February 28, 2019 Thursday
Bedtime Story
My Experience at Animal Module for the Wilmer Core
At the Animal Module for the Wilmer Core there
were dedicated personnel to timely feed the model organisms including veterinarians
who could be called (and they did respond promptly) whenever the researchers
felt that their experimental animals needed medical care.
It is understood that most of them (model
organisms that is and not the veterinarians) would eventually be sacrificed
since most tissue and cellular analysis are done on histopathological samples
laid out on slides that are prepared once the eyeball has been enucleated.
It is less brutal to perform such
destructive procedures on a culled animal rather than a living one.
Yes, it is true that animal studies are a
gory process where sometimes one has to fight and suppress the ethical and
emotional conflicts that by default are bound to arise.
I found it quite painful to place a gentle
furry white New Zealand Rabbit into a gas chamber and then lift out its carcass
and perform destructive surgical procedures on it.
But it had to be done for the progress of
knowledge.
The only solace I have is that I subjected
my own body to experimental tests on untested drugs and dyes though that in no
way can be compared to that of experiments on animals since the most crucial
aspect of it – the consent – was overlooked in them.
The other aspect is even more crucial –
drugs injected into my organism did not turn out to be lethal and even to begin
with they were safe to a large extent.
Now how would I know or the doctors who
injected the drugs into me know that the drug is relatively safe?
For this you should know a little bit about
how drugs that you consume are determined for their safety and efficacy.
“Efficacy” is an interesting word.
Even though it has its origins in the
“effectiveness” it has slightly different meaning from it in pharmacology where
it is denoted by the symbol Emax.
You may get a hint from the subscript about
the meaning of this pharmacological term in which efficacy denotes the maximum
response achievable from a pharmacological agent especially in a research
setting.
Clinical research of any novel
pharmaceutical agent takes place through five phases that are termed as Phase
0, Phase I, Phase II, Phase III and Phase IV.
Phase 0 is the stage where very low number
of healthy volunteers (may be 10 or less) is subjected to the drug of very low
concentrations that is definitely below the therapeutic levels.
The key parameter that is studied at this
phase is the pharmacokinetics of the drug, oral bioavailability and half-life
of the drug.
Pharmacokinetics is not the study of how
the drug affects the organism but rather how the body affects a drug.
Pharmacokinetics is a very interesting
subject that will take way of several nights of ours and so I will not do into
the detail discussion of the subject.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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