Monthly report – April 2025

Welcome to Issue 4’s Monthly Report! This month, we take you through the latest life science developments in Singapore and abroad. Health controversies like drug abuse and untrustworthy telemedicine practices have featured in our local news this month, while on a global scale we’re witnessing an operation that’s groundbreaking in more ways than one – the autopsy of a baby mammoth found buried deep underground.

No laughing matter

The author is quite certain that everyone reading this article has tried whipped cream before. If you haven’t, your loss. At any rate, what people don’t often think about is one of the ingredients used in producing it, a rather unassuming-looking gas labelled “Nitrous Oxide” or, simply, N2O.

It turns out that you should instead be saying “NO” to that, because nitrous oxide is much more famously known as laughing gas, a substance used in the medical industry as a surgical anaesthetic. This simple molecule is capable of switching specific ion channels (think of sliding glass doors) in your cells on or off, resulting in changes in the transport of specific neurotransmitters that control your perception of pain, sensation and mood. This means that inhaling it can get you a “high”, hence the term laughing gas, and that it’s possible for people to abuse it for hallucinogenic and euphoric effects much like any other drug. In fact, overuse can result in vitamin B12 getting deactivated and long-term neurological damage will be the fallout.

Let’s say it’s CNY eve, and you see your neighbours hoisting canisters of this gas into their home. Usually, you’d just think that it was a little preparation for the festivities, perhaps to make some pastries before the family arrives.

In fact, this is what a Straits Times reader named Ms Pang saw just before her neighbour admitted to abusing laughing gas. In Singapore, a concerning trend is on the rise of people illegally obtaining nitrous oxide deliveries in order to abuse it. While the last officially reported case was in 2017, it seems that psychologists have testified to a worrying phenomenon where multiple people a year are coming in for treatment and revealing that they are hooked onto this substance.

What makes nitrous oxide abuse particularly insidious is that it can be concealed as being used for a variety of other purposes such as baking at home. Furthermore, doctors, psychologists and counselors rarely check for patients who might be using this gas compared with other drugs like cannabis, meaning it’s likely to fly under the radar.

While the jury is still out on how to control the use of laughing gas, what we can know for sure is that this problem is certainly no joke (as much as we love April Fools.)

Medicine at a distance

Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic rocked the world, thousands of workplaces have transitioned to hybrid modes of work that allow employees to do their jobs from home. But for those of you out there who are more technologically savvy, you’d know that the same applies to patients. Telemedicine apps have made it easy for anyone to consult the doctor from the comfort of their own bedroom. All you need to do is describe your symptoms to the doctor, and you’ll either get referred for further checks or receive a package of medication along with a medical certificate.

Naturally, being humans, we immediately attempted to push the limits of this system. In Singapore, one specific medical service provider fell under scrutiny: MaNaDr. Investigations last year proved that the doctors from its Citygate clinic were providing extremely short teleconsultations of of less than a minute and giving out MCs right afterwards, leaving open a question to the public of whether they had done their due diligence to determine if there was an issue with the patient or if they simply gave out these certificates for no good reason.

Knowing that there were many in the public who would attempt to game the system in order to get sick leave from work or school, MaNaDr had its clinic licence revoked. This year, hoping to regain the trust of the public, the company has introduced a variety of safeguards: a minimum call time, AI transcription of doctor-patient interactions as well as automated suggestions for questions and alternative treatments have all been rolled out in order to present the service as accountable.

We rarely ever think about how difficult it is for the medical industry to maintain trust with the public until a slip-up occurs that endangers the health of patients or imperils the integrity of the system. Hopefully, this case study lets us reconsider how much we take for granted for us to be able to implicitly trust our doctors as much as we do.

Meet Yana!!!

Entombed in the ice of Siberia lay what should have been a fossil, but was instead the practically mummified body of a baby mammoth, her intact milk tusks a dead giveaway as to her age.

What’s so special about Yana? Most remnants of her species would be nothing more than bone at this point, but thanks to the unique climate of the area her body was left behind in, her soft tissues have been left untouched. This discovery is, of course, of immense scientific value. But it’s for reasons you may not expect. Scientists already know plenty about how mammoth anatomy works. I mean, we have elephants right there to compare them with. What we don’t fully understand is what micro-organisms lived in their digestive and reproductive systems, coexisting with their larger hosts in the form of a microbiome.

You may have heard of the human gut microbiome. It helps us digest our food, but also has a wide variety of other effects through secreting chemicals that impact our immune responses and brain activity. Well, the same applies to mammoths.

Yana has been so excellently preserved, we can open up her body and check for the genetic traces left behind by the gut microflora that survived together with her 130000 years ago – traces we’d be completely unable to find without a sufficiently intact host.

What the autopsy shows has yet to be thoroughly detailed, but we can be certain that no matter what, we’ll be able to get an exciting glimpse into a time that’s long bygone.

That’s all for this month’s report! Keep learning, stay curious, and we’ll see you in the next article.

References:

1. https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/yana-a-130000-year-old-baby-mammoth-goes-under-the-scalpel

2. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/manadr-teleconsultation-rules-doctors-mc-clinic-licence-revoke-5039561

3. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/medical-professionals-concern-about-laughing-gas-abuse-among-young-people