By peterschutz

Peter is a research fellow in the Division of Biochemical Diseases, BC Children’s Hospital, Vancouver, and enrolled in the PhD program in Pathology at UBC. His education in philosophy and natural sciences at Cambridge University, England, left him in a position to do this or that. In the end, he decided to become a medical practitioner. However, an old passion for research tempted him and he was sidetracked into the current situation, soon after finishing medical school in Vienna, Austria. He currently studies new neuroprotective strategies for infants.

CREATINE: FROM MUSCLE TO BRAIN

Creatine is an organic molecule which was discovered in the first half of the nineteenth century, in meat extract resembling beef broth. A century later, in the first half of the twentieth century, another substance was found, this time in frog extract, being phosphocreatine – or creatine with a phosphate group stuck on it. It turned out that creatine and phosphocreatine are part of an intracellular energy management system, and the two have had a remarkable history since. I’m not alluding to the fact that around 2.5 million kg of creatine are consumed yearly by athletes in the belief that…