Blinded Me with Science

    Yesterday I attended a UCSD lecture called, “New Mass Spectrometry Tools to Battle Human Bacterial Pathogens”. First of all, let me tell you I am not a microbiologist, biochemist, or genomicist.  Why did I attend this erudite medical lecture that was clearly out of my intellectual league?  I have finally come to grips that I am a science groupie and I am attracted to unusual bits and bytes of scientific information.

  

    My fascination with science began when I was about six years of age. For fun, I used to read our library of encyclopedias and homespun medical books. I was totally entranced by the acquisition of facts. As I grew older and some of the facts changed, I became even more hypnotized by science’s shifting perceptions, accumulated knowledge, and global synthesis. Maybe this was all a manifestation of the neural connections in my youthful brain firing on all cylinders but I was hooked. Sometime later, I came to a fork in the road, choosing medicine and psychology as my primary science passions.  However my new focus did not prevent me from occasionally hanging out with my male astronomer friends for kicks or watching Nova on PBS. The groupie in me grew. This led me to having a varied career in medicine working in everything from medical social work, vocational rehabilitation, biofeedback/anxiety management, to circadian rhythm research. It  seems my career sunset will be my current job working in Immunization for UCSD, Department of Pediatrics.
     UCSD is a noble institution and prides itself on sharing the latest in medical discoveries to its staff. One day in my UCSD email I was notified the Department of Peds was doing a conference on “New Mass Spectrometry Tools to Battle Human Bacterial Pathogens”. Usually I ignore these events as they are too pedantic or just plain boring. But this one caught my eye. Every good medical science groupie knows bacteria are gaining superbug strength and may soon win the war of infectious disease. I was intrigued. So what do most medical groupies do when they don’t know something, they ask their Medical Director. My medical director doc is a very humble genius who knows everything about infectious disease. (He sat on the prestigious Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices for the CDC.) When I asked him about this lecture, he told me he knew little about it (shocking) but said I should go and report my findings back to him. That cinched it-if my genius doctor did not know about it I had to go.

    One of the things I like about UCSD, and the science people who work there, is that they are collegial. Even if they cannot quite figure out why an immunization person would come to their lecture, they are polite and gracious.The first person I met while I was waiting for the lecture to begin was the post-doc presenter. We struck up a conversation over the catered breakfast about his background and mine. When I asked him if I was going to understand his lecture, he assured me that it would be basic enough for me to comprehend. He obviously overrated my comprehension abilities.   
     The nomenclature of science, for the neophyte, is like hearing Russian when one only speaks English. Not having any background in microbiology, biochemistry, or genomics, all I heard were intermittent phrases like, profiling molecules, snippets, truncated, peptides, clusters, sporulating, and antibiotic. My brain worked overtime to follow the flow of concepts that were completely foreign to me. As I sat there struggling to connect the dots, I could see the rest of the audience smiling, nodding in approval, and being wowed by the implications of how this knowledge will impact the practice of medicine. What I deduced is UCSD is the worldwide mecca for dissecting pathogens through spectrometry and this didactic discovery about the molecular structure of these pathogens is changing the scientific paradigm of what we know about our greatest enemy. This shift in knowledge will eventually impact how these pathogens so easily develop resistance to antibiotics and provide treatments to stave off or prevent infectious disease. It will also have direct applications in the treatment of cancer and retroviruses like HIV. Of course, he may have said something entirely different but this was my translation. Some of this did get absorbed, instilling a profound appreciation for the intelligent bravery of these fine scientists. As a science groupie, one has to risk looking foolish to grasp heavy concepts like this. It does not deter me, though I wish I would have taken Russian in college.