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Thanks, CWRU, for forcing me to get the paper bag out again [Respectful Insolence]
It’s rare that I have much in the way of reluctance to leap into writing about a topic. Any regular reader of this blog should know this to be true, given the topics I regularly take on and how often my writing draws flak my way from various proponents of quackery and pseudoscience, in particular the antivaccine crowd. Still, sometimes a topic gives me pause, although, I must admit, the reason is that blogging about it will bring embarrassment to me. Usually, I can overcome this reluctance, as I have done in discussing, for example, how my alma mater, the university from which I obtained both my undergraduate and graduate degree, has an actual program in magic (i.e., anthroposophic medicine). Then there was the example of how reiki had infiltrated my old stomping grounds at MetroHealth Medical Center, one of the hospitals at Case Western Reserve University where I rotated during my general surgery residency. Then, just last week, there was the most embarrassing fact that I had to acknowledge, namely that the cancer center at Case has gone woo, even going so far as to host the 2011 meeting of the Society of Integrative Oncology.
So what more could embarrass me? One more thing, it would appear, so much so that it’s time to get the paper bag out again; you know, the one I routinely used to get out when surgeons and other physicians spouted embarrassing things back in the day.
I had heard about this a couple of days before P.Z. Myers blogged about it, but had decided that I probably wasn’t the one to blog about it. Then, P.Z. had to go and rub my face in the embarrassment of it all by writing about a paper published by a faculty member at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine named Erik Andrulis. He was, I have to admit, depressingly spot-on in pointing out that a comparison to jabberwocky is inevitable. I, however, have another comparison that I think more apt, as you will soon see. First, though, I must admit that I found it very surprising that someone like Andrulis would publish a paper like this. If you look at his publication list, with one glaring exception, it looks pretty respectable. Basically, he studies enzymes that metabolize RNA called RNases:
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