Saint Martyrs of the Damned , interview with Robin Aubert

I just watched the movie Saint Martyrs of the Damned by Robin Aubert, very interesting movie. Very David Lynch like, which I like :)

Anyway, here are some great quotes from the interview of Robin Aubert which was on the DVD:

RA: "I'm always separated between bad and good, It's the same in the film. I mean, sometimes I just want to drink and punch people in the face. And after, I just want to go to India and help the young child"... "Everyday I think about this, should I do LSD or should I drink milk?"

The interviewer asks Robin about the part of the movie which he didnt likes so much. And Robin tells that he feels he explains too much at a certain part in the film, while he should have left an explanation out and leave it to the viewer to find out.

RA: ..."But sometimes I think about my mum. I write the film for me, but after that I think about my friends and my mum and she won't understand nothing. So I put some explanation. But even tough the explanation is there, I think she saw the movie five times to understand. Everyday she goes to see it to understand it"
...
"It's about my family this film, but I didn't want them to know... So I made it really fucked up..."

FRESH TV - GAME OVER the dutch VJ performance very first " production"

Lately I've been working on me and Ramons little project: FRESH TV.

We made a little video to give you a short introduction about what FRESH TV. will be about, 
check it out at here at google vidoe 

A man and his friend

Took this photo last year while waiting for the bus in the snowy dutch landscape...

Endnote Masterclass

I'm surprised by finding people who add references to their written material manually. Don't you know that there is actually software designed to do this? For once and for all I will show you that Endnote is the ultimate bibliography manager you will ever need! (and no I'm not supported by that company, however I should).

1. In Endnote, open the library you want to add references to. Select Tools/connect/connect Now select Pubmed (NLM) (in the pubmed catalogue you will find most articles, duh)

2. In the searchscreen fill in the author (SMITH, J) and year and click search. Ofcourse you can also search on title, keywords, journal name etc.

3. Confirm the remote search and you endnote will download the results. Select the reference you need, and copy it to your library.

4. Voila! The reference has been added to your libary.

To download the article, right click on the reference and select Open URL. You will get directed to the article at pubmed.com. Also a very handy option is the link to PDF option in the same menu. You can link every reference in your library to the PDF file on your harddrive, after you linked th article just select open PDF. In this way you will never have to Endnote again to access your literature, since both finding and opening articles can be done in Endnote!

Dirk Jan, "the end of a fine clown"

introducing our new contributor

As some of you sharp knives obviously have seen we got a contributor, Ramon! As he is a little shy he'll need some time to adapt to the strange feeling of writing to a silent audience. Ramon is attending artschool and isn't very into lifesciences like me, so with him around things promiss to be alit less "serious".

Are medical Journals an extension of the marketing arm of pharmaceutical companies?

According to some people in the field modern medical journals are not more then a marketing machine for the pharmaceutical companies. In a recent essay by Richard Smith gives his view on this matter.

"The most conspicuous example of medical journals' dependence on the pharmaceutical industry is the substantial income from advertising, but this is, I suggest, the least corrupting form of dependence. The advertisements may often be misleading and the profits worth millions, but the advertisements are there for all to see and criticise."

Pharmaceutical companies trying to influence professionals in the medical field exposing their sponsored trials in highly respected medical journals.

"For a drug company, a favourable trial is worth thousands of pages of advertising, which is why a company will sometimes spend upwards of a million dollars on reprints of the trial for worldwide distribution. The doctors receiving the reprints may not read them, but they will be impressed by the name of the journal from which they come. The quality of the journal will bless the quality of the drug."

Although questionable, this still wouldn't be a problem. However these sponsored trials rarely show results that are unfavourable to the companies' products. Paula Rochon, analyzing the trial results funded by manufacturesr of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs for arhtritis. All the 56 trials published showed the company's drug to be as good as or better then the comparison treatment.

"The evidence is strong that companies are getting the results they want, and this is especially worrisome because between two-thirds and three-quarters of the trials published in the major journals—Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA, Lancet, and New England Journal of Medicine—are funded by the industry"

How are companies able to get the results they want from clinical trials? Smith gives us some examples. Ofcourse, fiddling with the results would be far to obvious. The right results can however be obtained by asking the "right" questions. For example a trial can be conducted of your drug against a treatment known to be inferior, or to dose your drugs against a too low a dose of a competitor drug. etc. Some suggestions made to prevent the journals from being a marketing tool for the pharmaceutical industry:

"Editors can review protocols, insist on trials being registered, demand that the role of sponsors be made transparent, and decline to publish trials unless researchers control the decision to publish."

Smith, R. Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies. PLoS Medicine 2, e138 (2005).

nonverbal > verbal

something to think about:

"Albert Mehrabian found that the total impact of a message is about 7 per cent verbal (words only) and 38 per cent vocal (including tone of voice, inflection and other sounds) and 55 per cent non-verbal. Professor Birdwhistell made some similar estimates of the amount of non-verbal communication that takes place amongst humans. He estimated that the average person actually speaks words for a total of about ten or eleven minutes a day and that the average sentence takes only about 2.5 seconds. Like Mehrabian, he found that the verbal component of a face-to-face conversation is less than 35 per cent and that over 65 per cent of communication is done non-verbally."

from: Pease, A. Body language: how to read others' thoughts by their gestures, (Sheldon Press, 10th impression 1988).

trans-kingdom RNAi

Some time ago I gave an introductional presentation to some of my collegues about the use of RNA interference to knockdown or silence genes. Back then the use of RNAi to knockdown certain genes was problematic since a solid way of delivering the RNAi to mammalian cells was not at hand. However since then alot of progress has been made...

Exciting progress has been made by Xiang and co-workers, non pathogenic Escherichia coli was engineered to produce short hairpin RNA (shRNA) targeting a mammalian gene, this to induce trans-kingdom RNAi in vitro and in vivo. The engineered E. coli strain induced, upon oral or intravenous administration, significant gene silencing in the intestinal epithelium and in human colon cancer xenografts in mice. "These results provide an example of trans-kingdom RNAi in higher organisms and suggest the potential of bacteria-mediated RNAi for functional genomics, therapeutic target validation and development of clinically compatible RNAi-based therapies".

Xiang, S., Fruehauf, J. & Li, C.J. Short hairpin RNA-expressing bacteria elicit RNA interference in mammals. Nat Biotechnol (2006).

and a great (short) review about the use of in vivo siRNA:
Xie, F.Y., Woodle, M.C. & Lu, P.Y. Harnessing in vivo siRNA delivery for drug discovery and therapeutic development. Drug Discov Today 11, 67-73 (2006).