The U.S. company Cleveland Biolabs has developed a product that can protect people from exposure to radiation.
Until now, doctors could not find a cure for radiation sickness. The only way to prevent the consequences of radiation exposure were iodine pills, which prevent the accumulation of radioactive iodine in the thyroid gland.
However, the drug CBLB502, developed by geneticist Andrew Gudkova of proteins from Salmonella bacteria, a much more efficient. Effects on receptors of cells damaged by radiation, it hinders the process of apoptosis of cells and their mutations.
In laboratory studies on mice and monkeys Gudkova failed to prove that if the irradiated animals receiving the dose of radiation equal to the level of radiation in the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, within 72 hours after exposure received medication, 60% of cases survived, and recovering from the effects of exposure.
"Dirty" bomb is considered one of the most terrible threats to humanity, and the Department of National Security of the United States, as reported by Der Spiegel, hastened to jump at the chance to protect United States citizens from possible radiation exposure, invest in the development of the drug 40 million dollars.
In addition, it is assumed that CBLB502 can be used for the treatment of cancer, helping cancer patients cope with the effects of radiotherapy.
The owner of Cleveland Biolabs Israeli Yaakov Reisman, a former combat pilot IDF intends to develop tools and weapons to the security services the Jewish state, where as in the United States to create a stockpile of drugs adequate to protect the civilian population.
Cleveland Biolabs, noting the high interest of pharmaceutical companies around the world for their design, meaning that the annual income from the sale of funds of the order of 20 billion dollars.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Life is a continual adjustment
We may have reason to live, without the wish to live, and in a struggle between reason and emotion, emotions seem always to win.
* * *
In order to live long we must guard our emotional health as we guard our physical health.
* * *
To keep life we must strengthen all our links with life and living.
* * *
we are really working at living we need not be afraid of dying.
The best way to prolong life is not to shorten it.
* * *
In order to live long we must guard our emotional health as we guard our physical health.
* * *
To keep life we must strengthen all our links with life and living.
* * *
we are really working at living we need not be afraid of dying.
The best way to prolong life is not to shorten it.
What Are Hormones?
The system of the internal or ductless glands, functioning with the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, is constantly engaged in meeting the changing conditions to which the individual is exposed. It does this by means of glandular secretions, which are called hormones.
The sex hormones were for a long time the hormones predominantly used in medicine, and for this reason people tend to identify hormones with the product of the sex glands only. They say, "My doctor gave me hormones," but this is like saying, "My doctor gave me capsules." There are probably hundreds of different hormones produced in the body.
Hormone is a general term, meaning the secretion of any one of the ductless glands, and there are a number of these glands. We call them "ductless" to distinguish them from the glands which have ducts or canals. Sweat glands, tear glands, salivary glands all have ducts and empty externally, on the outside of the body. Other glands, like those in the digestive system, empty within the body into an organ. The ductless glands empty directly into the blood stream.
The theory that inner fluids regulate the functions of the body goes hack to Hippocrates, who named four cardinal fluids responsible for health or illness: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. The four humors, as they were called from the Latin word for moisture, survive in our language as descriptive of four types of personality. A cheerful, confident person we call sanguine, from the Latin for blood.
The sex hormones were for a long time the hormones predominantly used in medicine, and for this reason people tend to identify hormones with the product of the sex glands only. They say, "My doctor gave me hormones," but this is like saying, "My doctor gave me capsules." There are probably hundreds of different hormones produced in the body.
Hormone is a general term, meaning the secretion of any one of the ductless glands, and there are a number of these glands. We call them "ductless" to distinguish them from the glands which have ducts or canals. Sweat glands, tear glands, salivary glands all have ducts and empty externally, on the outside of the body. Other glands, like those in the digestive system, empty within the body into an organ. The ductless glands empty directly into the blood stream.
The theory that inner fluids regulate the functions of the body goes hack to Hippocrates, who named four cardinal fluids responsible for health or illness: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. The four humors, as they were called from the Latin word for moisture, survive in our language as descriptive of four types of personality. A cheerful, confident person we call sanguine, from the Latin for blood.
How Not to Shorten Life
Can we guard ourselves against this shift of power away from the life-preserving force? Can we sustain the will to live?
The physiologist Rubner declared a generation ago that the best way to prolong life is not to shorten it. Today we are beginning to recognize that the first danger to length of life may not be the invading I'.crm, nor any physiological process beyond our control. We are beginning to understand that the first line of defense is in our emotional health.
If we are emotionally sound, we will be physically sound. Body and mind are one. When we truly want to be well, to live long and in health, we have the power to do it.
If grown children, who have long left their parents' home to live I heir own lives, come to a parent's bedside and say, however sincerely, "Live for our sake. We need you," the parent may be touched, but not really convinced. A mother whose children are immersed in their own lives knows when she is no longer needed as a mother. If she has not curried forward into her later years an interest apart from her children, something really meaningful to her, then she may not want to live.
The same may be true of a man who has retired from his business or profession, if he has lived solely for his work. When his work is published he may have nothing left to live for.
We need not come to this pass. If we live to our full capacity, not merely as parents, not merely as workers, but as mature, well-rounded human beings, then we will have something yet to live for even when work and parenthood are ended.
There are measures we can take, if we so desire. We can learn to r'i.ii.I our emotional health as we guard our physical health. We can make every effort to develop our fullest capacity as human beings.
The physiologist Rubner declared a generation ago that the best way to prolong life is not to shorten it. Today we are beginning to recognize that the first danger to length of life may not be the invading I'.crm, nor any physiological process beyond our control. We are beginning to understand that the first line of defense is in our emotional health.
If we are emotionally sound, we will be physically sound. Body and mind are one. When we truly want to be well, to live long and in health, we have the power to do it.
If grown children, who have long left their parents' home to live I heir own lives, come to a parent's bedside and say, however sincerely, "Live for our sake. We need you," the parent may be touched, but not really convinced. A mother whose children are immersed in their own lives knows when she is no longer needed as a mother. If she has not curried forward into her later years an interest apart from her children, something really meaningful to her, then she may not want to live.
The same may be true of a man who has retired from his business or profession, if he has lived solely for his work. When his work is published he may have nothing left to live for.
We need not come to this pass. If we live to our full capacity, not merely as parents, not merely as workers, but as mature, well-rounded human beings, then we will have something yet to live for even when work and parenthood are ended.
There are measures we can take, if we so desire. We can learn to r'i.ii.I our emotional health as we guard our physical health. We can make every effort to develop our fullest capacity as human beings.
Emotion Defeats Reason
The power of reason is formidable. It gives logical grounds for hope; it whips up new activity by revealing new possibilities. Probably this accounted for the days during which the patient showed outward improvement.
When reason and emotion are locked in battle, however, emotion eventually wins. There was the relapse, for which we physicians had no medical explanation. Coming the day after the patient's fast, the relapse might have been the result of physical exertion. Although through most of his life he had not observed the solemn holiday, this time he had chosen to fast against all the efforts of his physician and his nurse to dissuade him, as though he were preparing himself to meet his Maker. That very choice was a self-destructive act, in unconscious obedience to his triumphing destructive drive.
Later I learned that the holiday was also the anniversary of his father's death. I have observed that, just as a word of reassurance at a critical moment can inspire the creative instinct and raise a man once more to strive in his own behalf, so an alluring mental image can encourage the destructive drive and cause the patient to succumb. Especially when a system has already suffered strain, the thought of one's dead father or mother, of a wife or other beloved person who has gone before, beckons one to follow.
The death wish promises peace and surcease from struggle. But it does not rely upon lure alone, nor upon its power over the unconscious centers of the body. It pleads its case convincingly to reason too. No man lives forever. Why stretch a burdensome existence for just a few years more? The reward is not worth the effort.
And so a man shuts himself away from the outside world, not to hear the voices of those who love him, not to see the tempting glitter of fame which has already betrayed him, not to falter in his resolution to seek eternal rest.
The strange behavior of the sick, often so perplexing to their families and friends and even to their physicians, thus becomes understandable. When a man on his sick bed apparently fights with all his strength to recover, while his lips reiterate the assurance that he wants to live, the same man commits acts which are aimed directly at his own destruction. We who stand at the sick man's bedside are handicapped in our effort to understand him by the very fact that we ourselves are well. We attempt to evaluate a sick man's subjective experience, his feelings and his desires, with a healthy man's calm and reasonable objectivity and a healthy man's involvement in the work and relationships of living. But it is not what we would feel or desire, but the hidden inner resolution of the sick man which will determine the outcome.
When reason and emotion are locked in battle, however, emotion eventually wins. There was the relapse, for which we physicians had no medical explanation. Coming the day after the patient's fast, the relapse might have been the result of physical exertion. Although through most of his life he had not observed the solemn holiday, this time he had chosen to fast against all the efforts of his physician and his nurse to dissuade him, as though he were preparing himself to meet his Maker. That very choice was a self-destructive act, in unconscious obedience to his triumphing destructive drive.
Later I learned that the holiday was also the anniversary of his father's death. I have observed that, just as a word of reassurance at a critical moment can inspire the creative instinct and raise a man once more to strive in his own behalf, so an alluring mental image can encourage the destructive drive and cause the patient to succumb. Especially when a system has already suffered strain, the thought of one's dead father or mother, of a wife or other beloved person who has gone before, beckons one to follow.
The death wish promises peace and surcease from struggle. But it does not rely upon lure alone, nor upon its power over the unconscious centers of the body. It pleads its case convincingly to reason too. No man lives forever. Why stretch a burdensome existence for just a few years more? The reward is not worth the effort.
And so a man shuts himself away from the outside world, not to hear the voices of those who love him, not to see the tempting glitter of fame which has already betrayed him, not to falter in his resolution to seek eternal rest.
The strange behavior of the sick, often so perplexing to their families and friends and even to their physicians, thus becomes understandable. When a man on his sick bed apparently fights with all his strength to recover, while his lips reiterate the assurance that he wants to live, the same man commits acts which are aimed directly at his own destruction. We who stand at the sick man's bedside are handicapped in our effort to understand him by the very fact that we ourselves are well. We attempt to evaluate a sick man's subjective experience, his feelings and his desires, with a healthy man's calm and reasonable objectivity and a healthy man's involvement in the work and relationships of living. But it is not what we would feel or desire, but the hidden inner resolution of the sick man which will determine the outcome.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Illness is in the Mind of the Individual
Toward the end of the great century of mechanistic progress in medicine, resistance to this rigid formula began to grow. Doubts were expressed whether the sharp line between body and mind, between "scientific medicine" and neurology's young brother, psychiatry, could be maintained.
Psychiatry was the scorned orphan of medicine because its area, the diseases of the mind, stubbornly refused to give physical evidence of their presence. Psychiatrists endeavored to find the cause of mental disease in brain tissue, but all their brilliant anatomical research came to nothing except, for example, in general paralysis resulting from syphilis, and in senile dementia, the deterioration of the brain in old age. In these, at least, some physiological damage was discovered. Otherwise the most serious psychotics were found to have brains anatomically no different from that of any normal man.
But if brain anatomy proved to be a blind alley, progress was being made in the psychological research laboratories. Pavlov demonstrated scientifically by his conditioned reflex experiments that physical functions originate in a psychic impulse. Neurologists sought the nerve pathways by which the subjective idea in the mind is translated into physical action.
In France, Charcot brought order out of the chaos of nervous disturbances. His pupil, the young Freud, followed him through the chambers of the Salpetriere, observing the many unhappy human beings whose illness was not understood because it was of the mind.
From the neurology of his day Freud set forth in new directions to explore the dark world of the unconscious. For all that he was hooted at in the streets of Vienna, the early teachings of psychoanalysis had a dynamic impact which could not be ignored for long.
In 1914 a brilliant cure of toxic goiter (hyperthyroidism) by psychotherapy was reported in Germany. This was a case in which surgical treatment had been completely unsuccessful.
Signs of a change in medical thinking began to emerge, especially in gynecology. Freud's revelations of the depth and power of the sexual impulses gave pause to thoughtful medical men.
"There is too much minor gynecology and too little etiological [causal] thinking," wrote a leading professor of gynecology at the University of Berlin in 1925.
"... Their illness is a psychic conflict sailing under a gynecological Hag, which has escaped the attention of the quacks," declared the director of the Woman's Hospital of the University of Tubingen.
Elsewhere, and in other branches of medicine, the same questioning voices were heard. In such prevalent ills as heart diseases and gastrointestinal disorders, a literature began to grow on the possibility of psychic causes of physical illness.
Psychiatry was the scorned orphan of medicine because its area, the diseases of the mind, stubbornly refused to give physical evidence of their presence. Psychiatrists endeavored to find the cause of mental disease in brain tissue, but all their brilliant anatomical research came to nothing except, for example, in general paralysis resulting from syphilis, and in senile dementia, the deterioration of the brain in old age. In these, at least, some physiological damage was discovered. Otherwise the most serious psychotics were found to have brains anatomically no different from that of any normal man.
But if brain anatomy proved to be a blind alley, progress was being made in the psychological research laboratories. Pavlov demonstrated scientifically by his conditioned reflex experiments that physical functions originate in a psychic impulse. Neurologists sought the nerve pathways by which the subjective idea in the mind is translated into physical action.
In France, Charcot brought order out of the chaos of nervous disturbances. His pupil, the young Freud, followed him through the chambers of the Salpetriere, observing the many unhappy human beings whose illness was not understood because it was of the mind.
From the neurology of his day Freud set forth in new directions to explore the dark world of the unconscious. For all that he was hooted at in the streets of Vienna, the early teachings of psychoanalysis had a dynamic impact which could not be ignored for long.
In 1914 a brilliant cure of toxic goiter (hyperthyroidism) by psychotherapy was reported in Germany. This was a case in which surgical treatment had been completely unsuccessful.
Signs of a change in medical thinking began to emerge, especially in gynecology. Freud's revelations of the depth and power of the sexual impulses gave pause to thoughtful medical men.
"There is too much minor gynecology and too little etiological [causal] thinking," wrote a leading professor of gynecology at the University of Berlin in 1925.
"... Their illness is a psychic conflict sailing under a gynecological Hag, which has escaped the attention of the quacks," declared the director of the Woman's Hospital of the University of Tubingen.
Elsewhere, and in other branches of medicine, the same questioning voices were heard. In such prevalent ills as heart diseases and gastrointestinal disorders, a literature began to grow on the possibility of psychic causes of physical illness.
Friday, August 7, 2009
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