You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2009.
The setup is utterly conventional — except that the handsome, quiet and quirky male lead, Adam, has Asperger’s syndrome.
From ScienceNOW today:
Warning: This treatment could turn your skin blue. Researchers have found that Brilliant Blue G (BBG), a close relative of the common food dye, Blue No. 1, may protect neurons in mammals with spinal cord injuries. After such injuries, ATP, which facilitates signaling in neurons, can flood the area around the injured spinal cord and send neurons into a firing frenzy. That leads to inflammation and irreversible tissue damage. But BBG can cross the highly selective blood-brain barrier and block the spinal neuron’s ATP receptors; researchers report online 27 July in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When administered 15 minutes after an acute spinal cord injury, BBG prevented inflammation and improved motor recovery in rats. But, as you can see, there was one side effect.
(Hat tip: David)
Few people are fluent in the language of the genome. It’s really long, really complicated, and relatively unstudied. That’s why I was delighted to discover a project devoted to rewriting the human genome in a shorter, more creative, and more, well, human way.
The Human Genre Project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK, is a collection of short stories, “flash fictions,” reflections and poems inspired by genomic science. As one of its founders, Ken MacLeod, explained to The Scientist:
Read the rest of this entry »
Yes, he most certainly will, according to a passionate essay by immunologist Neil Greenspan.
Greenspan’s talking about Francis Collins, Obama’s recent pick for leading the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH is one of the world’s largest scientific funding agencies, and its director is responsible for managing 27 institutes, 18,000 employees and a $31 billion annual budget.
Although some scientists have raised eyebrows at Collins’ outspoken evangelical Christian beliefs, few doubt his research cred. Over the past two decades, his research team has discovered faulty genes in cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease, neurofibromatosis, type 2 diabetes and several other conditions.
From 1993 to 2008, as head of the National Human Genome Research Institute, he successfully led the government’s effort to sequence the 6 billion letters of the human DNA code. (He reportedly plays a guitar inscribed with a DNA double helix.)
But Greenspan is not worried about Collins’ research qualifications, nor his nonsensical ideas about reconciling faith and science. Greenspan’s worried about Collins’ track record of hype:
Tom Wolfe writes an astute, if a bit too cheeky, op-ed in the New York Times about the long failure of NASA. The major problem? It has no overarching philosophy, no mission, no “Word”:
What NASA needs now is the power of the Word. On Darwin’s tongue, the Word created a revolutionary and now well-nigh universal conception of the nature of human beings, or, rather, human beasts. On Freud’s tongue, the Word means that at this very moment there are probably several million orgasms occurring that would not have occurred had Freud never lived. Even the fact that he is proved to be a quack has not diminished the power of his Word.
July 20, 1969, was the moment NASA needed, more than anything else in this world, the Word. But that was something NASA’s engineers had no specifications for. At this moment, that remains the only solution to recovering NASA’s true destiny, which is, of course, to build that bridge to the stars.
In February, I wrote about a controversial report claiming that people with autism have ‘eagle-eye’ vision. Now, four scientists have published rebuttals to that study, citing major flaws in the way the experiment was carried out.
In the original paper, Emma Ashwin used a computer program to measure how well people with autism can see super-small pictures. Controlled experiments of this kind hadn’t been done before, but there are many anecdotal stories of people with autism noticing tiny details of a scene (sometimes at the expense of seeing the ‘big picture’).
A behavioral study published earlier this month suggests a curious addition to the list: anorexia nervosa.
“By May 1, 2029, given the genome of a fertilised egg of an animal or plant, we will be able to predict in at least one case all the details of the organism that develops from it, including any abnormalities.”
…so claims eminent developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert. In New Scientist‘s new series of scientific wagers, Wolpert bet his long-time intellectual rival, biochemist Rupert Sheldrake, a “case of fine port” that this statement was true. Sheldrake replied that Wolpert’s “faith in the predictive power of the genome is misplaced. Genes enable organisms to make proteins, but do not contain programs or blueprints, or explain the development of embryos.”
I’d side with Wolpert that this will be possible (note he says animal or plant, and “at least one case”), though I’m not sure that 2029 is realistic. Hats off to NS for getting scientists to stick their proverbial necks out!
(Hat tip: Genomics Law Report)
In September 2007, I wrote a feature for Nature Medicine about the uncertain future of gene therapy. The article came out a couple of months after the death of Jolee Mohr, a 36-year-old woman who had been a participant in a clinical trial of gene therapy for rheumatoid arthritis. Mohr had acquired the massive infection that eventually killed her just three weeks after receiving her shot of gene therapy in her inflammed knee. The timing gave the FDA enough reason to call off the whole trial.
But now, after two years and an extensive investigation into Mohr’s case, the doctors who treated her at the University of Chicago Medical Center say that in all likelihood, gene therapy was not the source of the lethal infection. As they explain in a full report published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the culprit was actually Histoplasma capsulatum, an environmental fungus from the Midwest U.S.
Still, gene therapy was the cause of death of 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger, in 1999, who was receiving the experimental treatment for a rare liver disease. With such horrible publicity, I wonder…is it too late to save gene thearpy’s reputation?
In the land of funny science videos, this one is king. (Den-dri-tic in-put make it hot.)
Vote for it in The Scientist‘s video contest!
