Replied to a tweet by Jack Turban MD (Twitter)

and if you’re *really* careful, you can get a D in Chemistry and win the Nobel Prize!

Listened to Episode 8: Choice Overload by Dr Laurie SantosDr Laurie Santos from The Happiness Lab

We all make thousands of choices each day. But making even trivial decisions can sap our energy and cause anxiety. Dr Laurie Santos examines why our society wrongly prioritises choice over happiness, and meets a woman who junked her wardrobe in a bid to improve her life.

Limiting one’s choice can be an important thing in life.

There’s some discussion of limiting one’s wardrobe choices as a way of freeing one’s life up a bit. They didn’t mention the oft-heard example of Einstein wearing the same thing every day, but did catch the possibly better example of Obama cycling through the small handful of choices in his wardrobe to limit the yet another decision of many he had to make each day.

👓 She lived for 99 years with organs in all the wrong places and never knew it | CNN

Read She lived for 99 years with organs in all the wrong places and never knew it (CNN)
Oregon medical students were shocked and surprised when they opened the cadaver of Rose Marie Bentley.

👓 Private IVF clinics urged to stop charging for expensive add-ons | Society | The Guardian

Read Private IVF clinics urged to stop charging for expensive add-ons by Matthew Weaver (the Guardian)
Fertility experts criticise use of optional extras that do not increase chance of pregnancy

👓 Nobel Prize for Medicine Goes to Cancer Immune Therapy Pioneers | Scientific American

Read Nobel Prize for Medicine Goes to Cancer Immune Therapy Pioneers by Karen WeintraubKaren Weintraub (Scientific American)
Two men are recognized for basic research that unleashed the immune system against cancer, becoming a new pillar of therapy
A nice quick overview of some basic cancer immune therapy.

🔖 Network medicine: a network-based approach to human disease | Albert-László Barabási, Natali Gulbahce & Joseph Loscalzo | Nature Reviews Genetics

Bookmarked Network medicine: a network-based approach to human disease by Albert-László Barabási, Natali Gulbahce & Joseph Loscalzo (Nature Reviews Genetics | volume 12, pages 56–68 (2011))

Abstract
Given the functional interdependencies between the molecular components in a human cell, a disease is rarely a consequence of an abnormality in a single gene, but reflects the perturbations of the complex intracellular and intercellular network that links tissue and organ systems. The emerging tools of network medicine offer a platform to explore systematically not only the molecular complexity of a particular disease, leading to the identification of disease modules and pathways, but also the molecular relationships among apparently distinct (patho)phenotypes. Advances in this direction are essential for identifying new disease genes, for uncovering the biological significance of disease-associated mutations identified by genome-wide association studies and full-genome sequencing, and for identifying drug targets and biomarkers for complex diseases.

Key points

  • A disease phenotype is rarely a consequence of an abnormality in a single effector gene product, but reflects various pathobiological processes that interact in a complex network.
  • Here we present an overview of the organizing principles that govern cellular networks and the implications of these principles for understanding disease. Network-based approaches have potential biological and clinical applications, from the identification of disease genes to better drug targets.
  • Whereas essential genes tend to be associated with hubs, or highly connected proteins, disease genes tend to segregate at the network's functional periphery, avoiding hubs.
  • Disease genes have a high propensity to interact with each other, forming disease modules. The identification of these disease modules can help us to identify disease pathways and predict other disease genes.
  • The highly interconnected nature of the interactome means that, at the molecular level, it is difficult to consider diseases as being independent of one another. The mapping of network-based dependencies between pathophenotypes has culminated in the concept of the diseasome, which represents disease maps whose nodes are diseases and whose links represent various molecular relationships between the disease-associated cellular components.
  • Diseases linked at the molecular level tend to show detectable comorbidity.
  • Network medicine has important applications to drug design, leading to the emergence of network pharmacology, and also in disease classification.
h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)

Bill Davenhall at TEDMED 2009 on Geomedicine: How Your Environment May Affect Your Health

Watched TEDMED 2009 on Geomedicine: How Your Environment May Affect Your Health by Bill Davenhall from TEDMED
Does where you live have an impact on your overhall health? Bill Davenhall believes that the location of our homes is critical to our medical history.
This is a great thing to think about the next time your doctor asks for your medical history. Perhaps with more data and a better visualization of it, it may bring home the messages of pollution and global warming.