The Novartis Foundation Series is a popular collection of the proceedings from Novartis Foundation Symposia, in which groups of leading scientists from a range of topics across biology, chemistry and medicine assembled to present papers and discuss results. The Novartis Foundation, originally known as the Ciba Foundation, is well known to scientists and clinicians around the world.
Introduction to a Submolecular Biology focuses on the study of the electronic interactions of biological molecules. This book discusses the energy cycle of life, units and measures, electronic mobility, and problems of charge transfer. The three examples of charge transfer—quinone-hydroquinone, riboflavine (FMN) and serotonin, and cortisone I2 are elaborated. This text deliberates the problems and approaches on the mechanism of drug action, adenosine triphosphate (ATP), chemistry of the thymus gland, and living state. Brief remarks on water, ions, and metachromasia are also included. Other topics covered include the redox potentials, ionization potentials and electron affinities, orbital energies, electromagnetic coupling resonance transfer of energy, and semiconduction. This publication is a good source for biochemists, biologists, and specialists aiming to acquire basic knowledge of submolecular biology.
The Living State: With Observations on Cancer explores some facets of life, including its pattern and structure, cellular mechanisms, and its connection with biochemistry and biophysics. It reflects the author's journey in his desire to understand life by looking at cells, animals, bacteria, molecules, and electrons, as well as his observations on cancer. Organized into eight chapters, this volume begins with an overview of the scientific community's longstanding pursuit to understand life and its origins. It then discusses water as an essential medium of organic matter on which life's machinery is built, along with the motion of muscle; biological stability and the paradox of evolution; the energetics of the biosphere based on the interaction of hydrogen and oxygen; the principles of defense against cellular damage; and how defense is linked to the regulation of growth in plants and animals. The reader is also introduced to growth regulation as a defense mechanism, which corrects mechanical injury in animals; the way that ketone aldehydes inhibit cell division; the theory of cancer; and cancer therapy. Biologists, chemists, and physicists will find this book an interesting read.
Since biological tissues are unstable in an oxygen atmosphere, a great deal of effort is expended by organisms to metabolically limit or repair oxidative tissue damage. This volume of Methods in Enzymology and its companion Volume 234 present methods developed to investigate the roles of oxygen radicals and antioxidants in disease. Key Features* Generation, detection, and characterization of oxygen radicals, chemistry, biochemistry, and intermediate states of reductio* Isolation, characterization, and assay of enzymes or substrates involved in formation or removal of oxygen radical* Methods for assessing molecular, cell, and tissue damage; assays and repair of oxidative damage.
"When President Nixon launched the War on Cancer with the signing of the National Cancer Act of 1971 and the allocation of billions of research dollars, it was amidst a flurry of promises that a cure was within reach. The research establishment was trumpeting the discovery of oncogenes, the genes that supposedly cause cancer. As soon as we identified them and treated cancer patients accordingly, cancer would become a thing of the past. Fifty years later it's clear that the War on Cancer has failed--despite what the cancer industry wants us to believe. New diagnoses have continued to climb; one in three people in the United States can now expect to battle cancer during their lifetime. For the majority of common cancers, the search for oncogenes has not changed the treatment: We're still treating with the same old triad of removing (surgery), burning out (radiation), or poisoning (chemotherapy). In Cancer and the New Biology of Water, Thomas Cowan, MD, argues that this failure was inevitable because the oncogene theory is incorrect--or at least incomplete--and based on a flawed concept of biology in which DNA controls our cellular function and therefore our health. Instead, Dr. Cowan tells us, the somatic mutations seen in cancer cells are the result of a cellular deterioration that has little to do with oncogenes, DNA, or even the nucleus. The root cause is metabolic dysfunction that deteriorates the structured water that forms the basis of cytoplasmic health. Despite mainstream medicine's failure to bring an end to suffering or deliver on its promises, it remains illegal for physicians to prescribe anything other than the "standard of care" for their cancer patients, despite the fact that gentler, more effective, and more promising treatments exist"--
This extraordinary book covers the extremely broad subject of electropharmacology-defined here as the application of principles and methods of electrochemistry to biological topics associated with the action of drugs. It focuses on the physical principles of the movement of electrical charges across interfaces in pharmacological phenomena. It also covers drugs and the electrical procedures which modify a natural process having an electrochemical basis or component. This outstanding report studies the pharmacologically important properties and effects by electrochemical methods, the electrochemical alternatives or adjuncts to drug therapy, and the pharmacology involved. Easy to read and understand, this is an ideal reference for all researchers and practitioners of pharmacology and related fields.
A Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Szent-Györgyi concerns himself with the underlying forces and conditions that have prevented the realization of the higher possibilities of the American Dream, and, by extension, of all mankind. He addresses himself especially to the youth of the world in his attempt to show how man, the more he progresses technologically, seems the more to regress psychologically and socially, until he resembles his primate ancestors in a state of high schizophrenia. The fundamental question asked by this book is: why is it that most of the scientific research that is done to elevate human life serves in the end to destroy it? That this phenomenon exists is unarguable. How to alter it is the problem the author tackles. He finds the possibility, indeed the instrument of our survival, in our youth. Dr. Szent-Györgyi calls upon the youth the world over to organize and exercise their power to create a new world. He implores them not to waste their energies in petulance and frustration—the world is ripe for the radical changes needed for man’s survival, and for youth to fritter away their opportunity would be to compound the tragedy and seal the fate of mankind.
This volume is devoted to atherosclerosis, hypertension, and diabetes, three of the most important disease conditions in the world today. Nutritional intervention, cholesterol lowering agents, lipids themselves, particularly oxidized LDL, protein modification by ADP-ribose, bone marrow study, endothelial cell dysfunction, angiotensin, and the role of infection and inflammation are all discussed in the context of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. The hypertension section focuses on factors that may be responsible for high blood pressure, such as genetic predisposition, vascular hyperplasia and remodeling, insulin resistance, neurological aspects such as hypothalamic peptides. Also discussed are the possible contributions of the cellular function of the endothelium, nutrition, kidney dysfunction, leptin, and the brain. Novel routes of drug delivery for treatment of hypertension is also a focus. The risk factors and mechanisms responsible for diabetic vascular and cardiac dysfunction are discussed. Lipid profile changes and fibrinolysis in diabetic patients is detailed, along with adipogenesis, diabetic cardiomyopathy, energy metabolism in the diabetic heart, vanadate as an alternative to insulin, insulin resistance mechanisms, and neurotransmitters as targets for the prevention of cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
