Dyeing and Dying

For this entry, I thought I might just show you what my notes look like as I read.

Hmmm....nice transitional knife metaphor to link the section on surgery to pharmacological therapy.  Visualize chemo as a tiny knife that cuts out cancer cells.

Definition of specificity: the ability of any medicine to discriminate between its intended target and its host.  Chemistry is cool.

Back to the beginning with the textile industry. 

William Perkin:  "boiling nitric acid and benzene in smuggled glass flasks"  Breaking Bad.

Gideon Harvey, expert in the field of insulting others.    Seems kind of uncalled for to me.  No need to get personal. Jeez.

Vitalism: the belief that the chemistry of living organisms was imbued (nice word) with some mystical property, a vital essence that could not be duplicated in a laboratory.

"Wohler only needed to take a short day-trip from his laboratory in Gottingen to the labs of Frankfort."  Communication between disciplines, between scientists and other professionals is key.  It makes me wonder what other sorts of miracles are sitting on a shelf somewhere waiting for someone to stumble upon them and provide the missing piece to some great discovery.

Ehrlich: "The biological universe was full of molecules picking out their partners like clever locks designed to fit a key; toxins clinging inseparably to antitoxins, dyes that highlighted only particular pairs of cells, chemical stains that could nimbly pick out one class of germs from a mixture of microbes." 
"rant in a train compartment"  "Chemotherapy" was conceptually born in the middle of the night.

"Syphillis--the secret malady."

Ehrlich- magic bullets.

Mustard Gas and the Krumbhaars:  again communication.  I guess it's important to read the "second tier" journals too.

"That their bullet would eventually appear out of that very chemical weapon seemed like a perversion of specific affinity, a ghoulish distortion of Ehrlich's dream" (88).  Circle back to page 38  " A cancer cell is  an astonishing perversion of the normal cell." And page 6, "If we seek immortality , then so, too, in a rather perverse sense sense, does the cancer cell."

So, after taking these notes, I might sit down and type up my blog entry and try to make some sense of what I just read. You might try this same strategy.  It  will produce a valuable set of notes upon which to reflect before test day.