(This is a peripatetic blog entry, but bear with me. It gets neuroscientific eventually!)

“Eeek – it’s Friday afternoon, and I haven’t managed to put up a real blog entry yet this week!” Thus I dug myself out of the manuscript pile and thought about typing up something about Nature’s open peer review trial. I had posted the links a couple of weeks ago, and last week I noticed they weren’t working anymore, so maybe that experiment had now ended (it was supposed to run for three months starting in mid-June), and maybe, just maybe, the Nature folks had already posted some evaluation or conclusions. However, those links work tonight, and manuscripts are still up for commenting, so obviously it isn’t over yet.

I clicked over to Timo Hannay’s Nascent blog (always good for cutting edge news about my employers!) to see whether he had anything enlightening to say about the open peer review trial. He hadn’t really (apart from this entry, blasting The Wall Street Journal and other outlets for having noticed the experiment only after more than two months, and getting it wrong, too…) Rummaging further around Nascent, I came across a link to ContentWise. ContentWise, as far as I can tell, is a blog by two publishing consultants who, again as far as I can tell, have no direct connection to Nature Publishing Group. But they are praising Nature.com as a transcendent website. TRANSCENDENT? Just what have these guys been smoking???

Now, I use Nature.com in the daily grind, so I might well be overlooking the diamond right under my nose. What exactly do ContentWise find so transcendent — I just can’t get over that word, folks! — about Nature.com? Turns out they praise the various interactive web initiatives, Connotea, the Nature Protocols Network, and Dissect Medicine, an example of a “niche-specific article recommendations network.”

Uh-huh. I work for this company and I have never heard so much as a whisper about Dissect Medicine.

So over I click to DM, and do some more rummaging. And there, finally, I find some neuroscience usable as blog fodder! Seems the idea behind DM is that users/readers are invited to post links to medicine-related news articles, and users can then vote for what they think are the most interesting articles, and those then rise to the top of the list, becoming literally “headlines.”

(Somebody who knows anything about DM please correct me if I’ve got this all wrong.)

Astonishingly this recent story from The Guardian is not at the top. It reports that seven years ago a physician in South Africa discovered by pure serendipity that the drug zolpidem could wake up patients who’ve suffered in persistent vegetative states (PVS) for years. Zolpidem is sold as “Ambien” in my part of the world — a common sleeping pill. These PVS patients are given an Ambien in the morning, and can function and communicate for several hours. Apparently it works day after day. The scientific report of these cases is here.

I am just floored at this fabulous news, and amazed that it has been so little publicized. (Maybe I am just sleepwalking…) The story is eerily reminiscent of Oliver Sacks’ “Awakenings”. I have no idea on what percentage of PVS patients this trick would work (and of course each patient is a unique case with unique lesions), nor does anyone understand how it works, but nevertheless. Anything that can help severely brain-damaged people is good news (unless it’s a hoax – I hope not!!)

In the hopeful vein, DM also gave me this story about an antiinflammatory medication reversing liver cirrhosis, from the BBC. Not neuroscience, you say? Maybe, but liver cirrhosis is almost always caused by chronic alcohol abuse, and alcoholism like all addictions is to a large extent a malfunction of the brain. We deal with plenty of papers on addiction mechanisms at Nature Neuroscience! And on the blog we consider anything with even a tenuous link to neuroscience fair game.

Great stories indeed are listed in DM, but the top headline tonight is “Madrid Fashion Show Bans 5 Thin Models” !!

Somebody explain this to me, please.

And let’s put an end to this embarrassment by casting our votes on Dissect Medicine for the Guardian story, “The ‘miracle’ treatment that’s bringing the brain-damaged back to life”.