A hundred years ago, if you got an infectious disease, the best available course of action was to be sure your will was in order. Then came sulfonamides, penicillins, and an impressive sequence of broad-spectrum antibiotics that cured everything from syphilis to plague.

Alas, microorganisms are smarter than we are. As quickly as an effective drug is put to use, the bugs find ways to circumvent them. The velocity of new drug discovery has not quickened—in fact it has lost pace—and there are strains of pathogenic bacteria that no drug will touch.

Science recently devoted a whole issue (18 July 2008) to the vagaries of this subject. Makes for interesting, even if scary, reading.

In addition to waiting for clever chemists to design new drugs, methinks two commonsense public-health practices would be effective in reducing the onslaught of drug-resistant organisms:

1. Don’t make writing a prescription the only satisfying end to a doctor’s visit. Too many of us leave with a slip of paper entitling us to access a drug that doesn’t address our underlying ailment and does facilitate the emergence of resistant bugs.
2. Restrict the growth-promotion use of antibiotics in food animals. This practice surely lowers the cost of meat, but it also promotes drug resistance in beasties that can later cause human disease. Not an acceptable trade-off in my book.

New chemical entities are routinely screened for biological activity. Often intriguing medicinal uses emerge, only to be dashed because of toxicity or other nasty repercussions.

Are all these promising drug candidates lost forever? Not necessarily, at least according to a recent paper from Harvard Medical School, in which nanotechnology comes to the rescue (Nature Biotechnology 26 [2008], 799–807).

The drug in question is ingloriously named TNP-470. It was isolated from a fungus and shown to have dramatic anticancer activity against a large range of tumor types, even the cruel metastatic ones that no other drug touches. A miracle drug in the making. Scientists even understand its mechanism of action: blockade of angiogenesis, or the growth of blood vessels essential for tumor growth.

Trouble is, TNP-470 is neurotoxic. In clinical trials, some patients showed distressing responses like loss of motor coordination, seizures, malaise, confusion, dizziness, depression. We can’t have these side effects, so the drug went away.

But the new paper shows that hooking the drug to nanopolymeric micelles (and giving it a new name, Lodamin) creates a conjugate that can be taken orally rather than by injection. Much better for patient comfort. Best of all, the nanomaterial retains the anticancer activity, at least in mice, and lacks the devastating toxicity of the original TNP-470.

And if you appreciate quiet sentiment, a coauthor of the paper is Judah Folkman, who died earlier this year, and was the original moving force behind anti-angiogenesis therapy.

I’m pretty sure that if you scratch on a scientist, you’ll more often than not find a musician underneath.

The best reason I can think of to explain the association is that both scientists and musicians attempt to impose order on the world by the manipulation of symbols. If you have a better idea, let me know.

Whatever the explanation, this disciplinary magnetism is nicely exemplified by the nine-part series of essays entitled Science and Music recently published in Nature.

Of course one worries that imposing an objective scientific analysis on the nature of music will spoil the wondrous joy of it. Maybe so, but we can’t help trying anyway. The latest example is a publication from a radiologist in Leiden and a violin maker in Arkansas on why Stradivari and Guarneri violins are so much more sonorous than anything modern humans have produced.

Others have attempted to explain the Stradivarius mystery. Previously offered but unproven theories include the use of wood preservatives, varnishes, lacquers, glues, or other secret treatments; a unique design of resonant boards and sound holes; or the fact that the wood used came from cathedrals.

The new paper argues that wood density is the culprit. Others have wondered whether this variable could be involved, but density measurements are destructive, and who would do such a thing to a sacred instrument? Plus average density may hide variations across a piece of wood. This time around, though, both measurement limitations were overcome by using computed tomography, a medical imaging technology that uses two-dimensional X-rays.

The result? Median wood density in modern and classical violins is similar, but the differential across wood grains is strikingly different. This doesn’t prove why the old instruments have superior sound, but it does offer a testable hypothesis that might lead to production of ever more beauteous violins.

And besides, if somebody accuses you of being dense, just tell them it worked for Antonio Stradivari.

Most people love chocolate. A few find its dark allure nearly addictive. But I suppose some unlucky souls can’t bear the silky delights most of us find so irresistible.

Many will recall teenage warnings that chocolate consumption risks blemishing one’s complexion, but this admonition is now counterbalanced by suggestions that chocolate’s antioxidant components may lengthen life. Alas, scientific evidence for both conjectures is inconclusive.

Given chocolate’s delectable history, it should come as no surprise that the intricacies of the chocolate genome are about to be revealed. More correctly, the DNA sequence of the small tree that produces cocoa beans (Theobroma cacao) will be decoded by a research team from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the candy company Mars, Inc.

Why do this? In part from pure scientific curiosity, and also to add to the growing number of organisms (almost 200 and counting) whose DNA sequences are completed.

On the practical side, Mars predicts that the sequencing will lead farmers to produce higher-yield, pest- and disease-resistant cocoa crops, mostly by taking the guesswork out of traditional plant-breeding schemes.

And although it challenges the imagination, perhaps the sequence will also reveal ways to make chocolate taste even yummier.

While waiting, and to simultaneously satisfy both chocolate and scientific cravings, you could check out the recently published The Science of Chocolate by Stephen P. Beckett. Read a review in Chemical and Engineering News (30 June 2008, pp. 38–39), or if you’re really an aficionado, meet the author at upcoming Royal Society of Chemistry or American Chemical Society meetings.