Alchemist Turns Polyphile

Full Metal AlchemistA quite gratifying email from Professor James E. Hanson of Seton Hall University made me realise that I’d gone all poly with The Alchemist column this week:

As a polymer chemist myself, I really liked this issue of The Alchemist – or rather in this case the “polyalchemist” newsletter. Except for the beaver pheromones, each of the scientific breakthroughs/hot topics had to do with polymers! Anti-graffiti polymers, perfect polymers, polymers connecting nanodots, and two protein (= biopolymer) topics. Keep up the poly good work!

Here’s my intro from the ChemWeb site itself, click through for the full details and links:

Graffiti-defeating coatings could protect buildings and statues, The Alchemist learns this week, while the glandular chemistry of the beaver is revealed in stereo. Perfect polymers could boost optical data storage several hundredfold and nano dots might help map out tumor sites in the body. In biochemistry, another reason not to opt for pate de foie gras is revealed. Finally, structural biology gets motoring and wins a French scientist a major award.

The current Alchemist on ChemWeb

Developing Health

developing-healthCompulsory licensing is one of those euphemisms that hide a whole raft of issues. By definition – it is “authorisation to a government or company to make and sell a pharmaceutical drug without the permission of the patent holder”, which makes the intent clear.

In its most obvious form, compulsory licensing is what occurs when a government allows a third party to produce a patented product or process without the consent of the patent owner. At first glance, it would seem to be nothing more than infringement of intellectual property rights. After all, one cannot imagine companies agreeing to a legal compulsory licensing system for music, movies, or even software. Of course, that’s the point, the breach of the patent becomes legal when a government says it is. So, if it seems unethical and immoral from the point of view of the companies, is there any justification, or compulsory licensing simply piracy at the national level?

Compulsory licensing seems to be an implicit flexibility in patent protection included in the WTO agreement on intellectual property, the TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement, and applies to public health only. But, we’re not talking about movies, music, and software. This flexibility is about allowing the developing world to develop healthily and the sidestepping of patents on pharmaceutical and other medical products.

Fundamentally, compulsory licensing overrides the patent protection a pharmaceutical company may have for its product and legalises the manufacture of generics for the benefit of that nation’s poor and sick. Usually, it is reserved for drugs that are simply too expensive for developing world countries to afford. Despite the cost, these are essential for treating the very diseases, such as malaria and HIV/AIDS, with which the poorer nations are worst afflicted.

Indian lawyers, Sagarika Chakraborty and Angira Singhvi, writing in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Intellectual Property Management, suggest that compulsory licensing has not yet been used extensively in the developing world as an instrument of public policy and in some instances has simply been a tool of economic abuse. However, used properly compulsory licensing could promote widespread health improvements, they say, and might allow the term ‘developing’ to become ‘developed’ in many parts of the world.

They argue that developing nations are not the primary markets for drug companies. Moreover, they currently represent a very small proportion of sales. Even in the absence of compulsory licensing that TRIPS should have little detrimental impact on profits. Of course, India has a burgeoning middle class and as it develops could begin to represent a vast untapped market for the pharmaceutical industry. If the pharmaceutical industry were to ignore compulsory licensing during this period of development it could find its potential markets compromised as wealth accrues in such countries. Conversely, working with developing nations now could accumulate goodwill for the future.

But, given that drug companies have essentially neglected so-called third-world diseases for decades, seeing no billion-dollar blockbusters in regions such as Africa, South America, and Asia, they have little ammunition to now enforce their patents in those places. It is likely that as that middle class emerges, they will have grown entirely accustomed to pharmaceutical generics that they may never accede to purchasing the expensive patent-protected versions.

Some companies are facing the issue of compulsory licensing head on. They are already taking tiny steps to circumvent TRIPS by offering discounts to developing nations on select drugs and essentially becoming generics manufacturers of their own products. In 2000 Pfizer offered fluconazole to South Africa for free to treat opportunistic infection in AIDS sufferers. This kind of action could counteract the putative market loss as nations develop, providing much needed publicity and branding.

Cynically speaking, these steps have perhaps been spurred on by the philanthropic actions of the likes of the The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and their promise to tackle malaria. They may have been triggered by the work of prescription drug retrieval charities like Intercare, and others which collects returned prescription medicines and supplies them free of charge to a network of health centres in Africa. Alternatively, various national changes, such as Brazil’s AIDS control program that breaks the patent on Merck’s AIDS drug Efavirenz, the Doha-enforcing amendments to Chinese Patent Law in December 2008, Thailand’s Foreign Business Act and international condemnation of the industry position may also have acted as a spur to push the compulsory licensing debate forward.

“A lot of drug companies are getting increasingly nervous about the ability of developing countries to override their patent rights in the interest of public health,” says SpicyIP. “The biggest worry for drug companies, however, is that countries will abuse compulsory licenses, employing them in the absence of any public health crisis, simply because the government wants to pay less for drugs.” Similar concerns are reported by Intellectual Property Watch.

TRIPS and the WTO’s DOHA Declaration, essentially allows developing and underdeveloped countries to sidestep patent law and “use without authorisation of the right holder”. Unfortunately, the Declaration does not clarify key terms, such as “public health”, say Chakraborty and Singhvi, which means the field remains open to interpretation that might the pharmaceutical industry and developed countries rather than those it aims to help.

Patent and IP pundit Tom Giovanetti recently highlight the issue of compulsory licensing and how it might affect the American motor industry and the development of green technologies. “Those who argue against patents inevitably are disingenuous about the innovation of the patent system itself,” he says.

“The true genius of the patent system is that, in exchange for your temporary market power, you must disclose your invention. In other words, a patent does not lock knowledge away. In fact, patents are the ultimate tools for technology transfer. Everyone gains immediate access to the knowledge–they just don’t get to copy the invention. They can build on it, they can improve it, but they cannot immediately copy it,” adds Giovanetti. That perhaps simply adds another brace to the argument put forward by Chakraborty and Singhvi for pharmaceuticals in the developing world.

Drug firms have argued that giving away free drugs is detrimental to R&D. R&D costs hundreds of millions of dollars, takes ten to fifteen years to bring a product to market, and patent protection is therefore vital for company survival.

This is true, say Chakraborty and Singhvi, but not in the developing world, where R&D for “third-world” diseases is minimal. ‘We argue that compulsory licensing is a fundamental tool that developing countries may use in certain conditions to ensure that poor people have access to necessary medicines,’ the say.

Research Blogging IconSagarika Chakraborty, Angira Singhvi (2009). Compulsory licensing for access to medicines in the developing world Int J Intellectual Property Management, 3 (2), 110-126

Thick Skinned Geordies

foggy-penninesA week or two ago the British media was full of the story of scientists hoping to discover why the indigenous people of Tyneside are wont to few clothes even in the briskest of breezes and the worst of winter cold snaps. If you’ve been out on the town in Newcastle any time of year, you will likely have spotted lads and lasses strolling between pubs and clubs with barely a stitch of clothing among them, save for the shortest of skirts, the flimsiest of shirts and rarely a hat, barely a scarf and never a pair of gloves. When it’s really, really, cold a Geordie lad might fasten the top button of his shirt.

Some of you are probably wondering why, as a Geordie, I didn’t cover this incredible news when it broke. Well, at the time I was carrying out my own scientific experiment into my personal hardiness. I was hoping to discover Edale campwhether my Geordie thick-skin genes had ceased to express the necessary hypothermal protection during the twenty years since I relocated to the much more southerly, and supposedly warmer, Cambridge.

The experiment involved heading north-west on a minibus, with my son and a group of his friends and assorted dads. The minibus was packed to the top with multi-layered, multi-season sleeping bags, backpacks, padded walking trousers, padded jackets, double-socks, waterproofs, fleecy sweaters, breathable tee-shirts, Goretex jackets, Thinsulate hats, gloves, snoods, etc etc. Oh, and a few flimsy tents to sleep in.

crash-siteOur plan was to camp in Edale at the start of the Pennine Way (this was mid-February you realise, not the balmiest of months anywhere in Britain). We would then stride up Kinder Scout several kilometres and camp overnight somewhere vaguely sheltered well over 600 metres above sea level. Next day, we’d walk even further, stopping to pay tribute to the air crews of a DC47 “Dakota”, a Lancaster, and a Superfortress that crashed up there in the bleakest, foggy conditions during and after WWII.

Unfortunately, the Sunday morning weather looked far too perilous for an overnight camp atop Kinder Scout with inexperienced youngsters (and dads), so we regrouped and changed tack so that we spent two nights in the vaguely sheltered Edale (which has a lovely pub with both a hikers’ bar and a locals bar). Ultimately, we covered the same ground walking but based at a single site and using the minibus on the second half to get us to the Snake Pass starting point on day two. There was not a spot of sun and plenty of fog, but it was fun.

Edale to Kinder LowAnyway, the conclusion is that with five layers on my upper body and a waterproof coat over the top of all that, I felt comfortable doing all that striding and scrambling up waterfalls and peaks. However, it felt like I was betraying my roots, although snow drifts, gale-force winds and fog meant I didn’t dare opt for the fashionable Newcastle Bigg Market look. I’m ashamed to admit, but it seems that my thick skin genes may have diminished in their potency against hypothermia. There is a glimmer of redemption for me though, underneath all those breathable waterproof layers I made sure that I didn’t fasten the top button of my shirt. They’d be so proud of me back home.

Whatever Happened to SARS?

sars-epidemicIn 2004, I did some reportage for the Royal Society from their meeting on emerging viral infections. The meeting was held just after the worldwide SARS outbreak that threw nations into chaos and had the more susceptible parts of the media hyping the end of the world. Of course, SARS, an emerging pathogen, was lethal and had devastating effects on thousands of people.

Ultimately, the first SARS outbreak was controlled, and a subsequent epidemic is yet to emerge. Severe acute respiratory syndrome, the disease caused by a highly infectious RNA coronavirus, remains in waiting. SARS is still an issue, it can, when required, undergo frequent mutations, which adds unpredictability to a future outbreak. There is no vaccine, assay, or treatment yet. Health officials can only resort to isolation and quarantine to control its spread.

In the meantime, scare stories surrounding the potential for avian influenza H5N1 have filled many column inches and web estate since that strain was first identified. We are, obviously, yet to succumb to an epidemic of global proportions of an evolved strain of H5N1 that could be transmitted person to person.

“At the peak of the worldwide SARS epidemic, apprehension arose out of partially disclosed, if not concealed, information on the current status,” says Yi-Chun Lin, at the Central Police University, in Taoyuan, Taiwan ROC. This he says led to many foreign companies to withdraw their business from Taiwan or move their bases elsewhere. At the time of the crisis, normal trading, investment and travel were suspended or came to a standstill. Some regions are yet to make a complete recovery from SARS and the advent of H5N1 in South Asia as well as the potential for the emergence of yet another virus or other pathogen has many investors wary of the region.

Lin suggests that proposals to be acted on in an emergency to help contain an emerging crisis, without obfuscation, ought to be put in place. This would allow foreign investors to undertake risk control assessment for this part of the world, ignore the scare-mongering, and be assured that whatever the next disease to emerge may be it will not have the shocking and devastating effects it otherwise would.

“SARS dramatically illustrated the wide-ranging impact that a new disease can have in a closely interconnected and highly mobile world,” Lin says, “The public anxiety it incited spread faster than the virus, causing social unease and economic losses.” The suddenness of the outbreak provided a critical test of medical systems, infection control policies, and tested many national disease response and crisis management abilities.

In a subsequent disease crisis, human lives will be at risk and economic stability [for what that is worth at the moment!] thrown into jeopardy. “It is thus important to learn from experience and enhance preparedness for future,” adds Lin.

Research Blogging IconYi-Chun Lin (2009). Impact of the spread of infectious disease on economic development: a study in risk management Int. J. Risk Assess. Manage., 11 (3/4), 209-218

Alchemy, Spectroscopy, and the Hash

magnetic drug deliveryIn the latest ezines from SpectroscopyNOW:

Magnetic drug delivery for Alzheimer’s disease – Tiny pieces of magnetite incorporated into chitosan microparticles could act as efficient drug-delivery agents for the Alzheimer’s drug tacrine. Tacrine has notoriously low oral bioavailability and unclear efficacy but this delivery approach boosts uptake.

Contrasting tumours – US scientists have successfully predicted the outcome on breast tumours in a pre-clinical study of a so-called nano drug. Their research could help determine which patients will respond best to these and other drugs.

Long-distance protein – The behaviour of dynein, a relatively little-studied protein found in muscle has been characterised using fluorescent markers and electron microscopy, paving the way for X-ray diffraction and NMR spectroscopy studies.

Farming phosphorus – Phosphorus NMR can help distinguish between the nature of organic and non-organic farming and provide clues about how phosphorus from both sources affects waterways and coasts.

Under February’s Spotlight over on Intute I reported on:

Ocean-going stalks fight global warming – Burying crop residues at sea may help reduce global warming, according to researchers in the USA. They suggest that transporting millions of tonnes of bailed up cornstalks, wheat straw, and other crop residues from farms, and burying it in the deep ocean.

Testing times for chameleon chromium – A new standard for chemical testing has been developed for a carcinogenic chromium salt. The hexavalent chromium ion was at the heart of the pollution controversy on which the movie Erin Brokovich was based.

Musing on supermassive black holes – New observations from a collection of powerful telescopes have allowed astronomers from Germany and the US to settle a paradox regarding the behaviour of merging elliptical galaxies. The team has revealed evidence that the largest, , most massive galaxies in the universe and the supermassive black holes at their cores grow together rather than one leading to the other, which explains the “fluffy” nature of their central regions.

Alchemist news this week – We hear how tubular soot, better known as carbon nanotubes, might displace costly platinum in future fuel cells and so herald a new era in power supply. In physical chemistry new insights could explain why molten glass solidifies but retains the structure of a liquid and in biochemistry a new approach to producing glycoproteins could bring some regularity to biomedical research into these substances.

Also, under the Alchemist’s gaze: In troubled times, airport security is high on the agenda and a new detector system for spotting secreted liquid explosives is emerging from the prototype stage. Finally, carbon dioxide is not all bad, research into its effects on wound healing has led to a significant prize for British scientists.

Speaking of alchemists watch out for my “Science and Islam” with embedded video this Friday, you can call me Al.

Oh, the hash? Well…strongest link would have to be #science, but I just want to reference The Pogues in a very abstruse way.

Stormwater Artwork

stormwater-artworkEarlier this year Laura Haddad of Haddad|Drugan emailed me with an unusual request regarding crystal structures. But, before I tell you about that, here’s a little background. Laura is working on an artistic installation called “Undercurrents”, that will be the basis of the public art component of a stormwater treatment facility on Seattle’s Elliott Bay.

The first phase has been in place since 2003 and includes a plaza and integrated sculpture, designed by Haddad. The concept reveals invisible site functions based around, in Laura’s words, “A poetically etched stainless steel swale in the paving channels surface drainage into Elliott Bay, mimicking the actions of the underground outfall pipes.”

The second phase of this project is now under construction and includes a new mechanical vault wrapped on three sides with a planted sculpted earth berm, conceptually conveying the message that a stormwater utility should be treated as green infrastructure. “The fourth side of this berm is a stainless steel retaining wall etched with a metaphoric pictogram depicting the processes of stormwater collection, transport, and treatment,” Laura told me. “Five gigantic mirrored stainless steel vent pipes extend out of the vault. Their reflections of the surrounding sky and landscape convey a concept of infrastructure merging with its environment.”

It all sounds quite wonderful, especially given the otherwise utilitarian nature of such a facility and their more common lack of aesthetics. Apparently Construction will be complete in August 2009, and so Laura was on a tight deadline when she emailed me.

Could I furnish her with molecular structures for two water treatment chemicals – sodium hypochlorite and sodium bisulfite? The idea would be to create a collage of chemicals showing how NaOCl is used to “treat” the water and the NaHSO4 used to “neutralize” the NaOCl. Seemed fair enough, I suggested I provide the “molecular” structures for both in various formats (space filling, van der Waals, ball and stick models etc and also generate nice three-dimensional crystal structure diagrams.

Obviously, neither of these compounds can be described as molecular in nature, but my first port of call was ChemSpider.com nevertheless, with it’s millions of chemical substances I assumed I’d find leads immediately. And, of course, I did. NaOCl and NaSO3 are both listed, but there were no CIF crystal structure files associated with their entries, which was odd. I double-checked with ChemSpiderMan (Tony Williams) who confirmed this, but then things started to get even more confusing.

I had imagined that the crystal structures of these two compounds would feature prominently in X-ray structure resources and so be widely available in a variety of downloadable formats from which Laura and I could work to create a suitable starting point for her steel etchings. But, after an hour or two of search I’d not found cif files or indeed anything related. I spoke to a contact, Noel O’Boyle, who suggested I check with CCDC. Unfortunately, their turnaround time would take me way past Laura’s (and so my) deadline. Noel also pointed out that there is no crystal structure for NaOCl because it does not exist as a solid, according to at least one resource. That would seem to scupper the idea of creating a 3D diagram of its crystal lattice, although another page on that same resource suggested that it does indeed exist as a white solid.

I turned to several other contacts. Sheffield University’s Mark Winter, famous for, among other things his WebElements.com site, pointed me to a clutch of research papers from the 1970s showing various polymorphs of the bisulfite, but no NaOCl, maybe Noel was right. Another good friend, science photographer Dana Lipp suggested I contact the tech services department of Phillips Analytical or some other manufacture of XRD equipment. In the meantime, chemist Venkat Thalladi of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts, by way of Richard Wobbe, sent me a message with an attachment – the CIF file for sodium bisulfite! Unfortunately, he also confirmed that he didn’t think the crystal structure for NaOCl had been confirmed.

At this point, I gave Laura an update on the structure situation. By her own admission, her “brain does not wrap around molecules and chemistry” so she was at my chemical mercy, although she also pointed out that given that it’s art, there is room for artistic licence.

In the end, I provided NaOCl in the various molecular model formats discussed and Laura was very happy to work with those. I also fired up Thalladi’s CIF in Crystal Diamond, tweaking it somewhat to get the most aesthetic layout and then rendering with Pov-ray to produce a shadowed, 3D perspective on the crystal lattice at high resolution, a thumbnail crop from which is shown here.

So, if you’re ever in Seattle’s Elliott Bay and visiting the stormwater treatment facility on a site-seeing tour, do check out Laura’s steely artwork and rest assured that the chemistry is accurate. If you have similar artistic requirements please get in touch. But, more pressingly if you know of a crystal structure for NaOCl do leave a comment

R&D People Matter

earth-on-microscopeIn the long-gone days of my Catalyst column on the original ChemWeb.com, I wrote about how R&D was becoming a distributed endeavour. It was going the way of large-scale data problems that are best solved using a distributed computing environment, or Grid. Now, roughly a decade later, it seems the management of globally dispersed R&D teams is coming of age.

According to Hans Thamhain of Bentley University in Massachusetts, USA, it is common practice for companies to look for partners that can perform research and development better, cheaper, and faster. Managing such a geographically dispersed team is still a complicated process, especially in high-technology industries.

He points out that collaborative technology, such as “groupware” and other tools have made multinational joint efforts more feasible. However, as ever, true success rests on the team leaders effective must understand more than just the various work processes and the collaborative technology.

From medical research to computer systems, companies try to leverage their R&D budgets and accelerate their schedules by forming alliances, consortia and partnerships with other firms, universities and government agencies. These collaborations range from simple cooperative agreements to ‘open innovation’, a concept of scouting for new product and service ideas, anywhere in the world.

Thamhain has studied 27 high-tech companies operating across 14 countries and found that for distributed R&D to work, those team leaders must understand fully their own organisation and be able to deal with the complex social, cultural, and economic issues as well as the technical factors a multinational enterprise faces.

With today’s almost infinite connectivity possibilities across the globe, companies can access the best talent and most favourable cost and timing conditions anywhere, regardless of the location of their company headquarters. “Organising and managing such globally dispersed R&D teams towards desired results is an art and a science, and a great challenge,” says Thamhain. And, while machines are very good at carrying out processes, even in the age of silicon and electrons, people still remain the best at doing art and science.

Research Blogging IconHans J. Thamhain (2009). Managing globally dispersed R&D teams International Journal of Information Technology and Management, 8 (1) DOI: 10.1504/IJITM.2009.022273

Darwin Day

darwin-dayLife on earth began several billion years ago when the small chunk of rock that orbits the fast fusion reaction that is our sun cooled sufficiently to allow it to emerge. It will last until the sun begins to die and its atmosphere vaporises the inner planets. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, indeed. But, look on the bright side, we’re in roughly only half way through the story. On this solar timescale, of course, humanity is but a twinkling. Nevertheless, we’re the only species we know that cares about its prehistory and its future in more than the sense of the three F’s – fight, flight, or f…well you know the third one.

So, in celebration of Darwin Day here’s a video with Professor Gil McVean courtesy of Pulse-Project (thanks Colin) that celebrates how natural selection, evolution, and genes are braided to tell us about how humans evolved, how our ancestors colonised the planet, and how we adapted genetically speaking over millennia to cope with local pressures of diet, disease, and environment.

Urine clues for prostate cancer

SarcosineA biomarker for prostate cancer has been identified in urine. Details of the molecule sarcosine is published later this week in the journal Nature.

Arul Chinnaiyan and colleagues profiled the metabolites present in the urine of prostate cancer patients compared and compared it to those of healthy individuals. They found that sarcosine – a derivative of the amino acid glycine – was present at higher levels in the urine of patients with aggressive prostate cancer. The team went on to show that simply adding sarcosine to cultures of benign prostate cells was enough to turn them into invasive cancer cells capable of spread, indicating that the molecule may have an important role in disease.

This is the first time a biomarker for prostate cancer has been detected in urine. Follow up research is now needed to develop a non-invasive approach to testing. The researchers hope that their findings could one day be used to aid prostate cancer diagnosis and may offer new opportunities for therapeutic intervention.

10.1038/nature07762

Astronomy to Zoology, Poetically

I’m trying to work out whether I’m a bad science journalist or not…scary thought. If I am, then I’ve wasted the last 20 years of my life.

I started out specializing in chemistry, that was my field. But these days, I cover science much more broadly, although I do still tend to do more chemistry than anything else. It’s all science after all, I’m still a specialist to my arts, humanities, finance, politics colleagues ;-) (As are they to me!)

Meanwhile, Bora Zivkovic, is perhaps one of the most well known scientist bloggers. And, rightly so, his A Blog Around the Clock is one of the best. On Sunday, he was waxing lyrical about science journalism, which seems to be a growing point of torment for many scientist bloggers. The title of his post is Why good science journalists are rare? [I’m not sure it needs the question mark, mind you, it’s not a question, is it?]

In the post, he suggests that a science journalist forced to cover a wide range of topics from astronomy and physics to archaeology and materials science, “he would do a bad job”. Well, I beg to differ. Bora seems to be equating non-specialism with ignorance, and he himself covers quite a range of scientific subjects beyond his chronobiology expertise, which is fine.

I think being a non-specialist journalist is actually a boon to reporting. It seems to apply to journalism in the arts, finance, and politics, where a generalist covers a huge range of expert areas, why not science too?

The first question a journalist must answer when confronted with any subject, whether in science, the arts, medicine, politics,or whatever is the “So what?”. This is the question that subconsciously crosses the mind of the reader every time they pick up a newspaper or click a link and the answer to which determines whether they will continue reading.

It’s irrelevant whether the writer is a specialist journalist, a scientist musing on their field, or a scientist blogger delivering commentary on what they perceive to be the latest public “misunderstanding” of science.

If the writer cannot engage the audience by answering that “So what?” question in a powerful attention-grabbing manner, then all the background reading and expertise in the article or blog post will count for nothing.

Indeed, the non-expert is often much better placed to answer the “So what?” They aren’t already steeped in and regurgitating the jargon and acronyms unexplained, they aren’t conversant with the hidden agendas of the characters involved, and they don’t necessarily have an agenda of their own or an axe to grind.

The non-specialist can arrive at a subject from essentially a lay standpoint. They can ask the scientists the dumbest questions without embarrassment (do scientist bloggers interview their subjects?). The answers to seemingly naive questions, will then hopefully lead the journalist and so the reader from that state of misunderstanding to understanding.

One of the best science writers I’ve ever met was a non-specialist. Tim Radford, the Guardian’s science editor for many years, began in the arts section, but sidestepped into science and produced some of the most poetic, lucid and engaging words on a wide range of science subjects for years. I’d suggest that there’s actually only a handful of scientist bloggers and specialist journalists who can do that.

To those in science, Tim would be seen as a generalist, of course, because, like me, he covered everything from astronomy to zoology. However, to those outside science: science is science. In writing only about science, Tim is as much a specialist as the writer who looks only to the stars or at the worms under the microscope.

More debate is taking place around Bora’s original post here