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Remembrance of things past
“As in the more obviously psychological experiments, colour theory was being transformed from the study of light into the study of vision. It was the new departure Goethe needed—he admitted to Sommerring that he had now virtually lost sight of his starting point in chromatics—though he thought he could at last now show that the phenomenon of colour was completely independent of refraction. A new term entered his optical vocabulary much more than people realized, colour phenomena were physiological—but with it came also an understanding of the terms “objective” and “subjective” which was much closer to that of contemporary philosophy than Goethe's own previous usage. (Nicolas Boyle. Goethe, the poet and the age. Vol 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000:214.)
Pharmacogenetics
In the journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), it was reported that in 1994 alone 100 000 patients in the United States died because of medications given to them. Many reasons exist for these adverse effects. However, one area of concern that is emerging is the new field of pharmacogenetics. This field studies the genetic variability of responses to standard pharmacological agents. One of the first success stories came in the early 1990s when investigators demonstrated that children being treated for leukaemia with the drug 6-mercaptopurine may die as the result of taking standardised doses of this medication. These children were found to have less than the normal concentrations of enzymes in the liver necessary to metabolise 6-mercaptopurine. It now appears likely that there are many examples of genetic variability in the metabolism of standard pharmacological agents, and identifying patients who are at risk for adverse reactions is the subject of pharmacogenetics. Occasionally, this scientific field ventures into the controversies of …