The Week-in-Preview: Hydrophobia, Hydrophilia and Coffee

Posted on | March 21, 2007 | Comments Off

For whatever reason, I am fascinated with this story of a BBC documentarian who had been bitten by a rabid cheetah. Perhaps it is the very notion of a rabid cheetah — a predator made more deadly, yet in a perverse way.  It’s like a poisonous pitbull or a shark with frickin’ laser beams.

So, I’m in a mood to learn more about rabies, which is fortunate, because Monday, I found the perfect lunctime lecture, yum:

Rabies at the Dawn of the 21st Century: A Retrospective
Monday, March 26, 2007 @ 12:00 pm
Temple Health Sciences Center, Broad and Montgomery

From the description:

Hilary Koprowski, head of the Biotechnology Foundation Laboratories and professor, Department of Cancer Biology at Thomas Jefferson University. Koprowski pioneered the first oral polio vaccine and developed a new type of rabies vaccine for humans and animals. For more information, e-mail Brenda Malinics at bmalinic@temple.edu, or call 215-707-7652.

An old name for rabies — and one of its symptoms — is “hydrophobia,” the fear of water, where victims will panic at the very site of a drink.

Fortunately, there’s a vaccine for that, (*lame segue alert*) since you wouldn’t to miss out on tomorrow’s event at The Bridge:

World Water Day Film Screening
Thursday, March 22, 2007 @ 7:00 pm
The Bridge Cinema De Lux
40th and Walnut Street

The UN tells us that tomorrow is World Water Day, an effort to draw attention to the world’s general lack of clean, safe water. Although The Bridge’s website doesn’t have much information, according to the frequently misnamed PhillyFunGuide:

The World Water Day Film events will feature inspirational and informative films about water. These events will also feature moving and enlightening discussion and are designed to inspire all of us to do what we can to help solve the world water crisis.

A Starbucks coffee tasting will follow

The Starbucks coffee, of course, will drive home the message that most of the world must make do with brackish, vile brown water laced with impurities

Just a reminder to something I linked to earlier this month. The Chemical Heritage Foundation has a brown bagger on March 27 called “The Sillier Side of Chemists,” a noontime lecture that’s open to the public. If you haven’t checked CHF out yet, please do.

In the Future: 

April  2 at Penn: Towards an Integrated Science of Demographic Behavior: the Interplays of Alleles, Brains, and Context

April 10 at the John Heinz Wildlife Refuge: Project WILD Workshop 

I’m not suggesting you actually go to that event, but I wanted to put the Heinz Refuge on your radar. We tend to zip past it on I-95 and vaguely remember the ketchup heir’s untimely death, yet never really learn if this place is any good. I’ll start mining their site for event for you, I’m that kind of guy.

More next week.

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