My interest in this subject got its start from John Lanchester's article in the December 2 1996 New Yorker ("A new kind of contagion"), which I read on Friday November 30th. The article combined the science-journalism mode with a connectionist proclivity that's pretty common in New Yorker articles: here's one thing you know something about, and here's another that's connected, and here are some more that you didn't already know about, etc. Prions seemed like an obvious choice for a Bio182 example: clearly an important area, a hot research topic, involving some real-life issues, exemplifying the tendency of science to slop over any boundaries erected around subfields.
My first stop in trying to find out more was AltaVista, and that was very fruitful; I made a page with nearly 20 links in only a few minutes, and later printed out more than 60 pages to read at leisure.
I think it's important to get people started with the web resources at the very first, though I certainly didn't think so a year ago. The presence of AltaVista and other search engines makes it much easier to locate seemingly-relevant material over a wide range of levels of expertise, and does require the kind of evaluative work that's one of the objectives of the course anyway.I then tried FirstSearch, using
I then reread the Lanchester article and planned several other steps once I had some concentrated computer time:
In fact this citation analysis element won't be in Bio182 this year, in the absence of any way to get to SciSearch.
So at this point I have an information-gathering agenda, and lots of reading and absorbing to do. Every bit I read suggests that this is indeed a worthy topic for the purpose: filling in my own curiosity, offering a real-life example, permitting the use of new ways to seek relevant information...I used the classroom account to inquire of DIALOG who had cited the two articles above, and downloaded the results for reorganization into something that tells the tale.
I searched UnCover for 'prion', and also did searches for articles by John Collinge and Stanley Prusiner.
Clearly we're looking right down the familiar barrel of too much stuff, and the consequent necessity to come up with some guidelines for how to proceed sensibly --to get the necessary things without becoming bogged down in details, but at the same time to learn something about the Forest as well as collecting specific Trees. Each of the collections can teach something without the necessity to absorb everything, but we need some good examples of how to accomplish that.
3 December: I tried ANNIE for 'prion*' but found nothing. I tried HOLLIS and, as usual, got some very useful guidance to the subject and related subjects. And I ordered Prusiner's 1995 book, Prions, prions, prions.
I also read the BioDigest material, the Prusiner 1982 article, the OMIM "Prion protein" entry (which I note has been updated to include Collinge et al. 1996), and photocopied Prusiner's January 1995 Scientific American article "The prion diseases", which includes the first illustration I've yet encountered of the prion protein.
I did several searches in Lexis/Nexis: first I tried the NEWS library, found that there are just too many for a simple prions search (hardly a surprise), but tried prions and (publication)science with better success. I then tried one for 'prusiner' to see how he'd appeared as a figure in the news. I also did a search for prions and scrapie in the MEDLNE library's REVIEW file.
4 December: There's a great advantage to "going wide" at the beginning of such a project, because it gives you a context for later specialization. It does mean that you need to develop efficient ways to collect and store and access stuff that may or may not eventually turn out to be useful.
The search for Prusiner's publications (Lexis/Nexis MEDLINE) needs comment, because it seems so excessive (what is an undergraduate going to DO with more than 300 citations?)... BUT it does give us a peek at how science is done, at the career of a scientist (who happens, by the way, to have started out as a doctor, a resident in neurology who lost a patient to CJD, as he says in the SciAm article). A nice example. Here's a link to Prusiner's own description of his work.
I did an AltaVista search for 'prion.gif' and found nothing useful, so tried 'prion.jpg' and got an image from a Swedish pop sci site:
Here are two more images: PrP (the 'normal' form) and PrPSc (the 'scrapie form')
I did some further searches on AltaVista and added them to the initial group of web links I started a few days ago, and later I'll organize them into something more satisfactory.
13 Dec: Reading through Collinge et al. 1966 I ran across a reference to an April 1996 article in Lancet (Will et al. 1966) which details "clinicopathological studies and epidemiological surveillance" on new variant CJD cases in UK.
Since this is a 'breaking news' sort of subject, a watch on The Lancet seems like it would be a good idea --and that's where the latest news will probably show up, when there's news at all. I tried a search for "BSE" and got a number of hits; there was indeed an editorial on Dec 7 (mostly about the inadequacy of statistical predictions), but evidently no new Big News lately.
Some reading in The Lancet led me to a link to ProMed, "The Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases Electronic Conference", which has a search engine for the postings.
26 December 1996
I happened to find a URL for a monthly bulletin of communicable diseases,
originating in France, which I thought might have something on CJD. It
did indeed: here's the link
to the article and another to the English
version of Euro Surveillance itself. The site is certainly of
potential interest to anyone looking at specific diseases, since it has
an immediacy that conventional print lacks.
12 January 1997
An article from The Lancet on diagnosis of new variant
CJD [nvCJD], co-authored by Collinge (I heard about it on
NPR on Friday morning).
13 January 1997
It occurred to me to wonder which databases index the Trends in...
journals from Elsevier (which have noteworthy review articles... IF the
searcher can find them). I did searches in AGRICOLA and MEDLINE for
so:trends (source, or journal title) and found both present
--though not very up to date [September 1996 the most recent in
Medline]. Searches for
so:trends and su:prion
got results in both databases.
I took the next step to so:science and so:nature and found the 'source' search a good way to reduce the common problem of "too many" hits for a simple search.
Now the question is how effective Elsevier's own table of contents search facility is in accessing the material in Trends in... journals. And the answer is... quite effective. Knowing that it's Elsevier isn't something that folks who aren't librarians would necessarily see the salience of, but this underlines yet again the constant proliferation of important information sources, and the difficulty of finding what one seeks with any single search.
And there is a limitation: the indexed (i.e., searchable) material is updated to mid-December 1996, but doesn't include the December article by Prusiner in Trends in Biochemical Sciences --which I know about because I happen to be keeping an eye out for articles on BSE and prions, and the issue happened to put the article on the cover.
The Lancet story showed up today on YAHOO (Tonsil Test For Brain Disorder ) in its Reuters form.
It also occurred to me to look at some of the other web links I've put on various pages, to see if they produce stuff to augment what I already have. I tried a search for prion in the Why Files and found a nice summary, an effective 'popular' treatment.
I tried the New England Journal of Medicine search and found several, one being a September 1996 editorial on new diagnostic tests.
31 Jan 1997
Serendipity at the Current Periodicals again: Trends in Microbiology for Jan 97 has an article on "Probing the dynamics of prion diseases with amphotericin B"
And Prusiner's Prions, Prions, Prions arrived today.
An opportunity to try out EBSCO's web database gives me a Jan 27th article from Time in full text. I also tried CINAHL (Nursing and Allied Health) and their version of MEDLINE, and found them at least as easy to use as FirstSearch or Lexis/Nexis. And I note that Journal of OB/GYN is available FULL TEXT in the HealthSource database...
4 Feb
Inspired (if that's the word) by the Shouts & Murmurs column in the Feb 10 New Yorker, I did a search for "creutzfeldt-jakob" and found some metasites, like
