Zack Lynch is author of The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World (St. Martin's Press, July 2009).
This week's Science also has an interesting proteomics tid-bit, titled, "Written in the Blood." The piece confirms the diagnostic potential of blood. "Blood teems with telltale proteins that can reveal incipient prostate cancer, for example, and help show whether a patient is cruising for a heart attack. Researchers hoping to discover more of these bio-markers might start with this new collection from the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Maryland. The database catalogs more than 1400 blood proteins isolated during a recent exhaustive analysis, the largest haul yet." This just goes to show that we still don't know all the proteins that exist in our blood, or for that matter in our brains, and that we are still in need of effective high-throughput methods of detecting and identifying them. Where is that protein chip anyway?