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Observatory: For Tough Recyclables, a Self-Mending Plastic
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, April 28, 2009
Most of the plastics that are recyclable today — water bottles and grocery bags, for instance — are what are called thermoplastics. They are polymers that can be melted down and molded into something else.
But there is another category of plastics, thermoset resins, that can’t be easily recycled. These polymers — the stuff of circuit boards, electrical insulation and epoxy glue, among other things — have strong cross-links and when heated tend to decompose. Most products made from these plastics end up as waste.
But chemists at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands have devised a thermoset plastic that, rather than decomposing, heals itself when heated. Writing in the journal Macromolecules, the researchers, Youchun Zhang, Antonius A. Broekhuis and Francesco Picchioni, say the material has the potential to be recycled and reused many times.
The building blocks of the polymer are polyketones, and they are cross-linked using another organic compound, bismaleimide. One secret to the material’s success is that the cross-linking reaction is reversible: when heated to about 300 degrees Fahrenheit, the material becomes unlinked, but as it cools the links re-form, creating a rigid polymer once again.
The researchers demonstrated that the material can be shredded, melted and remolded at least seven times with no loss of mechanical properties. Their discovery, they say, adds to scientific understanding of the nature of self-healing materials, and with more research may eventually lead to the full development of recyclable thermoset plastics.
Women Who Keep Ovaries Live Longer
By RONI CARYN RABIN, The New York Times, April 28, 2009
Each year, hundreds of thousands of women who undergo hysterectomies have their ovaries removed along with their uterus, a practice meant to protect them from ovarian cancer. But a new study has found that women who keep their ovaries live longer.
While women who had their ovaries removed developed fewer breast cancers and almost entirely eliminated their risk of ovarian cancer over 24 years of follow-up, they were more likely to develop heart disease than women who kept their ovaries, and they were more likely to die.
The new findings — from an analysis of data in the famous Nurses’ Health Study, published in the May issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology — raises questions about a widespread practice. Some 300,000 American women a year, about half of those who have hysterectomies, have their ovaries removed.
“This finding is contrary to 35 years of teaching in gynecology,” said the lead author, Dr. William H. Parker of the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica, Calif.
“In the 1970s, it was decided that taking out the ovaries to prevent ovarian cancer would be the new strategy,” he said. “This study shows that you’re more likely to die if you have your ovaries taken out, unless you’re among a group of women with a family history that places you at high risk for ovarian cancer or breast cancer.”
While ovarian cancer is difficult to detect and often deadly, it is also rare, Dr. Parker explained, noting that only 34 of the study participants who kept their ovaries died of ovarian cancer during the follow-up period. “Heart disease kills more than 20 times the number of women every year,” he said.
The study analyzed data on 29,380 women who had participated in the Harvard Nurses’ Health Study: 16,345 who had hysterectomy with both ovaries removed, and 13,035 who had hysterectomy but kept their ovaries.
After 24 years of follow-up, women in the first group had 895 cases of breast cancer — a 25 percent lower risk than those who kept their ovaries — and 96 percent less risk of ovarian cancer (just 5 cases). But they were 12 percent more likely to die during the follow-up period. Their risk of heart disease was 17 percent higher than the risk faced by women with ovaries. They also had a 17 percent greater risk of dying of cancer. And in an unexpected finding, they were at greater risk for lung cancer.
The risks of heart disease and death appeared to be even greater for women who had their uterus and ovaries removed before age 50 and did not take estrogen, compared with women who had a hysterectomy before 50 but kept their ovaries.
The study may add to the debate over estrogen and the role it plays in heart disease in women. Dr. Parker and other experts suggested that women who kept their ovaries lived longer because even though the ovaries make less estrogen after menopause, they produce androstenedione and testosterone, which are converted into estrogen by fat and muscle.
Dr. Isaac Schiff, chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor at Harvard School of Medicine, said the study did not mean that women undergoing hysterectomies should never have their ovaries removed.
“A woman with a strong family history of ovarian cancer or breast cancer should still be given the option of having her ovaries removed,” said Dr. Schiff, who was not involved in the study. “The individual patient should be given the information, and decide what’s best for her.”
But that is a change from the past, he said, adding, “We used to just arbitrarily say, ‘If you’re over 45, have your ovaries taken out.’ ”
With Aid of Drug Library, New Remedies From Old
By KATE MURPHY, The New York Times, April 28, 2009
Housed in a row of white freezers in a nondescript laboratory at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore are more than 3,000 of the estimated 10,000 drugs known to medicine. There is no sign on the door to indicate that this is perhaps the largest public drug library available to researchers interested in finding new uses for old and often forgotten drugs.
Already, researchers have used the library to discover that itraconazole, a drug used for decades to treat toenail fungus, may also inhibit the growth of some kinds of tumors and may forestall macular degeneration. Another drug, clofazimine, used more than a century ago to treat leprosy, may be effective against autoimmune disorders like multiple sclerosis and psoriasis.
“It takes 15 years and costs close to a billion dollars to develop a new drug,” said Jun O. Liu, professor of pharmacology and director of the Johns Hopkins Drug Library. “Why not start with compounds that already have proven safety and efficacy?”
He and his colleagues have been building the collection since 2002 and hope to have it complete by 2011. They acquire the drugs through donations, purchases and sometimes lab synthesis. And they will send researchers a complete set — minuscule amounts of every drug in the library — for $5,000, which covers the cost of shipping and replenishment.
Since the toenail and leprosy drugs are approved for use in the United States and are no longer under patent protection, clinical trials to test their new uses are either under way or close to regulatory approval, Dr. Liu said.
Drugs still under patent protection are more complicated; patent holders seldom allow independent research on alternative uses. “The drug companies haven’t been too keen on helping us,” Dr. Liu said.
There are other drug libraries, both commercial and noncommercial. Commercial suppliers offer considerably fewer drugs than Johns Hopkins (though they may have medicines it does not), and they charge much more. Noncommercial drug libraries include those at the National Institutes of Health; the University of California, San Francisco; and McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. But they will usually not send drugs to unaffiliated researchers. And like the commercial libraries, their holdings are smaller and composed largely of compounds from Hopkins.
Regardless of the source, researchers typically order copies of entire collections rather than individual drugs they think may work in their experiments.
“We’ve found drugs that are active in ways no one would have ever hypothesized,” said Marc G. Caron, a professor of cell biology at Duke who is using the Johns Hopkins library to find drugs that might quell the cravings of substance abusers.
Testing of these compounds has become much easier in recent years as a result of an automated technology called H.T.S., for high-throughput screening. The drugs are dissolved in a solution and stored in rectangular, compartmented plates reminiscent of ice trays; they can then be delivered to researchers for testing of their efficacy against various diseases, or disease mechanisms like inflammation.
Computerized droppers, plate agitators and microscope image readers can now accomplish in days what it once took bench scientists years to do.
Although H.T.S. has been around for at least a decade, it is just within the last five years that the technology has been widely available. Previously, only big pharmaceutical companies could afford to screen thousands of compounds; now more public and academic institutions are doing so, and their emphasis tends to be on rediscovering or tweaking the chemical structure of old drugs rather than developing new ones.
“The instrumentation to do sophisticated, large-scale screening of drugs has gotten significantly better and cheaper,” said Michelle Arkin, associate director of the Small Molecule Discovery Center at U.C. San Francisco.
Some institutions, like McMaster in Ontario and Rockefeller University in New York City, allow outside researchers to use their H.T.S. facilities for $10,000 to $20,000, depending on the complexity of the project.
Access to such facilities has increased demand for compounds, particularly already approved and off-patent drugs, to analyze. Johns Hopkins and commercial suppliers report a surge in orders over the last two years — because there are more H.T.S. laboratories, they said, and because of efforts to find cheaper therapies against third world scourges like malaria and tuberculosis.
“Old drugs are the low hanging fruit in terms of finding safe and inexpensive treatments for these diseases,” said Carl Nathan, chairman of microbiology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. Dr. Nathan receives plates of drugs from Johns Hopkins as well as commercial suppliers and does high-throughput screening at Rockefeller, which has a partnership with Weill.
“I’m addicted to it,” he said.
PEERING IN Dissection at the Yale School of Medicine around 1910. Such photos were popular in the 1910s and ’20s.
Books: Snapshots From the Days of Bare-Hands Anatomy
By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D., The New York Times, April 28, 2009
The array of familiar objects threatened by digital technology encompasses the old (books, paintings) and the new (CDs). And then there is the human body, which counts as both.
Not the bodies we use, of course, but rather the bodies we allow medical professionals to use while training, to familiarize themselves with the terrain. Dissecting a cadaver has been part of medical education for millenniums. But the cadaver that enters the gross anatomy suite with the blessing of both the prior owner and the state is actually quite a new phenomenon.
Barely a century ago American medical schools were helping themselves to alumni of the local poorhouse for some of their teaching material and paying grave robbers for the rest. Only with a 1968 federal act did a nationwide system of voluntary donation bring uniformity to the process.
Now the same technology that lets us scan living bodies in all dimensions may obviate our need for dead ones, as some anatomy courses move from real dissection to its virtual counterpart — clean and odor-free, in crystal-clear focus with infinite zoom.
Some say virtual anatomy can never replace the transcendent reality. Some say it is a huge improvement over smelly, greasy, inconvenient flesh. Both arguments will be fueled by “Dissection,” an extraordinary collection of photographs that makes even today’s flesh-and-blood anatomy laboratories look tame.
Photography soared in popularity after the Civil War, and in 1900 Eastman Kodak’s Brownie camera created armies of snapping amateurs. A vogue for photographing the gross anatomy class swept through American medical schools, as students were moved to recreate in black and white the iconic dissection scenes of Rembrandt and other great masters: scholarly doctors posing around the supine cadaver, scalpels in hand, gravitas on face.
Some student groups posed for professional photographers. Others took their own shots. The prints were mounted on living room walls, sent as postcards and even used as calling cards. By 1920 the craze had simmered down, and after World War II it was pretty much over.
But hundreds of these photographs endure. John Harley Warner, chairman of Yale’s History of Medicine program, and James M. Edmonson, curator of a museum of medical memorabilia at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, have culled more than 100 for what might under other circumstances be considered a coffee-table book. It is a striking, glossy, oversize volume, immensely decorative if shredded flesh and the odd bone are your idea of décor.
But as ghoulish as the cadavers in these shots may be — they range from pristine, untouched corpses to unrecognizable piles of picked-over remains — their shock value diminishes with each turned page. Conversely, the attention commanded by the groups of young students self-consciously posed around the dissecting table never wanes.
They attended schools all over the country, from prestigious Harvard and Johns Hopkins to small, short-lived institutions in the Midwest. Only a few female faces are scattered in the groups of white men: in one photograph a handwritten scrawl identifies one small girl as “wife.” A few shots depict all-female and all-black students from segregated schools.
The so-called dieners, who prepared the bodies and disposed of the remains, were almost all black men who stared impassively into the camera a little apart from the students.
Until well into the 20th century all of them wore street clothes. A few had skimpy aprons to deflect noxious splashes, but the disposable latex glove was far in the future: almost all worked with bare hands. That fact alone is enough to chill the 21st-century medical spine: we may shake our patients’ hands and touch their skin, but the tactile sensation of muscle, brain and viscera, living or not, is one we no longer know.
And the complex process of imagining it is only the beginning of the deep stretch of the mind these photographs provoke.
Many show medicine at its cocky, callous worst. Some students posed the cadaver as one of the boys — hat on head, pipe in bared grinning teeth, skeletal fist clutching a fan of playing cards. In one 1905 shot a balding, fully clad student lies on the dissection table while six flayed cadavers are propped to a standing position around him, purportedly preparing to cut. The photographer took the trouble to copyright this shot, titled “A Student’s Dream.”
But the other side of medicine is visible here, as well. For a haunting image of all it has ever aspired to be, little can surpass one of the last photographs in the book, shot at an unknown medical school in 1950. Four young men cluster about the head of a table, gazing down at the face of their eviscerated cadaver. The photographer has created the illusion that the body rests, Pietà-like, in their laps; the light illuminates their hair. Forget the truckloads of grandiose prose that has been spun about the art and science of medicine over the centuries: one look at this picture and you understand what it is all supposed to be about.
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, April 28, 2009
Most of the plastics that are recyclable today — water bottles and grocery bags, for instance — are what are called thermoplastics. They are polymers that can be melted down and molded into something else.
But there is another category of plastics, thermoset resins, that can’t be easily recycled. These polymers — the stuff of circuit boards, electrical insulation and epoxy glue, among other things — have strong cross-links and when heated tend to decompose. Most products made from these plastics end up as waste.
But chemists at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands have devised a thermoset plastic that, rather than decomposing, heals itself when heated. Writing in the journal Macromolecules, the researchers, Youchun Zhang, Antonius A. Broekhuis and Francesco Picchioni, say the material has the potential to be recycled and reused many times.
The building blocks of the polymer are polyketones, and they are cross-linked using another organic compound, bismaleimide. One secret to the material’s success is that the cross-linking reaction is reversible: when heated to about 300 degrees Fahrenheit, the material becomes unlinked, but as it cools the links re-form, creating a rigid polymer once again.
The researchers demonstrated that the material can be shredded, melted and remolded at least seven times with no loss of mechanical properties. Their discovery, they say, adds to scientific understanding of the nature of self-healing materials, and with more research may eventually lead to the full development of recyclable thermoset plastics.
Women Who Keep Ovaries Live Longer
By RONI CARYN RABIN, The New York Times, April 28, 2009
Each year, hundreds of thousands of women who undergo hysterectomies have their ovaries removed along with their uterus, a practice meant to protect them from ovarian cancer. But a new study has found that women who keep their ovaries live longer.
While women who had their ovaries removed developed fewer breast cancers and almost entirely eliminated their risk of ovarian cancer over 24 years of follow-up, they were more likely to develop heart disease than women who kept their ovaries, and they were more likely to die.
The new findings — from an analysis of data in the famous Nurses’ Health Study, published in the May issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology — raises questions about a widespread practice. Some 300,000 American women a year, about half of those who have hysterectomies, have their ovaries removed.
“This finding is contrary to 35 years of teaching in gynecology,” said the lead author, Dr. William H. Parker of the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica, Calif.
“In the 1970s, it was decided that taking out the ovaries to prevent ovarian cancer would be the new strategy,” he said. “This study shows that you’re more likely to die if you have your ovaries taken out, unless you’re among a group of women with a family history that places you at high risk for ovarian cancer or breast cancer.”
While ovarian cancer is difficult to detect and often deadly, it is also rare, Dr. Parker explained, noting that only 34 of the study participants who kept their ovaries died of ovarian cancer during the follow-up period. “Heart disease kills more than 20 times the number of women every year,” he said.
The study analyzed data on 29,380 women who had participated in the Harvard Nurses’ Health Study: 16,345 who had hysterectomy with both ovaries removed, and 13,035 who had hysterectomy but kept their ovaries.
After 24 years of follow-up, women in the first group had 895 cases of breast cancer — a 25 percent lower risk than those who kept their ovaries — and 96 percent less risk of ovarian cancer (just 5 cases). But they were 12 percent more likely to die during the follow-up period. Their risk of heart disease was 17 percent higher than the risk faced by women with ovaries. They also had a 17 percent greater risk of dying of cancer. And in an unexpected finding, they were at greater risk for lung cancer.
The risks of heart disease and death appeared to be even greater for women who had their uterus and ovaries removed before age 50 and did not take estrogen, compared with women who had a hysterectomy before 50 but kept their ovaries.
The study may add to the debate over estrogen and the role it plays in heart disease in women. Dr. Parker and other experts suggested that women who kept their ovaries lived longer because even though the ovaries make less estrogen after menopause, they produce androstenedione and testosterone, which are converted into estrogen by fat and muscle.
Dr. Isaac Schiff, chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor at Harvard School of Medicine, said the study did not mean that women undergoing hysterectomies should never have their ovaries removed.
“A woman with a strong family history of ovarian cancer or breast cancer should still be given the option of having her ovaries removed,” said Dr. Schiff, who was not involved in the study. “The individual patient should be given the information, and decide what’s best for her.”
But that is a change from the past, he said, adding, “We used to just arbitrarily say, ‘If you’re over 45, have your ovaries taken out.’ ”
With Aid of Drug Library, New Remedies From Old
By KATE MURPHY, The New York Times, April 28, 2009
Housed in a row of white freezers in a nondescript laboratory at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore are more than 3,000 of the estimated 10,000 drugs known to medicine. There is no sign on the door to indicate that this is perhaps the largest public drug library available to researchers interested in finding new uses for old and often forgotten drugs.
Already, researchers have used the library to discover that itraconazole, a drug used for decades to treat toenail fungus, may also inhibit the growth of some kinds of tumors and may forestall macular degeneration. Another drug, clofazimine, used more than a century ago to treat leprosy, may be effective against autoimmune disorders like multiple sclerosis and psoriasis.
“It takes 15 years and costs close to a billion dollars to develop a new drug,” said Jun O. Liu, professor of pharmacology and director of the Johns Hopkins Drug Library. “Why not start with compounds that already have proven safety and efficacy?”
He and his colleagues have been building the collection since 2002 and hope to have it complete by 2011. They acquire the drugs through donations, purchases and sometimes lab synthesis. And they will send researchers a complete set — minuscule amounts of every drug in the library — for $5,000, which covers the cost of shipping and replenishment.
Since the toenail and leprosy drugs are approved for use in the United States and are no longer under patent protection, clinical trials to test their new uses are either under way or close to regulatory approval, Dr. Liu said.
Drugs still under patent protection are more complicated; patent holders seldom allow independent research on alternative uses. “The drug companies haven’t been too keen on helping us,” Dr. Liu said.
There are other drug libraries, both commercial and noncommercial. Commercial suppliers offer considerably fewer drugs than Johns Hopkins (though they may have medicines it does not), and they charge much more. Noncommercial drug libraries include those at the National Institutes of Health; the University of California, San Francisco; and McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. But they will usually not send drugs to unaffiliated researchers. And like the commercial libraries, their holdings are smaller and composed largely of compounds from Hopkins.
Regardless of the source, researchers typically order copies of entire collections rather than individual drugs they think may work in their experiments.
“We’ve found drugs that are active in ways no one would have ever hypothesized,” said Marc G. Caron, a professor of cell biology at Duke who is using the Johns Hopkins library to find drugs that might quell the cravings of substance abusers.
Testing of these compounds has become much easier in recent years as a result of an automated technology called H.T.S., for high-throughput screening. The drugs are dissolved in a solution and stored in rectangular, compartmented plates reminiscent of ice trays; they can then be delivered to researchers for testing of their efficacy against various diseases, or disease mechanisms like inflammation.
Computerized droppers, plate agitators and microscope image readers can now accomplish in days what it once took bench scientists years to do.
Although H.T.S. has been around for at least a decade, it is just within the last five years that the technology has been widely available. Previously, only big pharmaceutical companies could afford to screen thousands of compounds; now more public and academic institutions are doing so, and their emphasis tends to be on rediscovering or tweaking the chemical structure of old drugs rather than developing new ones.
“The instrumentation to do sophisticated, large-scale screening of drugs has gotten significantly better and cheaper,” said Michelle Arkin, associate director of the Small Molecule Discovery Center at U.C. San Francisco.
Some institutions, like McMaster in Ontario and Rockefeller University in New York City, allow outside researchers to use their H.T.S. facilities for $10,000 to $20,000, depending on the complexity of the project.
Access to such facilities has increased demand for compounds, particularly already approved and off-patent drugs, to analyze. Johns Hopkins and commercial suppliers report a surge in orders over the last two years — because there are more H.T.S. laboratories, they said, and because of efforts to find cheaper therapies against third world scourges like malaria and tuberculosis.
“Old drugs are the low hanging fruit in terms of finding safe and inexpensive treatments for these diseases,” said Carl Nathan, chairman of microbiology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. Dr. Nathan receives plates of drugs from Johns Hopkins as well as commercial suppliers and does high-throughput screening at Rockefeller, which has a partnership with Weill.
“I’m addicted to it,” he said.
PEERING IN Dissection at the Yale School of Medicine around 1910. Such photos were popular in the 1910s and ’20s.
Books: Snapshots From the Days of Bare-Hands Anatomy
By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D., The New York Times, April 28, 2009
The array of familiar objects threatened by digital technology encompasses the old (books, paintings) and the new (CDs). And then there is the human body, which counts as both.
Not the bodies we use, of course, but rather the bodies we allow medical professionals to use while training, to familiarize themselves with the terrain. Dissecting a cadaver has been part of medical education for millenniums. But the cadaver that enters the gross anatomy suite with the blessing of both the prior owner and the state is actually quite a new phenomenon.
Barely a century ago American medical schools were helping themselves to alumni of the local poorhouse for some of their teaching material and paying grave robbers for the rest. Only with a 1968 federal act did a nationwide system of voluntary donation bring uniformity to the process.
Now the same technology that lets us scan living bodies in all dimensions may obviate our need for dead ones, as some anatomy courses move from real dissection to its virtual counterpart — clean and odor-free, in crystal-clear focus with infinite zoom.
Some say virtual anatomy can never replace the transcendent reality. Some say it is a huge improvement over smelly, greasy, inconvenient flesh. Both arguments will be fueled by “Dissection,” an extraordinary collection of photographs that makes even today’s flesh-and-blood anatomy laboratories look tame.
Photography soared in popularity after the Civil War, and in 1900 Eastman Kodak’s Brownie camera created armies of snapping amateurs. A vogue for photographing the gross anatomy class swept through American medical schools, as students were moved to recreate in black and white the iconic dissection scenes of Rembrandt and other great masters: scholarly doctors posing around the supine cadaver, scalpels in hand, gravitas on face.
Some student groups posed for professional photographers. Others took their own shots. The prints were mounted on living room walls, sent as postcards and even used as calling cards. By 1920 the craze had simmered down, and after World War II it was pretty much over.
But hundreds of these photographs endure. John Harley Warner, chairman of Yale’s History of Medicine program, and James M. Edmonson, curator of a museum of medical memorabilia at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, have culled more than 100 for what might under other circumstances be considered a coffee-table book. It is a striking, glossy, oversize volume, immensely decorative if shredded flesh and the odd bone are your idea of décor.
But as ghoulish as the cadavers in these shots may be — they range from pristine, untouched corpses to unrecognizable piles of picked-over remains — their shock value diminishes with each turned page. Conversely, the attention commanded by the groups of young students self-consciously posed around the dissecting table never wanes.
They attended schools all over the country, from prestigious Harvard and Johns Hopkins to small, short-lived institutions in the Midwest. Only a few female faces are scattered in the groups of white men: in one photograph a handwritten scrawl identifies one small girl as “wife.” A few shots depict all-female and all-black students from segregated schools.
The so-called dieners, who prepared the bodies and disposed of the remains, were almost all black men who stared impassively into the camera a little apart from the students.
Until well into the 20th century all of them wore street clothes. A few had skimpy aprons to deflect noxious splashes, but the disposable latex glove was far in the future: almost all worked with bare hands. That fact alone is enough to chill the 21st-century medical spine: we may shake our patients’ hands and touch their skin, but the tactile sensation of muscle, brain and viscera, living or not, is one we no longer know.
And the complex process of imagining it is only the beginning of the deep stretch of the mind these photographs provoke.
Many show medicine at its cocky, callous worst. Some students posed the cadaver as one of the boys — hat on head, pipe in bared grinning teeth, skeletal fist clutching a fan of playing cards. In one 1905 shot a balding, fully clad student lies on the dissection table while six flayed cadavers are propped to a standing position around him, purportedly preparing to cut. The photographer took the trouble to copyright this shot, titled “A Student’s Dream.”
But the other side of medicine is visible here, as well. For a haunting image of all it has ever aspired to be, little can surpass one of the last photographs in the book, shot at an unknown medical school in 1950. Four young men cluster about the head of a table, gazing down at the face of their eviscerated cadaver. The photographer has created the illusion that the body rests, Pietà-like, in their laps; the light illuminates their hair. Forget the truckloads of grandiose prose that has been spun about the art and science of medicine over the centuries: one look at this picture and you understand what it is all supposed to be about.
