Author: soskicl

As I had not completed my rough draft in time to receive a peer review, I missed my opportunity to peer review someone else’s work. However, I have been a part of many peer reviews in the past, although I can’t say many were for review papers like ours. Looking at the guidelines for the review and from my past experience with reviews however, sometimes the experience of peer reviewing someone’s work can be awkward and difficult. Regarding the section on the rubric containing a section on language and wordage used in the paper, this is something that can be quite difficult to review. Although it is easy if someone has made blatant errors in spelling or grammar in their paper, there are times where someone has worded something not quite the way you would have, and you believe that your wordage would better suit the paper, but you are unsure of whether or not to provide that suggestion. That is something that can be a bit of personal preference, and the author of the work could take offense to you suggesting a different line of wording.

There is much to learn from peer reviewing however, and one of the most important is looking at work with fresh eyes. That can be extremely beneficial for all reviews, and it has been proven that having someone else read your papers can help catch errors and mistakes that were not apparent to the author, but are glaringly apparent to the person who is reading it for the first time. This is also why people suggest that you read your papers out loud, as giving voice to your words can make it seem like someone else is reading them, and you catch errors you would not have originally.

The process of peer review is a generally effective process that ensures that only factual and accurate information is released to the scientific community. The first step of the process involves a group of scientists generating a study and corresponding article based on the contents of that study. This article is then passed to a journal for publication. The journal then passes the article to other experts in whatever the article was written about. These experts ensure that correct methods were followed and the integrity of the scientific process was not violated. They also ensure that the conclusions drawn from the evidence in the study are accurate conclusions that can be made from those data. Then, if approved, the article is passed back to the journal for final publication.

Although the peer review process is generally a great model for ensuring that scientific works remain accurate, there are some glaring problems with it. One is that the experts who are peer reviewing the work may have some sort of monetary incentive from the journal to approve works, even if those works did not follow the correct processes. Additionally, if a work presents some sort of extravagant idea but the underlying data doesn’t necessarily support that idea, the reviewers may be inclined to approve it anyway because it will generate much revenue for the journal.

Another problem is that because the peer reviewers are experts in the same field as those that produced the work, there may be instances where a work is rejected simply because of competition between those experts and those who wrote the article. Also, theft of intellectual property could occur, and one scientists novel idea for studying some particular thing could be stolen my a reviewer.

However, the integrity in the scientific community is generally quite strong, and many value accurate facts and knowledge over money and societal pull, thus these instances are few and far between.

The use of antibiotics is an emerging subject with much controversy surrounding it. On one hand there are very many educated people that use antibiotics regularly and advocate for their use when used appropriately. On the other hand, there are very many educated individuals that advocate for antibiotic use only when absolutely necessary. Based on my knowledge of antibiotics and my experience, I stand somewhere in the middle.

I believe that the use of antibiotics in the medical field today is quite the problem. However, this is due to no fault of most doctors, as I trust that their education would guide them to make the most informed choices a majority of the time. Of course, there may be some doctors that choose to take the easy way out in terms of treatment, and antibiotics are amazingly effective in what they do. But providing antibiotics when some other treatment would suffice is an unnecessary risk that should be avoided.

Regarding my statement “to no fault of most doctors”, I mean that even if doctors were to only provide antibiotics when antibiotics are absolutely necessary, the problem of patient compliance presents new risks. Because doctors cannot force patients to complete their cycles of antibiotics, some patients will inevitable miss a dose, or several. To my knowledge, this is where the problems tend to arise. I remember seeing one study that showed how well bacteria survived under conditions in which antibiotics were present. The gist of it was that in high antibiotic environments, no bacteria would survive. However, if a bacterium were presented with a low antibiotic environment, over time it would proliferate and create a community with antibiotic resistance. It was found that after some resistance was incurred, some of these bacteria from this community could survive in high antibiotic environments, even when no bacteria from the original community could.

This is essentially the problem with patients not taking their antibiotics regularly, as they allow resistant bacteria the chance to form. Additionally, some patients think that they should stop their course of antibiotics as soon as the problem the antibiotics were intended to treat has gone away. This is a popular misconception that again lends to the generation of antibiotic resistant bacteria.

One intentional choice I make regarding my microbial communities is the consumption of the milk beverage kefir. However, now that I think about it, although it is touted as a probiotic, I am honestly not sure that the microbial communities present in kefir would actually impact the microbial state of my gut in a positive way. It seems like many companies are taking advantage of undereducated people by using buzzwords like ‘probiotic’. Even though something may be probiotic, it doesn’t mean that it will affect you in a positive way, or any way at all really. However, culturally, being from Serbia, I grew up consuming kefir, so even if I were to not drink it for the potentially effect on my microbial communities, I would drink it simply to enjoy.

Another intentional choice I make regarding my microbial communities is the decision to shower and maintain general hygiene using soaps and other cleansing products. As a child, I was quick prone to the fungus that causes jock itch, so I have personal experience with microbial communities affecting the health of my skin. Additionally, as an adult, I developed a case of pityriasis after long exposure to the sun on a daily basis. However, this decision can also negatively impact the health of my skin, as it could strip it of microbes that are actually beneficial to my skin. Despite this, the potentially detrimental affects of not cleaning the skin seem to far outweigh the potential negative effects of removing microbes that may be beneficial from my skin.

(1) Doctor of public health Michela Stillo in her review article “Safety of human papillomavirus vaccines: a review” (2015) asserts that evidence shows that despite common rumors regarding the adverse effects of vaccines, HPV vaccines are safe. Stillo cites evidence of adverse effects caused by HPV vaccines from randomly controlled trials published in peer reviewed articles. The purpose of this article is to prove that HPV vaccines are safe in order to increase vaccine coverage. The article seems to target more intellectual audiences, in hopes to arm them with information that can be provided to the laypeople.

My research proposal would be regarding the effects of microbes on human weight loss and gain. There is already an incredible amount of money being funneled into the study of human weight loss (less so into human weight gain) so this kind of proposal could be quick to be accepted and funded.

It has been shown that when germ free mice are inoculated with the microflora of an obese or lean person, those mice tend to mimic the weight of the person they received the microflora from, even if diet is the same between the two groups of mice. My proposal is to analyze the microbial contents of the microflora and determine what microbes are primarily responsible or at least whose presence is correlated with weight loss or gain. Then, as germ free mice tend to be quite unhealthy, take standard mice who have been exposed to a variety of conditions and attempt to change their weight by introducing these microbes. Eventually, if there is success in this stage, there could be trials done on humans in which we attempt to change the composition of their gut microflora in order to induce weight gain or loss. This sort of data would be invaluable to healthcare as it would allow doctors to reduce or increase the weight of their patients even if the patients are not compliant with doctors suggestions (as they usually are not). This sort of treatment would almost certainly be broadly implemented, provided there are no harsh side effects.

Cancer, depression, anxiety, irritable bowel syndrome, swelling of the brain, obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cystic fibrosis.

When comparing this list, although relatively short, to the one formed in writing exercise one, I see that there is a huge increase in the number of diseases I was able to list. Of course, this is because much of the conversation in this course was regarding microbes effects on humans, including their effects on non-infectious diseases. Some of the responses did overlap as I had some prior knowledge of microbes effects on the body.

The most important topics I will take away from this course are essentially that microbes can influence almost all human conditions. One of the most interesting to me personally was the effect that they have on human weight, and the microflora of an obese person is vastly different from that of a lean person.

1. Can experiments detect differences that matter? The significance of this question is that it suggests that when analyzing scientific literature, we must be aware of what methods are available to use and which are used in any particular study, and whether or not these methods can actually point out significant differences.
2. Does the study show causation or correlation? This question is significant because sometimes people tend to assume that a correlation is a causation. We must take the time to decipher whether the results of a study are presenting correlation or causation.
3. What is the mechanism? This is significant particularly in microbiology as it suggests that we analyze the exact mechanism by which a microbe is causing some effect. We now have the means to do this to some extent, and creating an entire pathway for explaining a microbes effects would be invaluable.
4. How much do experiments reflect reality? When we read a study, it is important that we understand how much we can generalize from the study unto the human population. The article discusses that germ free mice are regularly used in microbial experiments, but findings from them generally cannot be used to describe human populations as these mice are usually unhealthy due to their lack of a diverse microbial community.
5. Could anything else explain the results? This question is significant because we must be aware that there are few experiments that are truly perfect for providing results which can be applied in a broader context and because of this, we must be aware of other variables in the experiments that could have affected the results.

I believe that the most helpful of these questions to ask when discussing controversy is the third, what is the mechanism? I think this is the most helpful because if you can draw out a mechanism of all of the chemical and physical interactions caused by some microbe, that is the best proof of its effect on a system.

Microbial communities and mental health states both have the means to affect one another. In order to better understand this abstract connection, lets first examine how microbial communities can impact mental health states.

Microbes tend to utilize the resources around them to propagate. In this hypothetical scenario, these resources are allocated in our bodies. For the purpose of this example, lets analyze microbes that tend to attack the lungs. Although these microbes may not be feasting on the matter in our lungs, their presence may cause an immune response which causes inflammation of the lungs. Due to this inflammation, the lungs become incapable of inhaling as much air as they could previously. Thus, less air reaches the brain. In extreme cases, this could cause the cells of the brain to work less effectively, and perhaps die. This is an example of how microbes can affect our mental health states.

An example of the inverse is in the case of someone with bipolar disorder. These people tend to have depressive and manic phases. During these manic phases, these people tend to race about and stay up for several days performing some task. During this time, their body temperature is elevated. This elevation in body temperature could provide an optimal environment for some bacteria to flourish, and for others it may be the opposite and they may die. This is an example of how a mental health state could affect microbial communities.

There are many behaviors that humans exhibit, especially in today day and age, that contribute to the reduction of exposure to microbes. One of which is self isolation, which many people are doing today due to COVID-19. If not self isolation, many people are at least attempting to limit the number of people that they interact with. This leads to a reduction of exposure to microbes because just as people are diverse, so are the microbes that they carry, and as we see fewer and fewer people, we also see fewer and fewer microbes.

Another example of this phenomenon is hand washing and use of antibacterial agents such as hand sanitizer. Although your skin is still exposed to external microbes, other systems such as the mouth and nose will see less exposure to microbes as a result of this behavior. This is another behavior that has been increased due to the prevalence of COVID-19.

A final example of a human behavior that reduces exposure to microbes is the decision to work at home. Many people are working from home because of COVID, but it is not some new idea that was brought about because of the virus. People have been working from home more and more as the internet and related services have expanded, resulting in having fewer coworkers, or at least seeing them, and thus a lessening in the exposure to microbes.