EEMB Seminar time and location change

NOTE: Today's EEMB seminar is at 3:30 PM in the third floor conference room of the MSI building- 3322 MSRB

Mark Vellend, an ecologist from the University of British Columbia will be giving the EEMB departmental seminar today, "Integrating ecology and genetics: patterns, experiments, and ideas."  Mark is an interactive and broad thinking population and community ecologist, who focuses on plants.  His website is: http://www.botany.ubc.ca/vellend/

Alcohol and Caffeine - a Potent Mix

Last year the Food and Drug Administration sent warning letters to 27 manufacturers of alcoholic beverages containing caffeine (see this blog Nov. 15, 2009), asking the companies to justify the safety of their products. But apparently the agency has not yet followed through with its promises to review the safety information requested from the companies and then to take appropriate action if it was not forthcoming.

One of the companies selling caffeine-and-alcohol drinks was in the news again last month after students at two universities ended up in emergency rooms with alcohol poisoning. The drinks in question, called Four Loko, contain 23.5 ounces of 12% alcohol laced with caffeine. Allegedly the caffeine overrides the natural sleepiness effect of alcohol, causing the user to underestimate how drunk he/she really is.

The company says that it is being unfairly singled out.

Some college students will abuse alcohol no matter what form it is in. But are packaged caffeine-and-alcohol drinks GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) or not? It should be up to the FDA to decide, and so far it hasn’t.

Meanwhile, states and municipalities are taking action. Last Thursday Michigan became the first state to ban alcohol-and-caffeine drinks. The city of Chicago is considering a similar ban.

Geeky science students wanted

As CCS students you should not restrict yourself to those labs that actively advertise for undergraduates. But if research on the molecular mechanisms underlying polycystic kidney disease and mechanisms of epithelial cell function and kidney physiology sound like your thing then this is a great opportunity.

Geeky science students invited to apply for undergraduate research internships in the Weimbs lab in MCDB

Do you have a passion for research? Did you spend your childhood looking at dirt samples under a microscope or mixing concoctions with a beefed-up chemistry set? Are you serious about a career in research and attending a PhD program in a top graduate school? Do you want to make a real contribution to research on a human disease that affects millions? Do you want to be intellectually involved, read research papers, come up with new ideas and test them yourself? Are you unafraid of learning new scientific techniques, tinkering with experiments over and over until you get them to work, spending long hours in the lab, reading papers all night long, presenting your findings in front of the research team?

If this sounds like you, we want you in the lab!

You would be teamed up with and trained by an experienced scientist in the lab. You would be expected to work more and more independently over time, manage your own experiments and schedule, plan and interpret experiments, understand what you are doing, be productive, move your research project forward.

Look up our research on the web to see if this excites you. If it does, send your resume and list of grades to:

Thomas Weimbs, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology
weimbs@lifesci.ucsb.edu

Yearly courses

GOLD is your best source of information about what courses are running next quarter but what about the one after that? The two biology departments at UCSB plan at least a year in advance and publish their list of planned courses online. They aren't however, that easy to find. Go to the EEMB website, click on Academic Programs - Undergraduate Studies and then on the menu on the left hand side click 'current students'. Scroll down and you'll see a link to:

Updated list of the proposed courses for the year

• EEMB Proposed Courses (2010-11)
• MCDB Proposed Courses (2010-11)

This is a list, updated yearly, of what courses the two departments are actually planning on running. It isn't a guarantee but it's as good as you are going to get. I use it all the time to find out what is happening.

EEMB seminar

Today's EEMB seminar should be of interest to those with an interest in marine biology, ecology or global change

Dr. Jonathan Shurin from UCSD will be giving this Monday's EEMB seminar. Dr. Shurin works in aquatic ecosystems investigating local and regional controls of species diversity, consumer-resource dynamics and food web energetics. The title of his talk is "Plankton ecosystem dynamics in a warmer, wilder world"

Assessing the Long-Term Risks of Drugs

Here’s a dilemma for you; drugs that prevent or treat chronic diseases and that therefore will probably be taken for the rest of the patient’s life are generally only tested for a only a couple of years (for safety and efficacy) before they are approved. What if the drugs have adverse effects that only become apparent when they have been taken for many years?

This concern has been raised recently by the discovery that two blockbuster drugs do in fact have long-term negative effects not seen in their initial safety studies. The class of drugs known as bisphosphonates (Fosamax, Actonel, and Boniva) widely used to prevent osteoporosis can, on rare occasion, lead to degeneration of the jawbone or to thigh fractures. And a drug called Avandia, often prescribed for diabetics to prevent heart disease, has been shown to increase the risk of heart disease in certain cases.

I'm not saying that FDA approval of these drugs in the first place was a mistake, because in some cases the benefits may still outweigh the risks. Still, it would be nice to know the long-term risks as soon as possible so that patient treatment decisions can be made with full information. The question becomes, then, how to reduce the potential long-term risk without making the drug approval process even longer than it already is. Requiring 30 years of clinical trials before a drug can be approved is clearly impractical.

Once a drug is approved, currently there is no method for effectively tracking the incidence of adverse side effects over time. Some health officials are suggesting that we develop a national drug-use database and require physicians to report all adverse effects, so that long-term effects can be determined as soon as possible. But that raises concerns over confidentiality of patient information.

What do you think?

Drug Safety in the Workplace

Should a company be permitted to fire a worker for taking a drug that is legally prescribed by a physician to treat a medical condition? That’s what happened to a worker on an auto-parts assembly line who was taking hydrocodone for back pain, according to an article in The New York Times.

You might say, “That’s not fair!”, but it’s not that simple. After all, companies have a responsibility to maintain a safe work environment. Companies can be held responsible for accidents on the job and for product defects caused by impaired workers. And in “safety-sensitive” jobs, such as airline pilot, the public has a right to expect that the employee is not impaired.

The question becomes, then, how does society achieve the right balance between the rights of workers and the responsibilities of employers? At present we know very little about just how safe various prescription drugs are in the workplace, because testing for workplace safety is not part of the normal approval process for pharmaceutical drugs.

More and more companies are requiring drug tests of their employees. Employees who test positive are sometimes fired, in part because companies aren’t sure whether or not the drug creates a safety issue and just aren’t willing to take the risk. It’s a societal problem that needs to be addressed by valid scientific research into drug safety in the workplace.