otterman’s posterous

I breathed a sigh of relief when I filed for leave in mid-December, as it had been a tough half a year. I would be on leave until January and was planning on a few field trips with my students and resting.  

 

After a few days, my head felt quite sore and really sensitive. Then a  pimple appeared (a first for me) and then a burning ear infection kicked in. Inserting Vicks VapouRub in my ear gave temporary relief and I got ear drops from a clinic to treat it the next day. Since I was on leave anyway, I decided to avoid my research students who were busy with field work in December, just to be safe. Never know what I might have. 

Well that thought turned out to be prophetic as two more "pimples" appeared, one above and one below the first one - the linear arrangement gave it away and it seemed I had come down with shingles - chicken pox round 2. Having experienced  chicken pox as a kid, the virus had remained latent only to flare up later in life under conditions of severe stress, physical or psychological, apparently. Usually it does so in individuals over 50, oh well.  

My rarely visited doc, a former classmate, confirmed the symptoms the next morning and peered worriedly while I struggled to raise my right eyelid which was now closed from a sagging forehead (sounds worse that it was). After some effort, I did manage to raise my eyelid and rolled my eyeball for good measure. He was relieved for the nerves to my eye had been spared. 

Shingles blisters are localised around a specific area corresponding to the nerve tissue of  origin so it was bad luck to get it on my right nostril, eyelid, forehead and scalp, rather than my body. However, I was just glad my eye and ear were not included in the virus' hit list! 

I dutifully popped Zovirax every 4 hours 48 minutes from then on and after just one night of a body shaking (not jaw-shaking thankfully) fever, I was left to contend with a variety of throbbing and sharp pains on the right side of my head. After two days, I was thankful that my episode appeared to be a mild one. 

The really odd thing was my incredibly oily forehead! I imagined I finally really knew how some teenagers feel and for the first time, actually used a face wash - there were some handy Shokobutsu tubes around and I managed to avoid bursting the fragile blisters. 

I had heard of the anti-viral drug more than a decade ago when it cost in the region of $800 or more. I had to fork out $230. I know the antiviral list is not a long one so I looked it up several days later when I felt like looking at a screen and email my biology friends that amongst other things, I had learnt that: 

• The antiviral drug Zovirax or acyclovir is acycloguanosine, which
• is a guanosine analogue that gets phosphorylated by viral enzymes to acyclo-GMP and then to acyclo-GTP by celullar kinases,
• acyclo-GTP inhibits viral polymerase for which it has a much greater affinity (300x),
• acyclo-GMP gets incorporated into viral DNA (as nucleoside substrate), causes chain termination and cannot be removed by viral repair enzymes.
• Acyclovir is the first selective anti-viral,
• Getrude B Elion won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1988 (along with her mentor Hitchings and one other, James Black for his work on beta-blockers),
• it was only partly for the development of this drug because because she and Hitchings contributed to the development of a host of anti-virals; her resume includes drugs for leukemia, malaria, gout, immune disorders, AIDS, organ rejection - would hold 45 patents.
  
• was with Burroughs Wellcome Laboratories at the North Carolina research triangle with Hitchings,
  
• she was unable to get a graduate research position due to her gender (pre-war),
• had an MSc w/research in Chemistry,
• WWII resulted in a shortage of men in civillian jobs helped her get her position with Hitchings,
  
• terminated her PhD when she was requested to go full-time which would have ended her lab work with Hitchings (who said she didn't need her PhD for their work),
  
• later received multiple honourary PhDs (23 honorary degrees),
• her mentor Hitchings encouraged her cross-disciplinary explorations,
• she later ran a department with multiple-disciplinary research (chemistry, enzymology, pharmacology, immunology, virology, and equipped with a tissue culture facility),
• her parents were Lithuanian and Polish Jews who settled in NYC,
• her father, a dentist, suffered from the great crash of '24 but luckily for her, she had the grades to enter a free college,
• was an enthusiastic teacher,
  
• she died in 1999, RIP, at Chapel Hill, N.C.

If you read just one article about this lady, try this one:
http://www.nap.edu/html/biomems/gelion.html

I went back to campus last Friday with evidence of my shingles bout clearly reflected on my forehead and determined to see to it I keep things simpler in the new year. Unfortunately, three people in the department had the flu and I picked up a chest cold.

Oh well.