Dirac Angestun Gesept

The NYT is reporting that a Merck-Johnson & Johnson joint venture has applied to make Mevacor (lovastatin), an older anti-cholesterol drug, available over-the-counter.

The timing on this is somewhat interesting to me, since I just today went to get blood work done to check on how I’m doing on lovastatin, and to pick up a new prescription for the same dosage level they’re considering making the OTC dose.

One of the concerns is that both the condition being treated (high cholesterol) and a potential side effect (liver breakdown) can only be monitored by periodic blood tests, which makes it kind of hard to see how taking it OTC will allow patients to tell if it’s helping, or hurting.

I also have the selfish concern that the price I pay would probably go up; my co-pay for a generic drug, which lovastatin now is, is quite a bit lower than the price of a 30-day supply is likely to be if it does go OTC.

The FDA voted against OTC for Mevacor (as well as Pravachol) in 2000, so we’ll see what happens this time around.

Not long after the death of Francis Crick, we’ve lost another of the discoverers of the double helix, Maurice Wilkins.

Wilkins, along with Rosalind Franklin, did the X-ray diffraction work that made the discovery possible, and he shared the Nobel with Watson and Crick. (Franklin died before the award, and Nobel Prizes are not given posthumously.)

Lord May, president of the Royal Society:

We are all greatly saddened to learn of the death yesterday of Maurice Wilkins. While Watson and Crick have rightly been recognised across the world for their contribution, the roles of Wilkins and Franklin, which were crucial, have not always been fully acknowledged outside the scientific community.

Congratulations to all involved, from Scaled Composites and others, on the first of the Ansari X Prize flights.

Derek Draper’s story in the Guardian about his struggles with depression, and positing quite a bit of hidden-even-from-the-sufferer depression (or as he calls it “latent depression”) may be of interest.

Only by dealing with underlying depressive feelings will the mind be freed from clinging to its old patterns for warding them off. If latent depression is acknowledged and faced up to there is the potential to live in a fuller, richer, more meaningful way. For if depression is not just about a set of particular symptoms but is actually emotional - and psychic - deadness, the possibility held out by change is no less than life.

Read the article. If parts of it sound far too familiar, there can be help; medication, therapy, or a combination may be what you need.

Young people, as this newspaper reported recently, are more likely to die from depression than from Aids, cancer and heart disease combined.

It may seem hopeless, but there is hope.

Man who helped unlock DNA dies

The BBC obituary has further details on his life, including this great snippet:

He dabbled in science from an early age, once attempting, unsuccessfully, whilst in primary school, to make artificial silk. The process involved putting explosive material into bottles and blowing them up electrically.

That sounds like a really fun/cool thing to try, even if it didn’t work.

It’s been announced by the X Prize Foundation that the Scaled Composites group (Paul Allen & Burt Rutan) have officially given their 60 day notice and scheduled their first X Prize flight for September 29.

In addition, the Canadian da Vinci team plan to roll out their Wild Fire balloon-launched spacecraft in Toronto on August 5, en route to making their own prize flight attempts.

I’m really excited to see multiple teams going forward and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the Sept 29 flight.

Wired News covers the post-9/11 regulation problems affecting hobby rocketry. Basically, chalk up another casualty of the War on Things People Might Possibly Do Bad Stuff With Somehow.

I think the timing of the article is probably due to the success of SpaceShipOne; I’d heard grumblings about this before, but the juxtaposition of “private industry gets to space” and “government stomps on folks trying to do rocketry” is new.

I suspect Homer Hickam is not too happy about the situation; good thing these regs weren’t around in the late 1950s. Note another of his books, written after 9/11: We Are Not Afraid.

Who drives a Honda Insight, powers his gadgets with solar panels, and even travels sometimes using wind power–on land?

Eco Man!

Another tool Trainer uses is something he calls a wind blade — a vertical advertising board in the shape of an airplane wing balanced on a single wheel or on a modified scooter. It catches the wind and pulls him along on his in-line skates.

A neat article about a guy who really takes alternative energy seriously, but isn’t a dogmatic “my way is the only way” guy:

But he doesn’t stomp. He doesn’t roar. And he doesn’t browbeat. In the driveway he shares with his neighbors, a white sport utility vehicle towers over Trainer’s little silver bullet. It belongs to Melissa Dunford, who lives with her husband in the unit next door.

“We’re kind of opposite of him,” she said, laughing at the contrast of the two cars parked side by side. “But we’re very good friends. They’ve never judged us.”

The good news: SpaceShipOne had a successful flight.

The bad news: the US Supreme Court decided 5-4 that refusing to identify yourself is not Constitutionally protected. When I was a kid, we were always told that “papers, please” was something only the Nazis and Communists required, and weren’t we glad we lived in a free country? I suppose it was nice while it lasted.

The BBC is covering the story under the misleading title “Human genome data to be released”. This is misleading, because the public Human Genome Project released their data long ago (which they do mention in the article). (A badly-written headline on a news story? Quelle surprise!)

I’m pleased. I’m biased, because I worked on the public HGP, but having this additional data in GenBank is a Very Good Thing in my opinion. Free availability of genome data has already helped researchers around the world.