Chris Masterjohn's Guide to Methylene Blue
Chris Masterjohn has made publicly available his guide to methylene blue (YouTube, substack announcement). I found it amazingly illuminating, not just about methylene blue but about energy metabolism and even more wide ranging insights (such as how ozone therapy can work).
Some choice excerpts:
[Heinrich] Caro introduced four bromine atoms into the fluorescein molecule to make a yellow-red dye that he named “eosin.” He chose this name based on the nickname “Eos” of his friend’s sister, Anna Peters, on whom he had a crush in his youth. Today, esoin is used in red ink. Together with the wood-derived natural dye haematoxylin, it is used to stain cells and their components, known in the study of tissue slices — histology — as “haematoxylin & eosin” or “H&E” staining. The white blood cells eosinophils are named for their “love” of eosin; that is, eosin stains them red. Few may realize these cells are, in name, competing with Caro for the elusive Anna. One wonders, then, if allergic reactions are characterized by eosinophilia because the eosinophils are rising up to finally win over the spirit of Anna Peters with some grand gesture. [Page 4]
Whether you approach this with a Darwinian, creationist, intelligent design, systems biology, or basic engineering perspective, there is simply no way on earth it makes any sense that you can “improve” the respiratory chain from its baseline with a highly non-specific redox-cycling dye that was invented to make cotton clothes and tapestries a blue that would never come out in the wash. [Page 29]