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Prescriptions Movie Stars Our Children Ive been thinking about writing this article for a few weeks now. And then yesterday I heard the news of the Illinois Campus shooting so I had to write it. A few weeks before Heath Ledgers death I was in Hollywood on a video shoot. I met up with some friends who wanted me to take the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) tour with them. For those of you (and I was among you) who hadnt heard of this organization, the CCHR was started in 1969 by The Church of Scientology. Now before you either dig in or turn away from that controversial subject let me just say that it was an extremely enlightening and frightening exhibit that left a very strong impression on me. We walked from room to room viewing documentaries on the history of the alliance between the pharmaceutical companies and the psychiatric profession. Each room was designed like a set (this was Hollywood) starting with the lobotomies, shock treatments and torture they performed on orph...

The Children Rebirth Reviewed by Nathan Ford Heres an excellent Texan psychedelic artifact from 1968, freshly reissued on vinyl by Spains Guerssen Records. Evolving from garage outfit the Stoics into The Minds Eye (who released the excellent 45 "Help, Im Lost"), the band headed to LA in 1967, playing popular Sunset Boulevard venues with the help of Monkee Davy Jones. The Minds Eye soon became the Children, but financial issues and increased acid usage convinced the band to head back to Texas, where "Rebirth" was recorded. Produced by Lelan Rogers, who also recorded the 13th Floor Elevators and the Golden Dawn among others, "Rebirth" is a surprisingly lush album, full of intricate psychedelia quite unlike that of Lelan Rogers other charges. String sections, vibraphone solos and other baroque-pop touches rub shoulders with acid drenched psychedelic rock, with the powerful female vocal presence of Cassell Webb tying these disparate strands together nicely. Th...

Proteomics of CSF of children with meningitis Yikes. So...nothing is supposed to be in your cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) except the stuff that is supposed to be in there...and especially not a detectable amount of bacterial proteins! And...in this new study... this team successfully detects and quantifies pneuomococcal proteins in children with bacterial meningitis. A good bit of this study is optimizing a method for collection, digestion and prep for mass spec. They use in-solution digestion with a commercial MS-compatible detergent prep, and they use 2 hour gradients on 15cm nanoLC columns with an LTQ Orbitrap Velos system. And...loads of bacterial proteins even in the complexity of the CSF proteome! Im no medical expert, but those sound like some seriously sick kids. Progenesis appears to be used for the quantification and all IDs were obtained with Mascot after using the Proteome Discoverer Viewer to create the MGFs. The paper is straight-forward, but the downstream plots for analys...