Ten days ago or so, I posted some photos of Time Goes By Elder Music columnist Peter Tibbles and his Assistant Musicologist, Norma, during their stay with me here in Oregon.

On 3 May, I saw them off to Idaho where they visited relatives. A week later, the AM flew to the east coast of the U.S. to see friends and Peter returned to my house for a few more days.

Among the interests Peter and I share is food and wine so a lot of our time was expended on thinking about, talking about, shopping for and preparing meals. What I did not realize until now, as I was going through the photos, is that we might as well have been in Japan.

That, above, is part of our meal at the excellent Japanese restaurant in Lake Oswego, Kurata, where we had lunch one day. And here is Peter at another excellent Japanese lunch at Mio in Portland a few days later. I've forgotten what the waving around of the $10 bill was about.

After Peter described a salmon and black bean dish he likes to cook, we made a trip to the nearby Japanese supermarket, Uwajimaya, to purchase supplies for the dinner. Here is Peter deep into preparation:

Here are the salmon and black beans ready to steam.

While Peter played chef for this meal (and many others at home), I set the table.

It was a glorious meal that I will try to repeat on my own sometime soon.

In past posts about Ollie the cat, I've told you how shy he is when people visit – straight under the bed he goes when anyone who is not me walks through the door. Maybe it was the length of Peter's stay or maybe he really, really likes Peter or maybe in his old age, Ollie is relaxing – as he did in this chair.

He even allowed himself to get oh-so-cute while Peter was here as in this poorly lighted shot of him peeking at us in the dining room.

He even reverted to some odd behavior I haven't seen in more than a year when he dropped a mouse into his water bowl one day. There's no way to know what that's about.

Unlike the first week Peter was here with Norma, there was glorious weather during his second stay. On the day we had lunch at Mio in Portland, we also spent some time at the Portland Japanese Garden. This stone lion is one of two that greeted us at the entrance.

The garden is as beautiful as you would imagine. Although the wisteria wasn't ready yet, spring flowers and shrubs were in bloom. Peter and I both found a lot to photograph.

And this flat garden is, obviously, serene whatever the season of the year.

At home (when we were not eating), Peter educated me on Australian TV comedy shows, we both read a lot and aren't we all happy for modern communications that make it easy to keep up with email when we're away from home.

Peter is spending another couple of weeks with his sister in the San Francisco area before flying home to Melbourne. Last Sunday afternoon, I drove him to Union Station in Portland for the train trip south.

It's amazing the friends we make on the internet and I have to remind myself now that I can't just call Peter to invite him and Norma to dinner or suggest we meet at Mio or Kurata for lunch. It was hard to say goodbye and I sat in the car for a while until my eyes cleared up enough to drive.

At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Mary Hertslet: Life Lessons Learned

How much do we really know about what small drug molecules do when they get into cells? Everyone involved in this sort of research wonders about this question, especially when it comes to toxicology. There's a new paper out in PLoS One that will cause you to think even harder.

The researchers (from Princeton) looked at the effects of the antidepressant sertraline, a serotonin reuptake inhibitor. They did a careful study in yeast cells on its effects, and that may have some of you raising your eyebrows already. That's because yeast doesn't even have a serotonin transporter. In a perfect pharmacological world, sertraline would do nothing at all in this system.

We don't live in that world. The group found that the drug does enter yeast cells, mostly by diffusion, with a bit of acceleration due to proton motive force and some reverse transport by efflux pumps. (This is worth considering in light of those discussions we were having here the other day about transport into cells). At equilibrium, most (85 to 90%) of the sertaline that makes it into a yeast cell is stuck to various membranes, mostly ones involved in vesicle formation, either through electrostatic forces or buried in the lipid bilayer. It's not setting off any receptors - there aren't any - so what happens when it's just hanging around in there?

More than you'd think, apparently. There's enough drug in there to make some of the membranes curve abnormally, which triggers a local autophagic response. (The paper has electron micrographs of funny-looking Golgi membranes and other organelles). This apparently accounts for the odd fact, noticed several years ago, that some serotonin reuptake inhibitors have antifungal activity. This probably applies to the whole class of cationic amphiphilic/amphipathic drug structures.

The big question is what happens in mammalian cells at normal doses of such compounds. These may well not be enough to cause membrane trouble, but there's already evidence to the contrary. A second big question is: does this effect account for some of the actual neurological effects of these drugs? And a third one is, how many other compounds are doing something similar? The more you look, the more you find. . .

You've heard of Peter G. Peterson, haven't you? He is the billionaire financier who has, for decades, been spending his money in pursuit of privatizing Social Security. Whenever you read the word “privatize” in that regard, read “loot.”

Here is what Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and TGB contributor Saul Friedman wrote about Peterson in these blog pages two years ago:

(If you've never thought about it, consider where you would be today if part of your Social Security account had been invested on Wall Street in 2008.)

As you read this blog post on Tuesday 15 May 2012, The Peter G. Peterson Foundation is holding its third annual, all-day Fiscal Summit in Washington, D.C. where participants include

Former President Bill Clinton
House Speaker John Boehner
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner
Senator Rob Portman
Congressman Paul Ryan
Former Senator Alan Simpson.

Do you see a pattern among these Summit speakers? What these “Peterson people” will talk about today is that the deficit is so awful we must slash public spending (read food stamps, unemployment insurance, etc.) and “reform” (always means “cut”) what they refer to as entitlements but we know we have paid for with dollars we earned over a lifetime – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

The ignorant media - those who operate as stenographers - will report what is said at this Summit as gospel truth. You will be reading and hearing the lies tomorrow and the next day with no attempt from the stenos to correct the record.

While I'm on the topic of the media, on the list of speakers and panelists at the Fiscal Summit webpage, are a number of well-known, celebrity journalists listed not as reporters but as participants:

Tom Brokaw, NBC
Erin Burnett, CNN
John F. Harris, Politico
Patricia Murphy, The Daily Beast/Newsweek
George Stephanopoulos, ABC
David Wessel, Wall Street Journal
Judy Woodruff, PBS

Personally, it does not gladden my heart to see the elite of national media (who have no need of Social Security for their retirement), taking part in the meeting organized by a billionaire whose decades-old goal is to dismantle Social Security and Medicare.

Attendance at the Peter G. Peterson Fiscal Summit is by invitation only which makes the above lists of speakers and participant journalists look even worse than they would without such exclusivity.

Here is a much better-looking list of people who, excluded from the Summit, will be demonstrating outside the meeting venue at the Andrew Mellon Auditorium at 1301 Constitution Avenue, N.W. In Washington, D.C. today:

Bernie Sanders, U.S. Senator
Terry O’Neill of NOW
Max Richtman of NCPSSM
Roger Hickey of Campaign for America's Future

Among the sponsors of the rally are Health Care for America Now, CREDO, Social Security Works, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, National Committee to Protect Social Security and Medicare and National Organization for Women.

The Protest the Fiscal Summit rally (more about it here) begins at 1PM today and if you are in the D.C. area and are reading this in time, it would be terrific if you would lend your presence. Here is what Roger Hickey wrote about the reasons for the demonstration:

I know I do bang on about the threats to Social Security and Medicare and I know your eyes glaze over when you see these posts. But without those programs, I would be living under a bridge and so would a lot of you. We must fight back against the elites who would do that to us and to future generations.

Here are a couple of reports on today's Peterson Fiscal Summit from people who know a lot more about it than I do:

Dean Baker - co-director of CEPR

At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Michael Gorodezky: My Grief

This fine reagent was mentioned here (disparagingly) in the comments the other day, and I knew that it was time to add it to the list. I've had some other selenium entries before, and they're all here for the same reason: their unsupportable stenches. Everyone, even people who've never had a chemistry class in their lives, knows that sulfur compounds are stinky, of course, but it's a problem that continues as you move down Group XVI of the periodic table.

And it's not like plain phenol itself has no odor. It's strong, penetrating, and completely unmistakable. As soon as I get a whiff of the stuff, I'm immediately transported back to the Verser Clinic, the small hospital in the town I grew up in back in Arkansas. Phenol smells like an old-fashioned medical office; it was used for many years as a disinfectant (and was, in fact, introduced as such by Joseph Lister himself). If you move it down a notch to sulfur, you get thiophenol, which is easy to describe: burning rubber - the pure, potent, platonic ideal of burning rubber, bottled up and daring you to open the cap. I can't say that I won't work with thiophenol, since I have (very much to my regret, at times), but I've used it most reluctantly, and probably haven't touched it in at least fifteen years.

Ah, but move down one more element and you have selenophenol, and that's a more exotic reagent. I've never seen any, and after reading the descriptions, I never want to. Actually, let me take that back: I'd look at some from the other end of the lab. What I never want to do is open any of it up. The chemical literature has numerous examples of people who are at a loss for words when it comes to describing its smell, but their attempts are eloquent all the same. A few years ago, Gaussling at the Lamentations on Chemistry blog referred to it as "The biggest stinker I have run across. . .Imagine 6 skunks wrapped in rubber innertubes and the whole thing is set ablaze. That might approach the metaphysical stench of this material." So we'll start with that.

I believe that this lovely compound is commercially available (if you're anywhere close to anyone making it, you'll know about it). But should you wish to prepare it with your own hands, do violence to your own schnozz, and drape yourself out of your own window while you throw up into your own rhododendrons, feel free to use this reliable preparation from Organic Syntheses, circa 1944. This features the note that "it is frequently advisable to work with [selenium compounds] on alternate days", which I suppose is to give them time to work their way out of your nasal passages.

I'm not so sure. When I was a teaching assistant in grad school, I taught three labs a week one semester, and one of those labs, damn it all, was the phenyl Grignard reagent. We had them making it in diethyl ether, outside of the small and inadequate fume hoods, and the solvent fumes were fit to strip paint. By the end of the Monday lab, I was well saturated with ether and had a terrible headache, which returned as soon as I caught my first whiff of the stuff on Tuesday afternoon. I barely made it through that lab, mostly by holding my breath and using a lot of hand gestures, and I took the opportunity on Wednesday to get as much fresh air as I could. But when I came back for the Thursday session, the first first wave of ether vapor washed over me and nearly stretched me out on the tiles. I taught the entire lab from the hallway, shouting and waving like Monty Python's "Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights". So in my mind, the choice between getting these things over with and stretching them out is still not settled.

That Org Syn prep also notes that it can produce small amounts of hydrogen selenide, which is very toxic indeed (and will give you a sore throat, too, apparently, before it kills you). This luckless graduate student from the 1920s got to experience both of these bracing selenium room fresheners in the course of his work:

Berzelius described the poisonous effect of hydrogen selenide quite impressively; "In order ta get acquainted with the smell of this gas I allowed a bubble not larger than a pea to pass into my nostril ; in consequence of its smell I so completely loss my sense of smell for several hours that I could not distinguish the odor of strong ammonia even when held under my nose. My sense of smell returned after five or six hours, but severe irritation of the mucous membrane set in and persisted for a fortnight' The writer has been working on the gas for some time and was also quite seriously affected once, the injury persisting for many days. That it is more poisonous than the hydrogen sulphide is well known."

So you have that to look forward to on your way to selenophenol. And at your destination? Assuming your nose is still attached to your face, you'll experience what few chemists ever have. I'll let this 1908 report from Wisconsin take over:

When benzeneselenonic acid in solution is treated with reducing agents such as hydrogen sulphide, sulphur dioxide, or, best, with zinc and hydrochloric, acid selenophenol is obtained as a yellow oil with an overpowering and most nauseating odor. . .The odor of diphenyl diselenide is extremely disagreeable but is not nearly so bad as that of selenophenol.

. . .The effect of selenophenol on the skin is very similar to that of thiophenol, forming blisters which itch intensely. After a time, these dry up, the skin scales off, and there appears to be a deposit of red selenium beneath it. The odor of selenophenol is very penetrating, and is nauseating beyond description.

Gloves, man, gloves. Unless, of course, you wish to be tattooed with elemental selenium while being nauseated beyond description. Should this be your idea of a fun Saturday night, I will not stand in your way.

“How do you create awareness about migraine disease and headache disorders as a regular patient with a life full of other obligations?” was the question for the May 2012 Headache & Migraine Disease Blog Carnival. Though I didn’t get a post written in time to be included in the carnival, I have been mulling the question over. I was surprised to discover myself coming back to a very simple answer: talk about migraine.

Advocating for folks with migraine doesn’t require a fancy degree, having a blog, or devoting tons of time to the cause. All it takes is for people with migraine — and those who love us — to speak up about what migraine really is whenever the opportunity arises. This means not dismissing a migraine as “no big deal” and not shrugging off when someone says migraine is “just a headache,” but explaining that this is a neurological disorder that affects the entire body.

Explaining that the autonomic nervous system — which is responsible for all the processes the body does without obvious input from the brain, like breathing and digestion — goes haywire and that all five senses are on super-high alert are illustrative for non-migraineurs. The list of little-known migraine symptoms and weird migraine symptoms help, too.

How do you talk about migraine to raise awareness of the disease?

Studies show TheraSpecs glasses can reduce migraines up to 74%, relieve painful sensitivity to light (photophobia), and protect you from fluorescent lights. Best of all, they are drug-free so there is no risk of medication overuse headache. Learn more and get your own pair at www.theraspecs.com.

Now here's a worrisome thought, if you're doing kinase research. A tyrosine kinase inhibitor in the clinic against Bcr-Abl, bosutinib (SKI-606), is also being used as a research tool in a number of academic groups. But they're probably not using what they think they're using.

This article has the details. The compound has a dichloromethoxy aryl group hanging off of it, and apparently someone has been making (or made one good-sized batch of) the wrong isomer. Instead of 2, 4-dichloro-5-methoxy, many commercial samples appear to be 3,5-dichloro-4-methoxy. This got noticed at first by inspection of an X-ray structure deposited in the Protein Data Bank, 3ZZ2, from a group at Oxford. A postdoc at Stanford saw that something was off, and at the same time, he was having trouble matching his own X-ray data with the known structure of the compound.

The explanation wasn't what anyone wanted to hear, for sure. The two groups had purchased their material years apart, from different vendors. The count of vendors selling the wrong material is now up to thirteen and climbing. That link also suggests a possible earlier source of the problem: some of the commercial supplies of 2,4-dichloro-5-methoxy aniline are not the right material. Whoever made this bosutinib may well have thought that they were right on target.

Odds are, some batch of the wrong stuff has been resold through the supplier community since at least 2006 - this sort of thing goes on all the time. But the tricky part here is that LC/MS wouldn't have told you that there was a problem, unless you had an authentic sample to check the retention times (which would have been pretty darn close, anyway, I'd guess). The mass is, of course, the same. And the NMRs of the authentic and mis-labeled stuff would be different, but not on casual inspection, for sure (same number of aryl protons). No, I would have let this stuff through, I've no doubt about that. Makes a person wonder what else on the shelf is the wrong material, doesn't it?

The latest cover of the New Yorker magazine on newsstands today. Isn't this terrific:

Compared to Congress and the judicial branch of government, a president has few actual powers. However, his position does imbue him with the authority to influence and, in time, even to change the course of the social zeitgeist.

That happened last week when President Barack Obama endorsed same-sex marriage:

Now the public conversation about full rights for gays and lesbians is altered.

Among the zillions of words spoken in response to the president's announcement were some important ones from our own Jan Adams at her blog in a post titled, BHO made me happy.

If you are straight and are having any trouble understanding that, imagine your life if you had been barred from marrying your wife or husband. Many gay and lesbian couples have lived decades in that second-class condition. Please go read the rest of Jan's post.

At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Lyn Burnstine: Love's Memories

A reader sends along this query, which I thought asked a very useful question:

". . .as a member of a growing biopharma company I am tasked with evaluating the effectiveness of industrial post-docs from both a business perspective and the post-doc's experience. Specifically, we are considering adding one for a short-term (2yr) to add headcount to a project. This adds resources without the long term commitment and also gives the scientists on site a chance for a paper they otherwise might not have time to work on. The candidate obviously gets a well-paid post-doc experience, and an industrial foot in the door. But, does this model work? I imagine that if it were that cut and dried you would see more of them."

Good point. Industrial post-docs are still relatively rare, although I've certainly seen a few. Come to think of it, though, those were mostly in biology, as opposed to chemistry. So, what do people think? From my end, I'd say that traditionally, companies have felt that temporary positions are best filled with experienced temporary employees, who presumably don't have to be trained as much. And if you're going to hire someone to learn the ropes, they might as well be good enough to be brought in as a full-time employee.

From the other end, an industrial post-doc has always been seen as less prestigious than an academic one, and there are some hiring managers who probably don't know what to think when one shows up on a c.v. There's often a feeling that if the person did a really good job during the post-doc that the company would have tried to offer them something permanent. And since they didn't, well. . .

Even so, it does seem as if there are situations where an industrial post-doc could be a good fit, and in today's job market, anything looks good. Anyone out there experienced this, from either end?

This Sunday Elder Music column was launched in December of 2008. By May of the following year, one commenter, Peter Tibbles, had added so much knowledge and value to my poor attempts at musical presentations that I asked him to take over the column. He's been here each week ever since delighting us with his astonishing grasp of just about everything musical, his humor and sense of fun. You can read Peter's bio here and find links to all his columns here.

Self indulgence time today (as if all these columns aren’t just that).

BUDDY HOLLY was the most famous musician to come from Lubbock, Texas, and yes, there were others.

Born Charles Hardin Holley, he always claimed to be related to the notorious gunslinger John Wesley Hardin. I won’t go into whether that’s so or not as it’s really irrelevant to what we are about today - and that is music. No gunplay will be in evidence.

Buddy has been described as "the single most influential creative force in early rock and roll" and I wouldn’t disagree with that assessment.

He defined the genre by writing the songs himself, having a self contained band, The Crickets, in which he played guitar and sang, produced his own records, and recorded them at his own speed without record company interference, utilizing unorthodox instruments in his songs.

You could almost be describing The Beatles upon whom he had an overwhelming influence. This wasn’t obvious at the time; it’s only in retrospect that this became clear.

There are a number of songs that are so iconic I don’t need to mention them. I won’t be featuring them today. Well, not many of them. I just want to show that there was more to Buddy than the hits.

Indeed, the progress he showed in the last year of his life in songwriting, producing and general musicianship is remarkable and, of course, it raises the “what if?” question. Buddy was 22 when he died. We’ll never know the answer so I’m not going to dwell further on that.

Due to all sorts of legal shenanigans, Buddy was contracted to two separate record companies, one as himself and another as a member of The Crickets. Thus, twice as much music was released at the time which was good for us but led to problems down the track. I won’t bother you with that, I’ll just get into the music.

The second album I bought with my own money was “The Buddy Holly Story, Volume 2” (Volume 1 was the first, although it didn’t have the “Volume” on it).

This second one was rushed out when the first sold a million or more. That first one contained all the hits that everyone knew. The songs on Volume 2 were what were then considered also-rans. They have proved to be some of his most enduring songs over the years. There will be a few from that one today.

So much for my initial premise of only having lesser known songs - here’s one of Buddy’s most famous. It was originally called Cindy Lou after Buddy’s niece - the name was later changed to Peggy Sue. This was the name of Jerry Allison’s girl friend and later, wife. Jerry was the drummer in The Crickets and he produced that wonderful rolling drum beat throughout the song.

♫ Buddy Holly - Peggy Sue

Buddy kept the story of Peggy Sue going with this next song. There were various versions of Peggy Sue Got Married released after he died. This is the first I encountered on the album “Volume 2”.

It was overdubbed, but not as badly as some other versions of the song that had different additions to it. There is Buddy’s original version out there, the one he recorded in his apartment in New York and that’s really the pick of the bunch.

I have used that one before and you can find it in a column called Singer Songwriters. Here’s the version I first heard when I was young.

♫ Buddy Holly - Peggy Sue Got Married

Listen to Me sounds to me rather like a calypso song. Calypso music was big around then, so I wouldn’t be surprised. There’s also Buddy’s distinctive Stratocaster guitar playing throughout and even a talky bit to add a touch of country.

♫ Buddy Holly - Listen to Me

Crying, Waiting, Hoping seems to be the song that has had the most overdubs on various releases over the years. None of these is very good and some are atrocious.

Given that, I’ve selected the version with just Buddy and acoustic guitar that he recorded in his apartment in New York before going on the last tour.

♫ Buddy Holly - Crying Waiting Hoping (original)

A song that wasn’t a big hit in its time is Not Fade Away. It was the flip side of Rave On, a 45 I bought as a whippersnapper. The Rolling Stones covered the song early in their career and made it a hit.

Buddy’s version beats the Stones’ version easily. Buddy usurped the Bo Diddley beat as did the Stones in a lot of their early records. Bo said that if he could have copyrighted that he’d have made a fortune. He probably wouldn’t have as he didn’t get much from the songs he wrote either.

However, Bo remained a great performer for the rest of his life. This is about Buddy though.

♫ Buddy Holly - Not Fade Away

Words of Love was a song The Beatles covered in their early recording days. Their version wasn’t bad but not as good as Buddy’s.

♫ Buddy Holly - Words of Love

Valley of Tears was written by Fats Domino and is a rare cover from Buddy. Fats had a minor hit with the song in 1957. I prefer Buddy’s version, but not by much.

♫ Buddy Holly - Valley of Tears

I first discovered Well, All Right on my album of “Volume 2”.

Here it is as I heard it as a callow youth.

♫ Buddy Holly - Well, All Right

Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues is a fine example of the “hiccup” style of singing for which Buddy was renowned. He said that this was just a Texas way of singing. I don’t know. I’ll have to ask some Texans. However it came into being, I like the song.

♫ Buddy Holly - Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues

Okay, here’s another famous one. As I mentioned up above, this was the single I bought that had Not Fade Away on the flip side. I didn’t know about that song when I first got it but I sure knew about this one, Rave On.

♫ Buddy Holly - Rave On

BIONIC EYES FOR ELDERS
An estimated half million Amercians age 75 and older are afflicted with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) along with, eventually, the resultant blindness. Two years ago, the Federal Trade Commission approved an amazing space-age treatment for some with AMD:

video platform video management video solutions video player

You can read more here.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY TOMORROW
And if you happen to live in the Spokane, Washington area, have we got a gift idea for you.

Peter Tibbles found this and passed it on. Nothing says love like a family holiday at the shooting range.

WORLD CLASS EDUCATION ONLINE – FOR FREE
On 2 May, Harvard and MIT announced a joint non-profit partnership that will offer free online courses from both universities. And that's only the beginning:

As good as these educational developments will be for young students, I believe they are an excellent learning source for elders who in retirement have time to pursue interests they were too busy for during the mid-years of life.

A year or so ago, I told you about the free online-only lectures at the then-new Khan Academy. At the time, most of the topics were in mathematics but there is now a growing collection in history and the humanities. I liked this discussion of the famous 1434 painting of Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife by Jan Van Eyck.

SEEING AURAS
Synesthesia is a fascinating neurological condition in which the brain's crossed wires allow some people to, for example, taste colors or hear sounds when they smell certain odors.

Now, take a little memory trip and recall that time in the sixties when seeing auras around people was in fashion. It always felt like a hippie dippie kind of thing to me and probably fraudulent. But now researchers in Spain have done some work suggesting that some who claim to see auras may actually see those glowing colors due to synesthesia:

Okay, yet another study filled with weasel words like “may” and “suggest” which means no one knows yet if this is true or not. But I still think it's interesting.

WHO KNOWS WHAT GOES ON IN THE MINDS OF CATS
(Hat tip to Darlene Costner)

WHO SAID THIS, DO YOU THINK, ABOUT ELECTRONIC BOOKS?

Give up? It was the author of Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak, who died last week at age 83. You can read more about him here.

For our celebration of his life today, here is Sendak's interview in two parts with Stephen Colbert.

Interesting Stuff is a weekly listing of short takes and links to web items that have caught my attention; some related to aging and some not, some useful and others just for fun.

You are all encouraged to submit items for inclusion. Just click “Contact” in the upper left corner of any Time Goes By page to send them. I'm sorry that I probably won't have time to acknowledge receipt and there is no guarantee of publication. But when I do include them, you will be credited and I will link to your blog if you have one.

You chemists may have really stretched things to get a reaction to work, but here's a good set of "Conditions You'll Probably Never Be Desperate Enough to Try". Bone meal? Ground carrots? I think he has a point.

Drug companies are very attuned to competitive intelligence. There's a lot of information sloshing around out there, and you'd be wise to pay attention to it. Publications in journals are probably the least of it - by the time something written up for publication from inside a pharma company, it's either about to be on the drugstore shelves or it never will be at all. Patents are far more essential, and if you're going to watch anything, you should watch the patent applications in your field.

But there's more. Meetings are a big source of disclosure, as witness the Wall Street frenzies around ASCO and the like. Talks and posters release information that won't show up in the literature for a long time (if indeed it ever does). And there are plenty of other avenues. The question is, though, how much time and money do you want to spend on this sort of thing?

There are commercial services (such as Integrity) that monitor companies, compounds, and therapeutic areas in this fashion, and they're happy to sell you their services, which are not cheap. But figuring out the cost/benefit ratio isn't easy. My guess is that these things, while useful, can be thought of as insurance. You're paying to make sure that something big doesn't happen that you're unware or (or unaware of in enough time).

So here's a question for the readership: has competitive intelligence ever made a big difference for you? Positive and negative results both welcome; "I'm so glad we found out about X" versus "I really wish we'd known about Y". Any thoughts?

Sometimes it takes me all day to write a post for this blog. That is, six or eight or more hours sitting in a chair poring over books, magazines, printouts, a dozen or more open browser windows and a keyboard.

For many years, sometimes – nay, most times – I didn't get out of the chair but for lunch, to search the shelves for another book or magazine I needed, or to pee. (Ollie the cat conveniently jumps up on the desk when he needs stroking.)

All this sitting is not good. In fact, it is so bad in terms of health, it alone could kill me before my time. Which is the reason that a couple of months ago, I downloaded a free smartphone app that has only one function – it dings at whatever interval of time I set it for.

At first, that was once an hour to remind me to get out of the chair and move around for awhile. But now, after a rash of new information about the health dangers of inactivity, I've set the app to ding twice as often - every half hour.

There are hundreds of studies each corroborating the findings of all the others: nothing keeps us healthier than exercise and exercise is almost a miracle treatment for many conditions and diseases. Here is a new report about how exercise slows muscle wasting due to age and heart failure:

Did you notice the amount of time devoted to exercise in this study? Twenty minutes spread four times throughout the day is not much for such a big-deal return on investment.

More and more research is finding that although there is nothing wrong with running marathons, sweating through 90-minute gym workouts or ten-mile bicycle rides if that is your pleasure, it takes far less effort than previously believed to stave off the dire effects of inactivity.

Gretchen Reynolds writes the popular “Phys Ed” column in The New York Times and a couple of weeks ago, her new book, The First 20 Minutes: Surprising Science Reveals How We Can Exercise Better, Train Smarter, Live Longer (whew!), was published.

It is on my list for “next” (along with six others) but I haven't read the book yet. Even so, I am so impressed by an interview with Ms. Reynolds in the Times last week and encouraged at how important I believe her information is for elders who may not be able to do strenuous exercise anymore, that I wanted to share this with you now.

Some more excerpts from the interview which you will find here.

“Humans,” writes Ms Reynolds, “are born to stroll” and she makes a clear distinction between the kind of movement needed to help maintain health and that meant to improve sports performance. For the former, “movement” is key and you already have everything you need to do that:

It turns out, according to Ms. Reynolds, that I have been doing exactly the right thing with my reminder app that dings to help counteract a life spent in front of a screen:

I hope this post has moved you to get moving. Although Ms. Reynolds' prescription is aimed at people of all ages, it seems tailor-made for elders. And it is frequency more than length of time spent moving that matters.

You will find the archive of Gretchen Reynolds' Times columns here which is well worth a read.

At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Dan Vitale: Butchie

Here's an excellent article, with copious references, tracing the history of what we now know as the metal-catalyzed coupling field. Victor Snieckus of Queen's University, Thomas Colacot (Johnson Matthey) and co-authors go back to the Wurtz and Glaser reactions of the 1850s and 60s, up through the Ullmann reaction (1891, and still very much with us) and Kharasch and Cadiot-Chodkiewicz couplings (1940s) before breaking into the world of palladium with the Wacker oxidation.

Along the way, one learns that the discoverer of palladium (Wollaston) could never interest anyone in the metal, and almost all of it that he'd extracted was still sitting on the shelf, unsold, at his death. Time vindicated him, and how - it's now perhaps the most essential catalytic metal in the world. The late 1960s were a turning point:

Entry of Richard Heck: Following post-doctoral studies, Heck accepted a position at Hercules Powder Co where he was afforded freedom that is seldom experienced by the modern industrial chemist. Briefed with the task of “doing something with transition metals,” Heck investigated the chemistry of cobalt carbonyl complexes. Although this work generated many interesting observations, finding profitable applications for his research proved difficult. Inspired by his colleague Pat Henry's work on the Wacker oxidation, Heck's attention turned in the direction of arylpalladium chemistry.

He tried Wacker-type conditions with other reagents around to try to intercept the palladium intermediate, and organomercurys obliged with an immediate reaction. The story from there is a trip through a good swath of the periodic table, and the development of an awful lot of knowledge and expertise in metal complexes. Enter then Mizoroki, Kumada, Sonogashira, Negishi, Stille, Suzuki and many others. It's a long, complex, story, but this paper should serve as the definitive overview, and an excellent look at how chemistry (and science in general) go about discovering and developing things.

For those of you following Arena Pharmaceuticals and their long-running efforts to get lorcaserin approved by the FDA, there's a committee hearing on that matter today. Adam Feuerstein is live-blogging the event here. The big issues, now with fresh data: tumors in rat models, and possible heart-valve damage, versus efficacy. The FDA has until June 27 to make a decision.

More disruption in the scientific publishing model: the UK government has announced that it will set up an open-access system for papers that are generated through its funding, similar to the system in the US. The details are still being worked out, and the government is still making noises about not "ruining the value provided by academic publishers", but it's that value that's at issue, isn't it?

A statement from Wiley said that "Publishers enable content digitisation, rigorous peer review, strong editorial infrastructure and support and investment in an effective online platform for dissemination." And yes, they do those things. But how well do they do them? And how well do they do them for the prices they charge? I'm glad that these arguments are finally out on the table.

Well, not the entire poem of T.S. Eliot although it is surely worth the read and you will find it here.

This, today, is a short six lines taken from near the end of the work with that wonderful, well-worn question in line 3.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think they will sing to me.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in the U.S., moved to the U.K. in his 20s and eventually became a naturalized British citizen. He was one of the most renowned poets of the 20th Century.

In addition to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, many of Eliot's works are among the best-known and loved - Gerontion, Ash Wednesday, The Waste Land and my favorite, Four Quartets.

He died in 1965 at age 76.

At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Mickey Rogers: Dementia Patients

I mentioned the other day that Human Genome Sciences had turned down an offer from GSK, feeling that they could do better. Well, if they can, now's the time: GSK is now offering the same deal ($13/share) on the open market in a hostile takeover attempt. One of these companies is wrong about that price, and now I guess we'll find out which one of them it is. . .

Sometimes you don’t hear from me for awhile because I’m in a horrible spell of migraine attacks. Other times it is because the migraines have let up enough that I’m racing around, trying to accomplish everything that falls to the wayside when the migraines overtake me. I continue to expect the migraines — and thus my life — will even out. Silly me.

The last week of April I had a cold, a mouth full of cold sores, and storm-triggered migraines. A down week. Last week I felt great even though I discovered I had an indomethacin-induced ulcer. The migraines were mild and I had a ton of energy. I went to the dentist, the doctor, yoga and physical therapy, had coffee with an old friend, got a magnesium infusion, cleaned the house, hosted a Cinco de Mayo party, was swamped with TheraSpecs work, and more I won’t bore you with. I was exhausted by the end of each day, but woke up the next morning ready to go. Clearly an up week taking loops at high speeds. This week I’m struggling to keep my head up through severe migraines. And the roller coaster plunges back down.

Maybe I’m now paying for overexerting last week. Or maybe this is a new week with unrelated migraine triggers. The amount of time I spend second-guessing my health-related decisions is dramatically less than it was, say, a year ago. Still it feels like far too much time and energy. Balance continues to elude me. Not just in deciding how much to do and when to rest, but also in how I think about migraine and my role (if any) in exacerbating the illness.

In theory I know migraine is a disease and I am not at fault for having it. In practice, though, when “stress” is a commonly cited trigger for an illness, the patient is inherently blamed for worsening their own health. So I always wonder what I did wrong and what I can change next time.

I’m stuck on a ride I can’t get off of even though I didn’t want to be on it in the first place. I never did like roller coasters, but am willing to make the most of the ride since I’m already here. If only I could figure when to throw my arms in the air and scream with joy and when to hunker down and hold on tight.

Studies show TheraSpecs glasses can reduce migraines up to 74%, relieve painful sensitivity to light (photophobia), and protect you from fluorescent lights. Best of all, they are drug-free so there is no risk of medication overuse headache. Learn more and get your own pair at www.theraspecs.com.

I've received another e-mail from Prof. Fathi Moussa, lead author of the C60 longevity paper that's been discussed around here. I'd sent a list of the critiques that had shown up in the comments sections, and here's the reply:

An erratum with the right figures 3 and 4 will be published soon in Biomaterials. The right lifespan values after the beginning of the treatment are given in the original text without any change. To sum it up, the extensions of lifespans are twenty months and sixteen months with respect to water-treated controls and olive-oil-treated controls, respectively.

We hope now that others will try and confirm our results. If our results are confirmed by others, which we firmly believe, it will be then necessary to try to reproduce these experiments on bigger samples including other species and of course to optimize the dose and the duration of the treatment.

I share that hope that others will try to confirm the results. It'll be a while, most likely, before we hear about anything in this area, but when something comes up, I'll blog about it.