough. We could consider that, in areas with high spread, #AirIsTheNewPoop. The CDC has now made an explicit recommendation that, “universal masking is essential to preventing the spread of the delta variant."
My view is, your immune system (which is prepared to specifically fight this virus due to vaccination) *is* by definition the last line of defense. Don't wait for your immune system to have to respond when you inhale aerosols containing the virus; prevent that from happening in the first place by rationally acknowledging how the thing spreads and wearing your mask when indoors - yes, in the workplace; I believe the Sydney premier is out of line on this - and open the windows; good ventilation is almost as good as being outdoors. I don’t want us to follow some parts of the world in a few months, finding out that cases and their consequences do increase if you disregard the virus’s mode of transmission after you’re vaccinated. This is important.
The great news is that we are not in the dark about the science, and these simple measures are, compared to introducing sanitation from scratch, cheap and within our control. People ignored the science of cholera being waterborne until the world realised the hard way that acknowledging the way the thing spread was necessary. Public awareness and indeed political awareness is needed on wearing masks indoors even once vaccinated, because we are in a pandemic, and none of us want it prolonged, and we need to control the virus by precisely targeting its mode of transmission. I hope to contribute to that.
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A random memory
It's nothing to do with a science newsletter, per se, except to say that I like books. The setting: train to London, fields of Kent blurred in the window, and a young, literary-looking, and, frankly, gorgeous man opposite me was very clearly loving what he was reading. I strained to see the title. 'To the Lighthouse.' I resolved to find it, and promptly loved it. Some people say that nothing happens in the book. But I adore its feeling, and later sought out 'The Waves,' too, jumping on a bus outside the bookstore where I bought it which - I didn't know where the bus went - it turns out winded its way to Bloomsbury where Virginia Woolf herself had written both these works. If you're after other books with feeling, I recommend 'Snow' by Orhan Pamuk, especially if you like poetry, and if you want something utterly unique go for 'The Famished Road' by Ben Okri.
I wasn't planning on including this, but here's a short video of relaxation if you ever saw one. I like birds, alright.
If you have sciency or other interesting things that you want to see stories about, tell me those topics or questions or keywords: renaecrossing@substack.com. I’d also love your feedback.
Thank you, thank you. Go well and do good. Share with a friend or two if you like.