Nigel - Whether I'm being entirely fair or not is not matter in dispute. By definition, I'm expressing my own viewpoint. While I try the best I can, my perspective will be undoubtedly biased.
Now lets get down to some facts (!). This Bush guy says 'Until the 1990s, the neuroscience research community paid scant attention to the neurometabolism of metal ions. Apart from a great deal of work done on calcium, and some on magnesium, the neurobiology of the heavier metal ions did not arouse much interest as they were not notably linked to major disease syndromes.' What utter nonsense! I did my graduate work in the same building as Dan Perl, a neuropathologist who, *along with many others* studied the role of aluminum (and other heavy metals) in Alzheimer's disease (and other neuropathologies) for a decade or more before the nineties (here's one of Perl's papers ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=4076080&dopt=Abstract).
Bush says all this other stuff about neuroscientists not studying oxidation chemistry etc. - just more pure garbage. Another investigator (Gerald Cohen) at Mt. Sinai had been studying the role of redox reactions in dopaminergic cells as it related to Parkinson's Disease since the early 1970's. Neuroscience KNOWS heavy metals. Neuroscience KNOWS redox chemistry. This Bush fellow is the green clown who clearly is out of his league.
Insofar as the abstract on Cu/Mn SOD - trust me, you don't want to go there. I've worked with nitric oxide (NO) and, by definition, one must understand at least a small amount of SOD chemistry to conduct NO experiments. The heavy metal component on Cu/Mn SOD is almost an apples and oranges distinction versus the earlier discussion of heavy metals themselves catalyzing redox reactions. But the real message is this: when it comes to data involving SOD, NO, and all of their chemical relatives (oxygen radicals, NO radicals, peroxynitrite, and countless other products of redox reactions), the data for tightly controlled animal experiments or retrospective human observations is all over the place. If you read one abstract YOU MUST read 100 to appreciate the complexity of the physiological chemistry. For every paper that screams, 'Nitric oxide is toxic!' there will be one that implores, 'Nitric oxide is protective'.
Trust me here. I'm really not trying to lecture nor am I unaware how pedantic my posts read. Bush's remarks were simply ignorant and blasphemous. He was relying on a poorly informed audience. Ignore Bush and any easy explanation for neurological diseases that have baffled the explanatory attempts of many excellent researchers for many decades. |
