I had just clicked "save" to publish my blog and the internet closed without warning, so this is an abbreviated version of my abbreviated blog. Two stories caught my eye on the train ride in to work - the Washington Post's compacted commuter daily, the Express, featured one bona fide science story and one story that mentioned the word science, so I'll include both.
The first: D.C. has the (mis)fortune of lovely ginkgo trees lining certain streets in town. I love ginkgos. Except when they drop their fruit. Arborists attempted to mitigate the foul stench with a new method this year - instead of the ineffectual SproutNip spray, they tried injecting a chemical mixture into the base of the trees so the flowers would drop before the fruit ripes, producing the death-like scent of rotten putrid grossness. Here's the headline and first few graphs of the Washington Post story. Kudos to David Fahrenthold for having fun with the article.
Ginkgo-Lined D.C., Capital of the U.S., and Now P.U.
The bouquet of a ginkgo tree's fruit has strong notes of unwashed feet and Diaper Genie, with noticeable hints of spoiled butter. For the District government this winter, it is the smell of defeat. This year, arborists working for the city tried a new solution for the stinky fruit, which has plagued residents for decades. They injected more than 1,000 ginkgo biloba trees with a chemical to stop them from producing the fruit. Whoops. The chemical didn't work, for reasons that scientists still don't understand. Now, instead of less ginkgo stink, Washington has its worst case in years -- a bumper crop of nastiness that is studding sidewalks and sliming dress shoes from Capitol Hill to Kalorama.
One fun fact: ginkgos, which are actually living fossils, are normally of the male variety (in the suburbs), which don't produce the fruit and hence don't smell. Some female trees were accidentally planted in the district. Stupid girls.
On to less stinky topics: in another article the staff writers recommended various taverns in town, in which certain Heroes characters might feel at home while imbibing and watching themselves on TV. I have no idea how this escaped my notice, but apparently D.C. has a bar called The Science Club! They even have old chem lab stools and a chalkboard. Awesome. Whether or not the place survives, the reviewer noted, is Darwinian - survival of the fittest.
And finally, this week FDA is discussing two oncologics, Erbitux and Vectibix, in the context of KRAS as a predictive and/or prognostic biomarker in oncology drug development. Since I've written about this for my publication I won't go into detail, but the story is fascinating and a great case study for pharmacogenomics. Essentially, for those who aren't aware, patients with wild-type KRAS (of the RAS oncogene family) respond differently to EGFR therapy than patients with mutant KRAS. Whether this results in testing for patients a la warfarin remains to be seen.
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