Putting Two-and-Two Together

INVENT.

A poster in the room where I spend some of my days studying is one of few words, including the one above and "motorola.com" (from the respective sponsor of the poster), but to me it means a lot. It has various gears on the poster in a red/blue/green color scheme, and sometimes I'll just look up to Learning medicine isn't just about the memorizing of rote details and quirky facts, it requires an ability to put information together. Kary Mullis in the short TED talk I had an opportunity to watch a few days ago was a man who was able to do the latter.

Kary Mullis, who is credited for invention of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), in this talk took two very well known pieces together and was willing to take a risk with them:

1) Knowing that there are specific molecules in transplants that are attacked by the human body.
2) Knowing that there are species of bacteria that are achieving resistance to antibiotics.

Putting two-and-two together, as seen in this talk:

Why don't we come up with a way to tag these antigenic molecules to the resistant bacteria, so the body utilizes the molecule to increase effectiveness of the immune system on these organisms?

I'll have to say that is good thinking there. I betcha the idea to some scientists might have seemed quite silly at first, but Mullis went ahead and tried it. He seems to have progress with his research. And I admire him for his ideas, for that's medicine (like I've probably seen seventeen-thousand times in my blog): not just treating people, but working towards preventing any health obstacles foreseen (and unforeseen) ahead of us.

Thinking about how "simple" it was just to put those two ideas together, in reality it seems to take a lot of guts, risk, and work.