Zoloft is a popular drug used for the treatment of depression symptoms.

Depression is hardly new. The Roman physician Galen, in the second century A.D., expounded on the prevailing medical view that four bodily fluids, or humors, existed within all people but that the unique variation of these humors within people resulted in individual differences among people in their behavior and temperament. An excess of black bile, for example, indicated a melancholic personality.

Fortunately, a lot of scientific progress has been made since then in understanding depression to be an organic, brain-based medical condition that afflicts millions. In fact, an individual has a ten to fifteen percent lifetime risk of developing a major depressive episode. But as Dr. Karl Deisseroth, a Stanford neuroscientist and psychiatrist, told me during our interview for “Illuminating Depression”, “Diagnosis is a big challenge because in psychiatry, we don’t have a lab test. There’s not a blood draw that you can do as you might to check how your liver is doing or how your thyroid function is doing.” So given that the diagnosis of depression is based on clinical observation (most often done by a primary care physician), one can’t help feel that hard, empirical understanding of depression is somewhat lacking, especially when compared to diseases of other organs like the heart and lungs where tests do exist to gauge the presence of pulmonary and cardiovascular diseases.

This was the most interesting observation for me when working on this story. Imagine a medical disease that afflicts eighteen million people in the U.S. (26 million if you include Bipolar Disorder), for which more than 160 million prescriptions were filled in 2008, that is one of the leading causes of disability in the U.S., but a disease for which no definitive medical model of pathology exists. Increasingly, doctors are prescribing antidepressants to treat not just depression but a host of other medical conditions, including chronic pain and insomnia, some of which can co-occur with depression. Sure, we’ve made strides since the time of Galen’s bodily humors and the Freudian view of misplaced hostility and mourning to explain depression, but in some respects, we’re still in the dark about why some people get depression while others don’t, why some people respond to one treatment and not another, or why one person will suffer from a form of depression that is less or more severe than another person. This lack of clear, empirical understanding comes at an awful price to victims of depression, as they encounter remarks from people that tell them to “snap out of it”, implying that they somehow can control the emotional crumbling and dark ideations that accompany the disease.

The consequence of all this is that it’s incredibly tough to create effective, lasting treatments for the disease if we can’t exactly track how the disease affects not only specific regions of the brain but the activity among individual brain cells in regions that may not have even been known to play an integral role in the disease. My layperson’s view is that treating depression currently is a bit like bringing in a car to the mechanic and telling him to fix it but there’s a catch – the mechanic can’t get under the hood to observe directly what’s wrong with the car. We suspect that the problem is with the engine but good luck with opening it up and peering into its pistons. So the mechanic attempts to work on the engine but indirectly, and whatever repairs are attempted may affect the engine but they may also have unwanted effects on the car’s transmission, muffler, timing belt, etc.

Fortunately, advances in imaging techniques like two-photon microscopy and fMRI are elucidating the activity of the depressed brain, allowing the previously impenetrable forest of billions of neurons to be explored, to see their pathways altered, their branches pruned by the disease. And scientists like Philippe Goldin and Kelly Werner are compiling biomarkers like DNA and brain blood flow activity to see if those biomarkers can help predict if people suffering from anxiety and/or depression will respond more favorably to cognitive behavioral therapy than to mindfulness meditation, for example. Dr. Deisseroth is using genetically engineered, photosensitive proteins implanted into rodents’ brains to control brain activity at the level of individual neurons.

Dr. M. Bret Schneider told me during our interview, “A real cure for depression is gonna involve being able to selectively affect those portions of the brain which don’t function properly in depression… But fathoming the huge number of possibilities in each brain with every brain being a little bit different than every other one, is gonna require individualized solutions and will be a scientific feat.” I suppose that with a disease as complex as depression, where one’s individual genetic makeup can influence the kinds of side effects one may experience with an antidepressant, it’s apropos that the future of treating and eventually curing it will entail personalized medicine. Until then, let’s hope that more people bring psychiatry into the research lab to study illnesses like depression, for it’s only through the methodical rigor of science that we have the best hope for curing depression.

Watch the Illuminating Depression television story online.

UCSF biologist Jeff Tabor holds up an ecoli culture designed to display the shape of a squid.

Synthetic biology portends big changes in our lives by ushering in a dizzying array of applications in everything from medicine to biofuels, environmental remediation to agriculture. Though many of these applications haven’t yet come on line, researchers are hard at work to synthesize new drugs and devices made from genetic parts.

For example, there’s an enzyme that exists in plants which makes methyl halides, a molecule which can be catalytically converted into gasoline and other chemicals. Imagine if you could put this enzyme-making gene into yeast, then you could brew the yeast to churn out the methyl halides and after some optimization of the production pathway, you could scale up production to pump out this carbon neutral gasoline precursor for use in today’s automobiles. This is the idea behind an innovative biofuels project that has taken off in the lab of Chris Voigt at UCSF’s School of Pharmacy.

Voigt and his team surveyed the genetic database for the presence of the gene that encodes for the enzyme that makes methyl halides. Lo and behold, the gene exists in plants as diverse as ice plant, which dots the northern California coast, bok choy and pinot noir grapes. After building a library of about 100 enzymes from these diverse plants, the researchers had to determine which of these would function best in the yeast. They zeroed in on an enzyme from ice plant and then used the tool of DNA synthesis to translate the gene for the enzyme that makes methyl halides into something that would work in yeast.

The remarkable thing about this project is that the researchers never actually touched any of the plants. They simply “Googled” a genetic database to find all the genes out there in plants that produce the enzyme that makes methyl halides. As Professor Voigt says, “it’s incredible that synthetic biology is something that could really unlock the potential of using organisms in order to produce fuels.”

Watch the video made by the Voigt Lab demonstrating the combustible property of their synthetically derived methyl halides:

QUEST on KQED Public Media. Video courtesy of
Prof. Chris Voigt, UCSF School of Pharmacy

Watch the Decoding Synthetic Biology television story online.

A scale model of the LCROSS payload.

Update: On October 9th, 2009 at 4:30AM PDT, the upper stage of the Centaur rocket carrying LCROSS smashed into a crater near the moon's south pole. The LCROSS spacecraft followed close behind, made measurements and took images of the emerging lunar debris. On November 15th, beds of water ice were discovered at the lunar south pole.

With a price tag of 80 million dollars and a little more than two years in the making, the LCROSS spacecraft will begin its voyage atop an Atlas V rocket. Shortly thereafter it will shepherd the upper stage of the rocket in an orbit around the moon to position it in place for a colossal impact that will kick up a cloud of lunar dust forty miles high. The goal is to see if water exists on the moon and if it does, buried deep beneath the lunar soil, accumulating over millions of years of impacts with comets, it would accelerate our efforts to establish a permanent lunar base. Think of it as a rest stop to refuel (oxygen is an essential ingredient of rocket fuel) before arriving at the next closest planetary body, Mars, a journey which takes roughly 600 days, or 200 times longer than a trip currently to the Moon from Earth.

The avid QUEST viewer may recall that we covered the LCROSS mission in the first episode of QUEST back in 2007. A lot has happened since then, including most notably a change in the launch date which at the time of this post was scheduled for May 20th, 2009. Peter Schultz's vertical gun range has been outfitted with some dizzyingly high-tech cameras, which are capable of recording at tens of thousands of frames per second (one can record at one million frames per second) to capture the most minute progressions of the lunar impact simulations performed with the thirty-foot tall vertical gun. The suite of nine instruments aboard LCROSS, known as its "payload", has been mercilessly subjected to thermal, vibration and acoustic testing to make sure they can withstand the effects of launch and the harsh celestial environment. And then there's the spacecraft itself which we weren't able to show you in 2007 because the spacecraft still had to be transformed from a set of designs into a compact, robust structure the size of a small car by a team of sharp, young Northrop Grumman engineers. Moreover, amateur astronomers, armed with telescopes ten inches or more, are now being encouraged by NASA to share their images of LCROSS' historic lunar impact.

One of the most impressive attributes of the LCROSS mission is its rapid turnaround and cost containment which in turn highlight the innovative production model that was essential in making LCROSS a reality. Imagine the spirit of Silicon Valley, with its entrepreneurial zeal and efficiency, fusing with some of the sharpest minds in astrophysics and aeronautical engineering, and you have a glimpse of the unique nature of this small but nimble mission which just may forever change our understanding of the moon and its secrets.

Watch the LCROSS Rocket to the Moon" television story online.

Animals generally receive diets that are rich and varied.

Few images will stay as indelibly with me as the sight of a 500 pound grizzly bear devouring a horse bone while standing waist high in water. I should add to that the sight of a geriatric koala slurping his eucalyptus meal. In the aquatic realm, there's something ineffably captivating about watching an anemone's candy-pink arms wrap around its lunch of grain-sized krill.

Witnessing the feeding scenes firsthand, I marveled at the bewilderingly diverse array of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds and insects that are fed every day at zoos and aquariums worldwide. Fortunately, to facilitate the feedings and developments of diets, today there are tools like Zootrition, a software program developed by the St. Louis Zoo that allows for the nutritional evaluation and comparison of various diets. Then there's ZuPreem, a manufacturer of ready-made meals for exotic animals. A perusal of their web site reveals such tasty items as "Primate O's" (naturally preserved with vitamins C and E), canned monitor food (boasting nutrient levels comparable to "a mouse in a can"), bags of dry omnivore diet for the hungry bear or boar.

The upshot of this is that animals at facilities accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums generally receive diets that are rich and varied, frequently monitored for the effect they have on the animals to whom they’re served. Not surprisingly, many animals at zoos and aquariums live longer in captivity than they would in the wild, not only because of the high level of care they get in captivity but also because they are safe from predation in the wild.

Jacquelyn Jencek, Chief of Veterinary Services at the San Francisco Zoo, shared with me an amazing story of how they greatly expanded the longevity of koalas with an intervention that has been emulated at other zoos throughout the nation. Most koalas in the wild don’t live past thirteen years of age, when their teeth have been ground down from years of eating coarse eucalyptus leaves and they no longer have enough dental surface to break down the leaves and extract their nutrients. Thus, even if they attempt to eat the leaves, they can still die of malnutrition. So the SF Zoo decided to help the koalas by breaking down dried eucalyptus leaves with a coffee grinder and mixing the powder with water and supplements, turning it into a solution that could be fed by vial to geriatric koalas at the zoo. The zoo first tried administering the eucalyptus solution to Clarry, who lived to be nearly 20 years old, and is now giving it to Clarry's son, Leo, and a few other koalas whose longevity attests to its success. According to Dr. Jencek, "they love the taste of it", and it's clearly good for them.

The story affirms for me the bond of trust that exists between the animals and the zoo and aquarium personnel who take care of them, and how there’s nothing cookie-cutter about feeding the animals and creating their diets.

Watch the Animal Chefs television story online.

Though it was McCarthy who persuaded his nine other colleagues at the conference to adopt the term "artificial intelligence" to describe the nascent field, the seeds of artificial intelligence were planted earlier. Alan Turing, who was instrumental in breaking the German's Enigma code during WWII, published a paper in 1950 that laid out what came to be known as the "Turing Test:" if a machine could carry out a conversation with a human in such a sophisticated manner as to trick the human into thinking that he or she was conversing with another human, then the machine would have displayed true "intelligence."

But nearly 60 years later, the world still awaits a machine capable of exhibiting "general A.I.", instead of the "narrow A.I." demonstrated by IBM's chess-playing Deep Blue or Stanford University's Stanley, an autonomous robotic vehicle, or other impressive albeit limited applications of A.I. For example, Deep Blue may be able to beat Gary Kasparov at chess but can it beat a 10 year-old at a game of checkers? The lack of a general A.I. is made even more stark when juxtaposed with Moore's Law, a maxim that goes back to 1965 when Intel founder Gordon Moore postulated that the number of transistors on a computer chip would double roughly every 18 months.

There's even a term – "Singularity" – that is being used to describe the moment when technological progress will leapfrog and herald the creation of computers that not only achieve human-like intelligence, but also give rise to a progeny of computers who will be smarter then their digital forbears. Though he didn't coin the term (sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge did), the most famous exponent of this belief is inventor Ray Kurzweil. He places the Singularity as occurring sometime before 2050 and believes that with the advent of this unheralded technological progress, mankind may solve some of our society's most pressing ills, such as global warming, and even conquer death, by uploading one's consciousness into a virtual medium.

Though this seems a far stretch from engineering a domestic robot like Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Robot, top A.I. researchers like Stanford's Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller do believe that computing systems will some day be as smart or smarter than humans. When I spoke with Dharmendra Modha about his work into cognitive computing at IBM, he talked effusively about creating an "i-Brain," a digital accessory that people could carry around, making decisions and processing information like its human cousin. But if you're like me, and lament those moments when you've misplaced your keys or other instances of poor neural performance, you can't help but think that such a device can't arrive soon enough. On second thought, I'll wait until v2.0 hits the shelves.

Watch the Artificial Intelligence: Thinking Big television story report online.

And don't miss our Web Extra: A Dose of A.I. In this QUEST web exclusive, Stanford University computer science professor and artificial intelligence (A.I.) researcher Daphne Koller provides an elegant explanation of how A.I. can be employed in the examining room to diagnose a patient's illness more accurately than a human clinician. Find out more and learn how medical diagnosis is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to tasks that rely on making sense of a sea of data to arrive at an informed conclusion.

So we know – or should know – the seismic risks of living in one of the most vibrant, diverse places in the U.S. Short of leaving the region, what can we do?

Well, one of the most illuminating things about working on this story for me was learning a bit about retrofitting one’s home to make it withstand the lateral and vertical forces that accompany a strong earthquake. In short, you need to build shear walls – made of reinforced plywood and shear transfer ties – and bolt them to the walls in the foundation of your house. Suprisingly, there are no official codes as to what constitutes a proper seismic retrofit of a residential unit in California, nor is there a dearth of licensed contractors who will offer quotes and purport to retrofit your home but without any standards in place, homeowners are often at a loss to evaluate the quality of the retrofit which can easily exceed ten thousand dollars, depending on the size of the home and its location. Still, homeowners can avail themselves of a few retrofit resources online, such as Plan Set A, a guideline for retrofitting one's home that has been approved by building departments of several Bay Area municipalities such as Oakland and Hayward. Also on the Association of Bay Area Government's web site is a set of schematics illustrating shear wall construction. If you are interested in retrofitting your home, you should get quotes from several contractors, consult your city's building department to inquire about permits and possibly consult a structural engineer to perform a building analysis on your home.

If you're like me, though, and don’t own a home but want to prepare for "the big one," it's imperative to get an earthquake survival kit. The sells earthquake survival kits but why not make your own, provided that it has water, first aid supplies, a flashlight, food rations and other essentials for you to survive 72 hours while waiting for emergency help. If you want to make your own kit, try the USGS, the city and county of San Francisco, or helpful suggestions from the San Francisco Chronicle and LA Times.

Living in earthquake country, it pays to be vigilant. I applaud the 1868 Hayward Earthquake Alliance, a consortium of agencies that are raising awareness of the risk posed by the Hayward fault with a series of events aimed at educating the public about the importance of preparedness, including a city-wide drill in San Francisco on October 21st, the 140th anniversary of the 1868 Hayward earthquake. We may not be able to predict when exactly the next earthquake on the Hayward fault may occur but we can start planning today to mitigate its effects.

For those who aren't familiar with the Hayward fault, check out our this link to the USGS Google Earth tour over the fault.

When I was assigned to work on our QUEST story on nanotechnology, I braced myself for the complex terrain ahead. The focus is on the public policy implications of the surge in consumer goods containing nanoparticles. And just how big is the market for nano-manufactured goods? According to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, a partnership between the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, there are hundreds of products available to consumers that contain manufactured nanomaterials. They run the gamut from tennis rackets to toothpaste to air purifiers and even stuffed animals which contain antibacterial nanosilver. Lux Research projects that the worldwide market for nano-manufactured goods will exceed 2 trillion dollars by 2014.

Meanwhile, the federal government has been criticized for failing to regulate more stringently the use of nanoparticles and for not investing enough dollars to study the effects of their exposure. Even when the federal authorities do act, like when they ruled that germ-killing products laced with nanosilver must be registered as pesticides, it makes you scratch your head at how outdated some of our environmental laws are and ill-equipped to deal with materials that came online after the laws were written.

The nuts and bolts of producing this story were challenging as well. To lay out the public policy debate, we needed to get opinions and facts from an environmental organization, the federal government and a firm that is actually manufacturing products at the nano-scale. I was also fortunate to get access to Kent Pinkerton and his colleagues at UC Davis, who are studying the exposure effects of quantum dots and carbon nanotubes on rodents. Special thanks goes to my Associate Producer, Jenny Oh, for securing an important interview with Dr. John Howard, the director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. As I was about to commence my interview with Dr. Howard, I ran through with him the list of questions, including one about respirators and whether they would adequately protect exposure to materials that are thousands of times smaller than the human hair. Without missing a beat, Dr. Howard grabbed his pen, asked me for a sheet of paper and drew a sketch of a filter lattice, explaining how yes, thanks to Brownian motion, the tiny nanoparticles would be moving around so wildly that they would bounce off the surface of the lattice. Bigger particles, on the other hand, may get through the lattice.

Discussion about nanotechnology, its benefits, its risks, the knowns and unknowns will continue for some time. Perhaps QUEST will revisit nanotechnology as new breakthroughs emerge and science reveals more clearly how nanoparticles affect the environment and living organisms.

Watch the "Macro Concerns in a Nano World" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Our QUEST story on the science of anabolic steroids, how they affect the body, and the super-smart sleuths who are using science to catch the cheaters who abuse them, turned up some interesting information. For one thing, I was surprised to learn that according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse's fact sheet about anabolic-androgenic steroids, nearly 2 percent of 10th graders (both boys and girls) admitted to using steroids at some point. Now that may not seem like much, but when you think about the devastating consequences that steroids can have on the body, such as jaundice, kidney failure, and infertility, that's pretty alarming. One could even argue that there's a trickle-down effect when high-school athletes hear allegations of steroid abuse amongst professional athletes and see the athletes continue to pull down multimillion dollar contracts while winning accolades and national titles.

It's nice to know that there are scientists like Terry Sheehan and other high-tech chemists who have the high-tech tools like liquid chromatography and gas chromatography to identify the cheaters in the elite sporting competitions, like the upcoming Beijing Olympics and Tour de France. Clearly the temptation to cheat is great but as the case of Marion Jones has illustrated recently, the fall from grace if you're caught is swift and unremitting. At the end of June, Floyd Landis lost his last appeal to try and hang onto his 2006 Tour de France title. At the time, he vehemently denied that he used testosterone, instead claiming that he naturally has high levels of testosterone. This year's Tour de France has also been riven by positive doping results for several cyclists who tested positive for EPO, a banned substance that is naturally produced by the kidneys and stimulates the production of red blood cells in the bone marrow.

The other thing that I discovered when researching this QUEST story was how prevalent the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing illicit substances are amongst "average" people and amateur/semi-pro athletes. Granted, I can only speak anecdotally but there were quite a few personal trainers in the Bay Area with whom I spoke who mentioned how easily available anabolic steroids and increasingly, Human Growth Hormone (HGH), is in the gym-going and semi-pro cage-fighting and weightlifting community. Nowadays, it's not even necessarily the lure of big bucks or stardom that is enticing people to risk their health by abusing steroids, EPO, HGH or other substances. It seems that the quest for a youthful, fit appearance is enough of a motivator to make some people do so.


Watch the "Science Flexes Its Muscles" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the story, in 2005, Ashok Gadgil, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, led a team of four people to north and south Darfur to determine how families were cooking their meals. This may seem like an odd fact-finding mission but it had very real consequences for alleviating the suffering and violence the Darfuri women experience. Every other day, many women leave the relative safety of the refugee camps to travel six to seven hours to collect fuel wood for their meals. In the process, they risk rape and mutilation at the hands of the Janjaweed, a state-sponsored militia which has been lodged in a genocidal fight against Darfuri rebel groups pressing for more autonomy from the government in Khartoum. Three years later, Ashok Gadgil and Ken Chow of Engineers Without Borders are on version eight of the Berkeley Darfur stove, an elegantly simple yet effective ten pound metal stove which is four times more efficient than the traditional three-stone fire with which the Darfur refugees have traditionally cooked. Ashok and his colleagues on the Darfur Stoves Project hope to have five to six manufacturing plants operating in north, west and south Darfur, producing hundreds of thousands of stoves a year from the flat-pack kits of the stove Ken Chow has engineered.

For me, this QUEST segment highlighted how scientists with the brilliance and dedication of Ashok Gadgil can think up solutions to problems that have the potential to alleviate suffering and help the economic lot (each stove saves roughly $250 dollars in fuel wood annually for a Darfuri family) of hundreds of thousands of people existing within the margins of survival. Fortunately, there are organizations, in addition to the Darfur Stoves Project, that are also helping to get more stoves into the hands of Darfuri refugees, including The Hunger Site, Global Giving, The Child Health Site. You can visit these non-profit organizations and purchase a Berkeley Darfur stove on behalf of a family in Darfur, and also make a donation to the U.S. chapter of Engineers Without Borders to support their projects in Asia and Africa.

On a final production note, our QUEST segment about the Darfur Stoves Project was immensely helped by U.N.'s archival footage department and the U.N. Mission in Sudan, both of which gave us footage of the stark conditions in the Darfuri refugee camps. The U.N. High Commission for Refugees also accepts donations for their international humanitarian activities.

Watch the "Darfur Stoves Project" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources.


Sheraz Sadiq is an Associate Producer for QUEST on KQED Television.

Forty years later, the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers is still going strong, boasting a web site replete with a monthly star chart, specific for San Francisco, a calendar of monthly amateur astronomy events, a helpful "cheat sheet" of astronomical facts and answers to questions that routinely come up if you set up a telescope on your neighborhood sidewalk, and where to go if you want to borrow, build or donate a telescope.

Another great resource for the budding SF amateur astronomer is the Randall Museum, which hosts star parties, lectures by amateur and professional astronomers and classes for making your own Dobsonian telescope from scratch. The free public lectures at the Randall Museum take place on the third Wednesday of each month, sponsored by the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers.

Since 1952, the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers have been an invaluable resource for stargazers to learn about the choicest observing sites throughout the Bay Area, monthly star parties and make contact with a community of like-minded folks. Be sure to also check out their astrophotography web page, where they have uploaded photos and even videos shot with their telescopes of galaxies, comets, moons, planets and nebulae.

If you can't get enough of amateur astronomy clubs in the Bay Area, check out the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and the Astronomical Association of Northern California. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific, founded in the 19th century, has members from 70 countries and claims to be the largest astronomy society in the world. It also boasts educational outreach programs, such as Astronomy from the Ground Up, a National Science Foundation-funded program that helps informal science educators such as docents and volunteers by giving them the tools and training to more effectively communicate astronomy information to the public.

If you should need to buy equipment or talk with some very knowledgeable folks about the right telescope, accessories or CCD digital camera to begin your foray into astrophotography, check out Scope City, a retailer in San Francisco specializing in telescopes and binoculars.

Watch the "Amateur Astonomers" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources.


Sheraz Sadiq is an Associate Producer for QUEST on KQED Television.