Book Review: Gulp

Note: For other reviews, check out Neurotic Psych, Science News, the New York Times, or the Boston Globe.

It took a bit longer than anticipated to finish Mary Roach's new book Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.  Not any fault of hers - the book reads glibly enough, with just enough science to hold my interest (and just enough yuuuckk for wider audience appeal!).

Other reviews (see above) have explored the book's structure, which jokes hit or miss, and whether it holds water compared to Roach's other works. I'm going to take a slightly different take:

Gulp is a chemistry love story, wrapped in fart jokes and gallows humor.

As before, I'm just going to jump around to different chapters for moments I unexpectedly learned something about the unique chemistry of taste, smell, digestion, and excretion.

Page 44: "Pyrophosphates have been described [to author Roach] as 'cat crack.'"
(Finicky eater? Add some phosphates!)

Page 56: "A serving of liver provides half the RDA for vitamin C, three times the RDA for riboflavin, nine times the vitamin A in the average carrot, plus good amounts of vitamins B12, B6, and D, folic acid, and potassium."

"What's the main ingredient in dog food palatants? Liver."

Page 73: Huh: L-cysteine extracted from human hair has been used to make fake soy sauce.

Page 110: Baby saliva contains extra lipase, to compensate for "...the newborn's high-fat, 100% whole-milk diet."

Page 111: Fabric softener works by "...ever so gently digesting the fibers" using enzymes.
[Interestingly, howstuffworks.com, Wikipedia, and Answers.com seem to disagree, attributing the effect to static dispersal]

Page 142: Why does fruit crunch? "When you bite into an apple, the flesh deforms, and at a certain moment the cell walls burst."

Page 175: Oysters go into shock at low pH. Thus, "Researchers who need to sedate crustaceans use seltzer water."

Page 226: Apparently, in the early days of NASA space-flight, researchers expressed real concerns over capsule explosions due to methane and hydrogen gas produced during astronaut digestion.

Page 234: "Bean gas" results from complex oligosaccharides passing through the stomach and fermenting in the small intestine.

Page 245: Three sulfurous compounds contribute to most human flatulence odor: hydrogen sulfide, methanethiol, and dimethyl sulfide (the redolent-of-farts haze formed after a successful Swern oxidation.)

Page 247: Bismuth subgallate pills "...reduce 100% of sulfur gas odor, [functioning like an] 'internal deodorant.'"

Page 263: More on hydrogen sulfide, the "...hottest area in biomedicine right now: it's a gastrotrasmitter, a signaling molecule, [and] it has tremendous therapeutic value."

Page 275: Rats and rabbits engage in autocoprophagia - eating their own feces - as a method of supplementing vitamins (B5, B7, B12, thiamine, riboflavin) produced only by bacteria in their intestines.

Page 316: When processing "samples" for a stool transplant, a blender is modified to deoxygenate and store the material under nitrogen, thus promoting survival of anaerobic gut bacteria.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book, though I couldn't escape feeling that certain chapters (4, 11, 16?) had been shoehorned in from other projects only tangentially related to these "alimentary adventures." One interesting thing differentiating Roach's writing involves asides* to the reader, giving one the feeling that you're leaning in for a secret bit of wisdom...or an extra-terrible pun.

Seeing that Mary's last few books have dealt with (decidedly dirty) topics like death and digestion, I can only assume the next book will be titled Waste, and will uncover the exciting science of garbage and landfills.

If she writes it, I'll be first in line for a copy.

*Seriously, I know I'm supposed to 'kill my darlings' in writing, but I can't resist doing this sometimes...**
**Nor, apparently, can I resist ellipses. Dangit.

JLC to JPL: Huh?

Readers, help me out here: what am I missing about this NASA-JPL press release? (thanks to Phenomena for the tip). I mean, I grok where they're trying to go - investigating OOL chemistry through construction of a hydrothermal vent simulator - but the text feels all jumbled-up! For instance:

"Scientists with the NASA Astrobiology Institute's JPL Icy Worlds team have built this series of glass tubes, thin barrels and valves with a laser and a detector system"

Wait, they built it with a laser? (Must be for the spot-welds)

"They want to see if sending these two liquids through a sample of rock that simulates ancient volcanic ocean crust can lead to the formation of simple organic molecules such as ethane and methane, and amino acids, biologically important organic molecules. Scientists have long considered these compounds the precursor ingredients for what later led to chains of RNA, DNA and microbes."

Hang on just a second, that sounds rather confusing, NASA. I think you mean complex molecule generation paves the way for future complexity. Methane, ethane, and amino acids aren't going to spontaneously assemble into DNA. Ever.

That word, "ancient,"
I do not think it means what you think it means...

"This experiment has its roots in a theory from Russell in 1989 that moderately warm, alkaline hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean could have hatched life about 4 billion years ago. The ancient ocean at these vents contains carbon dioxide, which provides the supply of carbon that could be reassembled into organic molecules."

"Ancient Ocean?" Is there a secret time-bubble hidden deep in the present-day mid-Atlantic? In case you're counting, they use the clunky 'organic molecules' some six times in the release.

"Scientists will alternately send the two solutions through a thin barrel of iron-magnesium-silica-volcanic-type rock that was synthesized by Shibuya..."

A what? A zeolite, maybe? There are so many qualifiers in that adjective conglomeration, I can't even figure out whether it's really a rock...

Source: NASA JPL

Also, PPE alert: If you're showing off your experiment, which is under pressure (100 atm) and heat (near to boiling), wear your goggles! We don't want Jyllian including you in the weekly round-up!

OK, maybe I'm being too harsh. In no way do I mean to impugn the actual science, which seems fascinating, just the strange retelling of it. 

But hang on, aren't these the same folks (NASA Astrobiology Institute) who wrote that "Extraterrestrial Life on Earth" presser just two years ago? We all know how that turned out. 

One would think they'd be very careful wording future releases.

Osteoporitic Mice in Space

Clinical trials will have one last hurrah on the Final Frontier: According to a July 5 press release from Amgen and UCB Pharma, the last flight of the space shuttle program (STS-135 on Shuttle Atlantis) will carry mice receiving a sclerostin antibody to counter bone density loss. Mild osteoporosis (bone loss) and muscle atrophy are nothing new to astronauts (or cosmonauts, taikonauts, etc.), whose bodies change due to lack of normal gravity and from "skeletal disuse" brought on by insufficient exercise in spacecraft - you can't easily jog a mile when your track is 122.17 feet long.

I hadn't heard about UCB Pharma until this press release, although it's surprising, given that they have nearly 9,000 people across 40 countries! UCB proudly proclaims three (3) core products: Cimzia (certolizumab), Vimpat (lacosamide), and Neupro (rotigotine). Cimzia, an anti-inflammatory monoclonal antibody, comes with a catch: it's marketed in Europe for rheumatoid arthritis, but in the US, it's exclusively marketed for Crohn's, a bowel disorder. The other two are more "small-molecule" (and thus up my alley).  Lacosamide is a simple benzyl- and acetyl-protected O-methylserine used to treat epileptic and neuropathic pain. Hmm....a small peptide affecting the brain...wonder if it'll be Scheduled?  You betcha.

Rotigotine, a chiral (S-enantiomer) tetrahydronaphthylphenol with a stapled-on thiophenylamine, has been approved for Parkinson's and RLS.  Its story is equally convoluted: the molecule was originally developed by Aderis Pharma, which used to be Discovery Pharma. As Aderis, it was acquired by Schwarz pharma in 2005, and Schwarz as a whole acquired by UCB a few years later.  Got that?  Four companies, one molecule, roughly twelve years. 

Aside from these products, UCB's cash cow is Keppra (levetiracetam, for neropathic pain) and several generics, among them Zyrtec (allergies) and omeprazole (heartburn and GERD).  Their total haul for all meds? 2.8 billion Euros / year in net sales.

Update (July 30, 7:25PM) - Phew! Commenter gippgig spurs me to make some (important) changes to the (previously incorrect) drug structures. I've also changed the description of lacosamide from "homoserine" to "O-methylserine."