At the risk of turning my blog into a temporary cat blog 😉 I am going to post a couple of the most recent photos of my new kitten, Peekaboo. The first of a series, I am afraid! 😉 Ah yes, I didn’t do any research yesterday (or today, for that matter) because we picked her up yesterday morning. Who can think of doing anything serious with a new kitten in the house? Plus, we need to monitor her closely because she is suffering from horrid intestinal parasites and ear mites (typical of outdoor kitties). We are treating her for this crappy (literally) stuff, of course. The vet told us that we wouldn’t be able to introduce Peekaboo to our other cats for a month or so. She has to be “quarantined” until she is completely rid of the nasty creatures. So we have created a feline entertainment centre for her down in our TV room, which is a long room with plenty of space for her to play and run around, and comfy chairs where she can sleep (when human bodies are not provided as cushions). Yesterday, after we brought her home from the vet, she went nuts over all her new cat toys, which range from simple Chianti wine corks (my Priscilla’s favourite!) to rubber balls that glow in the dark and scratching “trees.” Etc. Too much fun. She ran around like a mad thing, climbed all over the chairs and us, took several tumbles, etc. Then she conked out on my chest. Today she seems even more exhausted, in part because the medicine is beginning to work (probably), so right now she is lying on my husband (see photos). He is absolutely thrilled, because our other cats never really curled up on him. Peekaboo hasn’t budged from his chest since we had lunch, about three hours ago, and he hasn’t moved an inch, either! Oh dear, I had better move my computer downstairs, or I won’t get any research done for the next century or so! 😉

First, I would like to thank everyone who sent me birthday messages in various forms (e-cards, photos of beautiful flowers, e-mails etc.). No way I can answer every single message, but I want you all to know that I appreciated everything! Grazie!

A friend (thanks!) sent me a joke that gave me a good chuckle yesterday. Keep ’em coming! 🙂 Here goes:

The morning after attending his company’s anniversary party, Jack wakes up with a huge hangover. He doesn’t even remember how he got home from the party. He is troubled by a vague feeling that he did something wrong.

He forces himself to open his eyes, and the first thing he sees are a couple of aspirins and a glass of water on the bed table. He sits up and sees his clothing laid out in front of him, clean and pressed.

He looks around the room and notices that it is in perfect order, spotless and tidy, as is the rest of the house. He takes the aspirins, but then cringes when he sees a huge black eye staring back at him in the bathroom mirror.

Then he sees a note stuck to the corner of the mirror: “Honey, breakfast is on the stove, I left early to get groceries to make you your favorite dinner tonight. I love you, darling! Love, Jillian”

He staggers into the kitchen, and sure enough, there is a hot breakfast, steaming hot coffee and the morning newspaper. His son is also at the table, eating.

Jack asks, “Son…what happened last night?”

“Well, you came home after 3 A.M., drunk and delirious. You fell over the coffee table and broke it, you were sick in the hallway, and you got that black eye when you stumbled into the door.”

Confused, he asked, “So, why is everything in such perfect order and so clean, and breakfast is on the table waiting for me???”

His son replies, “Oh THAT!… Mom dragged you to the bedroom, and when she tried to take your pants off, you yelled, “Lady, leave me alone, I’m married!!!”

I have just linked a couple of news items €”on quercetin and oncogenic RAS €”whose consequences may be significant to us MMers. Before I go on, though, what is this RAS business? Simply put, RAS is a gene that can mutate and become overactive, leading to the development of cancer. In this dangerously altered state, it is known as oncogenic RAS, and is present in almost one-third of all cancers, according to a recently published Duke Medical news release, see http://tinyurl.com/34x3oo. According to these Duke researchers, attempts at inhibiting this mutated form of the RAS gene have failed so far. Therefore, they looked at inhibiting the cytokine activated by oncogenic RAS, and guess what? That cytokine just happens to be Interleukin-6 (yes, our infamous pro-inflammatory IL-6!). The Duke University researchers also found that angiogenesis was reduced by inhibiting the production of IL-6, and that “‘IL-6 was like the gas pedal driving the growth of tumors,’ Counter said. ‘No gas, no growth, which is exactly what we saw when we inhibited IL-6 in tumors.’ Counter is encouraged that even though these findings are in cell culture and animal models, therapies based on targeting IL-6 in cancers driven by the ras oncogene could be tested in humans in the near future. [ ] A phase II trial is underway testing a monoclonal antibody against IL-6 for patients with multiple myeloma, a cancer that depends on IL-6 but is not known to have a connection to the ras oncogene. If the results of this trial are positive, studies might begin in ras-dependent cancers. Counter’s group is actively pursuing the idea that such an antibody may inhibit pancreatic cancer growth in mouse models. If these results are positive, this will open the door for Duke oncologists to organize a clinical trial to test the agent in human cancer patients.” The abstract of the Duke study can be read here: http://tinyurl.com/23merm

The question then arises: is oncogenic RAS present in MM? As you may have guessed from the above-mentioned Duke Medical news release, the answer is: yes, it is, in a certain percentage of patients which seems to vary from study to study. Not surprising, I would add, since we are all so different. A 1992 study (http://tinyurl.com/ytb863) showed that RAS gene mutations were present in 47% of the MM patients (14 out of 30 patients). I thought the following finding was significant: RAS gene mutations were more frequently observed in patients with fulminating disease (10/15, 67%) than in patients with less aggressive forms of the disease (4/15, 26%). So, oncogenic RAS seems to be connected to a more aggressive form of MM. This would appear to be confirmed by the results of a 1989 study (http://tinyurl.com/yux83g): While the mechanism of occurrence and biological role of ras activation in MM remains to be elucidated, the preliminary correlations observed in this study between the presence of ras oncogenes and poor therapeutic response suggest that further investigations of the possible prognostic significance of these alterations are necessary. According to a more recent Italian study, published in March 2007 (http://tinyurl.com/2bfugg) Ras gene mutations are a recurrent genetic lesion in multiple myeloma (MM). These mutations were detected in 20% of 81 newly diagnosed MM patients. The abstract concludes, however, that these mutations are not likely to represent a master lesion in MM but its relevance needs to be considered in the context of other genetic abnormalities.

Another study, published in Blood in 2003 (full study: http://tinyurl.com/23e48r), looks at pathways activated by oncogenic ras that may stimulate IL-6-independent growth, and concludes: In summary, we have identified several signal pathways in myeloma cells constitutively activated by expression of mutated ras genes. Our results also suggest that these pathways provide excellent molecular targets for future therapy.

Why am I writing about this today? Because I just finished reading a study titled Quercetin mediates preferential degradation of oncogenic Ras and causes autophagy in Ha-RAS-transformed human colon cells and published in Carcinogenesis in May 2007 (abstract: http://tinyurl.com/22byoz; full text: http://tinyurl.com/23clc8) showing that quercetin downregulates the levels of oncogenic RAS in cancer cells. How about that? The study suggests that quercetin be used in cancers with frequent mutations of RAS genes. Interestingly enough, quercetin inhibits oncogenic RAS but not normal RAS. Excellent. Sure, this study is about colon cancer cells, but I think the implications could apply to MM as well, given the IL-6 connection. Therefore, I believe we MMers have another GOOD reason to keep taking quercetin (or to start taking it!). Indeed, I couldn’t have received a better birthday present (except the news that J.C. Rowling has decided to continue writing more chapters in the Harry Potter series! 😉 )

Does anybody else get the pre-birthday blues? I was hit hard by those this year for no apparent reason. Oh right, my birthday is tomorrow. The big.4…6. 😉 No, the blues had nothing to do with worrying about getting older (on the contrary, for obvious reasons, I am quite happy about that! 🙂 ), but Usually Cheerful Margaret was gone for the entire morning. In her place was a horrible Margaret Down in the Dumps. My parents tried to cheer me up and get me excited about my birthday, asking me what kind of cake I wanted to order (cake, even just the prospect of cake, has been known to have a cheery effect on me), but even that didn’t do the trick. Well, the gloom and doom didn’t last long. Not in my nature. By the time I had gone out on a few errands and had listened to some classical music, I was almost back to my regular self again. Then Mom and I stopped at our favourite local pastry shop (the best in the world!) and ordered my favourite dessert. In the Florentine dialect, it’s known as bongo. Bongo? It sounds exotic, but it’s simply a heap of profiteroles. Similar to a croquembouche, for those pâtissiers among you. Ah, but not just your usual boring pile of profiteroles. These are exquisite cream puffs filled with mouth-watering Chantilly cream and covered in rich dark melted chocolate. There is no dessert like a Florentine bongo. Anyway, as soon as we’d ordered that birthday bongo, my usual good humour returned. I’m baaaaack. And doing lots of research.

To all of those who are Cancers (ironic, ain’t it?) and have birthdays this month, buon compleanno! In fact, auguri a tutti quanti!

That’s one of my favourite movies. Yesterday I discovered that, in addition to being an organic farm with 300 hectares of land and 20,000 olive trees (!), the former convent where we took my parents for lunch yesterday has been the set for many films, including Room with a View ! Fancy that. This huge complex is located on a hill above Florence, only a 10-minute drive from our house, yet we have never been or even eaten there. Yes, we have passed it a number of times on our way to Fiesole, but never stopped to check it out. Then, just a few days ago, we read a write-up about it in an Italian gourmet magazine and thought it would be a good place to have a birthday celebration. And it was! Well, well. I still have a lot to discover about my own city, it would seem!

The food was quite decent, but the best parts were:

1. the view of the hills from the loggia where we ate, and

2. the sight of two pairs of swallows busily and oh so quickly! feeding their hungry offspring in two different nests. One nest (the one in the photos) had been built under the rafters, the other was sitting right on the alarm system box over in a corner of the loggia. (I hope that alarm never has cause to go off!) These photos give an idea of what the little birds looked like right before and after a feeding. I just love the facial expressions! I was totally mesmerized, and almost didn’t eat my lunch!

After lunch, my Mom and I took a look at the 15th century cloister, and came upon a fresco, the Madonna della Misericordia, by Spinello Aretino. The icing on the cake! Okay, I have some research to do, so, ciao a tutti!

Today is my Mom’s birthday. We have made lunch reservations in a country trattoria–a small family-owned restaurant–which has a loggia overlooking fields and hills (your typical lovely Tuscan scenery) and, in the distance, Florence. It’s our birthday surprise for her. I don’t have much time for research today and wasn’t actually going to post anything, but a close friend (thank you!) sent me this joke, which has an excellent food-for-thought message, so here goes:

A man and his dog were walking along a road. The man was enjoying the scenery, when it suddenly occurred to him that he was dead. He remembered dying, and that the dog walking beside him had been dead for years. He wondered where the road was leading them. After a while, they came to a high, white stone wall along one side of the road. It looked like fine marble. At the top of a long hill, it was broken by a tall arch that glowed in the sunlight. When he was standing before it he saw a magnificent gate in the arch that looked like mother-of-pearl, and the street that led to the gate looked like pure gold. He and the dog walked toward the gate, and, as he got closer, he noticed a man sitting at a desk off to one side.

When he was close enough, he called out, “Excuse me, where are we?”

“This is Heaven, sir,” the man answered.

“Wow! Would you happen to have some water?” the man asked.

“Of course, sir. Come right in, and I’ll have some ice water brought right up.” The man gestured, and the gate began to open.

“Can my friend,” gesturing toward his dog, “come in, too?” the traveller asked.

“I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t accept pets.”

The man thought a moment and then turned back toward the road and continued the way he had been going with his dog. After another long walk, and at the top of another steep hill, he came to a dirt road leading through a farm gate that looked as if it had never been closed. There was no fence. As he approached the gate, he saw a man inside, leaning against a tree and reading a book.“Excuse me!” he called to the man. “Do you have any water?”

“Yeah, sure, there’s a pump over there, come on in.”

“How about my friend here?” the traveller gestured to the dog.

“There should be a bowl by the pump.”

They went through the gate, and sure enough, there was an old-fashioned hand pump with a bowl beside it. The traveller filled the water bowl and took a long drink, then gave some to the dog. After they had both quenched their thirst, they walked back toward the man who was standing by the tree.

“What do you call this place?” the traveller asked.

“This is Heaven,” he answered.

“Well, that’s confusing,” the traveller said. “The man down the road said that was Heaven, too.”

“Oh, you mean the place with the gold street and pearly gates? Nope. That’s Hell.”

“Doesn’t it make you mad for them to use your name like that?”

“No, we’re just happy that they screen out the folks who would leave their best friends behind.”

Soooo…Sometimes we wonder why friends keep forwarding jokes to us without writing a word. Maybe this will explain. When you are very busy, but still want to keep in touch, guess what you do? You forward jokes.When you have nothing to say, but still want to keep contact, you forward jokes.

When you have something to say, but don’t know what and don’t know how, you forward jokes.

Also, to let you know that you are still remembered, you are still important, you are still loved, you are still cared for, guess what you get? A forwarded joke.

So, the next time you receive a joke, don’t think that you’ve been sent just another forwarded joke, but that you’ve been thought of today, and your friend on the other end of your computer wanted to send you a smile.

You are all welcome @ my water bowl anytime.

It turns out that I had miscalculated Peekaboo’s age, so we have to wait for another week to bring her into our household. Kittens should not be taken away from their mothers until they are at least 2 months old. So, we wait patiently for Monday, July 23.

On the subject of cats: I was looking through my photos the other day and found this one, which reminded me of the trip we took to Rome in April 2006. My husband had never been to Rome (fancy that!), and I hadn’t been there since I was in high school (an Italian liceo in Florence), so this was a particularly enchanting trip. Practically a new experience for both of us. But almost the best part of our trip was when we came upon Torre Argentina, a square that hosts the remains of four Roman temples and Pompey’s Theatre. Extraordinary. At one point, though, we began rubbing our eyes after seeing strange-looking little dots moving around among the ruins. The dots turned out to be cats. Cats everywhere, sleeping, walking, playing among the ruins. Upon closer inspection, on one side of the ruins, we found the Torre Argentina Cat Sanctuary, a shelter for homeless cats. Women called “gattare,” or “cat-ladies,” have been taking care of these cats since 1929. We walked down a few steps and then into the shelter, which is located inside a sort of low-ceilinged cave. We were very impressed with what we saw and with the stories we were told by the really friendly volunteers who run the shelter, and who feed and take care of all the cats. Sick cats are kept inside large cages, treated, then released. There is also a gift shop. Of course, I bought cat calendars (the photos are of these cats among the ancient Torre Argentina ruins) and T-shirts and left a donation. Have a look at the Wikipedia write-up on Torre Argentina, which also mentions the sanctuary: http://tinyurl.com/yo44vq. By the way, according to tradition, Julius Caesar was assassinated right here in this square. Cat-lovers who know Italian can check out: http://www.romancats.de/romancats/index_it.php My final advice is, if you are a cat-lover and are on holiday in gorgeous Rome, please stop by this cat sanctuary (after or before eating a meal at Giggetto al Portico d’Ottavia, of course! 😉 ). You won’t regret it!

Quercetin. Okay, so this is nothing new: organic vegetables are better for us than non organic vegetables. I eat only organic vegetables and fruit, and in summer we grow our own tomatoes, arugula, eggplant as well as several different varieties of herbs, plus we have a fig tree, an apple tree, a strawberry plant and a monster raspberry plant (which is attempting to take over our entire back yard at the moment!), which periodically explodes with fruit between May and October and, if we are quick enough, we get to eat some of it before the bugs polish off everything. I also juice only organic vegetables and fruit, since I also use the peels and rinds. Anyway, this is neither here nor there.

My point is, I found a recently published University of California-Davis study (http://tinyurl.com/3dbb7d) particularly interesting because it compared the amounts of two flavonoids, quercetin and kaempferol (the latter is extracted from tea, broccoli and grapefruit, e.g.), in dried tomato samples that had been collected between 1994 and 2004 as part of a long-term study on agricultural methods. Researchers compared organic versus non-organic tomatoes. And, quelle surprise!, the organic samples had higher levels of both compounds, respectively 79% and 97%, than the non-organic ones. Science may finally be catching up to plain common sense.

According to the Times UK July 5 online edition (http://tinyurl.com/2pu5zq), these researchers believe that the different levels of flavonoids in tomatoes are due to the absence of fertilisers in organic farming. Plants produce flavonoids as a defence mechanism; they are triggered by nutrient deficiency. Feeding a plant with too many nutrients, such as inorganic nitrogen commonly found in conventional fertiliser, curbs the development of flavonoids. The lower levels of flavonoids in conventional tomatoes were caused by over-fertilisation , the research team concluded. So a rich soil may actually not be such a good thing to have in our vegetable garden, after all! Interesting.

Honey Bee Epidemic. I reported in an earlier post about honey bees dying all over the world (by the way, please switch off your cell phones!). This horrifying phenomenon has reached such serious proportions that there is a name for it: Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, a term coined in late 2006. I don’t want to go overboard on this issue, but I do have an update. A couple of days ago, just by chance, I came across some news about organic honey bees. Apparently, organic bees are NOT dying. That caught my attention, so I did a bit of research into the matter, thinking of my little honey bee friend (whom I saw on my raspberry plant the other day, so he at least is in good health!). Sharon Labchuk, an organic beekeeper from Prince Edward Island, reports that organic beekeepers have experienced no problems with CCD. She says that The problem with commercial operations is pesticides used in hives to fumigate for varroa mites and antibiotics are fed to the bees to prevent disease. Hives are hauled long distances by truck, often several times during the growing season, to provide pollination services to industrial agriculture crops, which further stresses the colonies and exposes them to agricultural pesticides and GMOs. Speaking of trucking bees all around the country, I read that, in order to pollinate the half million acres of almond trees in California, one million “rented” hives are driven there from 40 U.S. States. Talk about stressing out those poor little creatures! No wonder that since October 2006 billions of U.S. bees have disappeared. Billions! Another problem I read about is that bees are being bred to be larger than normal. And, apparently, bigger bees do not do as well as natural-sized bees. Michael Bush is a beekeeper who addresses some of these issues on his website: http://www.bushfarms.com/bees.htm

It all boils down to being sensible. If you use pesticides and other poisons or try to create a super-bee variety, i.e., if you tamper too much with Nature, eventually you will run into huge problems. And the finished product €”tomatoes, apples, honey, whatever €”may well be toxic and won’t taste as good, either. Need I say more? Organic is the only way to go. Of course, this is just my opinion!

Here we go again. I recently came across another natural substance that has been used to treat various ailments for hundreds of years in traditional medicine throughout the world, from North America to Russia and Japan. It is called betulinic acid, or BA, and is extracted from the white birch tree (Betula Alba), as well as from other plant species found mainly in tropical areas. Ralph Moss (http://tinyurl.com/25g8sv) informs us that traditional medicine has used it to treat diarrhea, dysentery, cholera, and all diseases of the alimentary tract. It is said to be a good “blood cleanser.” Blood cleanser, huh? Sounds good to me!

Of course I did an online search, et voilà , there it was!, a study mentioning birch tree extract and MM cells in the same breath, a study (http://tinyurl.com/2room7) published in 2006, informing us that BA possesses antiviral, antiparasitic, antibacterial and anti-inflammatory activities, including, from what I read elsewhere, the ability to inhibit both Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli. But most importantly, BA can inhibit the growth of cancer cells: In this study, we demonstrated a remarkable antiproliferative effect of BA in all tested tumor cell cultures including neuroblastoma, rabdomyosarcoma-medulloblastoma, glioma, thyroid, breast, lung and colon carcinoma, leukemia and multiple myeloma, as well as in primary cultures isolated from ovarian carcinoma, cervical carcinoma and glioblastoma multiforme.

That BA could kill cancer cells is not such a recent discovery. A University of Illinois study on BA and melanoma cells was published in 1995: http://tinyurl.com/29j76f Melanoma tumour growth was completely inhibited without toxicity. A follow-up study (http://tinyurl.com/235mag) was published in 2003. Another 2003 study showed for the first time that BA induces apoptosis in head and neck cancer cells. See: http://tinyurl.com/28hm27 And yet another 2003 study (full study: http://tinyurl.com/39tdwk) published in the Journal of Immunology examines the anti-cancer properties of BA and also mentions its anti-HIV effects. BA was found to suppress the activation of NF-kappa B in different cancer cell lines €”colon and lung, for instance. The researchers found that BA is a very potent inhibitor of TNF-induced NF-kB activation. This is important because TNF, or tumour necrosis factor, is very much involved in cancer growth and metastasis. BA was also found to induce apoptosis in brain tumour cells. The study ends: overall our results suggest that BA may have applications for various diseases mediated through NF-kB activation, including cancer, inflammation, and AIDS.

A July 2007 study (http://tinyurl.com/2fclmz) published in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics points out that, while BA is not toxic even at a high dosage, it is not very potent. These researchers examine the purportedly stronger effects of six BA analogues, notably CBA-Im [1-(2-cyano-3-oxolupa-1,20(29)-dien-28-oyl)imidazole] (how’s that for a mouthful?). Another 2007 study (http://tinyurl.com/24aumm) published in Cancer Letters states that Treatment with BA was shown to protect mice against transplanted human melanoma and led to tumor regression. In contrast, cells from healthy tissues were resistant to BA and toxic side-effects in animals were absent. This is important. Like curcumin and many other non toxic compounds, BA leaves healthy cells alone. Those are five key words I seek in a study: It Leaves Healthy Cells Alone. These researchers tested cells from five high mortality cancers €”lung, colorectal, breast, prostate and cervical €”and discovered that, after 48 hours, almost equal amounts of BA inhibited their proliferation.

A clinical trial (see: http://tinyurl.com/23fqjp) is currently examining the effects of betulinic acid (a 20% betulinic acid ointment) on melanoma. I hope BA will soon be tested in a clinical trial setting with MM patients, which is the same wish I have expressed concerning so many other plant extracts with anti-MM effects in vitro.

I would like to end by quoting the final passages of Robert Frost’s poem “Birches”:

It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

My computer has the flu today. My display suddenly goes dark, then my computer reboots for no apparent reason. I have lost a few online searches (a slight annoyance…), so I have finally decided to give my computer some aspirin and tuck it into bed for the rest of the day, until the household technical genius (my husband) gets home from work.

However, I am on another hot trail, so stay tuned. 😉

P.S. Before I go, though, if any cat-lovers out there can give me an idea on how to give an antibiotic to a cat, please please please drop me a line. Puzzola, our eldest cat, has a urinary tract infection, but she is more cunning than a fox and can “smell” that pill miles away. We have tried everything, even grinding it up and hiding it inside her favorite food (a bit of chicken). Nothing works! So now it takes three of us to hold her, throw the pill down her throat, clamp her mouth shut, tickle her throat and wait for her to swallow the bloody pill. Such an indignity for our queen! Any ideas? Thank you! Okay, I’d better post this before my computer sneezes again!