The five most-read stories on Scope this week were:

Stanford’s Brian Kobilka wins 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: This week, Brian Kobilka, MD, professor and chair of molecular and cellular physiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and Robert Lefkowitz, MD, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at Duke University, were named winners of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Nobel Prize-netting iPS-cell discovery was initially a tough sell (for me, anyway): Scope contributor Bruce Goldman recalls the first time he learned about the groundbreaking research of Shinya Yamanaka, PhD, MD. On Monday, Yamanaka was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Medicine, alongside John Gurdon, D.Phil, for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent.

Combining online learning and the Socratic method to reinvent medical school courses: A piece published in the latest issue of Inside Stanford Medicine takes a closer look at the efforts of a core group of Stanford professors, education technology specialists and collaborators from the Khan Academy to develop a new online learning initiative to reinvent medical school courses.

Using the “flipped classroom” model to re-imagine medical education: In this video, Stanford’s Charles Prober, MD, senior associate dean for medical education, and medical school colleagues discuss replacing the traditional lecture format with the “flipped classroom” model to make better use of the fixed amount of educational time available to train doctors.

Stanford psychologist partners with ‘30 Rock’ actor on the ‘The Lutz Experiment’: Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki, PhD, is collaborating with comedian John Lutz, who plays a sketch writer on the popular TV series “30 Rock,” on a new book project tentatively titled “The Lutz Experiment.”

This week of Nobel Prize excitement is also the season of some other less-heralded scientific contests, including my personal favorite, the “Dance your PhD” contest sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Graduate students submit videos of their efforts to use dance to explain their research to non-scientist audiences, and anyone can help to elect the winner. I adore this contest because it combines scientific discovery, science communication for lay audiences, and last but certainly not least, the madcap side of graduate school.

This year’s entries are really creative - I’m especially fond of the dance by Diana Davis, “Cutting Sequences on the Double Pentagon,” for its beautiful visual explanation of a complex mathematical concept, and of Peter Liddicot’s “A Super-Alloy is Born: The Romantic Revolution of Lightness & Strength,” for its lighthearted depiction (featuring a unicycle, a toy microscope, and even some gold lamé) of the formation of a new kind of lightweight aluminum.

But my favorite, shown above, is Carrie Seltzer’s “Seed Dispersal and Regeneration in a Tanzanian Rain Forest.” I admit I’m a bit biased here. My own dissertation research was focused on obese, diabetic rats. I’ve always thought that if I were to dance my dissertation I would need some people dressed in rat costumes, a là the “Rodents of Unusual Size” in the movie The Princess Bride. Carrie’s dance does a great job of explaining her research, and she herself gets to don a giant-rat costume to do so.

There are still a few days left to vote for the dance you like best; the winner will be announced on Monday, Oct. 15.

Previously: PhD research explained through interpretive dance

Half of the world’s population, some 3.3 billion people, are at risk for malaria. In an effort to reduce the spread of malaria, an international team of researchers is using cell phone data to determine how human travel affects the transmission of the disease and identify regions where imported infections originate.

For the study, researchers combined a year’s worth of cell phone GPS data for Kenya’s nearly 15 million subscribers with maps showing malaria prevalence and estimates of infection risk. In doing so, they were able to create highly-detailed maps depicting population travel patterns to and from malaria hotspots that could be useful in shaping public health efforts to reduce infection rates. As reported in a recent Scientific American story:

The researchers found that many of the journeys, as mapped via cell phone data, involved travel to or through the capital city, Nairobi, where previous malaria eradication efforts and urbanization have pushed the illness to low levels and reduced the number of potential carrier mosquitoes. Thus, even the many visitors to the city who might be infected and city residents who have become infected while traveling to other regions are unlikely to cause a large spike in subsequent transmission of the disease there.

Many other areas of the country, however, are at higher risk from imported cases of malaria, according to the travel maps. Some of the most vulnerable places are those in the central and Lake Victoria region, which offer more potential vectors and less robust eradication progress. Those people moving within these regions, between areas where malaria has high and low prevalence, might actually be one of the biggest forces of spreading the illness.

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With this information, governments could focus efforts on areas that were likely to both contribute and receive the highest number of infections. New control efforts could include boosting surveillance in these places, improving communication about risk of travel to these areas, and perhaps even sending text messages to travelers if they are visiting a high-risk region.

Previously: Using crowdsourcing to diagnose malaria and Tracking infectious disease outbreaks with satellite images of the nighttime sky
Photo by Erik (HASH) Hersman

Electronic medical records have become an essential backdrop to modern medical practice. Paper charts, not long ago the mainstay of health-care documentation, have become antediluvian. Whereas once doctors used to write notes with pen and paper and insert the paper into a physical binder, doctors now keep track of patients by clicking keys on a keyboard and entering data into a computer software program.

One of the great advantages of the electronic medical record over its ancestral precursor ‘notes-in-a-binder’ is that records are now centralized and can be accessed by multiple authorized care providers, such that it is possible to know what treatment a patient received from any health-care provider working in the conjoined medical system, from primary care visits to hospital admissions. Physicians are less siloed within specialties and more able to share information.

This week’s Science section of the New York Times discusses the upsides and the downsides of modern technology in the medical workplace, but one of the downsides that isn’t emphasized is the fact that much of the data entered into electronic medical records is being mined to make important decisions about clinical care and health policy. And if data-mining is based on inaccurate information, then the whole operation is a house of cards. Let me cite one example.

A physician I know in Merced County, California has been practicing medicine for the greater part of three decades, and he was recently obliged by his medical group to transition from paper to electronic medical records. The medical-records software he uses mandates that he indicate on a pull-down menu the ethnicity of each of his patients. He views his patients’ ethnicity as non-essential to his practice, and so - pressed for time like most health-care providers - he clicks on “Albanian” for all of his patients, not because they are Albanian, but because “Albanian” is the very first item on the pull-down menu and therefore the fastest to access. The result is that over 90 percent of his patients appear to be Albanian, when in fact they represent the usual constituents of Merced County, with few if any Albanians among them.

Misinformation in electronic medical records, whether accidental or otherwise, has far-reaching consequences for patients and health care policy, because electronic medical records are being actively ‘data-mined’ by large health care conglomerates and the government as a basis for improving care. This is an important downside to consider as we move forward.

Previously: Health-care experts discuss opportunities and challenges of mining ‘big data’ in health care, Mining for research: How computerized records open new doors for medical researchers and More health-care providers embrace the high-tech office

Anna Lembke, MD, is an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford.

Due to yesterday’s Nobel win, my colleagues and I woke up, and began working, at 3 AM - and I was reminded of how difficult it is to function after getting such a small amount (four hours, in this case) of sleep. My sleep deprivation, thankfully, was a temporary thing – but chronic sleep loss is something that millions of Americans deal with on a regular basis. And, as Stephanie Lee highlights in a recent San Francisco Chronicle story, its effect on health is something that researchers are busy studying:

Over the past five or so years, scientists have begun to make inroads into understanding the way poor or little sleep wreaks havoc on the immune system.

“We’re at the beginning stage,” said Clete Kushida, medical director of Stanford University’s Sleep Disorders Clinic. “There are a number of studies that indicate that sleep can affect immune functions in terms of the amount of sleep, as well as the degree of sleep deprivation.”

Their research shines a light on an exhausting and common lifestyle. Nearly one-third of U.S. workers - 41 million people - get less sleep than the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep a day, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this spring.

The health consequences can be significant. Sleeping fewer than six hours a night can weaken the effectiveness of vaccinations, an August study found, while other studies have shown that sleep loss changes the body’s bacteria-fighting mechanisms, sometimes in ways that can actually do harm. These discoveries are opening up avenues of study that scientists hope will lead them to someday understand the precise ways sleep loss causes sickness.

I’m a little late to this because of yesterday’s Nobel announcement, but a new Stanford study shows that brain scans can distinguish the neural differences between children with strong reading skill and those who struggle. The findings, say researchers, could help shape reading lessons for pre-elementary children by tailoring them to youngsters’ needs.

In the study (subscription required), neuroscientists examined the cognitive, language and reading skills of children aged 7 to 15 over a three-year period. They also conducted MRI scans of participants’ brains annually during that period. According to a Stanford release, results showed:

In each case, the rate of development (measured by fractional anisotropy, or FA) in the white matter regions of the brain, which are associated with reading, accurately predicted their test scores.

Specifically, children with above-average reading skills exhibit an FA value in two types of nerve bundles – the left hemisphere arcuate fasciculus and the left hemisphere inferior longitudinal fasciculus – that is initially low, but increases over time. Children with lower reading skills initially have a high FA, but it declines over time.

Further down Jason D. Yeatman, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Stanford and lead study author, comments on how the findings could be used in developing early screening methods:

Once we have an accurate model relating the maturation of the brain’s reading circuitry to children’s acquisition of reading skills, and once we understand which factors are beneficial, I really think it will be possible to develop early intervention protocols for children who are poor readers, and tailor individualized lesson plans to emphasize good development … Over the next five to 10 years, that’s what we’re really hoping to do.

Previously: Imaging study shows little difference between poor readers with low IQ and poor readers with high IQ, Stanford study furthers understanding of reading disorders and Researchers use brain imaging to predict which dyslexics will learn to read
Photo by United Way of Massachusetts Bay & Merrimack Valley

Comedian John Lutz, who plays a sketch writer on the popular TV series “30 Rock,” is often the fall guy for others’ mischief and the target of practical jokes on the show. So when I read in a recent Arts Beat blog entry about a new endeavor called “The Lutz Experiment,” I naturally assumed he’d be the lead role in some sort of new reality TV show where he would eat strange and unusual foods, perform death-defying acts and, in general, test his emotional and physical limits.

But, as the article explains, there’s more depth to the actor and his latest project, which he is working on with Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki, PhD. Zaki’s work focuses on the cognitive and neural bases of social behavior, and:

The men are now collaborators on a new book tentatively titled “The Lutz Experiment,” which was recently acquired by the Free Press imprint of Simon & Schuster. It’s a project they hope will make social psychology more accessible while it runs Mr. Lutz through a battery of experiments, teaches him a few lessons about himself and perhaps helps him conquer some long-held fears.

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For their book, Dr. Zaki said it was still to be determined what experiments he would run on Mr. Lutz, and even then he could probably not tell his partner exactly what he would be getting into.

“So many of our studies depend on people not knowing the hypotheses ahead of time,” Dr. Zaki said. “I get to deploy him to these different, weird parts of the country. ‘Meet this person, and they’ll bring you into a basement testing room.”

Photo by Jason Anfinsen

Updated 2:26 PM: The university just posted a fun video from Kobilka’s house this morning. My favorite part is when the still-stunned award winner said he didn’t realize the prize was such a big deal. “It’s a big deal,” my boss, Paul Costello, assured him.

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6:35 AM: Here’s the scene from the home of Brian Kobilka, MD, who was named co-recipient of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry this morning. He has been busy fielding calls since getting the news at 2:20 AM.

Previously: Stanford’s Brian Kobilka wins 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Photo by Linda Cicero/Stanford News Service

Updated 1:57 PM: We’ve included on our website some thoughts and congratulatory remarks from Kobilka’s colleagues. I quite like what Andrew Fire, PhD, who won a Nobel in 2006, had to say:

Fire offered some thoughts on how winning a Nobel doesn’t entirely change a scientist’s life. “Winning the Nobel doesn’t mean that every grant is going to get approved,” he said. “You shouldn’t be able to convince somebody that something is true just because you have the Nobel. What it does mean is that if you have something you want to say, people will listen. There’s that media attention — that has been somewhat useful.” He noted, for instance, that he works with two other medical school Nobel laureates — Paul Berg, PhD, and Roger Kornberg, PhD — to champion basic science. “That press attention has helped,” he said.

Fire also said that he thought it was great that this Nobel award is for a very recent piece of work. “Often the award is for work that is done 30, 40 years ago,” he said. And he also observed that Kobilka’s background was significant for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. “His background is in medicine,” Fire said. “He was very modest about that, but his training is really tremendous.”

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Updated 11:22 AM: My colleague Kris Newby just bought to my attention an excellent personal profile of Kobilka’s life that appeared last year in Nature. As she explained it to me, “the narrative describes how the son of a baker from rural Minnesota town got a medical degree, then quietly toiled at a lab bench for more 20 years before his ‘eureka moment,’ when he and the co-recipient of the prize unlocked the mysteries of how cells interact with their environment and adapt to their environment.”

The article also vividly illustrates the need for the country to make long-term investments in basic research, describing the time that Kobilka’s lab almost ran out of funding:

In 2001, Kobilka got disheartening news. His main funding, from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, would not be renewed after it ran out in 2003. His lab began to struggle financially, and went “deep into the red” to support his expensive crystallization crusade. “I don’t think I ever considered giving up,” says Kobilka. “I admit that it was frustrating at times, but I enjoyed the challenge and I wanted to know the answer.” Kobilka says that one of his friends “best described my persistence as ‘irrational optimism’.”

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Updated 10:15 AM: When asked by a Reuters TV reporter at the press conference about his “emotional and physical reaction” to learning he had won, Kobilka said, “I wasn’t actually sure it was real to begin with.” And then, causing the room to roar with laughter, “I was extremely happy.”

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Updated 8:59 AM: Kobilka will talk about his work and Nobel Prize during a press conference being held at 10 AM Pacific time. For those interested, the conference will be broadcast live here.

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Updated 8:26 AM: People have been buzzing a bit this morning over the fact that two MDs were given a prize in chemistry. (Slate’s Josh Voorhees points to a colleague’s tweet saying “Chemistry is everywhere! Except in this year’s #chemistry #Nobel.) Ian Sample from the Guardian chatted about this with David Phillips, PhD, past president of the Royal Society in Chemistry, who said the work “is of such importance to human health, I’m not at all surprised they’ve been awarded this prize.” Phillips elaborated:

The field of chemical biology is burgeoning because at its heart, at the heart of certainly cell biology, is an understanding at the molecular level of what’s going on and that’s chemistry essentially. So other sorts of chemistry are still going on and still very important, but this level of understanding which has been made possible by advances in techniques over the last 20 years or so is crucial to mankind. I’m not worried at all that many of my colleagues are working in what is essentially a biological field, because I think it’s so crucial that we understand the molecular processes that are going on in cells in animal and human bodies.

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Updated 7:51 AM: Experts in the field are beginning to weigh in on today’s Nobel Prize announcement. Reuters reports:

Sven Lidin, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at Lund University and chairman of the [Nobel] committee, said the discovery had been vital for medical research.

“Knowing what they (the receptors) look like and how they function will provide us with the tools to make better drugs with fewer side effects,” he added.

The receptors were “the holy grail of membrane protein research”, said Mark Sansom, Professor of Molecular Biophysics at Oxford University.

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“Out of the roughly 1,400 drugs that exist in the world, about 1,000 of them are little pills that you consume, and the majority of these are based in these receptors,” [Johan Aqvist, Professor of Chemistry at Sweden's Uppsala University,] told Reuters.

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Updated 7:19 AM: Medical school dean Philip Pizzo, MD, comments on Kobilka’s prize this morning, saying Kobilka’s work “is a testament to the importance of supporting basic science research - whose payoff can take many years or decades to reach fruition but, when it does, it changes the direction of medicine and science.”

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Updated 5:05 AM: In our developing story, my colleague Krista Conger offers a nice description of G-protein-coupled receptors and captures Kobilka’s initial reaction to his win:

The receptors, which snake in and out of the cell membrane, serve as one of the main methods of communication within the body — conveying chemical messages from outside through the membrane and into the cell’s interior.

About 1,000 human genes encode the receptors. They regulate the beating of our hearts, the workings of our brains and nearly every other physiological process. About 40 percent of all medications target these receptors.

One of these receptors recognizes and responds to epinephrine, or adrenaline. Kobilka received a powerful lesson in the effect of the hormone when he received the call from the Nobel committee early this morning.

“I didn’t believe it at first, but after I spoke with about five people — they handed the phone around — with really convincing Swedish accents, I started to think it was for real,’ said Kobilka.

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3:30 AM: Brian Kobilka, MD, professor and chair of molecular and cellular physiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, alongside Robert Lefkowitz, MD, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at Duke University, have been named winners of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. An announcement was just made by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, saying the researchers were rewarded for their “groundbreaking discoveries that reveal the inner workings of an important family of… G-protein–coupled receptors.”

We’re thrilled with the news, and we’ll post more details here as the day progresses. You can also get updates on Twitter by following our @SUMedicine feed or following the hashtag #SUNobel.

Photo by Linda Cicero/Stanford News Service

During a press conference on the Stanford campus this morning (captured in the video above), Nobel Laureate Brian Kobilka, MD, discussed his work, shared memorable discoveries in his career, and talked about adversity. On the topic of “eureka” moments, he said:

There have probably been a couple of eureka moments in my career. But the one that stands out above all others is seeing for the first time a G-protein-coupled receptor in the active actually signally. This was a crystal structure that was reported last year. When we actually saw [that interaction] it was just amazing, and so exciting.

Later on, he discussed staying motivated in the face of tough challenges:

A colleague, who is now a professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, describes it as irrational optimism. Even though something fails… you’ll think of an idea and it’s, ‘Oh, this one is going to work!’ So you just keep thinking that something’s going to work.

Previously: A busy morning for Nobel Laureate Brian Kobilka and Stanford’s Brian Kobilka wins 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry