The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 279 No 7472 p384
6 October 2007

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Gecko-mussel power

Diagnosis through the music of the genes

Spoon improvements — might a spoon made of toffee help the medicine go down?

Louis MacNiece centenary

Gecko-mussel power

Glues have come a long way since we boiled animal bones, skins and horns. Nowadays a wide range of adhesives is available.

For example, poly-vinylacetate (PVA) is cheap but not water-resistant. Epoxies, two-part systems using a resin and a hardener, are strong and durable. Polyurethane glues proved to be strong and flexible and cyanoacrylate, or Superglue, a sort of one-part epoxy, is claimed to stick anything to anything, whether one wants it to or not.

A porous surface like wood requires a different approach to a smooth surface such as glass or ceramic. Sticking two different surfaces together poses further problems and developing adhesives which can be easily removed adds to the difficulty.

Researchers at McCormick School of Engineering (Northwestern University, Illinois) investigated how geckos walk up vertical surfaces and upside down across ceilings. Flat pads on a gecko’s feet have densely packed fine hairs split at the ends to give a huge number of points of contact.

Known as “contact splitting” this mechanical principle allows their feet to stick temporarily, like Post-it notes. Flies and bees use a similar method.

This principle has been considered for glue before but the adhesives were useless when wet and quickly lost their “stickability” when tested with repeated contact/release cycles. The temporary and reversible nature of the system is however interesting.

Then researchers, noting that mussels stick to rocks even underwater, investigated their “glue” and found proteins with high concentrations of an amino acid, 3,4-L-dihydroxy-phenylalanine (DOPA).

They developed a system which imitates the gecko’s foot in having flexible silicon hairs and coated those with a synthetic polymer mimicking the mussel’s “DOPA-stickability”. The result, known as Geckel, sticks through repeated contact/release cycles like a gecko and performs extremely well underwater like a mussel.

In future adhesive tapes to replace sutures and water-resistant adhesives for dressings and drug delivery patches may use Geckel. These would remain attached when bathing yet be easy to remove when required.

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Diagnosis through the music of the genes

Music fascinates us, whether it be the sublime Elgar Cello Concerto, Pavarotti, Peter Paul and Mary or the latest racket hissing from a hoodie’s ear-buds.

Pythagoras, the father of geometry, while giving us a reason to use the word “hypotenuse”, also discovered the relationship between mathematics and musical harmony. He used plucked strings to show how harmonious sounds or chords correspond to exact divisions of the string by whole numbers.

His followers believed they could calculate the orbits of the heavenly bodies, which they thought of as crystal spheres, moving to these musical intervals. This was “the music of the spheres”.

Mind you, Pythagoras also thought odd numbers were masculine and dominant over even numbers, which were feminine. When divided, even numbers have nothing remaining. Furthermore an odd plus an even number always makes odd and, whereas two evens can never produce an odd, two odds do produce an even. Therefore even or feminine numbers were weaker. Hmm … but I digress.

Now we have “the music of the genes”. The journal, Genome Biology, has recently reported how Rie Takahashi and Jeffrey Miller of the University of California at Los Angeles translated the amino acids in human protein sequences into musical chords. They represented 20 amino acids in a 13-note scale.

Similar amino acids were given the same chord but arranged differently and some frequently occurring ones were given longer notes. In theory we could each have our own tune.

The resulting music determined by the protein sequence was converted to a playable MIDI-file. The initial idea was to use “gene music” to promote science to the mp3-generation (a download of “Goodbye Norma’s Gene” was suggested) but it seems that being able to hear the different tune made by an abnormal protein compared with a normal one may become a useful aid to the diagnosis of genetic neurodegenerative disorders like Huntington’s chorea.

Now that’s what I call music.

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Spoon improvements — might a spoon made of toffee help the medicine go down?

In the summer of 1937 the British Patents Office received an application for “Improvements in spoons”, made by Constance Winifred Honey.

This was described as “a spoon constructed to serve as a medicine spoon and measurer yet which would also render the taking of medicines, oils, medicinal and other foods less nauseating and easier for children and adults to swallow”.

The bowl of the spoon would be made of toffee, chocolate or a similar sweet substance and have the capacity of a standard measuring unit (like a 5ml spoon today) or be graduated with a mark to give several possible measures. Since the spoon could be consumed after use it would not need to be washed and its handle of wood or similar material would be discarded.

So, 70 years on, what happened to this idea? Were parents wary of their children just eating the spoons? Did dentists complain about tooth decay? Or did 1930s paediatricians believe that medicine had to taste nasty to work? We don’t know but it seems a great idea and worth a pat on the back.

Speaking of a pat on the back, and who in pharmacy doesn’t deserve one, 50 years later US Patent Office number 4608967 featured a “pat on the back apparatus” — presumably to keep handy in case your employer wouldn’t oblige.

It consisted of a padded base held on your shoulder to which was fitted a “hand” on a lever projecting over your back. A string at the front was pulled and so you patted yourself between the shoulder blades or, if the base slipped off your shoulder, presumably clipped yourself round the ear.

On second thoughts, someone would probably do that for you.

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Louis MacNiece centenary

The centenary of the birth, in Belfast, of the poet and playwright Louis MacNiece fell on 12 September 2007. It was he who wrote:

The glass is falling hour by hour,
   the glass will fall for ever.
But if you break the bloody glass,
   you won’t hold up the weather.

So that’s what weather forecasters were really thinking this summer.