http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/world ... nted=print
May 20, 2007
Solar Flashlight Lets Africa's Sun Deliver the Luxury of Light to the Poorest Villages
By WILL CONNORS and RALPH BLUMENTHAL
FUGNIDO, Ethiopia — At 10 p.m. in a sweltering refugee camp here in western Ethiopia, a group of foreigners was making its way past thatch-roofed huts when a tall, rail-thin man approached a silver-haired American and took hold of his hands.
The man, a Sudanese refugee, announced that his wife had just given birth, and the boy would be honored with the visitor's name. After several awkward translation attempts of "Mark Bent," it was settled. "Mar," he said, will grow up hearing stories of his namesake, the man who handed out flashlights powered by the sun.
Since August 2005, when visits to an Eritrean village prompted him to research global access to artificial light, Mr. Bent, 49, a former foreign service officer and Houston oilman, has spent $250,000 to develop and manufacture a solar-powered flashlight.
His invention gives up to seven hours of light on a daily solar recharge and can last nearly three years between replacements of three AA batteries costing 80 cents.
Over the last year, he said, he and corporate benefactors like Exxon Mobil have donated 10,500 flashlights to United Nations refugee camps and African aid charities.
Another 10,000 have been provided through a sales program, and 10,000 more have just arrived in Houston awaiting distribution by his company, SunNight Solar.
"I find it hard sometimes to explain the scope of the problems in these camps with no light," Mr. Bent said. "If you're an environmentalist you think about it in terms of discarded batteries and coal and wood burning and kerosene smoke; if you're a feminist you think of it in terms of security for women and preventing sexual abuse and violence; if you're an educator you think about it in terms of helping children and adults study at night."
Here at Fugnido, at one of six camps housing more than 21,000 refugees 550 miles west of Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, Peter Gatkuoth, a Sudanese refugee, wrote on "the importance of Solor."
"In case of thief, we open our solor and the thief ran away," he wrote. "If there is a sick person at night we will took him with the solor to health center."
A shurta, or guard, who called himself just John, said, "I used the light to scare away wild animals." Others said lights were hung above school desks for children and adults to study after the day's work.
Mr. Bent's efforts have drawn praise from the United Nations, Africare, Rice University and others.
Kevin G. Lowther, Southern Africa director for Africare, the largest American aid group for Africa, said his staff was sending 5,000 of his lights, purchased by Exxon Mobil at $10 each, to rural Angola.
Dave Gardner, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, said the company's $50,000 donation in November grew out of an earlier grant it made to Save the Children to build six public schools in Kibala, Angola, a remote area of Kwanza Sul Province.
"At a dedication ceremony for the first four schools in June 2006," Mr. Gardner said in an e-mail message, "we noticed that a lot of the children had upper respiratory problems, part of which is likely due to the use of wood, charcoal, candles and kero for lighting in the small homes they have in Kibala."
The Awty International School, a large prep school in Houston, has sent hundreds of the flashlights to schools it sponsors in Haiti, Cameroon and Ethiopia, said Chantal Duke, executive assistant to the head of school.
"In places where there is absolutely no electricity or running water, having light at night is a luxury many families don't have and never did and which we take for granted in developed countries," Ms. Duke said by e-mail. Mr. Bent, a former Marine and Navy pilot, served under diplomatic titles in volatile countries like Angola, Bosnia, Nigeria and Somalia in the early 1990s.
In 2001 he went to work as the general manager of an oil exploration team off the coast of the Red Sea in Eritrea, for a company later acquired by the French oil giant Perenco. But the oil business, he said, "didn't satisfy my soul."
The inspiration for the flashlight hit him, he said, while working for Perenco in Asmara, Eritrea. One Sunday he visited a local dump to watch scavenging by baboons and birds of prey, and came upon a group of homeless boys who had adopted the dump as their home.
They took him home to a rural village where he noticed that many people had nothing to light their homes, schools and clinics at night.
With a little research, he discovered that close to two billion people around the world go without affordable access to light.
He worked with researchers, engineers and manufacturers, he said, at the Department of Energy, several American universities, and even NASA before finding a factory in China to produce a durable, cost-effective solar-powered flashlight whose shape was inspired by his wife's shampoo bottle.
The light, or sun torch, has a narrow solar panel on one side that charges the batteries, which can last between 750 and 1,000 nights, and uses the more efficient light-emitting diodes, or L.E.D.s, to cast its light. "L.E.D.s used to be very expensive," Mr. Bent said. "But in the last 18 months they've become cheaper, so distributing them on a widespread scale is possible."
The flashlights usually sell for about $19.95 in American stores, but he has established a BoGo — for Buy One, Give One — program on his Web site, BoGoLight.com , where if you buy one flashlight for $25, he will buy and ship another one to Africa, and donate $1 to one of the aid groups he works with.
Mr. Bent, who is now an oil consultant, lives in Houston with his wife and four young children. When he is not in the air flying his own plane, he is often on the road.
Traveling early this month in Ethiopia's border area with Sudan, Mr. Bent stopped in each town's market to methodically check the prices and quality of flashlights and batteries imported from China.
He unscrewed the flashlights one by one, inspecting the batteries, pronouncing them "terrible — they won't last two nights."
On his last day along the border, Mr. Bent visited Rapan Sadeeq, 21, a Sudanese refugee who is something of a celebrity in his camp, Bonga, for his rudimentary self-made radios, walkie-talkies and periscopes.
The two men huddled in the hut, discussing what parts would be needed to power the radio with solar panels instead of clunky C batteries. "Oh, I can definitely send you some parts," Mr. Bent said. "You can be my field engineer in Ethiopia."
Will Connors reported from Fugnido, Ethiopia, and Ralph Blumenthal from Houston.
TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/25/opini ... nted=print
May 25, 2007
Editorial
Lighting the Way
Sometimes thinking small can get things done. To bring artificial light to an isolated village or refugee camp could require building an enormous hydroelectric dam, followed by laying hundreds of miles of cable. Or it could take the donation of a $10 solar flashlight.
As Will Connors and Ralph Blumenthal reported in The Times recently, the entrepreneur Mark Bent, through his company SunNight Solar, has developed and manufactured a solar-powered flashlight that gives up to seven hours of light, before recharging, and can last close to three years between battery replacements. The flashlight retails for around $20 in American stores, but corporate donors have gotten them for aid groups at half the price, a deep discount but still a profit for Mr. Bent.
One might be tempted to ask what’s the big deal about a flashlight? In America they often sit under car seats for years without being used, or are the object of fruitless searching when the power goes out.
Artificial light is among the easiest things for people in the developed world to take for granted. But to those living off the grid — a number approaching 2 billion people worldwide — access to a safe, affordable source of light can be life-changing. The productive day stretches past sunset to allow students to do schoolwork or small vendors to extend their selling hours. Light means added safety, whether at home or traveling alone, particularly for women. As a replacement for kerosene and wood fires, the flashlights are a boon for the environment.
As technologies advance, people in wealthy countries carry ever smaller computers in knapsacks and phones in their pockets. But the same advances bring simple, rugged technologies like the solar torch within reach of the poor. The brightest minds shouldn’t be afraid to think incrementally. Often that’s where you find the best results.
May 25, 2007
Editorial
Lighting the Way
Sometimes thinking small can get things done. To bring artificial light to an isolated village or refugee camp could require building an enormous hydroelectric dam, followed by laying hundreds of miles of cable. Or it could take the donation of a $10 solar flashlight.
As Will Connors and Ralph Blumenthal reported in The Times recently, the entrepreneur Mark Bent, through his company SunNight Solar, has developed and manufactured a solar-powered flashlight that gives up to seven hours of light, before recharging, and can last close to three years between battery replacements. The flashlight retails for around $20 in American stores, but corporate donors have gotten them for aid groups at half the price, a deep discount but still a profit for Mr. Bent.
One might be tempted to ask what’s the big deal about a flashlight? In America they often sit under car seats for years without being used, or are the object of fruitless searching when the power goes out.
Artificial light is among the easiest things for people in the developed world to take for granted. But to those living off the grid — a number approaching 2 billion people worldwide — access to a safe, affordable source of light can be life-changing. The productive day stretches past sunset to allow students to do schoolwork or small vendors to extend their selling hours. Light means added safety, whether at home or traveling alone, particularly for women. As a replacement for kerosene and wood fires, the flashlights are a boon for the environment.
As technologies advance, people in wealthy countries carry ever smaller computers in knapsacks and phones in their pockets. But the same advances bring simple, rugged technologies like the solar torch within reach of the poor. The brightest minds shouldn’t be afraid to think incrementally. Often that’s where you find the best results.
Scientist wants to patent life form
Man-made bacterium could create ethanol
Kelly Patterson
CanWest News Service
Saturday, June 09, 2007
A leading U.S. scientist has applied to patent the world's first man-made life form.
Hailed as the biggest, most controversial genetics breakthrough since the cloning of Dolly the sheep, Dr. Craig Venter -- the scientist who led the private-sector race to map the human genome -- says his research team has figured out which genes provide the bare essentials for life. Now he wants the commercial rights to their use.
Venter plans to cobble together synthetic versions of these genes to create the world's first artificial living being, a bacterium called mycoplasma laboratorium, which could then be programmed to convert sunlight into eco-friendly fuels such as hydrogen or ethanol.
The plan represents a quantum leap in genetics, from reading the DNA of living organisms, to writing it from scratch.
"This is a biological bombshell," warns Pat Mooney of the Ottawa-based Erosion, Technology and Concentration Group (ETC), a biotechnology watchdog that discovered the patent application this week.
Once you've created an artificial bacterium, "it becomes a small step to do the same for a plant, an animal, and eventually even a human being," said Jim Thomas, also with ETC.
"Society hasn't even discussed what the environmental and ethical implications are when humans create novel life-forms the planet has never seen before," Mooney said, let alone the ethics of allowing a company to gain sole control over the set of genes that constitute the basic building blocks of life, he added.
Venter has filed patent applications in the U.S. and at the World Intellectual Property Organization, an international body that issues patents for more than 100 countries, including Canada.
The ETC Group has appealed to the patent authorities to turn down the applications.
Venter's research team would manufacture the essential genes, insert them into a "ghost" cell and add selected artificial genes.
Venter says the main goal would be to produce hydrogen and ethanol which "could save an estimated $20 billion per year on fuel costs over the next 50 years (and) decrease greenhouse emissions by 1.7 billion tonnes per year," the firm says on its website.
But Mooney said a programmable life form could "just as easily be used to make a bio-weapon."
Mooney said Venter's organism is almost certain to get released into the environment with untold consequences.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Man-made bacterium could create ethanol
Kelly Patterson
CanWest News Service
Saturday, June 09, 2007
A leading U.S. scientist has applied to patent the world's first man-made life form.
Hailed as the biggest, most controversial genetics breakthrough since the cloning of Dolly the sheep, Dr. Craig Venter -- the scientist who led the private-sector race to map the human genome -- says his research team has figured out which genes provide the bare essentials for life. Now he wants the commercial rights to their use.
Venter plans to cobble together synthetic versions of these genes to create the world's first artificial living being, a bacterium called mycoplasma laboratorium, which could then be programmed to convert sunlight into eco-friendly fuels such as hydrogen or ethanol.
The plan represents a quantum leap in genetics, from reading the DNA of living organisms, to writing it from scratch.
"This is a biological bombshell," warns Pat Mooney of the Ottawa-based Erosion, Technology and Concentration Group (ETC), a biotechnology watchdog that discovered the patent application this week.
Once you've created an artificial bacterium, "it becomes a small step to do the same for a plant, an animal, and eventually even a human being," said Jim Thomas, also with ETC.
"Society hasn't even discussed what the environmental and ethical implications are when humans create novel life-forms the planet has never seen before," Mooney said, let alone the ethics of allowing a company to gain sole control over the set of genes that constitute the basic building blocks of life, he added.
Venter has filed patent applications in the U.S. and at the World Intellectual Property Organization, an international body that issues patents for more than 100 countries, including Canada.
The ETC Group has appealed to the patent authorities to turn down the applications.
Venter's research team would manufacture the essential genes, insert them into a "ghost" cell and add selected artificial genes.
Venter says the main goal would be to produce hydrogen and ethanol which "could save an estimated $20 billion per year on fuel costs over the next 50 years (and) decrease greenhouse emissions by 1.7 billion tonnes per year," the firm says on its website.
But Mooney said a programmable life form could "just as easily be used to make a bio-weapon."
Mooney said Venter's organism is almost certain to get released into the environment with untold consequences.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Breakthrough sees stem cells derived from other cells
Scientists use discovery to create baby mice
Margaret Munro
CanWest News Service
Thursday, June 07, 2007
With a few strokes of genetic trickery, scientists have transformed mouse skin cells into embryonic stem cells and proved their potency by using the new cells to produce baby mice.
The experiments are seen as a major advance for regenerative medicine, which aims to custom-build tissues and cells to repair ailing and aging bodies.
Scientists caution there are serious safety issues that must be resolved before the techniques could ever be used on people, but they say the advance points to a new way of making embryonic stem cells for patients from their own cells.
There is no need to destroy embryos, and might allow researchers to sidestep many of the ethical objections now dogging stem-cell research.
Three teams, one in Japan and two in the U.S., reported Wednesday in the journals Nature and Cell Stem Cell they have reprogrammed skin cells to an embryonic state.
"Neither eggs nor embryos are necessary," says Shinya Yamanka of Kyoto University, who pioneered the technique that's been replicated by the U.S. teams.
All three groups individually used the cells to generate live mice.
The feat has the stem-cell world buzzing.
"It's pretty phenomenal," Michael Rudnicki, scientific director of Canada's Stem Cell Network and director of molecular medicine at the Ottawa Health Research Institute, said in an interview.
The skin cells reverted to embryonic stem cells, or a state the scientists describe as nearly identical to it, after they added four genes to the skin cells. The genes triggered a process that made the cells become "pluripotent" and capable of turning into any type of cell found in the body, which is the hallmark of embryonic stem cells and what makes them so alluring.
"This is very exciting scientifically because these four genes can reprogram any cell, it would seem, to become an embryonic stem cell," says Rudnicki. The technique presents a possible "work around" that could eliminate the need to use embryos to generate cells for regenerative medicine, he says.
Until now, the only way to obtain embryonic stem cells has been to take them from an embryo. Producing cells that are a genetic match for a patient would entail making a clone of that person and harvesting the cells when the cloned embryo is days old, which raises thorny ethical issues and is illegal in several countries, including Canada.
The new work promises cells free of such contentious issues.
"You could take a skin cell, or a blood cell, and reprogram it with these four genes to make embryonic stem cells," says Rudnicki.
They could then be turned into any type of cell required for therapeutic use, be it neurons to treat Alzheimer's or insulin producing for diabetics.
He cautions that significant hurdles still need to be overcome.
"You wouldn't want any of these cells put into a person or they'd end up with tumours," Rudnicki says of the cell lines created for the experiments. He notes one of the genes used to reprogram the cells is involved in cancer.
Yamanaka's team reports 20 per cent of the mice produced from the reprogrammed cells developed cancer. He and his colleagues think the risk can be eliminated.
The three teams produced live mice from their reprogrammed cells by injecting them into days-old mouse embryos. The baby mice proved the reprogrammed cells can give rise to every kind of tissue type, including sperm and eggs, the so-called "germ line" cell that is passed on to the next generation.
"Germ line transmission is the final and definitive proof that these cells can do anything a traditionally derived embryonic stem cell can do," says Rudolf Jaenisch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who led the team working at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
Meanwhile, the scientists say cell lines taken from human embryos are still essential to researchers striving to understand their biology.
"We still need to work with embryonic stem cells, to compare them and understand them," says Rudnicki.
His network has financed derivation of a few Canadian cell lines created from human embryos donated by couples who had undergone fertility treatment and no longer needed the extra embryos.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Scientists use discovery to create baby mice
Margaret Munro
CanWest News Service
Thursday, June 07, 2007
With a few strokes of genetic trickery, scientists have transformed mouse skin cells into embryonic stem cells and proved their potency by using the new cells to produce baby mice.
The experiments are seen as a major advance for regenerative medicine, which aims to custom-build tissues and cells to repair ailing and aging bodies.
Scientists caution there are serious safety issues that must be resolved before the techniques could ever be used on people, but they say the advance points to a new way of making embryonic stem cells for patients from their own cells.
There is no need to destroy embryos, and might allow researchers to sidestep many of the ethical objections now dogging stem-cell research.
Three teams, one in Japan and two in the U.S., reported Wednesday in the journals Nature and Cell Stem Cell they have reprogrammed skin cells to an embryonic state.
"Neither eggs nor embryos are necessary," says Shinya Yamanka of Kyoto University, who pioneered the technique that's been replicated by the U.S. teams.
All three groups individually used the cells to generate live mice.
The feat has the stem-cell world buzzing.
"It's pretty phenomenal," Michael Rudnicki, scientific director of Canada's Stem Cell Network and director of molecular medicine at the Ottawa Health Research Institute, said in an interview.
The skin cells reverted to embryonic stem cells, or a state the scientists describe as nearly identical to it, after they added four genes to the skin cells. The genes triggered a process that made the cells become "pluripotent" and capable of turning into any type of cell found in the body, which is the hallmark of embryonic stem cells and what makes them so alluring.
"This is very exciting scientifically because these four genes can reprogram any cell, it would seem, to become an embryonic stem cell," says Rudnicki. The technique presents a possible "work around" that could eliminate the need to use embryos to generate cells for regenerative medicine, he says.
Until now, the only way to obtain embryonic stem cells has been to take them from an embryo. Producing cells that are a genetic match for a patient would entail making a clone of that person and harvesting the cells when the cloned embryo is days old, which raises thorny ethical issues and is illegal in several countries, including Canada.
The new work promises cells free of such contentious issues.
"You could take a skin cell, or a blood cell, and reprogram it with these four genes to make embryonic stem cells," says Rudnicki.
They could then be turned into any type of cell required for therapeutic use, be it neurons to treat Alzheimer's or insulin producing for diabetics.
He cautions that significant hurdles still need to be overcome.
"You wouldn't want any of these cells put into a person or they'd end up with tumours," Rudnicki says of the cell lines created for the experiments. He notes one of the genes used to reprogram the cells is involved in cancer.
Yamanaka's team reports 20 per cent of the mice produced from the reprogrammed cells developed cancer. He and his colleagues think the risk can be eliminated.
The three teams produced live mice from their reprogrammed cells by injecting them into days-old mouse embryos. The baby mice proved the reprogrammed cells can give rise to every kind of tissue type, including sperm and eggs, the so-called "germ line" cell that is passed on to the next generation.
"Germ line transmission is the final and definitive proof that these cells can do anything a traditionally derived embryonic stem cell can do," says Rudolf Jaenisch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who led the team working at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
Meanwhile, the scientists say cell lines taken from human embryos are still essential to researchers striving to understand their biology.
"We still need to work with embryonic stem cells, to compare them and understand them," says Rudnicki.
His network has financed derivation of a few Canadian cell lines created from human embryos donated by couples who had undergone fertility treatment and no longer needed the extra embryos.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Stem-cell breakthrough
Calgary Herald
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
The debate over stem-cell use has been polarized by ethical and moral concerns. Unfortunately, much time has been spent in debate that could have been spent in forging ahead with research.
That could all come to an end soon with the announcement that a Japanese genetics researcher has successfully produced human stem cells, without resorting to the ethically charged practice of creating embryos to obtain them.
Shinya Yamanaka, who opposes embryo use, stimulated mouse skin cells to revert to stem cells, a technique which, if it can be duplicated in humans, will allow researchers to forge ahead with the treatments that patients with diabetes, Parkinson's and other diseases are so desperately waiting for.
Meanwhile, other exciting research on adult stem cells could soon make the demand for embryonic cells obsolete.
According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, an adult stem cell is "an undifferentiated cell found among differentiated cells in a tissue or organ." Baxter International, a biotechnology and medical products firm based in Deerfield, Ill. is one of numerous companies undertaking a study in which heart patients' own stem cells are removed, purified in the lab, and reimplanted in the heart to see if they can be used to treat congestive heart failure. The results of the study will be out in 2009, says the Chicago Tribune, but a Phoenix company claims to have already successfully treated 12 heart patients with the technique.
An enlightened society does not create human life in the lab in order to sacrifice it to another cause. Nor does such a society turn a blind eye to using human embryos on the pretext that it is all in the name of science.
The Baxter research and Yamanaka's work with mouse skin cells clearly show there are alternatives. Researchers need to focus on refining and perfecting these morally neutral options. Enough time has been spent debating the ethics of embryo use. It's a non-starter.
Patients have been waiting too long for help while the debate raged -- and that is an immoral situation, too.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Calgary Herald
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
The debate over stem-cell use has been polarized by ethical and moral concerns. Unfortunately, much time has been spent in debate that could have been spent in forging ahead with research.
That could all come to an end soon with the announcement that a Japanese genetics researcher has successfully produced human stem cells, without resorting to the ethically charged practice of creating embryos to obtain them.
Shinya Yamanaka, who opposes embryo use, stimulated mouse skin cells to revert to stem cells, a technique which, if it can be duplicated in humans, will allow researchers to forge ahead with the treatments that patients with diabetes, Parkinson's and other diseases are so desperately waiting for.
Meanwhile, other exciting research on adult stem cells could soon make the demand for embryonic cells obsolete.
According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, an adult stem cell is "an undifferentiated cell found among differentiated cells in a tissue or organ." Baxter International, a biotechnology and medical products firm based in Deerfield, Ill. is one of numerous companies undertaking a study in which heart patients' own stem cells are removed, purified in the lab, and reimplanted in the heart to see if they can be used to treat congestive heart failure. The results of the study will be out in 2009, says the Chicago Tribune, but a Phoenix company claims to have already successfully treated 12 heart patients with the technique.
An enlightened society does not create human life in the lab in order to sacrifice it to another cause. Nor does such a society turn a blind eye to using human embryos on the pretext that it is all in the name of science.
The Baxter research and Yamanaka's work with mouse skin cells clearly show there are alternatives. Researchers need to focus on refining and perfecting these morally neutral options. Enough time has been spent debating the ethics of embryo use. It's a non-starter.
Patients have been waiting too long for help while the debate raged -- and that is an immoral situation, too.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
July 23, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Birth Without the Bother?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Earlier this year in Gujarat, India, I came across a most unusual kind of outsourcing: womb-rental.
Americans looking for a surrogate mother to bear a child can save a fortune and avoid regulations by paying an Indian woman $4,000 or $5,000 to carry their fetus. An embryo that has been created in vitro by the American parents is implanted in the Indian woman’s uterus and she goes through the pregnancy and delivers the baby — and then hands it over to the Americans.
Ultimately, that kind of surrogacy could be mixed with genetic screening of embryos — to weed out babies of the “wrong” gender or with the “wrong” characteristics — to save busy couples the bother of pregnancy or the nuisance of chance.
Yes, all this gives me the willies, too. So some of the most monumental decisions we will face in the coming years will involve where we draw the line making some genetic tinkering legal and some illegal.
One of the crucial evolving technologies is P.G.D., or preimplantation genetic diagnosis. This allows a couple to test embryos that have been created in vitro when they are roughly three days old.
P.G.D. is now used principally to test for serious genetic diseases, including Down syndrome and Tay-Sachs. But it could equally be used to test for milder risks.
Five years ago, I tested my own DNA for 130 common genetic markers (a perk of journalism is the chance to test new technologies) and found that I have markers that give me slightly increased risk of blood clots, schizophrenia, Type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer’s. On the other hand, I didn’t have many other common genetic risk factors, including those associated with colon cancer, melanoma or breast cancer.
Everybody has some of these troublesome genetic predispositions. But in the future we could use P.G.D. to screen out these kinds of genetic risks.
Nonmedical screening would also be possible. Dr. Dean Hamer, a prominent geneticist, believes that the VMAT2 gene is the “God gene,” associated with spirituality. What if religious families prefer embryos with a genetic disposition for faith?
Michael Sandel, the Harvard philosopher, begins his new book on genetics, “The Case Against Perfection,” with the story of a deaf couple who sought a child who would be deaf as well. “Is it wrong to make a child deaf by design?” he asks, then refining the question: “Is there still something wrong with parents picking and choosing the kind of child they will have?”
Yes, there is.
Like Professor Sandel, I worry that our scientific capabilities may surpass our wisdom. Look at the dog kingdom. All of today’s dogs descended from wolves, and in less than 15,000 years we ended up with Chihuahuas and Great Danes. We may do the same to our own descendants.
As Liza Mundy notes in her fascinating new book, “Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction is Changing Men, Women and the World,” the main driving force in the new technologies is simply the profit motive.
“What is at work in assisted reproduction,” she writes, “is often not science but business.”
So where do we regulate and draw the line? My vote is to allow genetic technologies aimed at combating disease or infertility, but to bar any effort that goes beyond the curative to enhance the germ line DNA of our offspring.
International womb-rental troubles me but in the end would pass muster. It helps infertile American couples who might not otherwise be able to afford a baby, and the Indian women are thrilled with the chance to earn what for them are substantial sums, at less risk than with their other options.
Likewise, I would tolerate egg trafficking, a booming industry that offers women money to have their eggs extracted. Infertile couples need eggs — and why shouldn’t the donors be paid?
As for genetic screening, I would accept P.G.D. to cull embryos at risk for medical problems, even those that strike only in old age like Alzheimer’s. And my vote is to allow parents to use P.G.D. to choose the sex of a child in the U.S., although I would feel differently in countries like China or India where the son preference could create a huge shortage of girls.
What should cross the line into illegality is fiddling with the heritable DNA of humans to make them smarter, faster or more pious — or more deaf. That is playing God not just with a particular embryo but with our species, and we should ban it.
You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/op ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Birth Without the Bother?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Earlier this year in Gujarat, India, I came across a most unusual kind of outsourcing: womb-rental.
Americans looking for a surrogate mother to bear a child can save a fortune and avoid regulations by paying an Indian woman $4,000 or $5,000 to carry their fetus. An embryo that has been created in vitro by the American parents is implanted in the Indian woman’s uterus and she goes through the pregnancy and delivers the baby — and then hands it over to the Americans.
Ultimately, that kind of surrogacy could be mixed with genetic screening of embryos — to weed out babies of the “wrong” gender or with the “wrong” characteristics — to save busy couples the bother of pregnancy or the nuisance of chance.
Yes, all this gives me the willies, too. So some of the most monumental decisions we will face in the coming years will involve where we draw the line making some genetic tinkering legal and some illegal.
One of the crucial evolving technologies is P.G.D., or preimplantation genetic diagnosis. This allows a couple to test embryos that have been created in vitro when they are roughly three days old.
P.G.D. is now used principally to test for serious genetic diseases, including Down syndrome and Tay-Sachs. But it could equally be used to test for milder risks.
Five years ago, I tested my own DNA for 130 common genetic markers (a perk of journalism is the chance to test new technologies) and found that I have markers that give me slightly increased risk of blood clots, schizophrenia, Type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer’s. On the other hand, I didn’t have many other common genetic risk factors, including those associated with colon cancer, melanoma or breast cancer.
Everybody has some of these troublesome genetic predispositions. But in the future we could use P.G.D. to screen out these kinds of genetic risks.
Nonmedical screening would also be possible. Dr. Dean Hamer, a prominent geneticist, believes that the VMAT2 gene is the “God gene,” associated with spirituality. What if religious families prefer embryos with a genetic disposition for faith?
Michael Sandel, the Harvard philosopher, begins his new book on genetics, “The Case Against Perfection,” with the story of a deaf couple who sought a child who would be deaf as well. “Is it wrong to make a child deaf by design?” he asks, then refining the question: “Is there still something wrong with parents picking and choosing the kind of child they will have?”
Yes, there is.
Like Professor Sandel, I worry that our scientific capabilities may surpass our wisdom. Look at the dog kingdom. All of today’s dogs descended from wolves, and in less than 15,000 years we ended up with Chihuahuas and Great Danes. We may do the same to our own descendants.
As Liza Mundy notes in her fascinating new book, “Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction is Changing Men, Women and the World,” the main driving force in the new technologies is simply the profit motive.
“What is at work in assisted reproduction,” she writes, “is often not science but business.”
So where do we regulate and draw the line? My vote is to allow genetic technologies aimed at combating disease or infertility, but to bar any effort that goes beyond the curative to enhance the germ line DNA of our offspring.
International womb-rental troubles me but in the end would pass muster. It helps infertile American couples who might not otherwise be able to afford a baby, and the Indian women are thrilled with the chance to earn what for them are substantial sums, at less risk than with their other options.
Likewise, I would tolerate egg trafficking, a booming industry that offers women money to have their eggs extracted. Infertile couples need eggs — and why shouldn’t the donors be paid?
As for genetic screening, I would accept P.G.D. to cull embryos at risk for medical problems, even those that strike only in old age like Alzheimer’s. And my vote is to allow parents to use P.G.D. to choose the sex of a child in the U.S., although I would feel differently in countries like China or India where the son preference could create a huge shortage of girls.
What should cross the line into illegality is fiddling with the heritable DNA of humans to make them smarter, faster or more pious — or more deaf. That is playing God not just with a particular embryo but with our species, and we should ban it.
You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/op ... nted=print
Sister receives ovary transplant
Herald News Services
Thursday, August 02, 2007
The first ovary transplant between women who are not identical twins has been performed successfully in Belgium, offering a new route to fertility for women.
Teresa Alvaro, who is now 37, has started to menstruate again and has produced two eggs that have been fertilized with her husband's sperm after receiving grafts of ovary tissue donated by her sister, Sandra, 34.
The revolutionary procedure, performed by Jacques Donnez, of the Catholic University of Louvain, near Brussels, has given Teresa fresh hope of children. She became infertile at 20 because of treatment for a rare blood disorder. It also opens a new approach to restoring the fertility and menstrual cycles of thousands of women who have suffered premature ovarian failure, usually as a result of chemotherapy or an early menopause.
While a handful of ovary transplants have been conducted before, all these procedures have involved identical twins. As such twins share all their genes, there is no risk of tissue rejection.
Teresa and Sandra are the first ordinary sisters to take part in a successful transplant, and their case shows that the technique can work for patients who do not have an identical twin.
Herald News Services
Thursday, August 02, 2007
The first ovary transplant between women who are not identical twins has been performed successfully in Belgium, offering a new route to fertility for women.
Teresa Alvaro, who is now 37, has started to menstruate again and has produced two eggs that have been fertilized with her husband's sperm after receiving grafts of ovary tissue donated by her sister, Sandra, 34.
The revolutionary procedure, performed by Jacques Donnez, of the Catholic University of Louvain, near Brussels, has given Teresa fresh hope of children. She became infertile at 20 because of treatment for a rare blood disorder. It also opens a new approach to restoring the fertility and menstrual cycles of thousands of women who have suffered premature ovarian failure, usually as a result of chemotherapy or an early menopause.
While a handful of ovary transplants have been conducted before, all these procedures have involved identical twins. As such twins share all their genes, there is no risk of tissue rejection.
Teresa and Sandra are the first ordinary sisters to take part in a successful transplant, and their case shows that the technique can work for patients who do not have an identical twin.
Man reawakened after six years in vegetative state
Research offers hope for severely brain damaged
Margaret Munro
CanWest News Service
Thursday, August 02, 2007
A 38-year-old man unable to communicate or feed himself for six years has been reawakened from a coma-like state by tiny electrodes implanted deep in his brain.
The man, incapacitated after an assault left him in a "minimally conscious state," is now interacting with family and friends and gradually regaining more control of his mind and body.
The American family has requested anonymity, but the man's mother gave a tearful account in a teleconference Wednesday of how her son was declared a "vegetable" and placed in a care facility after his skull was crushed and he was "left for dead" after a robbery.
She thanked doctors for bringing back the eldest of her three sons, who had loved music, drawing and comic books.
With the electrodes now delivering weak electrical pulses to his brain for 12 hours a day, she says he is once again connecting with the world. He can watch movies, drink from a cup, cry, laugh, express pain and say "I love you, mommy."
"I still cry every time I see him, but now it's tears of joy," she said.
Researchers, who describe the case in the journal Nature, say deep-brain stimulation is opening the door to treatment of severe brain damage and might eventually help thousands of families.
Dr. Ali Rezai, director of the Center for Neurological Restoration at the Cleveland Clinic, led the surgical team that implanted two electrodes in the man's brain in 2005, wiring them to pacemaker batteries in his chest in a bid to switch on undamaged regions of his brain. Rezai likens the result to a pacemaker for the brain. The doctors charting the man's progress say the changes have been "remarkable and sustained."
"He regularly uses words and gestures and responds to questions quickly," says Dr. Joseph Giacino, co-leader of the study and associate director of the New Jersey Neuroscience Institute. The man, who lives in an East Coast rehabilitation centre, no longer requires a feeding tube and can drink from a cup and brush his hair. He routinely speaks in snatches of two and three words and has been able to recite the first 16 words of the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance.
Deep-brain stimulation is widely used to treat Parkinson's patients and movement disorders, but this is the first reported case of using the technique to restore consciousness. If it can be replicated, the doctors say the technique could change the standard of care for patients locked in a "minimally conscious state," or MCS. Unlike people in a persistent vegetative state, MCS patients show intermittent signs of awareness and may even attempt to communicate using simple words or signals.
"However, these glimpses of consciousness are usually rare, fleeting and unsustained," the researchers report.
The U.S. team plans to try the procedure on 11 more patients as part of a government-approved trial. If successful, it could lead to re-evaluation of countless people in the minimally conscious state. There is little reliable data on how many people are in such a state, but the researchers say one study has estimated there could be as many as 280,000 North Americans.
"Any intervention that can unlock the neurological potential of patients in MCS should have us reconsider how we care for these individuals," says Dr. Joseph Fins, chief of medical ethics at New York's Weill Cornell Medical College, who is helping guide the project. "It will force us to take a second look at each case and -- for appropriate patients -- move away from the therapeutic nihilism that has so plagued this population, most of whom are ignored, receiving what is euphemistically described as 'custodial care.' "
Observers caution the procedure has so far only been shown to work in one carefully selected patient and much more research is needed.
"It is impressive, but it is just the first step," says Dr. Elena Moro, the neurologist in charge of deep-brain stimulation at Toronto Western Hospital. The Toronto team, the largest group of its kind in Canada, implants deep-brain stimulation electrodes in about 60 patients a year to treat movement disorders, pain, epilepsy and, as part of an on-going clinical trial, severe depression.
The probes target different regions of the brain depending on the disorder. Moro says it is not clear how the electrical impulses work to reduce pain, restore the ability to walk or, as appears to be the case with the U.S. man, to reconnect individuals with the conscious world. The U.S. researchers speculate the electrical impulses are amplifying their MCS patient's brain activity and are "bumping up" its efficiency.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Research offers hope for severely brain damaged
Margaret Munro
CanWest News Service
Thursday, August 02, 2007
A 38-year-old man unable to communicate or feed himself for six years has been reawakened from a coma-like state by tiny electrodes implanted deep in his brain.
The man, incapacitated after an assault left him in a "minimally conscious state," is now interacting with family and friends and gradually regaining more control of his mind and body.
The American family has requested anonymity, but the man's mother gave a tearful account in a teleconference Wednesday of how her son was declared a "vegetable" and placed in a care facility after his skull was crushed and he was "left for dead" after a robbery.
She thanked doctors for bringing back the eldest of her three sons, who had loved music, drawing and comic books.
With the electrodes now delivering weak electrical pulses to his brain for 12 hours a day, she says he is once again connecting with the world. He can watch movies, drink from a cup, cry, laugh, express pain and say "I love you, mommy."
"I still cry every time I see him, but now it's tears of joy," she said.
Researchers, who describe the case in the journal Nature, say deep-brain stimulation is opening the door to treatment of severe brain damage and might eventually help thousands of families.
Dr. Ali Rezai, director of the Center for Neurological Restoration at the Cleveland Clinic, led the surgical team that implanted two electrodes in the man's brain in 2005, wiring them to pacemaker batteries in his chest in a bid to switch on undamaged regions of his brain. Rezai likens the result to a pacemaker for the brain. The doctors charting the man's progress say the changes have been "remarkable and sustained."
"He regularly uses words and gestures and responds to questions quickly," says Dr. Joseph Giacino, co-leader of the study and associate director of the New Jersey Neuroscience Institute. The man, who lives in an East Coast rehabilitation centre, no longer requires a feeding tube and can drink from a cup and brush his hair. He routinely speaks in snatches of two and three words and has been able to recite the first 16 words of the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance.
Deep-brain stimulation is widely used to treat Parkinson's patients and movement disorders, but this is the first reported case of using the technique to restore consciousness. If it can be replicated, the doctors say the technique could change the standard of care for patients locked in a "minimally conscious state," or MCS. Unlike people in a persistent vegetative state, MCS patients show intermittent signs of awareness and may even attempt to communicate using simple words or signals.
"However, these glimpses of consciousness are usually rare, fleeting and unsustained," the researchers report.
The U.S. team plans to try the procedure on 11 more patients as part of a government-approved trial. If successful, it could lead to re-evaluation of countless people in the minimally conscious state. There is little reliable data on how many people are in such a state, but the researchers say one study has estimated there could be as many as 280,000 North Americans.
"Any intervention that can unlock the neurological potential of patients in MCS should have us reconsider how we care for these individuals," says Dr. Joseph Fins, chief of medical ethics at New York's Weill Cornell Medical College, who is helping guide the project. "It will force us to take a second look at each case and -- for appropriate patients -- move away from the therapeutic nihilism that has so plagued this population, most of whom are ignored, receiving what is euphemistically described as 'custodial care.' "
Observers caution the procedure has so far only been shown to work in one carefully selected patient and much more research is needed.
"It is impressive, but it is just the first step," says Dr. Elena Moro, the neurologist in charge of deep-brain stimulation at Toronto Western Hospital. The Toronto team, the largest group of its kind in Canada, implants deep-brain stimulation electrodes in about 60 patients a year to treat movement disorders, pain, epilepsy and, as part of an on-going clinical trial, severe depression.
The probes target different regions of the brain depending on the disorder. Moro says it is not clear how the electrical impulses work to reduce pain, restore the ability to walk or, as appears to be the case with the U.S. man, to reconnect individuals with the conscious world. The U.S. researchers speculate the electrical impulses are amplifying their MCS patient's brain activity and are "bumping up" its efficiency.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... 2490211fb5
Pastor uses Facebook to connect with flock
'Simple, open, clean and professional'
Cindy Stephen
For the Calgary Herald
Sunday, August 19, 2007
CREDIT: Jenelle Schneider, Calgary Herald
Pastor Steve Osmond of First Assembly Church uses his Facebook account to keep in touch with people he's met in his ministry.
Originally created as an online network for college students, Facebook is now the hottest way to connect with friends, family and co-workers.
It's quickly eclipsing other network sites such as Nexopia and MySpace. Users are hooking up with old friends and collecting people like trading cards.
"Hey, have you got Joel?"
"Ya. I got him. You got Nicki?"
"No! That's weird -- I gotta add her."
Rumour has it that even job recruiters are rifling through the pages of Facebook, dodging flying sheep, looking for college grads with intelligent profiles. Users can put up as little or as much information about themselves as they like, including a line or two about their political and religious views.
Even the clergy is turning to Facebook to keep tabs on the faithful.
Steve Osmond, co-lead pastor of First Assembly Pentecostal Church, 6031 Elbow Dr. S.W., has abandoned his MySpace page in favour of Facebook.
"It's simple, open, clean and professional," says Osmond. "I can stay connected with people who I never would have remembered. People who have left my consciousness. They send you a message and it's like, yeah, I forgot all about that person."
As soon as Facebook users log in, a feature called "news feed" pops up. If anyone has changed status, or added photos or information, it shows up on the news feed.
The heart of Facebook is the Friends List and Osmond boasts more than 300 friends across Canada -- 116 in Calgary alone. That roster includes members of his congregation, couples he has married, youth he has counselled and co-workers and family from his native Newfoundland. Facebook users can create and belong to special interest groups, and Osmond has joined several, such as 24-7 Prayer Canada, YC Generation, Christians Uniting for a Revival in Canada and others.
There are currently more than 500 Christian groups registered on the Facebook site.
"Belonging to a group means you're entering a conversation, like a blog with like-minded people. They're centred around a cause or event," says Osmond, who estimates he spends about two hours a week on Facebook.
As useful as Facebook is, Osmond believes communicating with people face-to-face is still the way to go.
"But that may be more to do with my age," says Osmond, who admits there aren't many people over 40 on the site. The majority of his 300-plus friends are in their 20s. Among that generation, he believes communicating online can be more beneficial than chatting in
person.
"Youth pastors use it as a pastoring tool to find out what's going on in students' lives," Osmond says.
"It's just as effective a tool as being there in person and having coffee. Students are more honest online. It's almost like they forget there's a person on the other end of the computer. If you really want to know what kids are like, talk to them online. They're really different when they come to church."
Not all youth pastors feel that way.
Denver Wilson at Sunwest Christian Fellowship is a
22-year-old youth pastor who uses Facebook himself, but says it can't be the basis of a real relationship.
"There is something about real face-to-face conversation that the Internet can't duplicate," says Wilson, who has 400 friends nationwide on Facebook and has posted 82 photos for public viewing.
"I've noticed the younger generation (junior high age) in particular depending on these tools for social interaction. To me, this is a big concern," he says.
With his frequently updated Facebook site complete with links to his blogspot musings, Wilson is far from being a techno-prude. However, he worries about a future generation that is increasingly lonely and isolated.
"Don't settle for relationship through a screen," he warns.
Osmond says that, like MySpace, Facebook is a fad and something else will eventually come along to replace it.
"But what's not a fad is the deep desire for people to connect with each other."
Cindy Stephen is a Calgary freelance writer
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Pastor uses Facebook to connect with flock
'Simple, open, clean and professional'
Cindy Stephen
For the Calgary Herald
Sunday, August 19, 2007
CREDIT: Jenelle Schneider, Calgary Herald
Pastor Steve Osmond of First Assembly Church uses his Facebook account to keep in touch with people he's met in his ministry.
Originally created as an online network for college students, Facebook is now the hottest way to connect with friends, family and co-workers.
It's quickly eclipsing other network sites such as Nexopia and MySpace. Users are hooking up with old friends and collecting people like trading cards.
"Hey, have you got Joel?"
"Ya. I got him. You got Nicki?"
"No! That's weird -- I gotta add her."
Rumour has it that even job recruiters are rifling through the pages of Facebook, dodging flying sheep, looking for college grads with intelligent profiles. Users can put up as little or as much information about themselves as they like, including a line or two about their political and religious views.
Even the clergy is turning to Facebook to keep tabs on the faithful.
Steve Osmond, co-lead pastor of First Assembly Pentecostal Church, 6031 Elbow Dr. S.W., has abandoned his MySpace page in favour of Facebook.
"It's simple, open, clean and professional," says Osmond. "I can stay connected with people who I never would have remembered. People who have left my consciousness. They send you a message and it's like, yeah, I forgot all about that person."
As soon as Facebook users log in, a feature called "news feed" pops up. If anyone has changed status, or added photos or information, it shows up on the news feed.
The heart of Facebook is the Friends List and Osmond boasts more than 300 friends across Canada -- 116 in Calgary alone. That roster includes members of his congregation, couples he has married, youth he has counselled and co-workers and family from his native Newfoundland. Facebook users can create and belong to special interest groups, and Osmond has joined several, such as 24-7 Prayer Canada, YC Generation, Christians Uniting for a Revival in Canada and others.
There are currently more than 500 Christian groups registered on the Facebook site.
"Belonging to a group means you're entering a conversation, like a blog with like-minded people. They're centred around a cause or event," says Osmond, who estimates he spends about two hours a week on Facebook.
As useful as Facebook is, Osmond believes communicating with people face-to-face is still the way to go.
"But that may be more to do with my age," says Osmond, who admits there aren't many people over 40 on the site. The majority of his 300-plus friends are in their 20s. Among that generation, he believes communicating online can be more beneficial than chatting in
person.
"Youth pastors use it as a pastoring tool to find out what's going on in students' lives," Osmond says.
"It's just as effective a tool as being there in person and having coffee. Students are more honest online. It's almost like they forget there's a person on the other end of the computer. If you really want to know what kids are like, talk to them online. They're really different when they come to church."
Not all youth pastors feel that way.
Denver Wilson at Sunwest Christian Fellowship is a
22-year-old youth pastor who uses Facebook himself, but says it can't be the basis of a real relationship.
"There is something about real face-to-face conversation that the Internet can't duplicate," says Wilson, who has 400 friends nationwide on Facebook and has posted 82 photos for public viewing.
"I've noticed the younger generation (junior high age) in particular depending on these tools for social interaction. To me, this is a big concern," he says.
With his frequently updated Facebook site complete with links to his blogspot musings, Wilson is far from being a techno-prude. However, he worries about a future generation that is increasingly lonely and isolated.
"Don't settle for relationship through a screen," he warns.
Osmond says that, like MySpace, Facebook is a fad and something else will eventually come along to replace it.
"But what's not a fad is the deep desire for people to connect with each other."
Cindy Stephen is a Calgary freelance writer
© The Calgary Herald 2007
August 22, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Go Green and Save Money
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Have your eyes recently popped out of your head when you opened your electric bill? Do you, like me, live in one of those states where electricity has been deregulated and the state no longer oversees the generation price so your utility rates have skyrocketed since 2002?
If so, you need to listen to a proposal being aired by Jim Rogers, the chairman and chief executive of Duke Energy, and recently filed with the North Carolina Utilities Commission. (Duke Energy is headquartered in Charlotte.) It’s called “save-a-watt,” and it aims to turn the electricity/utility industry upside down by rewarding utilities for the kilowatts they save customers by improving their energy efficiency rather than rewarding them for the kilowatts they sell customers by building more power plants.
Mr. Rogers’s proposal is based on three simple principles. The first is that the cheapest way to generate clean, emissions-free power is by improving energy efficiency. Or, as he puts it, “The most environmentally sound, inexpensive and reliable power plant is the one we don’t have to build because we’ve helped our customers save energy.”
Second, we need to make energy efficiency something that is as “back of mind” as energy usage. If energy efficiency depends on people remembering to do 20 things on a checklist, it’s not going to happen at scale.
Third, the only institutions that have the infrastructure, capital and customer base to empower lots of people to become energy efficient are the utilities, so they are the ones who need to be incentivized to make big investments in efficiency that can be accessed by every customer.
The only problem is that, historically, utilities made their money by making large-scale investments in new power plants, whether coal or gas or nuclear. As long as a utility could prove to its regulators that the demand for that new plant was there, the utility got to pass along the cost, and then some, to its customers. Mr. Rogers’s save-a-watt concept proposes to change all of that.
“The way it would work is that the utility would spend the money and take the risk to make its customers as energy efficient as possible,” he explained. That would include installing devices in your home that would allow the utility to adjust your air-conditioners or refrigerators at peak usage times. It would include plans to incentivize contractors to build more efficient homes with more efficient boilers, heaters, appliances and insulation. It could even include partnering with a factory to buy the most energy-efficient equipment or with a family to winterize their house.
“Energy efficiency is the ‘fifth fuel’ — after coal, gas, renewables and nuclear,” said Mr. Rogers. “Today, it is the lowest-cost alternative and is emissions-free. It should be our first choice in meeting our growing demand for electricity, as well as in solving the climate challenge.”
Because energy efficiency is, in effect, a resource, he added, in order for utilities to use more of it, “efficiency should be treated as a production cost in the regulatory arena.” The utility would earn its money on the basis of the actual watts it saves through efficiency innovations. (California’s “decoupling” systems goes partly in this direction.)
At the end of the year, an independent body would determine how many watts of energy the utility has saved over a predetermined baseline and the utility would then be compensated by its customers accordingly.
“Over time,” said Mr. Rogers, “the price of electricity per unit will go up, because there would be an incremental cost in adding efficiency equipment — although that cost would be less than the incremental cost of adding a new power plant. But your overall bills should go down, because your home will be more efficient and you will use less electricity.”
Once such a system is in place, Mr. Rogers added, “our engineers would wake up every day thinking about how to squeeze more productivity gains out of new technology for energy efficiency — rather than just how to build a bigger transmission or distribution network to meet the growing demands of customers.” (Why don’t we think about incentivizing U.S. automakers the same way — give them tax rebates for save-a-miles?)
That is how you produce a more efficient energy infrastructure at scale. “Universal access to electricity was a 20th century idea — now it has to be universal access to energy efficiency, which could make us the most energy productive country in the world,” he added.
Pulling all this off will be very complicated. But if Mr. Rogers and North Carolina can do it, it would be the mother of all energy paradigm shifts.
Op-Ed Columnist
Go Green and Save Money
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Have your eyes recently popped out of your head when you opened your electric bill? Do you, like me, live in one of those states where electricity has been deregulated and the state no longer oversees the generation price so your utility rates have skyrocketed since 2002?
If so, you need to listen to a proposal being aired by Jim Rogers, the chairman and chief executive of Duke Energy, and recently filed with the North Carolina Utilities Commission. (Duke Energy is headquartered in Charlotte.) It’s called “save-a-watt,” and it aims to turn the electricity/utility industry upside down by rewarding utilities for the kilowatts they save customers by improving their energy efficiency rather than rewarding them for the kilowatts they sell customers by building more power plants.
Mr. Rogers’s proposal is based on three simple principles. The first is that the cheapest way to generate clean, emissions-free power is by improving energy efficiency. Or, as he puts it, “The most environmentally sound, inexpensive and reliable power plant is the one we don’t have to build because we’ve helped our customers save energy.”
Second, we need to make energy efficiency something that is as “back of mind” as energy usage. If energy efficiency depends on people remembering to do 20 things on a checklist, it’s not going to happen at scale.
Third, the only institutions that have the infrastructure, capital and customer base to empower lots of people to become energy efficient are the utilities, so they are the ones who need to be incentivized to make big investments in efficiency that can be accessed by every customer.
The only problem is that, historically, utilities made their money by making large-scale investments in new power plants, whether coal or gas or nuclear. As long as a utility could prove to its regulators that the demand for that new plant was there, the utility got to pass along the cost, and then some, to its customers. Mr. Rogers’s save-a-watt concept proposes to change all of that.
“The way it would work is that the utility would spend the money and take the risk to make its customers as energy efficient as possible,” he explained. That would include installing devices in your home that would allow the utility to adjust your air-conditioners or refrigerators at peak usage times. It would include plans to incentivize contractors to build more efficient homes with more efficient boilers, heaters, appliances and insulation. It could even include partnering with a factory to buy the most energy-efficient equipment or with a family to winterize their house.
“Energy efficiency is the ‘fifth fuel’ — after coal, gas, renewables and nuclear,” said Mr. Rogers. “Today, it is the lowest-cost alternative and is emissions-free. It should be our first choice in meeting our growing demand for electricity, as well as in solving the climate challenge.”
Because energy efficiency is, in effect, a resource, he added, in order for utilities to use more of it, “efficiency should be treated as a production cost in the regulatory arena.” The utility would earn its money on the basis of the actual watts it saves through efficiency innovations. (California’s “decoupling” systems goes partly in this direction.)
At the end of the year, an independent body would determine how many watts of energy the utility has saved over a predetermined baseline and the utility would then be compensated by its customers accordingly.
“Over time,” said Mr. Rogers, “the price of electricity per unit will go up, because there would be an incremental cost in adding efficiency equipment — although that cost would be less than the incremental cost of adding a new power plant. But your overall bills should go down, because your home will be more efficient and you will use less electricity.”
Once such a system is in place, Mr. Rogers added, “our engineers would wake up every day thinking about how to squeeze more productivity gains out of new technology for energy efficiency — rather than just how to build a bigger transmission or distribution network to meet the growing demands of customers.” (Why don’t we think about incentivizing U.S. automakers the same way — give them tax rebates for save-a-miles?)
That is how you produce a more efficient energy infrastructure at scale. “Universal access to electricity was a 20th century idea — now it has to be universal access to energy efficiency, which could make us the most energy productive country in the world,” he added.
Pulling all this off will be very complicated. But if Mr. Rogers and North Carolina can do it, it would be the mother of all energy paradigm shifts.
There is a photograph at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/busin ... ?th&emc=th
August 26, 2007
Slipstream
Mind Over Matter, With a Machine’s Help
By JASON PONTIN
WOULD that thinking made it so, people sometimes wistfully say. But Christopher deCharms, the chief executive of Omneuron, a start-up in Menlo Park, Calif., believes the adage.
The company he founded has created technologies that teach sufferers to think away their pain, and plans to similarly treat addiction, depression and other intractable neurological and psychological conditions.
Omneuron is one of a number of new companies that are commercializing a brain-scanning technology called real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. Using large scanners to measure blood flow to different parts of the brain, the technology makes the brain’s activity visible by revealing which of its parts are busiest when we perform different tasks.
While fMRI dates back to the early 1990s, hitherto it has been used mainly by doctors in hospitals to make diagnoses. The commercialization of brain scanning is a recent development, spurred by the refinement of the technology. Omneuron, which Dr. deCharms founded in 2001 and whose research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, uses fMRI to teach people how to play with their own heads. Other entrepreneurs are working on ways to deploy fMRI as a lie detector, a tool for conducting marketing research or an instrument to make brain surgeries safer and more precise.
Here’s how Omneuron uses fMRI to treat chronic pain: A patient slides into the coffin-like scanner and watches a computer-generated flame projected on the screen of virtual-reality goggles; the flame’s intensity reflects the neural activity of regions of the brain involved in the perception of pain. Using a variety of mental techniques — for instance, imagining that a painful area is being flooded with soothing chemicals — most people can, with a little concentration, make the flame wax or wane. As the flame wanes, the patient feels better. Superficially similar to an older technology, electroencephalogram biofeedback, which measures electrical feedback across multiple areas of the brain, fMRI feedback measures the blood flow in precise areas of the brain.
“We believe that people will use real-time fMRI feedback to hone cognitive strategies that will increase activation of brain regions,” Dr. deCharms said. With practice and repetition, he said, this could lead to “long-term changes in the brain.”
In time, he hopes, a patient could evoke the effect without the machine.
In a 2005 study, Dr. deCharms and Sean Mackey, associate director of the pain management division at Stanford, showed that eight patients with recalcitrant pain felt their discomfort reduced by as much as 64 percent by using Omneuron’s technology.
If fMRI proves effective in treating pain, it could be big business. According to the American Chronic Pain Association, one in three Americans will experience chronic pain at some point in life. At any one time, more than 50 million Americans complain of pain. And Dr. deCharms contends that fully one-third find their pain resistant to traditional treatments like narcotics. Omneuron’s technologies could offer such patients some relief, and without side effects.
The pain-relief industry is huge: the average American spends as much as $900 a year on pain medications, whose effects are generally short-lived.
But Dr. deCharms says that controlling pain is just one of many possible uses for fMRI feedback. Today, Omneuron is also researching treatments for addiction, depression and other psychological illnesses. In addition, he said. the company has contemplated “several dozen applications,” including the treatment of stroke and epilepsy. Brain scanning could even be used to improve athletic performance, he speculated.
Doctors and drug-abuse experts are particularly excited about the idea of treating addiction using fMRI. While scientists have talked about such an application since the technology was invented, Omneuron is the first to work on a real therapy. “We might have a tool to help control the inner sensation of craving,” said Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which helped fund Omneuron’s research into addiction.
A growing number of ventures hope to turn fMRI into a business. The most well-publicized is No Lie MRI, which wants to sell brain scanning to law firms and governmental bodies like police departments or security and intelligence agencies as a replacement for the notoriously unreliable polygraph test. No Lie MRI has already begun selling what it calls its truth verification technology for about $10,000 to individuals keen to prove their innocence.
Joel Huizenga, the chief executive of No Lie MRI, said: “A technology gets known by its first product. For fMRI, that application is going to be truth verification.”
Mr. Huizenga says he would also like to sell fMRI to marketers who wish to determine whether consumers are responding to advertising, a commercial application of an emerging field of research called neuro-economics.
Other brain-scanning ventures include Cephos, another lie-detection company, and Imagilys, which sells fMRI to surgeons who want to map the brains of patients before operations.
For its part, Omneuron would make money not by building fMRI centers — which are expensive and fairly common in larger hospitals — but by selling clinical skills, software and equipment.
“I imagine the business model would be akin to Lasik eye surgery,” Dr. deCharms says. “We’d provide the technology to outpatient treatment centers.”
There are challenges to the commercialization of brain scanning, and the most important may be regulatory. Clinical trials can take many years, and federal approval is famously unpredictable. But until clinical data and federal approval are forthcoming, Dr. deCharms says, Omneuron cannot sell its technology as a clinical treatment.
Ed Boyden, an assistant professor at the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a researcher in neuroengineering, distinguishes sharply among different brain-scanning ventures. “If you want to commercialize this technology,” he said, “then the use has to approximate real-world situations.”
In his view, tests of fMRI truth verification don’t meet that criterion. For instance, in studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002 and 2005, subjects were told to conceal the identity of a card under questioning. FMRI was able to distinguish falsification 77 percent of the time.
Mr. Huizenga was so inspired by this research that he decided to start his company, confident that fMRI would soon identify lies 90 percent of the time.
But Dr. Boyden says he believes that being asked to tell a falsehood that everyone knows is a falsehood is not the same thing as lying to deceive someone. Thus, whatever brain patterns fMRI detects when a person constructs such a requested fiction may be different from whatever happens when we lie.
By contrast, Dr. Boyden says: “What I like about Omneuron is that it’s working with real-world situations. They gave people visualization strategies which they could monitor — and which produced real, measurable results.”
If Dr. deCharms and Omneuron are successful, and can teach us to train our brains to manage neurological and psychological conditions, they will have given us something that has challenged philosophers, psychologists and yogis alike: gaining some reliable control over our own thoughts.
Jason Pontin is the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review, a magazine and Web site owned by M.I.T. E-mail: [email protected].
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/busin ... ?th&emc=th
August 26, 2007
Slipstream
Mind Over Matter, With a Machine’s Help
By JASON PONTIN
WOULD that thinking made it so, people sometimes wistfully say. But Christopher deCharms, the chief executive of Omneuron, a start-up in Menlo Park, Calif., believes the adage.
The company he founded has created technologies that teach sufferers to think away their pain, and plans to similarly treat addiction, depression and other intractable neurological and psychological conditions.
Omneuron is one of a number of new companies that are commercializing a brain-scanning technology called real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. Using large scanners to measure blood flow to different parts of the brain, the technology makes the brain’s activity visible by revealing which of its parts are busiest when we perform different tasks.
While fMRI dates back to the early 1990s, hitherto it has been used mainly by doctors in hospitals to make diagnoses. The commercialization of brain scanning is a recent development, spurred by the refinement of the technology. Omneuron, which Dr. deCharms founded in 2001 and whose research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, uses fMRI to teach people how to play with their own heads. Other entrepreneurs are working on ways to deploy fMRI as a lie detector, a tool for conducting marketing research or an instrument to make brain surgeries safer and more precise.
Here’s how Omneuron uses fMRI to treat chronic pain: A patient slides into the coffin-like scanner and watches a computer-generated flame projected on the screen of virtual-reality goggles; the flame’s intensity reflects the neural activity of regions of the brain involved in the perception of pain. Using a variety of mental techniques — for instance, imagining that a painful area is being flooded with soothing chemicals — most people can, with a little concentration, make the flame wax or wane. As the flame wanes, the patient feels better. Superficially similar to an older technology, electroencephalogram biofeedback, which measures electrical feedback across multiple areas of the brain, fMRI feedback measures the blood flow in precise areas of the brain.
“We believe that people will use real-time fMRI feedback to hone cognitive strategies that will increase activation of brain regions,” Dr. deCharms said. With practice and repetition, he said, this could lead to “long-term changes in the brain.”
In time, he hopes, a patient could evoke the effect without the machine.
In a 2005 study, Dr. deCharms and Sean Mackey, associate director of the pain management division at Stanford, showed that eight patients with recalcitrant pain felt their discomfort reduced by as much as 64 percent by using Omneuron’s technology.
If fMRI proves effective in treating pain, it could be big business. According to the American Chronic Pain Association, one in three Americans will experience chronic pain at some point in life. At any one time, more than 50 million Americans complain of pain. And Dr. deCharms contends that fully one-third find their pain resistant to traditional treatments like narcotics. Omneuron’s technologies could offer such patients some relief, and without side effects.
The pain-relief industry is huge: the average American spends as much as $900 a year on pain medications, whose effects are generally short-lived.
But Dr. deCharms says that controlling pain is just one of many possible uses for fMRI feedback. Today, Omneuron is also researching treatments for addiction, depression and other psychological illnesses. In addition, he said. the company has contemplated “several dozen applications,” including the treatment of stroke and epilepsy. Brain scanning could even be used to improve athletic performance, he speculated.
Doctors and drug-abuse experts are particularly excited about the idea of treating addiction using fMRI. While scientists have talked about such an application since the technology was invented, Omneuron is the first to work on a real therapy. “We might have a tool to help control the inner sensation of craving,” said Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which helped fund Omneuron’s research into addiction.
A growing number of ventures hope to turn fMRI into a business. The most well-publicized is No Lie MRI, which wants to sell brain scanning to law firms and governmental bodies like police departments or security and intelligence agencies as a replacement for the notoriously unreliable polygraph test. No Lie MRI has already begun selling what it calls its truth verification technology for about $10,000 to individuals keen to prove their innocence.
Joel Huizenga, the chief executive of No Lie MRI, said: “A technology gets known by its first product. For fMRI, that application is going to be truth verification.”
Mr. Huizenga says he would also like to sell fMRI to marketers who wish to determine whether consumers are responding to advertising, a commercial application of an emerging field of research called neuro-economics.
Other brain-scanning ventures include Cephos, another lie-detection company, and Imagilys, which sells fMRI to surgeons who want to map the brains of patients before operations.
For its part, Omneuron would make money not by building fMRI centers — which are expensive and fairly common in larger hospitals — but by selling clinical skills, software and equipment.
“I imagine the business model would be akin to Lasik eye surgery,” Dr. deCharms says. “We’d provide the technology to outpatient treatment centers.”
There are challenges to the commercialization of brain scanning, and the most important may be regulatory. Clinical trials can take many years, and federal approval is famously unpredictable. But until clinical data and federal approval are forthcoming, Dr. deCharms says, Omneuron cannot sell its technology as a clinical treatment.
Ed Boyden, an assistant professor at the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a researcher in neuroengineering, distinguishes sharply among different brain-scanning ventures. “If you want to commercialize this technology,” he said, “then the use has to approximate real-world situations.”
In his view, tests of fMRI truth verification don’t meet that criterion. For instance, in studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002 and 2005, subjects were told to conceal the identity of a card under questioning. FMRI was able to distinguish falsification 77 percent of the time.
Mr. Huizenga was so inspired by this research that he decided to start his company, confident that fMRI would soon identify lies 90 percent of the time.
But Dr. Boyden says he believes that being asked to tell a falsehood that everyone knows is a falsehood is not the same thing as lying to deceive someone. Thus, whatever brain patterns fMRI detects when a person constructs such a requested fiction may be different from whatever happens when we lie.
By contrast, Dr. Boyden says: “What I like about Omneuron is that it’s working with real-world situations. They gave people visualization strategies which they could monitor — and which produced real, measurable results.”
If Dr. deCharms and Omneuron are successful, and can teach us to train our brains to manage neurological and psychological conditions, they will have given us something that has challenged philosophers, psychologists and yogis alike: gaining some reliable control over our own thoughts.
Jason Pontin is the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review, a magazine and Web site owned by M.I.T. E-mail: [email protected].
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... 23a0e609e5
Mechanical heart let teen's organ heal
Girl removed from transplant list after recovery
Florence Loyie
Edmonton Journal
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
CREDIT: John Lucas, Edmonton Journal
Melissa Mills, 15, at a news conference in Edmonton on Tuesday, holds the mechanical heart that aided her recovery.
Last January, 15-year-old Melissa Mills became the third pediatric patient in Canada to receive a mechanical heart to keep her alive until she could receive a transplant.
Now the Camrose teenager is the first Berlin heart patient in Canada to be weaned from the device not because a donor heart was found, but because her own heart recovered.
"I wish I could keep it . . . it saved my life and it means so much to me," Melissa said Tuesday as she clasped the plastic and metal device in her hands.
Melissa must return it to the Berlin heart program at Edmonton's Stollery Children's Hospital, where it will likely be used for training purposes.
"We are just beginning to understand all the implications for the Berlin heart," said Dr. Ivan Rebeyka, head of the pediatric cardiac surgery for the Capital Health Region and clinical leader of the Berlin heart program.
"We are thrilled with Melissa's outcome and excited by what this means for future patients," Rebeyka said.
Last fall, the Stollery Children's Hospital became North America's first training and support centre for the world's first mechanical heart designed for children.
To date, five patients have received Berlin hearts at the Stollery.
Three have since received heart transplants, one is still wearing device and the other is Melissa.
"We thought the miracle was that the Berlin heart would give us time to find the perfect donor heart for Melissa. We are overwhelmed that instead, the Berlin heart gave her own heart time to rest and repair itself," said Melissa's mother, Sharon Mills.
Last June, Melissa, a hearty 14-year-old looking forward to summer holidays, became tired and lethargic. A chest X-ray showed her heart had become enlarged, most likely because of a virus.
In August, she was transferred to the Stollery in such grave condition her parents were told to prepare for the possibility she might not survive.
She needed a heart transplant -- quickly.
As Melissa's condition continued to deteriorate while she waited for a suitable donor, her doctors elected to implant a Berlin heart, hoping to give the petite teen time to recover while she waited.
In the weeks that followed, doctors were surprised to see Melissa's heart was starting to recover on its own. Over the next few months, she was gradually weaned from the device as her heart muscle continued to regain much of its strength.
On Jan. 22, after 146 days on the device, she had her Berlin heart removed.
She was released from hospital on March 22.
Rebeyka said Melissa's heart has recovered enough that she no longer needs a heart transplant. While she still requires medication and monitoring, she is healthy enough to carry on a fairly normal life, he said.
"We are taking it day-by-day. As long as she does what she is supposed to, everything should be OK," her mother said. "We just have to find a new kind of normal for us."
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Reply Forward
Mechanical heart let teen's organ heal
Girl removed from transplant list after recovery
Florence Loyie
Edmonton Journal
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
CREDIT: John Lucas, Edmonton Journal
Melissa Mills, 15, at a news conference in Edmonton on Tuesday, holds the mechanical heart that aided her recovery.
Last January, 15-year-old Melissa Mills became the third pediatric patient in Canada to receive a mechanical heart to keep her alive until she could receive a transplant.
Now the Camrose teenager is the first Berlin heart patient in Canada to be weaned from the device not because a donor heart was found, but because her own heart recovered.
"I wish I could keep it . . . it saved my life and it means so much to me," Melissa said Tuesday as she clasped the plastic and metal device in her hands.
Melissa must return it to the Berlin heart program at Edmonton's Stollery Children's Hospital, where it will likely be used for training purposes.
"We are just beginning to understand all the implications for the Berlin heart," said Dr. Ivan Rebeyka, head of the pediatric cardiac surgery for the Capital Health Region and clinical leader of the Berlin heart program.
"We are thrilled with Melissa's outcome and excited by what this means for future patients," Rebeyka said.
Last fall, the Stollery Children's Hospital became North America's first training and support centre for the world's first mechanical heart designed for children.
To date, five patients have received Berlin hearts at the Stollery.
Three have since received heart transplants, one is still wearing device and the other is Melissa.
"We thought the miracle was that the Berlin heart would give us time to find the perfect donor heart for Melissa. We are overwhelmed that instead, the Berlin heart gave her own heart time to rest and repair itself," said Melissa's mother, Sharon Mills.
Last June, Melissa, a hearty 14-year-old looking forward to summer holidays, became tired and lethargic. A chest X-ray showed her heart had become enlarged, most likely because of a virus.
In August, she was transferred to the Stollery in such grave condition her parents were told to prepare for the possibility she might not survive.
She needed a heart transplant -- quickly.
As Melissa's condition continued to deteriorate while she waited for a suitable donor, her doctors elected to implant a Berlin heart, hoping to give the petite teen time to recover while she waited.
In the weeks that followed, doctors were surprised to see Melissa's heart was starting to recover on its own. Over the next few months, she was gradually weaned from the device as her heart muscle continued to regain much of its strength.
On Jan. 22, after 146 days on the device, she had her Berlin heart removed.
She was released from hospital on March 22.
Rebeyka said Melissa's heart has recovered enough that she no longer needs a heart transplant. While she still requires medication and monitoring, she is healthy enough to carry on a fairly normal life, he said.
"We are taking it day-by-day. As long as she does what she is supposed to, everything should be OK," her mother said. "We just have to find a new kind of normal for us."
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Reply Forward
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/opini ... nted=print
September 24, 2007
Editorial
Of Animal Eggs and Human Embryos
Stem cell research in the United States has been hobbled for years by severe and misguided restrictions on federal funding. But now a vexing additional problem is slowing even privately financed research. There are distressingly few women willing to donate their eggs for experiments at the frontiers of this promising science.
A respected team of stem cell researchers at Harvard spent nearly $100,000 over the course of a year advertising for egg donors. Hundreds of qualified women were interested enough to call but, after hearing what was entailed, not one was willing to donate eggs. Many were likely deterred by the time, effort and pain required — including daily hormone injections and minor surgery — to retrieve the eggs. And they were almost certainly discouraged by the meager compensation.
Although women can be paid thousands of dollars to donate eggs for fertility treatments, ethical guidelines and some state laws say they cannot be paid much for donating to research. These restrictions are meant to protect the women against exploitation, but they have created a dearth of egg donors for stem cell research.
Surplus embryos from fertility clinics can seldom be used to study specific diseases or develop treatments for them. Scientists need to develop new stem cell lines genetically matched to patients with diseases like diabetes or Parkinson’s. They typically take the nucleus of a patient’s skin cell and inject it into an egg whose nucleus has been removed. If all goes well, the desired stem cell can be derived from the result.
With few human eggs available, some privately financed stem cell scientists are studying animal eggs to see if they can work the same magic when injected with a human nucleus. That may send shivers of apprehension through people who imagine rogue scientists creating grotesque half-human, half-animal creatures in the laboratory. But a thorough examination of the process by British regulators should alleviate such fears.
The British have approved, in principle, the creation of “cybrid embryos,” produced when scientists grow human embryos in animal eggs. Although the embryos would be, in some sense, animal-human hybrids, there would be remarkably little animal — only about 0.1 percent — in the mix. The embryos, and the stem cells derived, would be virtually identical to cells in the patient.
There is little doubt that human eggs would be better for research and ultimately treatment. But with a shortage of donors, animal eggs could prove a valuable alternative. Meanwhile, many scientists are hoping that it will be possible, without using eggs at all, to convert human skin cells directly into embryonic stem cells, as has been shown possible in mice. That would be an elegant solution to the vexing egg donor problem.
September 24, 2007
Editorial
Of Animal Eggs and Human Embryos
Stem cell research in the United States has been hobbled for years by severe and misguided restrictions on federal funding. But now a vexing additional problem is slowing even privately financed research. There are distressingly few women willing to donate their eggs for experiments at the frontiers of this promising science.
A respected team of stem cell researchers at Harvard spent nearly $100,000 over the course of a year advertising for egg donors. Hundreds of qualified women were interested enough to call but, after hearing what was entailed, not one was willing to donate eggs. Many were likely deterred by the time, effort and pain required — including daily hormone injections and minor surgery — to retrieve the eggs. And they were almost certainly discouraged by the meager compensation.
Although women can be paid thousands of dollars to donate eggs for fertility treatments, ethical guidelines and some state laws say they cannot be paid much for donating to research. These restrictions are meant to protect the women against exploitation, but they have created a dearth of egg donors for stem cell research.
Surplus embryos from fertility clinics can seldom be used to study specific diseases or develop treatments for them. Scientists need to develop new stem cell lines genetically matched to patients with diseases like diabetes or Parkinson’s. They typically take the nucleus of a patient’s skin cell and inject it into an egg whose nucleus has been removed. If all goes well, the desired stem cell can be derived from the result.
With few human eggs available, some privately financed stem cell scientists are studying animal eggs to see if they can work the same magic when injected with a human nucleus. That may send shivers of apprehension through people who imagine rogue scientists creating grotesque half-human, half-animal creatures in the laboratory. But a thorough examination of the process by British regulators should alleviate such fears.
The British have approved, in principle, the creation of “cybrid embryos,” produced when scientists grow human embryos in animal eggs. Although the embryos would be, in some sense, animal-human hybrids, there would be remarkably little animal — only about 0.1 percent — in the mix. The embryos, and the stem cells derived, would be virtually identical to cells in the patient.
There is little doubt that human eggs would be better for research and ultimately treatment. But with a shortage of donors, animal eggs could prove a valuable alternative. Meanwhile, many scientists are hoping that it will be possible, without using eggs at all, to convert human skin cells directly into embryonic stem cells, as has been shown possible in mice. That would be an elegant solution to the vexing egg donor problem.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/scien ... ?th&emc=th
September 25, 2007
The Space Age
New Horizons Beckon, Inspiring Vision if Not Certainty
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Fifty years of spaceflight have taken people to the Moon and have sent unmanned vehicles zipping to the fringes of the solar system. What could the next 50 years bring?
Much more, or potentially not much more. Government-financed space travel could stall in the face of America’s growing aversion to risk and a kind of orbital ennui. NASA has, after all, already tried for more than a decade to develop follow-on vehicles to the flawed space shuttle and is in the process of trying again.
Private enterprise is stepping up, but the industry is still fragile.
Michael D. Griffin, the NASA administrator, said in an interview that he was confident of one thing for the foreseeable future: “We’re going to have a space program.”
Beyond that, all bets are off.
“The one thing of which we can be certain,” Mr. Griffin wrote in a recent essay on the Web site of the magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology, “is that in trying to envision the world of 2057, two generations in the future, we will be wrong.”
Experts in government, industry and science agree, however, that these three broad trends will shape the coming decades in space:
¶NASA has embarked on a program to return to the Moon by 2020, not just for what some critics call “flags and footprints,” but also for a lasting presence with scientific research and preparation for expeditions to asteroids and, eventually, Mars. The space shuttle program is being wound down by 2010 to create the next generation of vehicles.
¶Other nations, notably Russia and China, have ambitious plans and could spur a space race like the one that sent Americans to the Moon. “It took Sputnik for us to recognize what the Soviet Union was up to,” said Harrison H. Schmitt, who flew the last mission to the Moon, in 1972. “I don’t know what it will take this time.”
¶Private enterprise is moving ahead, beginning with space tourism and, later, transport services for NASA and other governments to outposts like the International Space Station. Beyond that, ventures could include mining on asteroids and manufacturing drugs in space.
John M. Logsdon, director of the space policy institute at George Washington University, says a big question has yet to be answered.
“At the level of government, I think we’re still struggling as to why we’re sending people to space,” Dr. Logsdon said. “It’s a decent question, and I think it’s an unanswered question.”
That leaves the manned space program at a precarious point, he said, adding: “If the current proposals to restart human exploration fail politically, indeed, the human space flight endeavor conducted under government auspices might well lose its momentum. I obviously hope that doesn’t happen. But it’s far from a slam dunk that we’re going back to the Moon and on to Mars.”
Entrepreneurs say they have the answer — money. Peter Diamandis, a founder of the Ansari X Prize, the $10 million competition to put a pilot in space without government financing, said that with all the energy and minerals to be found there “the first trillionaires are going to be made in space.”
In the next 50 years, Mr. Diamandis said, “economic engines,” not political ones, will push the space frontier.
Dr. Logsdon is skeptical. “There are a variety of alluring prospects that have been around almost since the start of the last 50 years that are still there as alluring prospects,” he said. “And we are not further along in knowing whether they can be turned into reality or not.” The continued reliance on chemical rockets, for example, limits the weight that can be taken into space.
Yet much has changed in the last 50 years that could lay the foundation for the next 50. A new generation of ultrawealthy entrepreneurs who grew up with a space fascination are pouring personal fortunes into making space businesses real.
Paul G. Allen, a founder of Microsoft, paid for SpaceShipOne, the tiny craft that won the X Prize in 2004. Elon Musk, a founder of PayPal, is developing rockets through his company, Space Exploration Technologies, and has NASA financing that could lead to his spacecraft’s carrying people and supplies to the International Space Station.
Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, is developing rockets at a site he owns in western Texas.
Robert Bigelow, who made his fortune in hotels, is developing a space transportation system and a space station that could be used as an orbiting hotel or a research base.
The official charged with regulating commercial spaceflight, Patricia Grace Smith of the Federal Aviation Administration, said in an interview, “When I look out 50 years from now, I fully expect that we will have actual, operational spaceports” that are commercially operated and owned.
At the dusty, sprawling Mojave Air and Space Port in California, dreamers and pragmatists join in planning the future.
Jeff Greason, the founder of Xcor Aerospace, one of several rocket companies there, said his industry was ready to talk big again after years of having to shake off the pixie dust of science fiction. “We had to stop focusing on the grand and glorious future,” he said, “because otherwise, people weren’t going to take us seriously as a business. We very consciously turned the vision thing off.”
“We’re making progress on real businesses that turn profits,” he added.
Other companies are already in the game. Mr. Greason’s neighbor, Scaled Composites, is working on a successor vehicle to its SpaceShipOne.
Richard Branson’s company, Virgin Galactic, which will buy the vehicles, has a long list of potential space tourists.
Esther Dyson, a longtime technology guru who is encouraging investment in space, said the development of rocket businesses paralleled the early days of personal computing and the Internet. Early government financing created technologies whose use was largely limited to government and academia.
“So eventually these commercial types came in, and suddenly a whole lot of revenue came in,” she said. ”It benefited the research types, as well as the commercial types. And it created an infrastructure for the public.”
That led, in turn, to today’s Google, Netscape, Google Earth, “all these wonderful things we take for granted.”
Mr. Greason predicts that government will take the lead in long-range exploration, but that industry will take up the slack closer to home. Just as the military relies on private air carriers, he said, “the government efforts will become customers of the private efforts.”
NASA will meanwhile be trying to extend the reach of humanity. Mr. Griffin, its administrator, laid out a rough timetable for the goals that President Bush set in 2004.
He sees the mileposts clearly along the way, returning to the Moon by 2020, with a “small lunar outpost” a few years later, on the way to “towns on the Moon.” The first flights to Mars could occur in the next decade, he said, so that by the 100th anniversary of spaceflight in 2057, “we can be looking back at the 20th anniversary of the first human landing on Mars.”
If the United States wants to lead the way, he said, the clock is ticking.
“This is the last generation of Americans which is going to have the unquestioned opportunity to lead that enterprise,” Mr. Griffin said. “Because in the next generation we are going to find, at least, Russia, China, India and Europe fully as capable as we are. It will be a matter of interest and politics and societal will or desire. But it will not be a matter of capability.”
Whoever takes them on, the challenges will be greater than any that spacefaring nations have yet faced. They involve radiation levels that science does not yet know how to protect against and problems like reduced gravity and Moon dust, which is ultrafine-grained, chemically reactive and highly abrasive, all of which may mean serious health problems for astronauts.
At a conference in June on lunar settlements, Dr. James S. Logan, a former chief of medical operations at the Johnson Space Center and a founder of Space Medicine Associates, a medical consulting group, pointed out that the previous missions to the Moon involved just 600 total man-hours on the surface, a figure likely to be exceeded on the first return mission.
In his presentation, Dr. Logan pointed out that the earlier exposure times, “while significant,” did not provide strong evidence that long-duration exposure would be safe.
At a conference on space medicine this year at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, Peggy A. Whitson, an astronaut who is about to take her second stint aboard the International Space Station, said radiation would continue to be a concern.
“We have to just accept the fact that if we’re going to explore,” Dr. Whitson said, “we’re going to have to accept a higher level of radiation” than, say, OSHA permits for atomic workers.
Dr. Jonathan Clark, a former NASA flight surgeon on the panel with Dr. Whitson, said, “To me, an unacceptable level of risk would be a radiation exposure that would result in acute and substantial performance effects, either fatality or cognitive decline.”
If the effects are so debilitating that the mission fails, Dr. Clark said, “it’s pointless to go.”
There could be other problems with a Mars mission that scientists are just beginning to explore. At the Rice conference, Dr. Nick Kanas of the University of California, San Francisco, a psychiatrist who has studied astronauts, described what he called the “Earth out of view” phenomenon.
Dr. Kanas’s research has found that one of the most positive parts of going to space is seeing the Earth. But on a trip to Mars, the Earth would dwindle to a bluish speck.
“No one in the history of humans has ever studied what it’s like to see the Earth as a little dot,” he said.
In an interview, Dr. Kanas said losing the visual connection with the home planet could be a “unique stressor.”
Communications would slow markedly, with lags of more than 40 minutes, he said. Ready access to powerful telescopes and libraries of Earth images might help, but it would be important to fight those feelings of “extreme isolation and loneliness.”
Mr. Griffin acknowledged that problems like radiation presented grave challenges in each new environment, but added that he was confident that protections would be discovered, just as early sailors learned that sauerkraut and lemons could protect them from scurvy on long voyages.
And he predicted that the lessons learned about bone growth, cell biology, damage prevention and repair would help treat diseases on Earth.
Mr. Schmitt, the Apollo astronaut, agreed. Despite very real risks of living in space and on other planets, he said, “I don’t see any showstoppers.”
Stuart Witt, general manager of the Mojave Air and Space Port, takes an even longer view. In his office, with composite craft being designed in nearby buildings, Mr. Witt noted that five centuries ago, Magellan left Spain with five ships and 270 men. Two years later, one ship returned, with 18 men.
He quoted from memory a passage from Charles Van Doren’s book “A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future” (1991), pointing out that after the surviving ship returned loaded with valuable spices, subsequent expeditions “never lacked for sailors to man them and for captains to lead them.”
“They knew that the spirit of exploration was far bigger than any individual,” Mr. Witt said.
The argument resonates with Mr. Griffin: “Every time that humans have invested in the past in breaking through new frontiers, it’s been to our profit.
“It may be tough on the individual explorers, but it’s been pretty beneficial for the human race — as we sit here,” he continued, waving his arms to take in his office, Washington and America, “in what once was the New World.”
“We’ll lose people,” he said flatly, and risks must be minimized. But exploring is “embedded in our DNA.”
The urge to go beyond might actually be ingrained in the helical curves of our genes as one of the many behavioral traits now being linked to genetic propensities, said Jeffrey M. Friedman, director of the Starr Center for Human Genetics at the Rockefeller University.
Indulging in a bit of speculation at a reporter’s request, Dr. Friedman said “it’s very plausible to suggest” that there might be a primal urge to explore and take risks.
“And you sort of have direct evidence of it in the history of human migrations,” he added.
In any population, there would be a spectrum of traits from stay-at-homes to explorers, with those at either end of the spectrum prospering in some circumstances and suffering in others.
The future holds promise and peril, as any visitor to Mojave can see. At Scaled Composites, an explosion last month killed three employees. The accident involved the nitrous oxide that Scaled Composites uses as a propellant, though there was no rocket test at the time. The accident is under investigation.
Meanwhile, the company continues to develop its next craft, and Virgin Galactic said no customers had canceled. When asked whether the accident gave him second thoughts, James Lovelock, the 88-year-old British scientist and author, said, “I have no qualms whatever.”
September 25, 2007
The Space Age
New Horizons Beckon, Inspiring Vision if Not Certainty
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Fifty years of spaceflight have taken people to the Moon and have sent unmanned vehicles zipping to the fringes of the solar system. What could the next 50 years bring?
Much more, or potentially not much more. Government-financed space travel could stall in the face of America’s growing aversion to risk and a kind of orbital ennui. NASA has, after all, already tried for more than a decade to develop follow-on vehicles to the flawed space shuttle and is in the process of trying again.
Private enterprise is stepping up, but the industry is still fragile.
Michael D. Griffin, the NASA administrator, said in an interview that he was confident of one thing for the foreseeable future: “We’re going to have a space program.”
Beyond that, all bets are off.
“The one thing of which we can be certain,” Mr. Griffin wrote in a recent essay on the Web site of the magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology, “is that in trying to envision the world of 2057, two generations in the future, we will be wrong.”
Experts in government, industry and science agree, however, that these three broad trends will shape the coming decades in space:
¶NASA has embarked on a program to return to the Moon by 2020, not just for what some critics call “flags and footprints,” but also for a lasting presence with scientific research and preparation for expeditions to asteroids and, eventually, Mars. The space shuttle program is being wound down by 2010 to create the next generation of vehicles.
¶Other nations, notably Russia and China, have ambitious plans and could spur a space race like the one that sent Americans to the Moon. “It took Sputnik for us to recognize what the Soviet Union was up to,” said Harrison H. Schmitt, who flew the last mission to the Moon, in 1972. “I don’t know what it will take this time.”
¶Private enterprise is moving ahead, beginning with space tourism and, later, transport services for NASA and other governments to outposts like the International Space Station. Beyond that, ventures could include mining on asteroids and manufacturing drugs in space.
John M. Logsdon, director of the space policy institute at George Washington University, says a big question has yet to be answered.
“At the level of government, I think we’re still struggling as to why we’re sending people to space,” Dr. Logsdon said. “It’s a decent question, and I think it’s an unanswered question.”
That leaves the manned space program at a precarious point, he said, adding: “If the current proposals to restart human exploration fail politically, indeed, the human space flight endeavor conducted under government auspices might well lose its momentum. I obviously hope that doesn’t happen. But it’s far from a slam dunk that we’re going back to the Moon and on to Mars.”
Entrepreneurs say they have the answer — money. Peter Diamandis, a founder of the Ansari X Prize, the $10 million competition to put a pilot in space without government financing, said that with all the energy and minerals to be found there “the first trillionaires are going to be made in space.”
In the next 50 years, Mr. Diamandis said, “economic engines,” not political ones, will push the space frontier.
Dr. Logsdon is skeptical. “There are a variety of alluring prospects that have been around almost since the start of the last 50 years that are still there as alluring prospects,” he said. “And we are not further along in knowing whether they can be turned into reality or not.” The continued reliance on chemical rockets, for example, limits the weight that can be taken into space.
Yet much has changed in the last 50 years that could lay the foundation for the next 50. A new generation of ultrawealthy entrepreneurs who grew up with a space fascination are pouring personal fortunes into making space businesses real.
Paul G. Allen, a founder of Microsoft, paid for SpaceShipOne, the tiny craft that won the X Prize in 2004. Elon Musk, a founder of PayPal, is developing rockets through his company, Space Exploration Technologies, and has NASA financing that could lead to his spacecraft’s carrying people and supplies to the International Space Station.
Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, is developing rockets at a site he owns in western Texas.
Robert Bigelow, who made his fortune in hotels, is developing a space transportation system and a space station that could be used as an orbiting hotel or a research base.
The official charged with regulating commercial spaceflight, Patricia Grace Smith of the Federal Aviation Administration, said in an interview, “When I look out 50 years from now, I fully expect that we will have actual, operational spaceports” that are commercially operated and owned.
At the dusty, sprawling Mojave Air and Space Port in California, dreamers and pragmatists join in planning the future.
Jeff Greason, the founder of Xcor Aerospace, one of several rocket companies there, said his industry was ready to talk big again after years of having to shake off the pixie dust of science fiction. “We had to stop focusing on the grand and glorious future,” he said, “because otherwise, people weren’t going to take us seriously as a business. We very consciously turned the vision thing off.”
“We’re making progress on real businesses that turn profits,” he added.
Other companies are already in the game. Mr. Greason’s neighbor, Scaled Composites, is working on a successor vehicle to its SpaceShipOne.
Richard Branson’s company, Virgin Galactic, which will buy the vehicles, has a long list of potential space tourists.
Esther Dyson, a longtime technology guru who is encouraging investment in space, said the development of rocket businesses paralleled the early days of personal computing and the Internet. Early government financing created technologies whose use was largely limited to government and academia.
“So eventually these commercial types came in, and suddenly a whole lot of revenue came in,” she said. ”It benefited the research types, as well as the commercial types. And it created an infrastructure for the public.”
That led, in turn, to today’s Google, Netscape, Google Earth, “all these wonderful things we take for granted.”
Mr. Greason predicts that government will take the lead in long-range exploration, but that industry will take up the slack closer to home. Just as the military relies on private air carriers, he said, “the government efforts will become customers of the private efforts.”
NASA will meanwhile be trying to extend the reach of humanity. Mr. Griffin, its administrator, laid out a rough timetable for the goals that President Bush set in 2004.
He sees the mileposts clearly along the way, returning to the Moon by 2020, with a “small lunar outpost” a few years later, on the way to “towns on the Moon.” The first flights to Mars could occur in the next decade, he said, so that by the 100th anniversary of spaceflight in 2057, “we can be looking back at the 20th anniversary of the first human landing on Mars.”
If the United States wants to lead the way, he said, the clock is ticking.
“This is the last generation of Americans which is going to have the unquestioned opportunity to lead that enterprise,” Mr. Griffin said. “Because in the next generation we are going to find, at least, Russia, China, India and Europe fully as capable as we are. It will be a matter of interest and politics and societal will or desire. But it will not be a matter of capability.”
Whoever takes them on, the challenges will be greater than any that spacefaring nations have yet faced. They involve radiation levels that science does not yet know how to protect against and problems like reduced gravity and Moon dust, which is ultrafine-grained, chemically reactive and highly abrasive, all of which may mean serious health problems for astronauts.
At a conference in June on lunar settlements, Dr. James S. Logan, a former chief of medical operations at the Johnson Space Center and a founder of Space Medicine Associates, a medical consulting group, pointed out that the previous missions to the Moon involved just 600 total man-hours on the surface, a figure likely to be exceeded on the first return mission.
In his presentation, Dr. Logan pointed out that the earlier exposure times, “while significant,” did not provide strong evidence that long-duration exposure would be safe.
At a conference on space medicine this year at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, Peggy A. Whitson, an astronaut who is about to take her second stint aboard the International Space Station, said radiation would continue to be a concern.
“We have to just accept the fact that if we’re going to explore,” Dr. Whitson said, “we’re going to have to accept a higher level of radiation” than, say, OSHA permits for atomic workers.
Dr. Jonathan Clark, a former NASA flight surgeon on the panel with Dr. Whitson, said, “To me, an unacceptable level of risk would be a radiation exposure that would result in acute and substantial performance effects, either fatality or cognitive decline.”
If the effects are so debilitating that the mission fails, Dr. Clark said, “it’s pointless to go.”
There could be other problems with a Mars mission that scientists are just beginning to explore. At the Rice conference, Dr. Nick Kanas of the University of California, San Francisco, a psychiatrist who has studied astronauts, described what he called the “Earth out of view” phenomenon.
Dr. Kanas’s research has found that one of the most positive parts of going to space is seeing the Earth. But on a trip to Mars, the Earth would dwindle to a bluish speck.
“No one in the history of humans has ever studied what it’s like to see the Earth as a little dot,” he said.
In an interview, Dr. Kanas said losing the visual connection with the home planet could be a “unique stressor.”
Communications would slow markedly, with lags of more than 40 minutes, he said. Ready access to powerful telescopes and libraries of Earth images might help, but it would be important to fight those feelings of “extreme isolation and loneliness.”
Mr. Griffin acknowledged that problems like radiation presented grave challenges in each new environment, but added that he was confident that protections would be discovered, just as early sailors learned that sauerkraut and lemons could protect them from scurvy on long voyages.
And he predicted that the lessons learned about bone growth, cell biology, damage prevention and repair would help treat diseases on Earth.
Mr. Schmitt, the Apollo astronaut, agreed. Despite very real risks of living in space and on other planets, he said, “I don’t see any showstoppers.”
Stuart Witt, general manager of the Mojave Air and Space Port, takes an even longer view. In his office, with composite craft being designed in nearby buildings, Mr. Witt noted that five centuries ago, Magellan left Spain with five ships and 270 men. Two years later, one ship returned, with 18 men.
He quoted from memory a passage from Charles Van Doren’s book “A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future” (1991), pointing out that after the surviving ship returned loaded with valuable spices, subsequent expeditions “never lacked for sailors to man them and for captains to lead them.”
“They knew that the spirit of exploration was far bigger than any individual,” Mr. Witt said.
The argument resonates with Mr. Griffin: “Every time that humans have invested in the past in breaking through new frontiers, it’s been to our profit.
“It may be tough on the individual explorers, but it’s been pretty beneficial for the human race — as we sit here,” he continued, waving his arms to take in his office, Washington and America, “in what once was the New World.”
“We’ll lose people,” he said flatly, and risks must be minimized. But exploring is “embedded in our DNA.”
The urge to go beyond might actually be ingrained in the helical curves of our genes as one of the many behavioral traits now being linked to genetic propensities, said Jeffrey M. Friedman, director of the Starr Center for Human Genetics at the Rockefeller University.
Indulging in a bit of speculation at a reporter’s request, Dr. Friedman said “it’s very plausible to suggest” that there might be a primal urge to explore and take risks.
“And you sort of have direct evidence of it in the history of human migrations,” he added.
In any population, there would be a spectrum of traits from stay-at-homes to explorers, with those at either end of the spectrum prospering in some circumstances and suffering in others.
The future holds promise and peril, as any visitor to Mojave can see. At Scaled Composites, an explosion last month killed three employees. The accident involved the nitrous oxide that Scaled Composites uses as a propellant, though there was no rocket test at the time. The accident is under investigation.
Meanwhile, the company continues to develop its next craft, and Virgin Galactic said no customers had canceled. When asked whether the accident gave him second thoughts, James Lovelock, the 88-year-old British scientist and author, said, “I have no qualms whatever.”
Experts fear death of privacy
Advances could lead to ongoing surveillance
Carly Weeks
CanWest News Service
Friday, September 28, 2007
Canadians are hurtling toward a "wholesale surveillance society" where no phone conversation, e-mail exchange or instant messaging dialogue will ever disappear, thanks to new technology combined with corporate and governmental interests, warn leading privacy experts at an international privacy conference.
"The notion that we could have conversations that disappear is, in fact, disappearing," said Bruce Schneier, author and chief technology officer of U.S.-based security firm BT Counterpane. "Everything we do today creates a transaction where it didn't before."
While it may seem that privacy already comes at a premium these days, experts are predicting that continued advances in technology will bring with them the inability of individuals to escape the watchful eye of surveillance cameras or computers that record our online habits.
Privacy commissioners and experts from around the world are gathered in Montreal this week to tackle emerging privacy issues and their potential impact on the way we live. Some of the technological advances that could have serious implications for privacy include:
- Machines that can read fingerprints at a distance or have the ability to recognize a person's facial features, which could be implemented at border crossings or at the entrance to work places.
- Telephones that have the ability to record conversations and be stored by the service provider for long periods of time.
- Radio chips attached to common consumer products that have the ability to track not only our individual shopping patterns, but also our movement through a particular store.
"Our data isn't owned by us anymore. These days, more and more of our data isn't stored by us," Schneier said. "My e-mail address is stored by that (Internet service provider)."
The majority of corporations and government agencies that collect and track personal information don't have bad intentions, Schneier said, adding the problem is that we don't yet have a clear enough understanding of the consequences of developing technology that can recognize us, tracks our movements and records our habits.
"All the entities that have access to the information have some reason to save it," Schneier said. "It's not necessarily malicious, but because the data is there, because we collect it so easily, uses are found for it."
© The Calgary Herald 2007
****
New male contraceptive touted to replace vasectomy
CanWest News Service
Friday, September 28, 2007
A U.S.-based clinical trial has found a new male contraceptive procedure works as well as a vasectomy, says the Vancouver physician who designed the device.
Data collected over six months demonstrated the new procedure was as effective as a vasectomy at eliminating sperm, said Dr. Neil Pollock, who has spent eight years developing the product.
The new procedure implants two silicone plugs, called the Intra Vas Device , into the scrotum. The plugs block sperm from travelling through the vas deferens tubes, but still allow men to ejaculate.
The 18-month clinical study was conducted by Shepherd Medical, a Vancouver-based biotechnology company co-founded by Pollock.
Shepherd was given a $1.4-million grant by the U.S. National Institutes of Health for trials on humans under guidelines established by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Pollock is seeking grant and investment money to fund another trial that will test the IVD's other selling point -- reversibility.
The plan is to insert the devices, leave them in for a few months and then remove them and see if sperm flow returns to fertile levels, he added.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Advances could lead to ongoing surveillance
Carly Weeks
CanWest News Service
Friday, September 28, 2007
Canadians are hurtling toward a "wholesale surveillance society" where no phone conversation, e-mail exchange or instant messaging dialogue will ever disappear, thanks to new technology combined with corporate and governmental interests, warn leading privacy experts at an international privacy conference.
"The notion that we could have conversations that disappear is, in fact, disappearing," said Bruce Schneier, author and chief technology officer of U.S.-based security firm BT Counterpane. "Everything we do today creates a transaction where it didn't before."
While it may seem that privacy already comes at a premium these days, experts are predicting that continued advances in technology will bring with them the inability of individuals to escape the watchful eye of surveillance cameras or computers that record our online habits.
Privacy commissioners and experts from around the world are gathered in Montreal this week to tackle emerging privacy issues and their potential impact on the way we live. Some of the technological advances that could have serious implications for privacy include:
- Machines that can read fingerprints at a distance or have the ability to recognize a person's facial features, which could be implemented at border crossings or at the entrance to work places.
- Telephones that have the ability to record conversations and be stored by the service provider for long periods of time.
- Radio chips attached to common consumer products that have the ability to track not only our individual shopping patterns, but also our movement through a particular store.
"Our data isn't owned by us anymore. These days, more and more of our data isn't stored by us," Schneier said. "My e-mail address is stored by that (Internet service provider)."
The majority of corporations and government agencies that collect and track personal information don't have bad intentions, Schneier said, adding the problem is that we don't yet have a clear enough understanding of the consequences of developing technology that can recognize us, tracks our movements and records our habits.
"All the entities that have access to the information have some reason to save it," Schneier said. "It's not necessarily malicious, but because the data is there, because we collect it so easily, uses are found for it."
© The Calgary Herald 2007
****
New male contraceptive touted to replace vasectomy
CanWest News Service
Friday, September 28, 2007
A U.S.-based clinical trial has found a new male contraceptive procedure works as well as a vasectomy, says the Vancouver physician who designed the device.
Data collected over six months demonstrated the new procedure was as effective as a vasectomy at eliminating sperm, said Dr. Neil Pollock, who has spent eight years developing the product.
The new procedure implants two silicone plugs, called the Intra Vas Device , into the scrotum. The plugs block sperm from travelling through the vas deferens tubes, but still allow men to ejaculate.
The 18-month clinical study was conducted by Shepherd Medical, a Vancouver-based biotechnology company co-founded by Pollock.
Shepherd was given a $1.4-million grant by the U.S. National Institutes of Health for trials on humans under guidelines established by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Pollock is seeking grant and investment money to fund another trial that will test the IVD's other selling point -- reversibility.
The plan is to insert the devices, leave them in for a few months and then remove them and see if sperm flow returns to fertile levels, he added.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/02/scien ... nted=print
October 2, 2007
A Conversation With Hany Farid
Proving That Seeing Shouldn’t Always Be Believing
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
HANOVER, N.H. — As Hany Farid sat in his office here at Dartmouth College on a recent morning, he fiddled with his laptop and cracked disconcerting little jokes.
“Don’t ever send me a photograph of yourself,” said Dr. Farid, head of the Image Science Laboratory at Dartmouth. “I’ll do the most terrible things to it.”
Dr. Farid, a 41-year-old engineer, is a founder of a subdiscipline within computer science: digital forensics. Most days, he spends his time transforming ordinary images into ones with drastic new meanings. Click, goes his mouse. Courtney Love has joined Grandpa at the family barbecue. Click. Click. Elvis Presley is on Dartmouth’s board of trustees.
The purpose of all this manipulation is to discover how computerized forgeries are made. Intelligence agencies, news organizations and scientific journals employ Dr. Farid’s consulting services when they need to authenticate the validity of images. Dr. Farid sells a software package, “Q,” to clients so they, too, can become digital detectives.
An edited version of two hours’ worth of conversation follows.
Q. Let’s start with some definitions. What exactly is digital forensics?
A. It’s a new field. It didn’t exist five years ago. We look at digital media — images, audio and video — and we try to ascertain whether or not they’ve been manipulated. We use mathematical and computational techniques to detect alterations in them.
In society today, we’re now seeing doctored images regularly. If tabloids can’t obtain a photo of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie walking together on a beach, they’ll make up a composite from two pictures. Star actually did that. And it’s happening in the courts, politics and scientific journals, too. As a result, we now live in an age when the once-held belief that photographs were the definitive record of events is gone.
Actually, photographic forgeries aren’t new. People have doctored images since the beginning of photography. But the techniques needed to do that during the Civil War, when Mathew Brady made composites, were extremely difficult and time consuming. In today’s world, anyone with a digital camera, a PC, Photoshop and an hour’s worth of time can make fairly compelling digital forgeries.
Q. Why do scientists need to know about this?
A. Because not long ago, researchers from South Korea had to retract papers published in Science because the photographs used to prove that human stem cells had been cloned were effectively Photoshop-cloned, and not laboratory-cloned. There have been other recent cases, too. And today, in science, more and more, photographs are the data. The Federal Office of Research Integrity has said that in 1990, less than 3 percent of allegations of fraud they investigated involved contested images. By 2001, that number was 26 percent. And last year, it was 44.1 percent.
Mike Rossner of The Journal of Cell Biology estimates that 20 percent of the manuscripts he accepts contain at least one figure that has to be remade because of inappropriate image manipulation. He means that the images are not accurate reflections of the original data. Rossner estimates that about 1 percent of the papers have some piece of image data that is downright fraudulent.
Q. Where does he get his figures from?
A. Mike has a full-time person who looks at every image supporting accepted manuscripts. Other biologists tell me anecdotally that many images in journals are regularly touched up to improve contrast or to remove little imperfections. The journals are, in essence, doing the same things fashion magazines do. Some of it is legitimate. In other cases, they are crossing the line.
Q. Are there policy changes that you think scientists should be considering?
A. I think it’s very hard to define inappropriate manipulation. Sometimes you can change 30 percent of the pixels in an image and it won’t fundamentally change anything. At other times, you can change 5 percent of the pixels and it radically changes meaning. I’m not a purist. I think there’s room for cropping, adjusting, contrast enhancement, but I want to know what was done. I think journal editors need to see the unadulterated, unretouched original images.
No. 2, the scientific community as a whole needs to come out with a well-thought-out policy on what is and isn’t acceptable when it comes to altering photographs. And this is something that must be refined, updated and changed as the technology changes. The journals are probably going to have to hire more staff. That will slow down the publication pipeline somewhat. But the cost of these scandals is too high. They undermine the public’s faith in science.
Q. You make software to detect forgeries. How do you design your programs?
A. I think like a forger. I spend a lot of time in Photoshop making digital forgeries to learn the tools and techniques a forger uses. We’ll make a composite photograph of two people and ask, “How do you manipulate this photograph to make it compelling?” By working backwards, we learn the forger’s techniques and how to detect them.
For instance, when looking at composites of two people, we’ve discovered that one of the hardest things for a forger to match is the lighting. So we’ve developed a way of measuring whether the lighting is consistent within various parts of the image. Lately, I’ve become obsessed with eyes. In a person’s eyes, one sees a slight reflection of the light in the room. So I’ve developed a technique that can take that little image of the reflection of light and tell us where the light was while you were being photographed. Does that match what we see in the image?
We also look at numbers. The pixels of a digital image are represented on a computer by numbers. Once you’ve altered an image, the numbers change. So we can analyze those pixel values for traces of manipulation.
Q. You consult regularly in legal cases. How is your work used in the courts?
A. I’ve consulted for the F.B.I., which sometimes uses images in prosecutions. They make surveillance tapes. At a trial, the defense might argue that the F.B.I. doctored the images. So how do you prove they weren’t doctored? That’s my job.
I’ve also been an expert witness in several child pornography cases. The Supreme Court in 2002 ruled that computer-generated child porn is protected under the First Amendment. So now in these cases, defense lawyers will sometimes argue that the images aren’t real. So far, I have only testified on the side of the prosecution. But I’ve been approached by defendants several times and I’ve told them, “I’ll work on your case, but I’m going to testify to whatever I find.” And in every situation, the defense lawyers said, “No, thank you.” In my opinion, that’s because they knew the photographs were not computer generated.
Q. What’s been the most interesting use of your software?
A. I sold a copy of it to a Canadian company that runs a bounty fishing contest. People send in photographs of fish they’ve caught. My program can check if the fish in the picture has been enlarged. We can prove whether or not the fish was really “THIS big!”
October 2, 2007
A Conversation With Hany Farid
Proving That Seeing Shouldn’t Always Be Believing
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
HANOVER, N.H. — As Hany Farid sat in his office here at Dartmouth College on a recent morning, he fiddled with his laptop and cracked disconcerting little jokes.
“Don’t ever send me a photograph of yourself,” said Dr. Farid, head of the Image Science Laboratory at Dartmouth. “I’ll do the most terrible things to it.”
Dr. Farid, a 41-year-old engineer, is a founder of a subdiscipline within computer science: digital forensics. Most days, he spends his time transforming ordinary images into ones with drastic new meanings. Click, goes his mouse. Courtney Love has joined Grandpa at the family barbecue. Click. Click. Elvis Presley is on Dartmouth’s board of trustees.
The purpose of all this manipulation is to discover how computerized forgeries are made. Intelligence agencies, news organizations and scientific journals employ Dr. Farid’s consulting services when they need to authenticate the validity of images. Dr. Farid sells a software package, “Q,” to clients so they, too, can become digital detectives.
An edited version of two hours’ worth of conversation follows.
Q. Let’s start with some definitions. What exactly is digital forensics?
A. It’s a new field. It didn’t exist five years ago. We look at digital media — images, audio and video — and we try to ascertain whether or not they’ve been manipulated. We use mathematical and computational techniques to detect alterations in them.
In society today, we’re now seeing doctored images regularly. If tabloids can’t obtain a photo of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie walking together on a beach, they’ll make up a composite from two pictures. Star actually did that. And it’s happening in the courts, politics and scientific journals, too. As a result, we now live in an age when the once-held belief that photographs were the definitive record of events is gone.
Actually, photographic forgeries aren’t new. People have doctored images since the beginning of photography. But the techniques needed to do that during the Civil War, when Mathew Brady made composites, were extremely difficult and time consuming. In today’s world, anyone with a digital camera, a PC, Photoshop and an hour’s worth of time can make fairly compelling digital forgeries.
Q. Why do scientists need to know about this?
A. Because not long ago, researchers from South Korea had to retract papers published in Science because the photographs used to prove that human stem cells had been cloned were effectively Photoshop-cloned, and not laboratory-cloned. There have been other recent cases, too. And today, in science, more and more, photographs are the data. The Federal Office of Research Integrity has said that in 1990, less than 3 percent of allegations of fraud they investigated involved contested images. By 2001, that number was 26 percent. And last year, it was 44.1 percent.
Mike Rossner of The Journal of Cell Biology estimates that 20 percent of the manuscripts he accepts contain at least one figure that has to be remade because of inappropriate image manipulation. He means that the images are not accurate reflections of the original data. Rossner estimates that about 1 percent of the papers have some piece of image data that is downright fraudulent.
Q. Where does he get his figures from?
A. Mike has a full-time person who looks at every image supporting accepted manuscripts. Other biologists tell me anecdotally that many images in journals are regularly touched up to improve contrast or to remove little imperfections. The journals are, in essence, doing the same things fashion magazines do. Some of it is legitimate. In other cases, they are crossing the line.
Q. Are there policy changes that you think scientists should be considering?
A. I think it’s very hard to define inappropriate manipulation. Sometimes you can change 30 percent of the pixels in an image and it won’t fundamentally change anything. At other times, you can change 5 percent of the pixels and it radically changes meaning. I’m not a purist. I think there’s room for cropping, adjusting, contrast enhancement, but I want to know what was done. I think journal editors need to see the unadulterated, unretouched original images.
No. 2, the scientific community as a whole needs to come out with a well-thought-out policy on what is and isn’t acceptable when it comes to altering photographs. And this is something that must be refined, updated and changed as the technology changes. The journals are probably going to have to hire more staff. That will slow down the publication pipeline somewhat. But the cost of these scandals is too high. They undermine the public’s faith in science.
Q. You make software to detect forgeries. How do you design your programs?
A. I think like a forger. I spend a lot of time in Photoshop making digital forgeries to learn the tools and techniques a forger uses. We’ll make a composite photograph of two people and ask, “How do you manipulate this photograph to make it compelling?” By working backwards, we learn the forger’s techniques and how to detect them.
For instance, when looking at composites of two people, we’ve discovered that one of the hardest things for a forger to match is the lighting. So we’ve developed a way of measuring whether the lighting is consistent within various parts of the image. Lately, I’ve become obsessed with eyes. In a person’s eyes, one sees a slight reflection of the light in the room. So I’ve developed a technique that can take that little image of the reflection of light and tell us where the light was while you were being photographed. Does that match what we see in the image?
We also look at numbers. The pixels of a digital image are represented on a computer by numbers. Once you’ve altered an image, the numbers change. So we can analyze those pixel values for traces of manipulation.
Q. You consult regularly in legal cases. How is your work used in the courts?
A. I’ve consulted for the F.B.I., which sometimes uses images in prosecutions. They make surveillance tapes. At a trial, the defense might argue that the F.B.I. doctored the images. So how do you prove they weren’t doctored? That’s my job.
I’ve also been an expert witness in several child pornography cases. The Supreme Court in 2002 ruled that computer-generated child porn is protected under the First Amendment. So now in these cases, defense lawyers will sometimes argue that the images aren’t real. So far, I have only testified on the side of the prosecution. But I’ve been approached by defendants several times and I’ve told them, “I’ll work on your case, but I’m going to testify to whatever I find.” And in every situation, the defense lawyers said, “No, thank you.” In my opinion, that’s because they knew the photographs were not computer generated.
Q. What’s been the most interesting use of your software?
A. I sold a copy of it to a Canadian company that runs a bounty fishing contest. People send in photographs of fish they’ve caught. My program can check if the fish in the picture has been enlarged. We can prove whether or not the fish was really “THIS big!”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/scien ... ref=slogin
October 9, 2007
3 Win Nobel in Medicine for Gene Technology
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
Two Americans and a Briton won the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine yesterday for developing the immensely powerful “knockout” technology, which allows scientists to create animal models of human disease in mice.
The winners, who will share the $1.54 million prize, are Mario R. Capecchi, 70, of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City; Oliver Smithies, 82, of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill; and Sir Martin J. Evans, 66, of Cardiff University in Wales.
Other scientists are applying their technology, also known as gene targeting, in a variety of ways, from basic research to the development of new therapies, said the Nobel Committee from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm that selected the winners.
The knockout technique provided researchers with a superb new tool for finding out what any given gene does. It allows them to genetically engineer a strain of mice with the gene missing, or knocked out, then watch to see what the mice can no longer do.
After the first decoding of the mouse and human genomes in 2001 yielded thousands of new genes of unknown function, knockout mice became a prime source of information for making sense of these novel genes.
Most human genes can also be studied in this way through their counterpart genes in the mouse. Mice have been likened to pocket-size humans, because they have the same organs and their genes are about 95 percent identical in sequence. Scientists have developed more than 500 mouse models of human ailments, including those affecting the heart and central nervous system, as well as diabetes, cancer and cystic fibrosis.
Scientists can now use the technology to create genetic mutations that can be activated at specific time points, or in specific cells or organs, both during development and in the adult animal, the Nobel citation said.
Gene-targeting technology can knock out single genes to study development of the embryo, aging and normal physiology. So far, more than 10,000 mouse genes, or about half of those in the mammalian genome, have been knocked out, the committee said.
Researchers can also make conditional knockouts, mice in which a gene of interest can be inactivated in a specific tissue or part of the brain, at any stage in life. Another important variation is to tag a normal gene with a so-called reporter gene that causes a visible color change in all cells where the normal gene is switched on.
Knockout mice are so important in medical research that thousands of strains are kept available in institutions like the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Me.
“The technique is revolutionary and has completely changed the way we use the mouse to study the function of genes,” said Dr. Richard P. Woychik, the lab’s director. “When people come across a novel human gene, one of the first things they think about is knocking it out in a mouse.”
The three laureates, who are friends but work independently, also shared a Lasker Award in 2001. They began their work in the 1980s, and the first reports that the technology could generate gene-targeted mice were published in 1989. The reports involved a rare inherited human disease, the Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, in which lack of an enzyme causes fits of self-mutilation.
The prize was particularly rewarding for Dr. Capecchi, who said he lived as a street urchin in Italy during World War II and later had to prove his scientific peers wrong after they rejected his initial grant to the National Institutes of Health in 1980, saying his project was not feasible.
Dr. Capecchi’s mother, the daughter of an American, had lived in a luxurious villa in Florence and had become a Bohemian poet, writing against Fascism and Nazism. She refused to marry his father, an Italian Air Force officer with whom she had had a love affair.
When young Mario was not yet 4, the Gestapo came to their home in Tyrol, in the Italian Alps, to take his mother to the Dachau concentration camp — an event he said he remembered vividly.
Because she knew her time of freedom was limited, she had sold all her possessions and given the proceeds to an Italian farming family, with whom Mario lived for about a year. When the money ran out, the family sent him on his way. He said he wandered south, moving from town to town as his cover was exposed. He wandered, usually alone, but sometimes in small gangs, begging and stealing, sleeping in the streets, occasionally in an orphanage.
At the war’s end, the malnourished boy was put in a hospital for a year. During that time his mother, who had survived Dachau, searched hospitals and orphanages for him. A week after she found him — on his birthday — they were on a boat to join her brother in the home of a Quaker family in Pennsylvania.
The family put Mario in the third grade, where as a means of communication his teachers told him to draw murals. As he did, he slowly learned English. Because of the street smarts he developed in Italy, he became a class leader and the boy who beat up the bullies.
He went on to study political science at Antioch College, alternating periods of work and studies. Then he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, where he worked in the laboratory of James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.
When he decided to leave the Harvard faculty in 1973 because members of the department did not get along, he said, and did not recruit sufficient younger scientists, Dr. Capecchi went to Utah. Colleagues told him, he said, that he was “nuts” to leave Harvard’s Ivy League splendor. But Dr. Capecchi said Dr. Watson told him he could do good science anywhere.
Dr. Capecchi said the main advantage was that he could work on long-term projects more easily in Utah than at Harvard, where there was a push to get results quickly.
Dr. Capecchi said that when he reapplied to the N.I.H. in 1984 for the grant it had rejected in 1980, he was told, “We are glad you didn’t follow our advice.”
After learning he had become a Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Smithies told Agence France-Presse that “it’s actually a rather peaceful feeling of culmination of a life of science.”
Dr. Smithies has credited his interest in science to his boyhood love for radios and telescopes, and for a comic-strip inventor whom he wanted to emulate. He earned a scholarship to Oxford, then dropped out of medical school to study chemistry before moving to the University of Wisconsin. Because of a visa problem, Dr. Smithies worked in Toronto for about seven years before returning to Wisconsin. He became a geneticist and moved to the University of North Carolina 19 years ago.
Dr. Smithies is a licensed airplane pilot and is fond of gliding.
Dr. Evans had planned to have an “ordinary day” off work cleaning his daughter’s home in Cambridge, England, where he was visiting when he learned he won the prize. It was “a boyhood dream come true,” Dr. Evans told Agence France-Presse.
Like Dr. Capecchi, Dr. Evans said his scientific career was an upward struggle. In an interview with the Lasker Foundation, Dr. Evans said recognition was important to him because he often was a lone scientist who cried out against the consensus. In applying for grants, he said he was told many of his ideas were premature and could not be done.
“Then five years later,” he said, “I find everyone is doing the same thing.”
Nicholas Wade contributed reporting.
October 9, 2007
3 Win Nobel in Medicine for Gene Technology
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
Two Americans and a Briton won the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine yesterday for developing the immensely powerful “knockout” technology, which allows scientists to create animal models of human disease in mice.
The winners, who will share the $1.54 million prize, are Mario R. Capecchi, 70, of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City; Oliver Smithies, 82, of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill; and Sir Martin J. Evans, 66, of Cardiff University in Wales.
Other scientists are applying their technology, also known as gene targeting, in a variety of ways, from basic research to the development of new therapies, said the Nobel Committee from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm that selected the winners.
The knockout technique provided researchers with a superb new tool for finding out what any given gene does. It allows them to genetically engineer a strain of mice with the gene missing, or knocked out, then watch to see what the mice can no longer do.
After the first decoding of the mouse and human genomes in 2001 yielded thousands of new genes of unknown function, knockout mice became a prime source of information for making sense of these novel genes.
Most human genes can also be studied in this way through their counterpart genes in the mouse. Mice have been likened to pocket-size humans, because they have the same organs and their genes are about 95 percent identical in sequence. Scientists have developed more than 500 mouse models of human ailments, including those affecting the heart and central nervous system, as well as diabetes, cancer and cystic fibrosis.
Scientists can now use the technology to create genetic mutations that can be activated at specific time points, or in specific cells or organs, both during development and in the adult animal, the Nobel citation said.
Gene-targeting technology can knock out single genes to study development of the embryo, aging and normal physiology. So far, more than 10,000 mouse genes, or about half of those in the mammalian genome, have been knocked out, the committee said.
Researchers can also make conditional knockouts, mice in which a gene of interest can be inactivated in a specific tissue or part of the brain, at any stage in life. Another important variation is to tag a normal gene with a so-called reporter gene that causes a visible color change in all cells where the normal gene is switched on.
Knockout mice are so important in medical research that thousands of strains are kept available in institutions like the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Me.
“The technique is revolutionary and has completely changed the way we use the mouse to study the function of genes,” said Dr. Richard P. Woychik, the lab’s director. “When people come across a novel human gene, one of the first things they think about is knocking it out in a mouse.”
The three laureates, who are friends but work independently, also shared a Lasker Award in 2001. They began their work in the 1980s, and the first reports that the technology could generate gene-targeted mice were published in 1989. The reports involved a rare inherited human disease, the Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, in which lack of an enzyme causes fits of self-mutilation.
The prize was particularly rewarding for Dr. Capecchi, who said he lived as a street urchin in Italy during World War II and later had to prove his scientific peers wrong after they rejected his initial grant to the National Institutes of Health in 1980, saying his project was not feasible.
Dr. Capecchi’s mother, the daughter of an American, had lived in a luxurious villa in Florence and had become a Bohemian poet, writing against Fascism and Nazism. She refused to marry his father, an Italian Air Force officer with whom she had had a love affair.
When young Mario was not yet 4, the Gestapo came to their home in Tyrol, in the Italian Alps, to take his mother to the Dachau concentration camp — an event he said he remembered vividly.
Because she knew her time of freedom was limited, she had sold all her possessions and given the proceeds to an Italian farming family, with whom Mario lived for about a year. When the money ran out, the family sent him on his way. He said he wandered south, moving from town to town as his cover was exposed. He wandered, usually alone, but sometimes in small gangs, begging and stealing, sleeping in the streets, occasionally in an orphanage.
At the war’s end, the malnourished boy was put in a hospital for a year. During that time his mother, who had survived Dachau, searched hospitals and orphanages for him. A week after she found him — on his birthday — they were on a boat to join her brother in the home of a Quaker family in Pennsylvania.
The family put Mario in the third grade, where as a means of communication his teachers told him to draw murals. As he did, he slowly learned English. Because of the street smarts he developed in Italy, he became a class leader and the boy who beat up the bullies.
He went on to study political science at Antioch College, alternating periods of work and studies. Then he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, where he worked in the laboratory of James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.
When he decided to leave the Harvard faculty in 1973 because members of the department did not get along, he said, and did not recruit sufficient younger scientists, Dr. Capecchi went to Utah. Colleagues told him, he said, that he was “nuts” to leave Harvard’s Ivy League splendor. But Dr. Capecchi said Dr. Watson told him he could do good science anywhere.
Dr. Capecchi said the main advantage was that he could work on long-term projects more easily in Utah than at Harvard, where there was a push to get results quickly.
Dr. Capecchi said that when he reapplied to the N.I.H. in 1984 for the grant it had rejected in 1980, he was told, “We are glad you didn’t follow our advice.”
After learning he had become a Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Smithies told Agence France-Presse that “it’s actually a rather peaceful feeling of culmination of a life of science.”
Dr. Smithies has credited his interest in science to his boyhood love for radios and telescopes, and for a comic-strip inventor whom he wanted to emulate. He earned a scholarship to Oxford, then dropped out of medical school to study chemistry before moving to the University of Wisconsin. Because of a visa problem, Dr. Smithies worked in Toronto for about seven years before returning to Wisconsin. He became a geneticist and moved to the University of North Carolina 19 years ago.
Dr. Smithies is a licensed airplane pilot and is fond of gliding.
Dr. Evans had planned to have an “ordinary day” off work cleaning his daughter’s home in Cambridge, England, where he was visiting when he learned he won the prize. It was “a boyhood dream come true,” Dr. Evans told Agence France-Presse.
Like Dr. Capecchi, Dr. Evans said his scientific career was an upward struggle. In an interview with the Lasker Foundation, Dr. Evans said recognition was important to him because he often was a lone scientist who cried out against the consensus. In applying for grants, he said he was told many of his ideas were premature and could not be done.
“Then five years later,” he said, “I find everyone is doing the same thing.”
Nicholas Wade contributed reporting.
Ancestry too complex for DNA test
Report says web tests can't link you to Genghis Khan
Margaret Munro
CanWest News Service
Friday, October 19, 2007
Ancestral DNA tests can often be misleading and have profound impact on people's lives, warn scientists concerned with the popular "recreational" gene tests.
The tests cannot, as one Canadian company claims, "discover" someone's relation to Mongolian emperor Genghis Khan, says Deborah Bolnick, a genetic anthropologist at University of Texas and lead author of a report on the tests.
Nor can they determine with certainty the origin of someone's ancestors or their race, says the report to be published today in the journal Science.
The tests, which almost half a million consumers have purchased for between $100 and $900 per test, claim to be able to trace people's roots to everything from African tribes to European palaces to Aboriginal bands.
"Using revolutionary DNA analysis, find out how you are related to Marie Antoinette -- one of the most illustrious women in European history," offers Genetrack Biolabs of Vancouver, one of Canada's largest gene testing companies. Genetrack says it can also "discover" your relation to notorious outlaw Jesse James or Genghis Khan and "find out where your ancestors came from, their ethnic background, and how they have scattered throughout the world today."
U.S. companies go even further.
"One simple test can identify your family's country of origin," says African Ancestry. It will even print up a certificate of ancestry to hang on the wall. Another firm, DNAPrint Genomics, says it can determine if someone's genetic heritage is Native American, East Asian, sub-Saharan African or Indo-European.
Bolnick and her colleagues say the tests -- and company websites featuring tribes of people in elaborate face paint and traditional clothing -- are often misleading. And they reinforce the controversial idea that race is genetically determined.
"There is no clear-cut connection between an individual's DNA and his or her racial or ethnic affiliation," say the researchers.
The report goes on to say ancestry tests "cannot pinpoint the place of origin or social affiliation of even one ancestor with exact certainty."
Some of the tests may be a harmless way for some people to spend their money, Bolnick said in an interview from Quebec City, where she is attending a Genome Canada conference. But she and her colleagues say the tests can have a "profound" impact on some lives. "Many people are taking the tests to get answers about their identity and instead end up with an identity crisis," says Bolnick.
Better standards and guidelines are needed to address the growing use of the tests, which might change how people report their race of ethnicity on government forms, college or job applications, Bolnick says.
The tests, promoted with the help of stars like Oprah Winfrey who have offered up DNA samples, have proliferated in recent years. People typically send in cheek swabs for testing and get the result in the mail a few weeks later. Winfrey was linked to a tribe in Liberia.
Genetic ancestry usually compares someone's DNA to databases of samples from different geographic regions. Bolnick says these tests tend to ignore the way people have moved around over the eons and that many DNA sequences are found in different populations. This is why tests can incorrectly conclude someone has Native American roots when their ancestors actually lived in Asia, she says.
June Wong, an official with Genetrack Biolabs in Vancouver, agrees some ancestry tests are misleading and oversold. She is particularly troubled by the tests that claim to link individuals to specific tribes and regions.
Wong says customers need to be aware the tests' limitations, which are often alluded to on company websites.
Report says web tests can't link you to Genghis Khan
Margaret Munro
CanWest News Service
Friday, October 19, 2007
Ancestral DNA tests can often be misleading and have profound impact on people's lives, warn scientists concerned with the popular "recreational" gene tests.
The tests cannot, as one Canadian company claims, "discover" someone's relation to Mongolian emperor Genghis Khan, says Deborah Bolnick, a genetic anthropologist at University of Texas and lead author of a report on the tests.
Nor can they determine with certainty the origin of someone's ancestors or their race, says the report to be published today in the journal Science.
The tests, which almost half a million consumers have purchased for between $100 and $900 per test, claim to be able to trace people's roots to everything from African tribes to European palaces to Aboriginal bands.
"Using revolutionary DNA analysis, find out how you are related to Marie Antoinette -- one of the most illustrious women in European history," offers Genetrack Biolabs of Vancouver, one of Canada's largest gene testing companies. Genetrack says it can also "discover" your relation to notorious outlaw Jesse James or Genghis Khan and "find out where your ancestors came from, their ethnic background, and how they have scattered throughout the world today."
U.S. companies go even further.
"One simple test can identify your family's country of origin," says African Ancestry. It will even print up a certificate of ancestry to hang on the wall. Another firm, DNAPrint Genomics, says it can determine if someone's genetic heritage is Native American, East Asian, sub-Saharan African or Indo-European.
Bolnick and her colleagues say the tests -- and company websites featuring tribes of people in elaborate face paint and traditional clothing -- are often misleading. And they reinforce the controversial idea that race is genetically determined.
"There is no clear-cut connection between an individual's DNA and his or her racial or ethnic affiliation," say the researchers.
The report goes on to say ancestry tests "cannot pinpoint the place of origin or social affiliation of even one ancestor with exact certainty."
Some of the tests may be a harmless way for some people to spend their money, Bolnick said in an interview from Quebec City, where she is attending a Genome Canada conference. But she and her colleagues say the tests can have a "profound" impact on some lives. "Many people are taking the tests to get answers about their identity and instead end up with an identity crisis," says Bolnick.
Better standards and guidelines are needed to address the growing use of the tests, which might change how people report their race of ethnicity on government forms, college or job applications, Bolnick says.
The tests, promoted with the help of stars like Oprah Winfrey who have offered up DNA samples, have proliferated in recent years. People typically send in cheek swabs for testing and get the result in the mail a few weeks later. Winfrey was linked to a tribe in Liberia.
Genetic ancestry usually compares someone's DNA to databases of samples from different geographic regions. Bolnick says these tests tend to ignore the way people have moved around over the eons and that many DNA sequences are found in different populations. This is why tests can incorrectly conclude someone has Native American roots when their ancestors actually lived in Asia, she says.
June Wong, an official with Genetrack Biolabs in Vancouver, agrees some ancestry tests are misleading and oversold. She is particularly troubled by the tests that claim to link individuals to specific tribes and regions.
Wong says customers need to be aware the tests' limitations, which are often alluded to on company websites.
Canada joins effort to re-create Big Bang
Kent Spencer
CanWest News Service
Sunday, October 21, 2007
It seems fitting that Canada's contribution to an international experiment into the universe's origins would look like a giant hockey puck.
Simon Fraser University physics professor Michel Vetterli said Saturday the 50-country effort will try to determine what makes the universe tick.
"I've always been fascinated taking radios apart," said Vetterli. "This is the ultimate -- taking the universe apart."
Canada's particle detector is made of copper, is five metres in diameter and two metres deep, and is shaped "like a big hockey puck with a hole in the middle," said Vetterli.
It is designed to catch particles smashed together in a $3.5-billion European particle accelerator, which will be switched on in 2008.
The conditions simulated will be close to those that existed during the formation of the universe, sometimes called the Big Bang.
It is hoped analysis will show what the particles are made of and, by extension, how the universe works.
"If you want to understand a car, you study its pieces. If you want to understand matter, you study its pieces," said Vetterli. "It's very exciting. We're expecting to learn an enormous amount."
Scientists don't know what discoveries they will make, but they are shooting high.
Vetterli isn't making predictions, but he said the particle accelerator is the way forward to the kinds of future tech we can only dream about now -- like the fictional matter teleportation technology which featured in the Star Trek TV series.
"We will never 'Beam me up, Scotty' if we don't do this," he said.
Once the puck is in Geneva, Switzerland, it will be set in place in the huge European accelerator. The accelerator shoots tiny invisible particles at close to the speed of light and smashes them together so scientists can study the collisions.
The particles are the same ones that pass unnoticed through a person's body every day as cosmic rays.
The accelerator tunnel, about the size of a subway tunnel, is being assembled in a giant circle stretching 27 kilometres underground.
An ultra-powerful IBM supercomputer at the TRIUMF nuclear research centre in Vancouver -- the second part of Canada's 14-year, $100-million contribution to the project -- will analyze the collision data.
The computer is housed in several closet-sized boxes that wield enormous power packed into very condensed space.
After the particles are rammed together, the reactions can be studied with the help of detectors like the hockey puck to determine their makeup.
"We want to know why mass exists.
"At the moment, all we have are theories," said Vetterli.
Kent Spencer
CanWest News Service
Sunday, October 21, 2007
It seems fitting that Canada's contribution to an international experiment into the universe's origins would look like a giant hockey puck.
Simon Fraser University physics professor Michel Vetterli said Saturday the 50-country effort will try to determine what makes the universe tick.
"I've always been fascinated taking radios apart," said Vetterli. "This is the ultimate -- taking the universe apart."
Canada's particle detector is made of copper, is five metres in diameter and two metres deep, and is shaped "like a big hockey puck with a hole in the middle," said Vetterli.
It is designed to catch particles smashed together in a $3.5-billion European particle accelerator, which will be switched on in 2008.
The conditions simulated will be close to those that existed during the formation of the universe, sometimes called the Big Bang.
It is hoped analysis will show what the particles are made of and, by extension, how the universe works.
"If you want to understand a car, you study its pieces. If you want to understand matter, you study its pieces," said Vetterli. "It's very exciting. We're expecting to learn an enormous amount."
Scientists don't know what discoveries they will make, but they are shooting high.
Vetterli isn't making predictions, but he said the particle accelerator is the way forward to the kinds of future tech we can only dream about now -- like the fictional matter teleportation technology which featured in the Star Trek TV series.
"We will never 'Beam me up, Scotty' if we don't do this," he said.
Once the puck is in Geneva, Switzerland, it will be set in place in the huge European accelerator. The accelerator shoots tiny invisible particles at close to the speed of light and smashes them together so scientists can study the collisions.
The particles are the same ones that pass unnoticed through a person's body every day as cosmic rays.
The accelerator tunnel, about the size of a subway tunnel, is being assembled in a giant circle stretching 27 kilometres underground.
An ultra-powerful IBM supercomputer at the TRIUMF nuclear research centre in Vancouver -- the second part of Canada's 14-year, $100-million contribution to the project -- will analyze the collision data.
The computer is housed in several closet-sized boxes that wield enormous power packed into very condensed space.
After the particles are rammed together, the reactions can be studied with the help of detectors like the hockey puck to determine their makeup.
"We want to know why mass exists.
"At the moment, all we have are theories," said Vetterli.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/opini ... ?th&emc=th
October 26, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
The Outsourced Brain
By DAVID BROOKS
The gurus seek bliss amidst mountaintop solitude and serenity in the meditative trance, but I, grasshopper, have achieved the oneness with the universe that is known as pure externalization.
I have melded my mind with the heavens, communed with the universal consciousness, and experienced the inner calm that externalization brings, and it all started because I bought a car with a G.P.S.
Like many men, I quickly established a romantic attachment to my G.P.S. I found comfort in her tranquil and slightly Anglophilic voice. I felt warm and safe following her thin blue line. More than once I experienced her mercy, for each of my transgressions would be greeted by nothing worse than a gentle, “Make a U-turn if possible.”
After a few weeks, it occurred to me that I could no longer get anywhere without her. Any trip slightly out of the ordinary had me typing the address into her system and then blissfully following her satellite-fed commands. I found that I was quickly shedding all vestiges of geographic knowledge.
It was unnerving at first, but then a relief. Since the dawn of humanity, people have had to worry about how to get from here to there. Precious brainpower has been used storing directions, and memorizing turns. I myself have been trapped at dinner parties at which conversation was devoted exclusively to the topic of commuter routes.
My G.P.S. goddess liberated me from this drudgery. She enabled me to externalize geographic information from my own brain to a satellite brain, and you know how it felt? It felt like nirvana.
Through that experience I discovered the Sacred Order of the External Mind. I realized I could outsource those mental tasks I didn’t want to perform. Life is a math problem, and I had a calculator.
Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.
Musical taste? I have externalized it. Now I just log on to iTunes and it tells me what I like.
I click on its recommendations, sample 30 seconds of each song, and download the ones that appeal. I look on my iPod playlist and realize I’ve never heard of most of the artists I listen to. I was once one of those people with developed opinions about the Ramones, but now I’ve shed all that knowledge and blindly submit to a mishmash of anonymous groups like the Reindeer Section — a disturbing number of which seem to have had their music featured on the soundtrack of “The O.C.”
Memory? I’ve externalized it. I am one of those baby boomers who are making this the “It’s on the Tip of My Tongue Decade.” But now I no longer need to have a memory, for I have Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia. Now if I need to know some fact about the world, I tap a few keys and reap the blessings of the external mind.
Personal information? I’ve externalized it. I’m no longer clear on where I end and my BlackBerry begins. When I want to look up my passwords or contact my friends I just hit a name on my directory. I read in a piece by Clive Thompson in Wired that a third of the people under 30 can’t remember their own phone number. Their smartphones are smart, so they don’t need to be. Today’s young people are forgoing memory before they even have a chance to lose it.
Now, you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.
I have relinquished control over my decisions to the universal mind. I have fused with the knowledge of the cybersphere, and entered the bliss of a higher metaphysic. As John Steinbeck nearly wrote, a fella ain’t got a mind of his own, just a little piece of the big mind — one mind that belongs to everybody. Then it don’t matter, Ma. I’ll be everywhere, around in the dark. Wherever there is a network, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a TiVo machine making a sitcom recommendation based on past preferences, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a Times reader selecting articles based on the most e-mailed list, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way Amazon links purchasing Dostoyevsky to purchasing garden furniture. And when memes are spreading, and humiliation videos are shared on Facebook — I’ll be there, too.
I am one with the external mind. Om.
October 26, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
The Outsourced Brain
By DAVID BROOKS
The gurus seek bliss amidst mountaintop solitude and serenity in the meditative trance, but I, grasshopper, have achieved the oneness with the universe that is known as pure externalization.
I have melded my mind with the heavens, communed with the universal consciousness, and experienced the inner calm that externalization brings, and it all started because I bought a car with a G.P.S.
Like many men, I quickly established a romantic attachment to my G.P.S. I found comfort in her tranquil and slightly Anglophilic voice. I felt warm and safe following her thin blue line. More than once I experienced her mercy, for each of my transgressions would be greeted by nothing worse than a gentle, “Make a U-turn if possible.”
After a few weeks, it occurred to me that I could no longer get anywhere without her. Any trip slightly out of the ordinary had me typing the address into her system and then blissfully following her satellite-fed commands. I found that I was quickly shedding all vestiges of geographic knowledge.
It was unnerving at first, but then a relief. Since the dawn of humanity, people have had to worry about how to get from here to there. Precious brainpower has been used storing directions, and memorizing turns. I myself have been trapped at dinner parties at which conversation was devoted exclusively to the topic of commuter routes.
My G.P.S. goddess liberated me from this drudgery. She enabled me to externalize geographic information from my own brain to a satellite brain, and you know how it felt? It felt like nirvana.
Through that experience I discovered the Sacred Order of the External Mind. I realized I could outsource those mental tasks I didn’t want to perform. Life is a math problem, and I had a calculator.
Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.
Musical taste? I have externalized it. Now I just log on to iTunes and it tells me what I like.
I click on its recommendations, sample 30 seconds of each song, and download the ones that appeal. I look on my iPod playlist and realize I’ve never heard of most of the artists I listen to. I was once one of those people with developed opinions about the Ramones, but now I’ve shed all that knowledge and blindly submit to a mishmash of anonymous groups like the Reindeer Section — a disturbing number of which seem to have had their music featured on the soundtrack of “The O.C.”
Memory? I’ve externalized it. I am one of those baby boomers who are making this the “It’s on the Tip of My Tongue Decade.” But now I no longer need to have a memory, for I have Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia. Now if I need to know some fact about the world, I tap a few keys and reap the blessings of the external mind.
Personal information? I’ve externalized it. I’m no longer clear on where I end and my BlackBerry begins. When I want to look up my passwords or contact my friends I just hit a name on my directory. I read in a piece by Clive Thompson in Wired that a third of the people under 30 can’t remember their own phone number. Their smartphones are smart, so they don’t need to be. Today’s young people are forgoing memory before they even have a chance to lose it.
Now, you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.
I have relinquished control over my decisions to the universal mind. I have fused with the knowledge of the cybersphere, and entered the bliss of a higher metaphysic. As John Steinbeck nearly wrote, a fella ain’t got a mind of his own, just a little piece of the big mind — one mind that belongs to everybody. Then it don’t matter, Ma. I’ll be everywhere, around in the dark. Wherever there is a network, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a TiVo machine making a sitcom recommendation based on past preferences, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a Times reader selecting articles based on the most e-mailed list, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way Amazon links purchasing Dostoyevsky to purchasing garden furniture. And when memes are spreading, and humiliation videos are shared on Facebook — I’ll be there, too.
I am one with the external mind. Om.
October 31, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
If I.T. Merged With E.T.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Ethakota, India
Well, here’s something you don’t see every day. I was visiting an Indian village 350 miles east of Hyderabad and got to watch a very elderly Indian man undergo an EKG in a remote clinic, while a heart specialist, hundreds of miles away in Bangalore, watched via satellite TV and dispensed a diagnosis. This kind of telemedicine is the I.T. revolution at its best. But what struck me most was that just underneath the TV screen, powering the whole endeavor, were 16 car batteries — the E.T., energy technology, revolution, at its worst.
Some 250 million Indians today have cellphones. Many of them are people who make just $2 or $3 a day. More and more are getting access to computers and the Internet, even in villages. But only 85 percent of Indian villages are electrified — and that is being generous, since many still don’t have reliable 24/7 quality power.
If only ... If only we could make a breakthrough in clean, distributed power — an E.T. revolution — it could drive the I.T. revolution into every forgotten corner of the world to create jobs, light up schools and tap the innovative prowess of rural populations, like India’s 700 million villagers. There is a green Edison growing up out here — if only we can give them the light to learn.
To appreciate that potential, look at how much is being done with just car batteries, backup diesel generators and India’s creaky rural electricity grid. I traveled to a cluster of villages with a team from the Byrraju Foundation — a truly impressive nonprofit set up by B. Ramalinga Raju and his family. Raju and his brother Rama are co-founders of one of India’s leading outsourcing companies, Satyam Computer Services. The Hyderabad-based brothers wanted to give back to their country, but they wanted it to be a hand up, not a hand out.
So besides funding health clinics and computer-filled primary schools in villages in their home state of Andhra Pradesh, they tried something new: outsourcing their outsourcing to villages.
Here in Ethakota, amid the banana and palm groves, 120 college-educated villagers, trained in computers and English by Satyam and connected to the world by wireless networks, are processing data for a British publisher and selling services for an Indian phone company. They run two eight-hour shifts, but could run three — if only the electricity didn’t go off for six hours a day!
Talking to the workers at the Ethakota data center — one of three Byrraju has set up — you can see what a merger of I.T. and E.T. could do: enable so many more Indians to live local and act global.
Suresh Varma, 30, one of the data managers, was working for a U.S. oil company in Hyderabad and actually decided to move back to the village where his parents came from. “I have a much higher quality of life here than in an urban area anywhere in India,” he said. “The city is concrete. You spend most of your time in traffic, just getting from one place to another. Here you walk to work. Here I am in touch with what is happening in the cities, but at the same time I don’t miss out on my professional aspirations. ... It is like moving from a Silicon Valley to a real valley.”
Unlike in the city, where outsourcing workers come and go, “in the village, nobody gives up these jobs,” said Verghese Jacob, who heads the Byrraju Foundation, which plans to gradually hand over ownership of the data centers to the villagers. “They are very innovative and positive, and because some of them had never worked on a computer before, their respect for the opportunity is so much more than for a city child who takes it for granted.”
When the world starts getting wired and electrified, you never know who you’ll bump into. In the village of Podagatlapalli, I met Sha Yu, a 22-year-old Chinese graduate of Beijing’s Renmin University and a Byrraju volunteer, teaching rural Indian high school students how to produce their own newspaper on a computer.
“I felt in China people don’t know so much about India, so I thought I want to come and see what is happening here,” she explained. “In rural India, communication is not that developed, so I started a newspaper for the high school. If I can learn something from here, and bring it back, I can give some ideas to the Chinese government. If this rural area can be empowered, it would be an amazing thing for the world.”
Amazing indeed. India’s strained megacities, like Mumbai and Calcutta, can’t keep growing. Mr. Jacob estimates that just one of his rural outsourcing centers creates the equivalent employment and salaries of 400 acres of farm land.
India, in other words, could actually mint more land in the countryside, but it can’t do it off car batteries. It will take a real energy revolution. If only ...
Op-Ed Columnist
If I.T. Merged With E.T.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Ethakota, India
Well, here’s something you don’t see every day. I was visiting an Indian village 350 miles east of Hyderabad and got to watch a very elderly Indian man undergo an EKG in a remote clinic, while a heart specialist, hundreds of miles away in Bangalore, watched via satellite TV and dispensed a diagnosis. This kind of telemedicine is the I.T. revolution at its best. But what struck me most was that just underneath the TV screen, powering the whole endeavor, were 16 car batteries — the E.T., energy technology, revolution, at its worst.
Some 250 million Indians today have cellphones. Many of them are people who make just $2 or $3 a day. More and more are getting access to computers and the Internet, even in villages. But only 85 percent of Indian villages are electrified — and that is being generous, since many still don’t have reliable 24/7 quality power.
If only ... If only we could make a breakthrough in clean, distributed power — an E.T. revolution — it could drive the I.T. revolution into every forgotten corner of the world to create jobs, light up schools and tap the innovative prowess of rural populations, like India’s 700 million villagers. There is a green Edison growing up out here — if only we can give them the light to learn.
To appreciate that potential, look at how much is being done with just car batteries, backup diesel generators and India’s creaky rural electricity grid. I traveled to a cluster of villages with a team from the Byrraju Foundation — a truly impressive nonprofit set up by B. Ramalinga Raju and his family. Raju and his brother Rama are co-founders of one of India’s leading outsourcing companies, Satyam Computer Services. The Hyderabad-based brothers wanted to give back to their country, but they wanted it to be a hand up, not a hand out.
So besides funding health clinics and computer-filled primary schools in villages in their home state of Andhra Pradesh, they tried something new: outsourcing their outsourcing to villages.
Here in Ethakota, amid the banana and palm groves, 120 college-educated villagers, trained in computers and English by Satyam and connected to the world by wireless networks, are processing data for a British publisher and selling services for an Indian phone company. They run two eight-hour shifts, but could run three — if only the electricity didn’t go off for six hours a day!
Talking to the workers at the Ethakota data center — one of three Byrraju has set up — you can see what a merger of I.T. and E.T. could do: enable so many more Indians to live local and act global.
Suresh Varma, 30, one of the data managers, was working for a U.S. oil company in Hyderabad and actually decided to move back to the village where his parents came from. “I have a much higher quality of life here than in an urban area anywhere in India,” he said. “The city is concrete. You spend most of your time in traffic, just getting from one place to another. Here you walk to work. Here I am in touch with what is happening in the cities, but at the same time I don’t miss out on my professional aspirations. ... It is like moving from a Silicon Valley to a real valley.”
Unlike in the city, where outsourcing workers come and go, “in the village, nobody gives up these jobs,” said Verghese Jacob, who heads the Byrraju Foundation, which plans to gradually hand over ownership of the data centers to the villagers. “They are very innovative and positive, and because some of them had never worked on a computer before, their respect for the opportunity is so much more than for a city child who takes it for granted.”
When the world starts getting wired and electrified, you never know who you’ll bump into. In the village of Podagatlapalli, I met Sha Yu, a 22-year-old Chinese graduate of Beijing’s Renmin University and a Byrraju volunteer, teaching rural Indian high school students how to produce their own newspaper on a computer.
“I felt in China people don’t know so much about India, so I thought I want to come and see what is happening here,” she explained. “In rural India, communication is not that developed, so I started a newspaper for the high school. If I can learn something from here, and bring it back, I can give some ideas to the Chinese government. If this rural area can be empowered, it would be an amazing thing for the world.”
Amazing indeed. India’s strained megacities, like Mumbai and Calcutta, can’t keep growing. Mr. Jacob estimates that just one of his rural outsourcing centers creates the equivalent employment and salaries of 400 acres of farm land.
India, in other words, could actually mint more land in the countryside, but it can’t do it off car batteries. It will take a real energy revolution. If only ...
Hologram technology takes to runway, leaving models behind
Reuters
Friday, November 02, 2007
NEW YORK - Finally, coming to New York, a fashion show devoid of skinny models and serious faces -- in fact, the models don't even exist.
U.S. discount retailer Target Corp., known for its innovative marketing, is staging a "model-less" fashion show in Manhattan next week that will feature holograms strutting down a runway in its merchandise instead of size-zero models.
The images, which will appear to be three-dimensional, will show clothes by designers like Isaac Mizrahi and Liz Lange sashaying across a virtual runway.
"This is the first time a fashion show will be completely produced with hologram technology, without models, without a runway and easily accessible to all fashion fans," Target senior vice-president Trish Adams said in a statement.
The show will take place Tuesday and Wednesday in Vanderbilt Hall at Grand Central Terminal.
It will show clothes and accessories from Target's men's, women's, bridal and maternity collections.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Reuters
Friday, November 02, 2007
NEW YORK - Finally, coming to New York, a fashion show devoid of skinny models and serious faces -- in fact, the models don't even exist.
U.S. discount retailer Target Corp., known for its innovative marketing, is staging a "model-less" fashion show in Manhattan next week that will feature holograms strutting down a runway in its merchandise instead of size-zero models.
The images, which will appear to be three-dimensional, will show clothes by designers like Isaac Mizrahi and Liz Lange sashaying across a virtual runway.
"This is the first time a fashion show will be completely produced with hologram technology, without models, without a runway and easily accessible to all fashion fans," Target senior vice-president Trish Adams said in a statement.
The show will take place Tuesday and Wednesday in Vanderbilt Hall at Grand Central Terminal.
It will show clothes and accessories from Target's men's, women's, bridal and maternity collections.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
November 11, 2007
The DNA Age
In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice
By AMY HARMON
When scientists first decoded the human genome in 2000, they were quick to portray it as proof of humankind’s remarkable similarity. The DNA of any two people, they emphasized, is at least 99 percent identical.
But new research is exploring the remaining fraction to explain differences between people of different continental origins.
Scientists, for instance, have recently identified small changes in DNA that account for the pale skin of Europeans, the tendency of Asians to sweat less and West Africans’ resistance to certain diseases.
At the same time, genetic information is slipping out of the laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry tests tell customers what percentage of their genes are from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. The heart-disease drug BiDil is marketed exclusively to African-Americans, who seem genetically predisposed to respond to it. Jews are offered prenatal tests for genetic disorders rarely found in other ethnic groups.
Such developments are providing some of the first tangible benefits of the genetic revolution. Yet some social critics fear they may also be giving long-discredited racial prejudices a new potency. The notion that race is more than skin deep, they fear, could undermine principles of equal treatment and opportunity that have relied on the presumption that we are all fundamentally equal.
“We are living through an era of the ascendance of biology, and we have to be very careful,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. “We will all be walking a fine line between using biology and allowing it to be abused.”
Certain superficial traits like skin pigmentation have long been presumed to be genetic. But the ability to pinpoint their DNA source makes the link between genes and race more palpable. And on mainstream blogs, in college classrooms and among the growing community of ancestry test-takers, it is prompting the question of whether more profound differences may also be attributed to DNA.
Nonscientists are already beginning to stitch together highly speculative conclusions about the historically charged subject of race and intelligence from the new biological data. Last month, a blogger in Manhattan described a recently published study that linked several snippets of DNA to high I.Q. An online genetic database used by medical researchers, he told readers, showed that two of the snippets were found more often in Europeans and Asians than in Africans.
No matter that the link between I.Q. and those particular bits of DNA was unconfirmed, or that other high I.Q. snippets are more common in Africans, or that hundreds or thousands of others may also affect intelligence, or that their combined influence might be dwarfed by environmental factors. Just the existence of such genetic differences between races, proclaimed the author of the Half Sigma blog, a 40-year-old software developer, means “the egalitarian theory,” that all races are equal, “is proven false.”
Though few of the bits of human genetic code that vary between individuals have yet to be tied to physical or behavioral traits, scientists have found that roughly 10 percent of them are more common in certain continental groups and can be used to distinguish people of different races. They say that studying the differences, which arose during the tens of thousands of years that human populations evolved on separate continents after their ancestors dispersed from humanity’s birthplace in East Africa, is crucial to mapping the genetic basis for disease.
But many geneticists, wary of fueling discrimination and worried that speaking openly about race could endanger support for their research, are loath to discuss the social implications of their findings. Still, some acknowledge that as their data and methods are extended to nonmedical traits, the field is at what one leading researcher recently called “a very delicate time, and a dangerous time.”
“There are clear differences between people of different continental ancestries,” said Marcus W. Feldman, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University. “It’s not there yet for things like I.Q., but I can see it coming. And it has the potential to spark a new era of racism if we do not start explaining it better.”
Dr. Feldman said any finding on intelligence was likely to be exceedingly hard to pin down. But given that some may emerge, he said he wanted to create “ready response teams” of geneticists to put such socially fraught discoveries in perspective.
The authority that DNA has earned through its use in freeing falsely convicted inmates, preventing disease and reconstructing family ties leads people to wrongly elevate genetics over other explanations for differences between groups.
“I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life researching how much genetic variability there is between populations,” said Dr. David Altshuler, director of the Program in Medical and Population Genetics at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass. “But living in America, it is so clear that the economic and social and educational differences have so much more influence than genes. People just somehow fixate on genetics, even if the influence is very small.”
But on the Half Sigma blog and elsewhere, the conversation is already flashing forward to what might happen if genetically encoded racial differences in socially desirable — or undesirable — traits are identified.
“If I were to believe the ‘facts’ in this post, what should I do?” one reader responded on Half Sigma. “Should I advocate discrimination against blacks because they are less smart? Should I not hire them to my company because odds are I could find a smarter white person? Stop trying to prove that one group of people are genetically inferior to your group. Just stop.”
Renata McGriff, 52, a health care consultant who had been encouraging black clients to volunteer genetic information to scientists, said she and other African-Americans have lately been discussing “opting out of genetic research until it’s clear we’re not going to use science to validate prejudices.”
“I don’t want the children in my family to be born thinking they are less than someone else based on their DNA,” added Ms. McGriff, of Manhattan.
Such discussions are among thousands that followed the geneticist James D. Watson’s assertion last month that Africans are innately less intelligent than other races. Dr. Watson, a Nobel Prize winner, subsequently apologized and quit his post at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island.
But the incident has added to uneasiness about whether society is prepared to handle the consequences of science that may eventually reveal appreciable differences between races in the genes that influence socially important traits.
New genetic information, some liberal critics say, could become the latest rallying point for a conservative political camp that objects to social policies like affirmative action, as happened with “The Bell Curve,” the controversial 1994 book that examined the relationship between race and I.Q.
Yet even some self-described liberals argue that accepting that there may be genetic differences between races is important in preparing to address them politically.
“Let’s say the genetic data says we’ll have to spend two times as much for every black child to close the achievement gap,” said Jason Malloy, 28, an artist in Madison, Wis., who wrote a defense of Dr. Watson for the widely read science blog Gene Expression. Society, he said, would need to consider how individuals “can be given educational and occupational opportunities that work best for their unique talents and limitations.”
Others hope that the genetic data may overturn preconceived notions of racial superiority by, for example, showing that Africans are innately more intelligent than other groups. But either way, the increased outpouring of conversation on the normally taboo subject of race and genetics has prompted some to suggest that innate differences should be accepted but, at some level, ignored.
“Regardless of any such genetic variation, it is our moral duty to treat all as equal before God and before the law,” Perry Clark, 44, wrote on a New York Times blog. It is not necessary, argued Dr. Clark, a retired neonatologist in Leawood, Kan., who is white, to maintain the pretense that inborn racial differences do not exist.
“When was the last time a nonblack sprinter won the Olympic 100 meters?” he asked.
“To say that such differences aren’t real,” Dr. Clark later said in an interview, “is to stick your head in the sand and go blah blah blah blah blah until the band marches by.”
Race, many sociologists and anthropologists have argued for decades, is a social invention historically used to justify prejudice and persecution. But when Samuel M. Richards gave his students at Pennsylvania State University genetic ancestry tests to establish the imprecision of socially constructed racial categories, he found the exercise reinforced them instead.
One white-skinned student, told she was 9 percent West African, went to a Kwanzaa celebration, for instance, but would not dream of going to an Asian cultural event because her DNA did not match, Dr. Richards said. Preconceived notions of race seemed all the more authentic when quantified by DNA.
“Before, it was, ‘I’m white because I have white skin and grew up in white culture,’ ” Dr. Richards said. “Now it’s, ‘I really know I’m white, so white is this big neon sign hanging over my head.’ It’s like, oh, no, come on. That wasn’t the point.”
Other related articles on DNA can be linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/us/11 ... ?th&emc=th
The DNA Age
In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice
By AMY HARMON
When scientists first decoded the human genome in 2000, they were quick to portray it as proof of humankind’s remarkable similarity. The DNA of any two people, they emphasized, is at least 99 percent identical.
But new research is exploring the remaining fraction to explain differences between people of different continental origins.
Scientists, for instance, have recently identified small changes in DNA that account for the pale skin of Europeans, the tendency of Asians to sweat less and West Africans’ resistance to certain diseases.
At the same time, genetic information is slipping out of the laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry tests tell customers what percentage of their genes are from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. The heart-disease drug BiDil is marketed exclusively to African-Americans, who seem genetically predisposed to respond to it. Jews are offered prenatal tests for genetic disorders rarely found in other ethnic groups.
Such developments are providing some of the first tangible benefits of the genetic revolution. Yet some social critics fear they may also be giving long-discredited racial prejudices a new potency. The notion that race is more than skin deep, they fear, could undermine principles of equal treatment and opportunity that have relied on the presumption that we are all fundamentally equal.
“We are living through an era of the ascendance of biology, and we have to be very careful,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. “We will all be walking a fine line between using biology and allowing it to be abused.”
Certain superficial traits like skin pigmentation have long been presumed to be genetic. But the ability to pinpoint their DNA source makes the link between genes and race more palpable. And on mainstream blogs, in college classrooms and among the growing community of ancestry test-takers, it is prompting the question of whether more profound differences may also be attributed to DNA.
Nonscientists are already beginning to stitch together highly speculative conclusions about the historically charged subject of race and intelligence from the new biological data. Last month, a blogger in Manhattan described a recently published study that linked several snippets of DNA to high I.Q. An online genetic database used by medical researchers, he told readers, showed that two of the snippets were found more often in Europeans and Asians than in Africans.
No matter that the link between I.Q. and those particular bits of DNA was unconfirmed, or that other high I.Q. snippets are more common in Africans, or that hundreds or thousands of others may also affect intelligence, or that their combined influence might be dwarfed by environmental factors. Just the existence of such genetic differences between races, proclaimed the author of the Half Sigma blog, a 40-year-old software developer, means “the egalitarian theory,” that all races are equal, “is proven false.”
Though few of the bits of human genetic code that vary between individuals have yet to be tied to physical or behavioral traits, scientists have found that roughly 10 percent of them are more common in certain continental groups and can be used to distinguish people of different races. They say that studying the differences, which arose during the tens of thousands of years that human populations evolved on separate continents after their ancestors dispersed from humanity’s birthplace in East Africa, is crucial to mapping the genetic basis for disease.
But many geneticists, wary of fueling discrimination and worried that speaking openly about race could endanger support for their research, are loath to discuss the social implications of their findings. Still, some acknowledge that as their data and methods are extended to nonmedical traits, the field is at what one leading researcher recently called “a very delicate time, and a dangerous time.”
“There are clear differences between people of different continental ancestries,” said Marcus W. Feldman, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University. “It’s not there yet for things like I.Q., but I can see it coming. And it has the potential to spark a new era of racism if we do not start explaining it better.”
Dr. Feldman said any finding on intelligence was likely to be exceedingly hard to pin down. But given that some may emerge, he said he wanted to create “ready response teams” of geneticists to put such socially fraught discoveries in perspective.
The authority that DNA has earned through its use in freeing falsely convicted inmates, preventing disease and reconstructing family ties leads people to wrongly elevate genetics over other explanations for differences between groups.
“I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life researching how much genetic variability there is between populations,” said Dr. David Altshuler, director of the Program in Medical and Population Genetics at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass. “But living in America, it is so clear that the economic and social and educational differences have so much more influence than genes. People just somehow fixate on genetics, even if the influence is very small.”
But on the Half Sigma blog and elsewhere, the conversation is already flashing forward to what might happen if genetically encoded racial differences in socially desirable — or undesirable — traits are identified.
“If I were to believe the ‘facts’ in this post, what should I do?” one reader responded on Half Sigma. “Should I advocate discrimination against blacks because they are less smart? Should I not hire them to my company because odds are I could find a smarter white person? Stop trying to prove that one group of people are genetically inferior to your group. Just stop.”
Renata McGriff, 52, a health care consultant who had been encouraging black clients to volunteer genetic information to scientists, said she and other African-Americans have lately been discussing “opting out of genetic research until it’s clear we’re not going to use science to validate prejudices.”
“I don’t want the children in my family to be born thinking they are less than someone else based on their DNA,” added Ms. McGriff, of Manhattan.
Such discussions are among thousands that followed the geneticist James D. Watson’s assertion last month that Africans are innately less intelligent than other races. Dr. Watson, a Nobel Prize winner, subsequently apologized and quit his post at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island.
But the incident has added to uneasiness about whether society is prepared to handle the consequences of science that may eventually reveal appreciable differences between races in the genes that influence socially important traits.
New genetic information, some liberal critics say, could become the latest rallying point for a conservative political camp that objects to social policies like affirmative action, as happened with “The Bell Curve,” the controversial 1994 book that examined the relationship between race and I.Q.
Yet even some self-described liberals argue that accepting that there may be genetic differences between races is important in preparing to address them politically.
“Let’s say the genetic data says we’ll have to spend two times as much for every black child to close the achievement gap,” said Jason Malloy, 28, an artist in Madison, Wis., who wrote a defense of Dr. Watson for the widely read science blog Gene Expression. Society, he said, would need to consider how individuals “can be given educational and occupational opportunities that work best for their unique talents and limitations.”
Others hope that the genetic data may overturn preconceived notions of racial superiority by, for example, showing that Africans are innately more intelligent than other groups. But either way, the increased outpouring of conversation on the normally taboo subject of race and genetics has prompted some to suggest that innate differences should be accepted but, at some level, ignored.
“Regardless of any such genetic variation, it is our moral duty to treat all as equal before God and before the law,” Perry Clark, 44, wrote on a New York Times blog. It is not necessary, argued Dr. Clark, a retired neonatologist in Leawood, Kan., who is white, to maintain the pretense that inborn racial differences do not exist.
“When was the last time a nonblack sprinter won the Olympic 100 meters?” he asked.
“To say that such differences aren’t real,” Dr. Clark later said in an interview, “is to stick your head in the sand and go blah blah blah blah blah until the band marches by.”
Race, many sociologists and anthropologists have argued for decades, is a social invention historically used to justify prejudice and persecution. But when Samuel M. Richards gave his students at Pennsylvania State University genetic ancestry tests to establish the imprecision of socially constructed racial categories, he found the exercise reinforced them instead.
One white-skinned student, told she was 9 percent West African, went to a Kwanzaa celebration, for instance, but would not dream of going to an Asian cultural event because her DNA did not match, Dr. Richards said. Preconceived notions of race seemed all the more authentic when quantified by DNA.
“Before, it was, ‘I’m white because I have white skin and grew up in white culture,’ ” Dr. Richards said. “Now it’s, ‘I really know I’m white, so white is this big neon sign hanging over my head.’ It’s like, oh, no, come on. That wasn’t the point.”
Other related articles on DNA can be linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/us/11 ... ?th&emc=th
102 years on, Einstein's 'time dilation' verified
Tom Spears
CanWest News Service
Monday, November 12, 2007
Chalk up another for Albert Einstein. A Canadian-led physics experiment supports his theory that time slows for objects that travel very fast. And it only took the physics world 102 years to show it.
Einstein was just a youngster when his special theory of relativity predicted something he couldn't actually test: the idea called "time dilation," which says time moves more slowly as you approach the speed of light.
That was in 1905. (His more famous theory, general relativity, came a decade later). Science fiction has been using this weird look at time ever since.
In the science journal Nature Physics, Gerald Gwinner of the University of Manitoba physics department shows how he tested the idea in a lab in Germany, using atoms that speed along at more than 10,000 kilometres per second. That was enough to make the atoms experience time more slowly.
The international team of physicists used a particle accelerator to make the most accurate measurements so far of time dilation, pinpointing the degree of the amount time slows.
Researchers verified Einstein's theory as far back as 1938, to a margin of error of one per cent, but Gwinner's group took it to a new level.
"We have an accuracy now of 10 to the minus seventh, or 10,000 times that."
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Tom Spears
CanWest News Service
Monday, November 12, 2007
Chalk up another for Albert Einstein. A Canadian-led physics experiment supports his theory that time slows for objects that travel very fast. And it only took the physics world 102 years to show it.
Einstein was just a youngster when his special theory of relativity predicted something he couldn't actually test: the idea called "time dilation," which says time moves more slowly as you approach the speed of light.
That was in 1905. (His more famous theory, general relativity, came a decade later). Science fiction has been using this weird look at time ever since.
In the science journal Nature Physics, Gerald Gwinner of the University of Manitoba physics department shows how he tested the idea in a lab in Germany, using atoms that speed along at more than 10,000 kilometres per second. That was enough to make the atoms experience time more slowly.
The international team of physicists used a particle accelerator to make the most accurate measurements so far of time dilation, pinpointing the degree of the amount time slows.
Researchers verified Einstein's theory as far back as 1938, to a margin of error of one per cent, but Gwinner's group took it to a new level.
"We have an accuracy now of 10 to the minus seventh, or 10,000 times that."
© The Calgary Herald 2007
November 16, 2007
Editorial
A Stem Cell Achievement
Scientists in Oregon have successfully cloned monkey embryos from the skin cells of an adult monkey and then extracted stem cells from them — the first time this feat has been achieved in any animal other than mice. The same method might also work in humans, bringing researchers closer to the goal of creating embryonic stem cells to study diseases and ultimately treat them with new drugs or stem cell therapies.
Scientists had previously cloned embryos of other species, but they had never been able to clone a primate — let alone extract primate stem cells. Now researchers at the Oregon Health and Science University have succeeded. They created embryos that were genetically identical to an adult monkey, extracted stem cells from them and grew the stem cells into heart cells and nerve cells that could, theoretically, be used to replace damaged cells.
The most immediate application will be to study diseases in monkeys that closely mimic human diseases, analyze how they develop in a laboratory dish and find ways to treat them. This research is likely to be welcomed by both sides of the battles over stem cells.
Using this technique to make human stem cells will still face daunting technical hurdles. The researchers used more than 300 monkey eggs to produce just one normal stem cell line. The success rate is bound to improve, but it may be difficult to find enough human egg donors to allow the research to move forward rapidly.
The Oregon achievement ought to galvanize Congress to expand the array of embryonic stem cell research that can receive federal financing. This research should not be hobbled by the opposition of President Bush and his backers among religious conservatives, who have severely limited the availability of federal funds. The potential benefits for human health are far too important.
Editorial
A Stem Cell Achievement
Scientists in Oregon have successfully cloned monkey embryos from the skin cells of an adult monkey and then extracted stem cells from them — the first time this feat has been achieved in any animal other than mice. The same method might also work in humans, bringing researchers closer to the goal of creating embryonic stem cells to study diseases and ultimately treat them with new drugs or stem cell therapies.
Scientists had previously cloned embryos of other species, but they had never been able to clone a primate — let alone extract primate stem cells. Now researchers at the Oregon Health and Science University have succeeded. They created embryos that were genetically identical to an adult monkey, extracted stem cells from them and grew the stem cells into heart cells and nerve cells that could, theoretically, be used to replace damaged cells.
The most immediate application will be to study diseases in monkeys that closely mimic human diseases, analyze how they develop in a laboratory dish and find ways to treat them. This research is likely to be welcomed by both sides of the battles over stem cells.
Using this technique to make human stem cells will still face daunting technical hurdles. The researchers used more than 300 monkey eggs to produce just one normal stem cell line. The success rate is bound to improve, but it may be difficult to find enough human egg donors to allow the research to move forward rapidly.
The Oregon achievement ought to galvanize Congress to expand the array of embryonic stem cell research that can receive federal financing. This research should not be hobbled by the opposition of President Bush and his backers among religious conservatives, who have severely limited the availability of federal funds. The potential benefits for human health are far too important.
November 17, 2007
The DNA Age
My Genome, Myself: Seeking Clues in DNA
By AMY HARMON
The exploration of the human genome has long been relegated to elite scientists in research laboratories. But that is about to change. An infant industry is capitalizing on the plunging cost of genetic testing technology to offer any individual unprecedented — and unmediated — entree to their own DNA.
For as little as $1,000 and a saliva sample, customers will be able to learn what is known so far about how the billions of bits in their biological code shape who they are. Three companies have already announced plans to market such services, one yesterday.
Offered the chance to be among the early testers, I agreed, but not without reservations. What if I learned I was likely to die young? Or that I might have passed on a rogue gene to my daughter? And more pragmatically, what if an insurance company or an employer used such information against me in the future?
But three weeks later, I was already somewhat addicted to the daily communion with my genes. (Recurring note to self: was this addiction genetic?)
For example, my hands hurt the other day. So naturally, I checked my DNA.
Was this the first sign that I had inherited the arthritis that gnarled my paternal grandmother’s hard-working fingers? Logging onto my account at 23andMe, the start-up company that is now my genetic custodian, I typed my search into the “Genome Explorer” and hit return. I was, in essence, Googling my own DNA.
I had spent hours every day doing just that as new studies linking bits of DNA to diseases and aspects of appearance, temperament and behavior came out on an almost daily basis. At times, surfing my genome induced the same shock of recognition that comes when accidentally catching a glimpse of oneself in the mirror.
I had refused to drink milk growing up. Now, it turns out my DNA is devoid of the mutation that eases the digestion of milk after infancy, which became common in Europeans after the domestication of cows.
But it could also make me question my presumptions about myself. Apparently I lack the predisposition for good verbal memory, although I had always prided myself on my ability to recall quotations. Should I be recording more of my interviews? No, I decided; I remember what people say. DNA is not definitive.
I don’t like brussels sprouts. Who knew it was genetic? But I have the snippet of DNA that gives me the ability to taste a compound that makes many vegetables taste bitter. I differ from people who are blind to bitter taste — who actually like brussels sprouts — by a single spelling change in our four-letter genetic alphabet: somewhere on human chromosome 7, I have a G where they have a C.
It is one of roughly 10 million tiny differences, known as single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced “snips”) scattered across the 23 pairs of human chromosomes from which 23andMe takes its name. The company generated a list of my “genotypes” — AC’s, CC’s, CT’s and so forth, based on which versions of every SNP I have on my collection of chromosome pairs.
For instance, I tragically lack the predisposition to eat fatty foods and not gain weight. But people who, like me, are GG at the SNP known to geneticists as rs3751812 are 6.3 pounds lighter, on average, than the AA’s. Thanks, rs3751812!
And if an early finding is to be believed, my GG at rs6602024 mean that I am an additional 10 pounds lighter than those whose genetic Boggle served up a different spelling. Good news, except that now I have only my slothful ways to blame for my inability to fit into my old jeans.
And although there is great controversy about the role that genes play in shaping intelligence, it was hard to resist looking up the SNPs that have been linked — however tenuously — to I.Q. Three went in my favor, three against. But I found hope in a study that appeared last week describing a SNP strongly linked with an increase in the I.Q. of breast-fed babies.
Babies with the CC or CG form of the SNP apparently benefit from a fatty acid found only in breast milk, while those with the GG form do not. My CC genotype meant that I had been eligible for the 6-point I.Q. boost when my mother breast-fed me. And because, by the laws of genetics, my daughter had to have inherited one of my C’s, she, too, would see the benefit of my having nursed her. Now where did I put those preschool applications?
I was not always so comfortable in my own genome. Before I spit into the vial, I called several major insurance companies to see if I was hurting my chances of getting coverage. They said no, but that is now, when almost no one has such information about their genetic make-up. In five years, if companies like 23andMe are at all successful, many more people presumably would. And isn’t an individual’s relative risk of disease precisely what insurance companies want to know?
Last month, alone in a room at 23andMe’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., with my password for the first time, I wavered (genetic?) and walked down the hall to get lunch.
Once I looked at my results, I could never turn back. I had prepared for the worst of what I could learn this day. But what if something even worse came along tomorrow?
Some health care providers argue that the public is unprepared for such information and that it is irresponsible to provide it without an expert to help put it in context. And at times, as I worked up the courage to check on my risks of breast cancer and Alzheimer’s, I could see their point.
One of the companies that plans to market personal DNA information, Navigenics, intends to provide a phone consultation with a genetic counselor along with the results. Its service would cost $2,500 and would initially provide data on 20 health conditions.
DeCODE Genetics and 23andMe will offer referrals. Although what they can tell you is limited right now, all three companies are hoping that people will be drawn by the prospect of instant updates on what is expected to be a flood of new findings.
I knew I would never be able to pass up the chance to fill in more pieces of my genetic puzzle.
But I had decided not to submit my daughter’s DNA for testing — at least not yet — because I didn’t want to regard anything about her as predestined. If she wants to play the piano, who cares if she lacks perfect pitch? If she wants to run the 100-meter dash, who cares if she lacks the sprinting gene? And did I really want to know — did she really want to know someday — what genes she got from which parent and which grandparent?
I, however, am not age 3. Whatever was lurking in my genes had been there my entire life. Not looking would be like rejecting some fundamental part of myself.
Compelled to know (genetic?), I breezed through the warning screens on the site. There would be no definitive information, I read, and new discoveries might reverse whatever I was told. Even if I learned that my risk for developing a disease was high, there might well be nothing to do about it, and, besides, I should not regard this as a medical diagnosis. “If, after considering these points, you still wish to view your results,” the screen read, “click here.”
I clicked.
Like other testers of 23andMe’s service, my first impulse was to look up the bits of genetic code associated with the diseases that scare me the most.
But in the bar charts that showed good genes in green and bad ones in red, I found a perverse sense of accomplishment. My risk of breast cancer was no higher than average, as was my chance of developing Alzheimer’s. I was 23 percent less likely to get Type 2 diabetes than most people. And my chance of being paralyzed by multiple sclerosis, almost nil. I was three times more likely than the average person to get Crohn’s disease, but my odds were still less than one in a hundred.
I was in remarkably good genetic health, and I hadn’t even been to the gym in months!
Still, just studying my DNA had made me more acutely aware of the basic health risks we all face. I renounced my midafternoon M&M’s.
And then I opened my “Gene Journal” for heart disease to find that I was 23 percent more likely than average to have a heart attack. “Healthy lifestyle choices play a major role in preventing the blockages that lead to heart attacks,” it informed me.
Thanks, Gene Journal. Yet somehow even this banal advice resonated when the warning came from my own DNA.
Back in New York, I headed to the gym despite a looming story deadline and my daughter’s still-unfinished preschool applications. At least I had more time. I had discovered a SNP that likely increased my life span.
But in what I have come to accept as the genomic law of averages, I soon found that I might well be sight impaired during those extra years. According to the five SNPs for macular degeneration I fed into the “Genome Explorer,” I was nearly 100 times more likely to develop the disease than someone with the most favorable A-C-G-T combination.
And unlike the standard eat-right-and-exercise advice for heart health, there was not much I could do about it. Still, I found the knowledge of my potential future strangely comforting, even when it was not one I would wish for. At least my prospects for nimble fingers in old age were looking brighter. I didn’t have the bad form of that arthritis SNP.
Maybe I was just typing too much.
The DNA Age
My Genome, Myself: Seeking Clues in DNA
By AMY HARMON
The exploration of the human genome has long been relegated to elite scientists in research laboratories. But that is about to change. An infant industry is capitalizing on the plunging cost of genetic testing technology to offer any individual unprecedented — and unmediated — entree to their own DNA.
For as little as $1,000 and a saliva sample, customers will be able to learn what is known so far about how the billions of bits in their biological code shape who they are. Three companies have already announced plans to market such services, one yesterday.
Offered the chance to be among the early testers, I agreed, but not without reservations. What if I learned I was likely to die young? Or that I might have passed on a rogue gene to my daughter? And more pragmatically, what if an insurance company or an employer used such information against me in the future?
But three weeks later, I was already somewhat addicted to the daily communion with my genes. (Recurring note to self: was this addiction genetic?)
For example, my hands hurt the other day. So naturally, I checked my DNA.
Was this the first sign that I had inherited the arthritis that gnarled my paternal grandmother’s hard-working fingers? Logging onto my account at 23andMe, the start-up company that is now my genetic custodian, I typed my search into the “Genome Explorer” and hit return. I was, in essence, Googling my own DNA.
I had spent hours every day doing just that as new studies linking bits of DNA to diseases and aspects of appearance, temperament and behavior came out on an almost daily basis. At times, surfing my genome induced the same shock of recognition that comes when accidentally catching a glimpse of oneself in the mirror.
I had refused to drink milk growing up. Now, it turns out my DNA is devoid of the mutation that eases the digestion of milk after infancy, which became common in Europeans after the domestication of cows.
But it could also make me question my presumptions about myself. Apparently I lack the predisposition for good verbal memory, although I had always prided myself on my ability to recall quotations. Should I be recording more of my interviews? No, I decided; I remember what people say. DNA is not definitive.
I don’t like brussels sprouts. Who knew it was genetic? But I have the snippet of DNA that gives me the ability to taste a compound that makes many vegetables taste bitter. I differ from people who are blind to bitter taste — who actually like brussels sprouts — by a single spelling change in our four-letter genetic alphabet: somewhere on human chromosome 7, I have a G where they have a C.
It is one of roughly 10 million tiny differences, known as single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced “snips”) scattered across the 23 pairs of human chromosomes from which 23andMe takes its name. The company generated a list of my “genotypes” — AC’s, CC’s, CT’s and so forth, based on which versions of every SNP I have on my collection of chromosome pairs.
For instance, I tragically lack the predisposition to eat fatty foods and not gain weight. But people who, like me, are GG at the SNP known to geneticists as rs3751812 are 6.3 pounds lighter, on average, than the AA’s. Thanks, rs3751812!
And if an early finding is to be believed, my GG at rs6602024 mean that I am an additional 10 pounds lighter than those whose genetic Boggle served up a different spelling. Good news, except that now I have only my slothful ways to blame for my inability to fit into my old jeans.
And although there is great controversy about the role that genes play in shaping intelligence, it was hard to resist looking up the SNPs that have been linked — however tenuously — to I.Q. Three went in my favor, three against. But I found hope in a study that appeared last week describing a SNP strongly linked with an increase in the I.Q. of breast-fed babies.
Babies with the CC or CG form of the SNP apparently benefit from a fatty acid found only in breast milk, while those with the GG form do not. My CC genotype meant that I had been eligible for the 6-point I.Q. boost when my mother breast-fed me. And because, by the laws of genetics, my daughter had to have inherited one of my C’s, she, too, would see the benefit of my having nursed her. Now where did I put those preschool applications?
I was not always so comfortable in my own genome. Before I spit into the vial, I called several major insurance companies to see if I was hurting my chances of getting coverage. They said no, but that is now, when almost no one has such information about their genetic make-up. In five years, if companies like 23andMe are at all successful, many more people presumably would. And isn’t an individual’s relative risk of disease precisely what insurance companies want to know?
Last month, alone in a room at 23andMe’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., with my password for the first time, I wavered (genetic?) and walked down the hall to get lunch.
Once I looked at my results, I could never turn back. I had prepared for the worst of what I could learn this day. But what if something even worse came along tomorrow?
Some health care providers argue that the public is unprepared for such information and that it is irresponsible to provide it without an expert to help put it in context. And at times, as I worked up the courage to check on my risks of breast cancer and Alzheimer’s, I could see their point.
One of the companies that plans to market personal DNA information, Navigenics, intends to provide a phone consultation with a genetic counselor along with the results. Its service would cost $2,500 and would initially provide data on 20 health conditions.
DeCODE Genetics and 23andMe will offer referrals. Although what they can tell you is limited right now, all three companies are hoping that people will be drawn by the prospect of instant updates on what is expected to be a flood of new findings.
I knew I would never be able to pass up the chance to fill in more pieces of my genetic puzzle.
But I had decided not to submit my daughter’s DNA for testing — at least not yet — because I didn’t want to regard anything about her as predestined. If she wants to play the piano, who cares if she lacks perfect pitch? If she wants to run the 100-meter dash, who cares if she lacks the sprinting gene? And did I really want to know — did she really want to know someday — what genes she got from which parent and which grandparent?
I, however, am not age 3. Whatever was lurking in my genes had been there my entire life. Not looking would be like rejecting some fundamental part of myself.
Compelled to know (genetic?), I breezed through the warning screens on the site. There would be no definitive information, I read, and new discoveries might reverse whatever I was told. Even if I learned that my risk for developing a disease was high, there might well be nothing to do about it, and, besides, I should not regard this as a medical diagnosis. “If, after considering these points, you still wish to view your results,” the screen read, “click here.”
I clicked.
Like other testers of 23andMe’s service, my first impulse was to look up the bits of genetic code associated with the diseases that scare me the most.
But in the bar charts that showed good genes in green and bad ones in red, I found a perverse sense of accomplishment. My risk of breast cancer was no higher than average, as was my chance of developing Alzheimer’s. I was 23 percent less likely to get Type 2 diabetes than most people. And my chance of being paralyzed by multiple sclerosis, almost nil. I was three times more likely than the average person to get Crohn’s disease, but my odds were still less than one in a hundred.
I was in remarkably good genetic health, and I hadn’t even been to the gym in months!
Still, just studying my DNA had made me more acutely aware of the basic health risks we all face. I renounced my midafternoon M&M’s.
And then I opened my “Gene Journal” for heart disease to find that I was 23 percent more likely than average to have a heart attack. “Healthy lifestyle choices play a major role in preventing the blockages that lead to heart attacks,” it informed me.
Thanks, Gene Journal. Yet somehow even this banal advice resonated when the warning came from my own DNA.
Back in New York, I headed to the gym despite a looming story deadline and my daughter’s still-unfinished preschool applications. At least I had more time. I had discovered a SNP that likely increased my life span.
But in what I have come to accept as the genomic law of averages, I soon found that I might well be sight impaired during those extra years. According to the five SNPs for macular degeneration I fed into the “Genome Explorer,” I was nearly 100 times more likely to develop the disease than someone with the most favorable A-C-G-T combination.
And unlike the standard eat-right-and-exercise advice for heart health, there was not much I could do about it. Still, I found the knowledge of my potential future strangely comforting, even when it was not one I would wish for. At least my prospects for nimble fingers in old age were looking brighter. I didn’t have the bad form of that arthritis SNP.
Maybe I was just typing too much.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/scien ... ?th&emc=th
November 20, 2007
Through Genetics, Tapping a Tree’s Potential as a Source of Energy
By ANDREW POLLACK
It might be true that “only God can make a tree,” as the poet Joyce Kilmer wrote. But genetic engineers can fundamentally redesign them.
Aiming to turn trees into new energy sources, scientists are using a controversial genetic engineering process to change the composition of the wood. A major goal is to reduce the amount of lignin, a chemical compound that interferes with efforts to turn the tree’s cellulose into biofuels like ethanol.
Vincent L. Chiang, co-director of the forest biotechnology group at North Carolina State University, has developed transgenic trees with as little as half the lignin of their natural counterparts. “I think the transgenic tree with low lignin will contribute significantly to energy needs,” he said.
Environmentalists say such work can be risky, because lignin provides trees with structural stiffness and resistance to pests. Even some scientists working on altering wood composition acknowledge that reducing lignin too much could lead to wobbly, vulnerable trees.
“Nature would have selected for lower-lignin trees if they could survive,” said Shawn Mansfield, associate professor of wood science at the University of British Columbia.
People working in the field also acknowledge that they will face resistance from others who see trees as majestic symbols of pristine nature that should not be genetically altered like corn and soybeans.
“The general public is not going to look at trees at this point as a row crop,” said Susan McCord, executive director of the Institute of Forest Biotechnology in Raleigh, N.C. “The same is true of foresters. The people who go into that work, they love trees. They view them very differently than a row of corn.”
Ethanol is mainly made from the starch in corn kernels. To increase the supply to make a dent in the nation’s energy picture, scientists are looking at using cellulose, a component of the cell wall in plants.
Proponents of using trees for this say they are good sources of cellulose and are also good at absorbing carbon dioxide, helping to fight global warming. Also, trees can be cut as needed rather than having to be harvested at a given time each year like a crop.
But the cellulose is covered by lignin, another component of the cell wall, making it difficult for enzymes to reach the cellulose and break it down into simple sugars that can be converted to ethanol. Pulp and paper companies break down lignin using acids and steam. Ethanol producers would have to do the same.
Trees that have less lignin might reduce or eliminate these steps. That could save at least 10 cents a gallon in ethanol costs, said Michael Ladisch, director of the Laboratory of Renewable Resources Engineering at Purdue.
Scientists understand the steps in creating lignin and can make lower-lignin trees by blocking one of them. One way is to put in a reverse copy of a gene that codes for an enzyme in lignin formation. The reverse copy silences that gene and reduces production of that enzyme.
Dr. Chiang said a 50 percent reduction in lignin appeared to be the maximum achievable, adding, “The tree doesn’t allow you to go further.”
The new focus on biofuels has brought a renewed interest in tree biotechnology, and new money for it, from the Energy Department. The field has been languishing because of technical challenges, costs, environmental concerns and financial problems in the forest products industry.
The revival has dismayed critics like Anne Petermann, a leader of the Stop Genetically Engineered Trees Campaign. She said energy concerns were being used “as a really great opportunity to sell this controversial technology to the public.”
Just one company in the United States is known to be pursuing genetic engineering of forest trees vigorously. The company, ArborGen, is small but has some big backers, being jointly owned by three forest products companies: International Paper, MeadWestvaco and Rubicon, based in New Zealand
ArborGen, based in Summerville, S.C., is developing a low-lignin eucalyptus that it hopes to sell in South America, where the fast-growing trees are already used for pulp and paper. For the United States, the company is developing a eucalyptus genetically engineered to survive cold snaps, allowing the trees to be grown more widely.
“In the next 5 to 10 years, you’ll be seeing transgenic trees on the market,” said Maud Hinchee, the chief technology officer at ArborGen.
Two genetically engineered trees are approved by the Agriculture Department, both for crops: papaya trees resistant to the ringspot virus, and plum trees resistant to plum pox virus.
The only known approval of a genetically engineered forest tree has come in China, where insect-resistant poplars have been widely planted.
Genetically modifying forest trees raises questions beyond those of crops. Trees can establish themselves in the wild, while corn would have trouble surviving without a farmer’s tender care.
A biologist, Claire Williams, said the wind could carry pollen from some trees like pines hundreds of miles, making it difficult to prevent a trait like reduced lignin from spreading to wild trees.
Dr. Williams, who works for the State Department but was interviewed while she was working at Duke, said the long life spans of trees made it “almost impossible to evaluate the long-term consequences of transgenic trees.”
Loblolly pine, the main tree the forest industry grows in the Southeast, takes 25 years to go from seed to harvest.
Critics also say transgenic trees would usually be grown on plantations, which, they say, lack the beauty and wildlife of natural forests.
Supporters of transgenic tree research say that because of the long time it takes to grow trees, conventional breeding is difficult.
“The only way to domesticate trees is through genetic engineering,” said Richard Meilan, associate professor of molecular tree physiology at Purdue. He said plantations of fast-growing trees for energy production would reduce the need to cut trees in natural forests. “Let’s domesticate those trees and grow them as commodities and not sacrifice our wild forests,” Dr. Meilan said.
The low-lignin trees, some experts say, have not been tested enough under real field conditions. “To mess with physiology like this, you really need to get out of the laboratory,” said Steven H. Strauss, a professor of forest science at Oregon State University who has conducted field tests of transgenic trees.
The one big field trial of low-lignin trees, conducted over four years in Britain and France, found that they appeared to grow normally and were not more vulnerable to insects, according to a paper published by the investigators in Nature Biotechnology in 2002.
And Jeffrey F. Pedersen, a research geneticist for the Agriculture Department in Lincoln, Neb., found that sorghum with reduced lignin was actually more resistant to a particular fungus than similar varieties with normal levels. He said arresting lignin production could lead to a buildup in the plant of chemical lignin precursors that also have pathogen-fighting properties.
Dr. Chiang of North Carolina State said his trees appeared normal, at least in the greenhouse. He has found that trees that produce less lignin might produce more cellulose, making them even more useful in producing ethanol, pulp or paper without reducing tree strength.
Some field tests are under way outside the United States, Dr. Chiang said, by corporate sponsors of his research who do not want to be identified.
Dr. Hinchee said ArborGen was aiming to reduce lignin 10 percent to 20 percent, to be on the safe side. “It’s not to our advantage to have a tree that’s weak in some other way,” she said.
Rather than reduce lignin, Purdue researchers, working under a $1.4 million three-year grant from the Energy Department, are trying to alter it.
Lignin can be made of two types of alcohols, said Clint Chapple, a biochemist who is working on the project with Professors Meilan and Ladisch. Pulp and paper companies know that one type is easier to remove. By boosting or inactivating various genes, the scientists plan to create trees with different mixes of the two alcohols and test how easy it is to make ethanol.
Dr. Meilan said that after determining an optimal composition, the team hoped to find such trees in the wild that could be reproduced, eliminating the need for genetic engineering.
But it is not certain that can be done. “I believe in the end,” he said, “we will have to rely on genetically engineered trees for our energy plantations.”
November 20, 2007
Through Genetics, Tapping a Tree’s Potential as a Source of Energy
By ANDREW POLLACK
It might be true that “only God can make a tree,” as the poet Joyce Kilmer wrote. But genetic engineers can fundamentally redesign them.
Aiming to turn trees into new energy sources, scientists are using a controversial genetic engineering process to change the composition of the wood. A major goal is to reduce the amount of lignin, a chemical compound that interferes with efforts to turn the tree’s cellulose into biofuels like ethanol.
Vincent L. Chiang, co-director of the forest biotechnology group at North Carolina State University, has developed transgenic trees with as little as half the lignin of their natural counterparts. “I think the transgenic tree with low lignin will contribute significantly to energy needs,” he said.
Environmentalists say such work can be risky, because lignin provides trees with structural stiffness and resistance to pests. Even some scientists working on altering wood composition acknowledge that reducing lignin too much could lead to wobbly, vulnerable trees.
“Nature would have selected for lower-lignin trees if they could survive,” said Shawn Mansfield, associate professor of wood science at the University of British Columbia.
People working in the field also acknowledge that they will face resistance from others who see trees as majestic symbols of pristine nature that should not be genetically altered like corn and soybeans.
“The general public is not going to look at trees at this point as a row crop,” said Susan McCord, executive director of the Institute of Forest Biotechnology in Raleigh, N.C. “The same is true of foresters. The people who go into that work, they love trees. They view them very differently than a row of corn.”
Ethanol is mainly made from the starch in corn kernels. To increase the supply to make a dent in the nation’s energy picture, scientists are looking at using cellulose, a component of the cell wall in plants.
Proponents of using trees for this say they are good sources of cellulose and are also good at absorbing carbon dioxide, helping to fight global warming. Also, trees can be cut as needed rather than having to be harvested at a given time each year like a crop.
But the cellulose is covered by lignin, another component of the cell wall, making it difficult for enzymes to reach the cellulose and break it down into simple sugars that can be converted to ethanol. Pulp and paper companies break down lignin using acids and steam. Ethanol producers would have to do the same.
Trees that have less lignin might reduce or eliminate these steps. That could save at least 10 cents a gallon in ethanol costs, said Michael Ladisch, director of the Laboratory of Renewable Resources Engineering at Purdue.
Scientists understand the steps in creating lignin and can make lower-lignin trees by blocking one of them. One way is to put in a reverse copy of a gene that codes for an enzyme in lignin formation. The reverse copy silences that gene and reduces production of that enzyme.
Dr. Chiang said a 50 percent reduction in lignin appeared to be the maximum achievable, adding, “The tree doesn’t allow you to go further.”
The new focus on biofuels has brought a renewed interest in tree biotechnology, and new money for it, from the Energy Department. The field has been languishing because of technical challenges, costs, environmental concerns and financial problems in the forest products industry.
The revival has dismayed critics like Anne Petermann, a leader of the Stop Genetically Engineered Trees Campaign. She said energy concerns were being used “as a really great opportunity to sell this controversial technology to the public.”
Just one company in the United States is known to be pursuing genetic engineering of forest trees vigorously. The company, ArborGen, is small but has some big backers, being jointly owned by three forest products companies: International Paper, MeadWestvaco and Rubicon, based in New Zealand
ArborGen, based in Summerville, S.C., is developing a low-lignin eucalyptus that it hopes to sell in South America, where the fast-growing trees are already used for pulp and paper. For the United States, the company is developing a eucalyptus genetically engineered to survive cold snaps, allowing the trees to be grown more widely.
“In the next 5 to 10 years, you’ll be seeing transgenic trees on the market,” said Maud Hinchee, the chief technology officer at ArborGen.
Two genetically engineered trees are approved by the Agriculture Department, both for crops: papaya trees resistant to the ringspot virus, and plum trees resistant to plum pox virus.
The only known approval of a genetically engineered forest tree has come in China, where insect-resistant poplars have been widely planted.
Genetically modifying forest trees raises questions beyond those of crops. Trees can establish themselves in the wild, while corn would have trouble surviving without a farmer’s tender care.
A biologist, Claire Williams, said the wind could carry pollen from some trees like pines hundreds of miles, making it difficult to prevent a trait like reduced lignin from spreading to wild trees.
Dr. Williams, who works for the State Department but was interviewed while she was working at Duke, said the long life spans of trees made it “almost impossible to evaluate the long-term consequences of transgenic trees.”
Loblolly pine, the main tree the forest industry grows in the Southeast, takes 25 years to go from seed to harvest.
Critics also say transgenic trees would usually be grown on plantations, which, they say, lack the beauty and wildlife of natural forests.
Supporters of transgenic tree research say that because of the long time it takes to grow trees, conventional breeding is difficult.
“The only way to domesticate trees is through genetic engineering,” said Richard Meilan, associate professor of molecular tree physiology at Purdue. He said plantations of fast-growing trees for energy production would reduce the need to cut trees in natural forests. “Let’s domesticate those trees and grow them as commodities and not sacrifice our wild forests,” Dr. Meilan said.
The low-lignin trees, some experts say, have not been tested enough under real field conditions. “To mess with physiology like this, you really need to get out of the laboratory,” said Steven H. Strauss, a professor of forest science at Oregon State University who has conducted field tests of transgenic trees.
The one big field trial of low-lignin trees, conducted over four years in Britain and France, found that they appeared to grow normally and were not more vulnerable to insects, according to a paper published by the investigators in Nature Biotechnology in 2002.
And Jeffrey F. Pedersen, a research geneticist for the Agriculture Department in Lincoln, Neb., found that sorghum with reduced lignin was actually more resistant to a particular fungus than similar varieties with normal levels. He said arresting lignin production could lead to a buildup in the plant of chemical lignin precursors that also have pathogen-fighting properties.
Dr. Chiang of North Carolina State said his trees appeared normal, at least in the greenhouse. He has found that trees that produce less lignin might produce more cellulose, making them even more useful in producing ethanol, pulp or paper without reducing tree strength.
Some field tests are under way outside the United States, Dr. Chiang said, by corporate sponsors of his research who do not want to be identified.
Dr. Hinchee said ArborGen was aiming to reduce lignin 10 percent to 20 percent, to be on the safe side. “It’s not to our advantage to have a tree that’s weak in some other way,” she said.
Rather than reduce lignin, Purdue researchers, working under a $1.4 million three-year grant from the Energy Department, are trying to alter it.
Lignin can be made of two types of alcohols, said Clint Chapple, a biochemist who is working on the project with Professors Meilan and Ladisch. Pulp and paper companies know that one type is easier to remove. By boosting or inactivating various genes, the scientists plan to create trees with different mixes of the two alcohols and test how easy it is to make ethanol.
Dr. Meilan said that after determining an optimal composition, the team hoped to find such trees in the wild that could be reproduced, eliminating the need for genetic engineering.
But it is not certain that can be done. “I believe in the end,” he said, “we will have to rely on genetically engineered trees for our energy plantations.”
There is a related pictorial representation linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/21/scien ... ref=slogin
November 21, 2007
Scientists Bypass Need for Embryo to Get Stem Cells
By GINA KOLATA
Two teams of scientists reported yesterday that they had turned human skin cells into what appear to be embryonic stem cells without having to make or destroy an embryo — a feat that could quell the ethical debate troubling the field.
All they had to do, the scientists said, was add four genes. The genes reprogrammed the chromosomes of the skin cells, making the cells into blank slates that should be able to turn into any of the 220 cell types of the human body, be it heart, brain, blood or bone. Until now, the only way to get such human universal cells was to pluck them from a human embryo several days after fertilization, destroying the embryo in the process.
The need to destroy embryos has made stem cell research one of the most divisive issues in American politics, pitting President Bush against prominent Republicans like Nancy Reagan, and patient advocates who hoped that stem cells could cure diseases like Alzheimer’s. The new studies could defuse the issue as a presidential election nears.
The reprogrammed skin cells may yet prove to have subtle differences from embryonic stem cells that come directly from human embryos, and the new method includes potentially risky steps, like introducing a cancer gene. But stem cell researchers say they are confident that it will not take long to perfect the method and that today’s drawbacks will prove to be temporary.
Researchers and ethicists not involved in the findings say the work, conducted by independent teams from Japan and Wisconsin, should reshape the stem cell field. At some time in the near future, they said, today’s debate over whether it is morally acceptable to create and destroy human embryos to obtain stem cells should be moot.
“Everyone was waiting for this day to come,” said the Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center. “You should have a solution here that will address the moral objections that have been percolating for years,” he added.
The White House said that Mr. Bush was “very pleased” about the new findings, adding that “By avoiding techniques that destroy life, while vigorously supporting alternative approaches, President Bush is encouraging scientific advancement within ethical boundaries.”
The new method sidesteps other ethical quandaries, creating stem cells that genetically match the donor without having to resort to cloning or the requisite donation of women’s eggs. Genetically matched cells would not be rejected by the immune system if used as replacement tissues for patients. Even more important, scientists say, is that genetically matched cells from patients would enable them to study complex diseases, like Alzheimer’s, in the laboratory.
Until now, the only way most scientists thought such patient-specific stem cells could be made would be to create embryos that were clones of that person and extract their stem cells. Just last week, scientists in Oregon reported that they did this with monkeys, but the prospect of doing such experiments in humans has been ethically fraught.
But with the new method, human cloning for stem cell research, like the creation of human embryos to extract stem cells, may be unnecessary. The new cells in theory might be turned into an embryo, but not by simply implanting them in a womb.
“It really is amazing,” said Dr. Leonard Zon, director of the stem cell program at Children’s Hospital Boston at Harvard Medical School.
And, said Dr. Douglas A. Melton, co-director of the Stem Cell Institute at Harvard University, it is “ethically uncomplicated.”
For all the hopes invested in it over the last decade, embryonic stem cell research has moved slowly, with no cures or major therapeutic discoveries in sight.
The new work could allow the field to vault significant problems, including the shortage of human embryonic stem cells and restrictions on federal financing for such research. Even when scientists have other sources of financing, they report that it is expensive and difficult to find women who will provide eggs for such research.
The new discovery is being published online today in Cell, in a paper by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University and the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease in San Francisco, and in Science, in a paper by James A. Thomson and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Thomson’s work received some federal money.
While both groups used just four genes to reprogram human skin cells, two of the genes used differed from group to group. All the genes in question, though, act in a similar way — they are master regulator genes whose role is to turn other genes on or off.
The reprogrammed cells, the scientists report, appear to behave very much like human embryonic stem cells but were called “induced pluripotent stem cells,” meaning cells that can change into many different types.
“By any means we test them they are the same as embryonic stem cells,” Dr. Thomson says.
He and Dr. Yamanaka caution, though, that they still must confirm that the reprogrammed human skin cells really are the same as stem cells they get from embryos. And while those studies are under way, Dr. Thomson and others say, it would be premature to abandon research with stem cells taken from human embryos.
Another caveat is that, so far, scientists use a type of virus, a retrovirus, to insert the genes into the cells’ chromosomes. Retroviruses slip genes into chromosomes at random, sometimes causing mutations that can make normal cells turn into cancers.
One gene used by the Japanese scientists actually is a cancer gene.
The cancer risk means that the resulting stem cells would not be suitable for replacement cells or tissues for patients with diseases, like diabetes, in which their own cells die. But they would be ideal for the sort of studies that many researchers say are the real promise of this endeavor — studying the causes and treatments of complex diseases.
For example, researchers could make stem cells from a person with a disease like Alzheimer’s and turn the stem cells into nerve cells in a petri dish. Then they might learn what goes awry in the brain and how to prevent or treat the disease.
But even the retrovirus drawback may be temporary, scientists say. Dr. Yamanaka and several other researchers are trying to get the same effect by adding chemicals or using more benign viruses to get the genes into cells. They say they are starting to see success.
“Anyone who is going to suggest that this is just a sideshow and that it won’t work is wrong,” Dr. Melton predicted.
The new discovery was preceded by work in mice. Last year, Dr. Yamanaka published a paper showing that he could add four genes to mouse cells and turn them into mouse embryonic stem cells.
He even completed the ultimate test to show that the resulting stem cells could become any type of mouse cell. He used them to create new mice. Twenty percent of those mice, though, developed cancer, illustrating the risk of using retroviruses and a cancer gene to make cells for replacement parts.
Scientists were electrified by the reprogramming discovery, Dr. Melton said. “Once it worked, I hit my forehead and said, ‘It’s so obvious,’” he said. “But it’s not obvious until it’s done.”
The work set off an international race to repeat the work with human cells.
“Dozens, if not hundreds of labs, have been attempting to do this,” said Dr. George Daley, associate director of the stem cell program at Children’s Hospital.
Ever since the birth of Dolly the sheep in 1996, scientists knew that adult cells could, in theory, turn into embryonic stem cells. But they had no idea how to do it without cloning, the way Dolly was created.
With cloning, researchers put an adult cell’s chromosomes into an unfertilized egg whose genetic material was removed. The egg, by some mysterious process, then does all the work. It reprograms the adult cell’s chromosomes, bringing them back to the state they were in just after the egg was fertilized. A few days later, a ball of stem cells emerges in the embryo, and every cell of the embryo, including its stem cells, is an exact genetic match of the adult.
The abiding questions, though, were: How did the egg reprogram the adult cell’s chromosomes? Would it be possible to reprogram an adult cell without using an egg?
About four years ago, Dr. Yamanaka and Dr. Thomson independently hit upon the same idea. They would search for genes that are being used in an embryonic stem cell that are not being used in an adult cell. Then they would see if those genes would reprogram an adult cell.
Dr. Yamanaka worked with mouse cells, and Dr. Thomson worked with human cells from foreskins.
The researchers found more than 1,000 candidate genes. So both groups took educated guesses, trying to whittle down the genes to the few dozen they thought might be the crucial ones and then asking whether any combinations of those genes could turn a skin cell into a stem cell.
“The number of factors could have been 1 or 10 or 100 or more,” Dr. Yamanaka said in a telephone interview from his laboratory in Japan.
If many genes had been required, the experiments would have failed, Dr. Thomson said, because it would have been impossible to test all the gene combinations.
As soon as Dr. Yamanaka saw that the mouse experiments succeeded, he began trying the same brute force method in human skin cells that he had ordered from a commercial laboratory. Some were face cells from a 36-year-old white woman and others were connective tissue cells from joints of a 69-year-old white man.
Dr. Yamanaka said he thought it would take a few years to find the right genes and the right conditions to make the human experiments work. Feeling the hot breath of competitors on his neck, he was in his laboratory every day for 12 to 14 hours a day, he said.
A few months later, he succeeded.
“We did work very hard,” Dr. Yamanaka said. “But we were very surprised.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/21/scien ... ref=slogin
November 21, 2007
Scientists Bypass Need for Embryo to Get Stem Cells
By GINA KOLATA
Two teams of scientists reported yesterday that they had turned human skin cells into what appear to be embryonic stem cells without having to make or destroy an embryo — a feat that could quell the ethical debate troubling the field.
All they had to do, the scientists said, was add four genes. The genes reprogrammed the chromosomes of the skin cells, making the cells into blank slates that should be able to turn into any of the 220 cell types of the human body, be it heart, brain, blood or bone. Until now, the only way to get such human universal cells was to pluck them from a human embryo several days after fertilization, destroying the embryo in the process.
The need to destroy embryos has made stem cell research one of the most divisive issues in American politics, pitting President Bush against prominent Republicans like Nancy Reagan, and patient advocates who hoped that stem cells could cure diseases like Alzheimer’s. The new studies could defuse the issue as a presidential election nears.
The reprogrammed skin cells may yet prove to have subtle differences from embryonic stem cells that come directly from human embryos, and the new method includes potentially risky steps, like introducing a cancer gene. But stem cell researchers say they are confident that it will not take long to perfect the method and that today’s drawbacks will prove to be temporary.
Researchers and ethicists not involved in the findings say the work, conducted by independent teams from Japan and Wisconsin, should reshape the stem cell field. At some time in the near future, they said, today’s debate over whether it is morally acceptable to create and destroy human embryos to obtain stem cells should be moot.
“Everyone was waiting for this day to come,” said the Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center. “You should have a solution here that will address the moral objections that have been percolating for years,” he added.
The White House said that Mr. Bush was “very pleased” about the new findings, adding that “By avoiding techniques that destroy life, while vigorously supporting alternative approaches, President Bush is encouraging scientific advancement within ethical boundaries.”
The new method sidesteps other ethical quandaries, creating stem cells that genetically match the donor without having to resort to cloning or the requisite donation of women’s eggs. Genetically matched cells would not be rejected by the immune system if used as replacement tissues for patients. Even more important, scientists say, is that genetically matched cells from patients would enable them to study complex diseases, like Alzheimer’s, in the laboratory.
Until now, the only way most scientists thought such patient-specific stem cells could be made would be to create embryos that were clones of that person and extract their stem cells. Just last week, scientists in Oregon reported that they did this with monkeys, but the prospect of doing such experiments in humans has been ethically fraught.
But with the new method, human cloning for stem cell research, like the creation of human embryos to extract stem cells, may be unnecessary. The new cells in theory might be turned into an embryo, but not by simply implanting them in a womb.
“It really is amazing,” said Dr. Leonard Zon, director of the stem cell program at Children’s Hospital Boston at Harvard Medical School.
And, said Dr. Douglas A. Melton, co-director of the Stem Cell Institute at Harvard University, it is “ethically uncomplicated.”
For all the hopes invested in it over the last decade, embryonic stem cell research has moved slowly, with no cures or major therapeutic discoveries in sight.
The new work could allow the field to vault significant problems, including the shortage of human embryonic stem cells and restrictions on federal financing for such research. Even when scientists have other sources of financing, they report that it is expensive and difficult to find women who will provide eggs for such research.
The new discovery is being published online today in Cell, in a paper by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University and the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease in San Francisco, and in Science, in a paper by James A. Thomson and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Thomson’s work received some federal money.
While both groups used just four genes to reprogram human skin cells, two of the genes used differed from group to group. All the genes in question, though, act in a similar way — they are master regulator genes whose role is to turn other genes on or off.
The reprogrammed cells, the scientists report, appear to behave very much like human embryonic stem cells but were called “induced pluripotent stem cells,” meaning cells that can change into many different types.
“By any means we test them they are the same as embryonic stem cells,” Dr. Thomson says.
He and Dr. Yamanaka caution, though, that they still must confirm that the reprogrammed human skin cells really are the same as stem cells they get from embryos. And while those studies are under way, Dr. Thomson and others say, it would be premature to abandon research with stem cells taken from human embryos.
Another caveat is that, so far, scientists use a type of virus, a retrovirus, to insert the genes into the cells’ chromosomes. Retroviruses slip genes into chromosomes at random, sometimes causing mutations that can make normal cells turn into cancers.
One gene used by the Japanese scientists actually is a cancer gene.
The cancer risk means that the resulting stem cells would not be suitable for replacement cells or tissues for patients with diseases, like diabetes, in which their own cells die. But they would be ideal for the sort of studies that many researchers say are the real promise of this endeavor — studying the causes and treatments of complex diseases.
For example, researchers could make stem cells from a person with a disease like Alzheimer’s and turn the stem cells into nerve cells in a petri dish. Then they might learn what goes awry in the brain and how to prevent or treat the disease.
But even the retrovirus drawback may be temporary, scientists say. Dr. Yamanaka and several other researchers are trying to get the same effect by adding chemicals or using more benign viruses to get the genes into cells. They say they are starting to see success.
“Anyone who is going to suggest that this is just a sideshow and that it won’t work is wrong,” Dr. Melton predicted.
The new discovery was preceded by work in mice. Last year, Dr. Yamanaka published a paper showing that he could add four genes to mouse cells and turn them into mouse embryonic stem cells.
He even completed the ultimate test to show that the resulting stem cells could become any type of mouse cell. He used them to create new mice. Twenty percent of those mice, though, developed cancer, illustrating the risk of using retroviruses and a cancer gene to make cells for replacement parts.
Scientists were electrified by the reprogramming discovery, Dr. Melton said. “Once it worked, I hit my forehead and said, ‘It’s so obvious,’” he said. “But it’s not obvious until it’s done.”
The work set off an international race to repeat the work with human cells.
“Dozens, if not hundreds of labs, have been attempting to do this,” said Dr. George Daley, associate director of the stem cell program at Children’s Hospital.
Ever since the birth of Dolly the sheep in 1996, scientists knew that adult cells could, in theory, turn into embryonic stem cells. But they had no idea how to do it without cloning, the way Dolly was created.
With cloning, researchers put an adult cell’s chromosomes into an unfertilized egg whose genetic material was removed. The egg, by some mysterious process, then does all the work. It reprograms the adult cell’s chromosomes, bringing them back to the state they were in just after the egg was fertilized. A few days later, a ball of stem cells emerges in the embryo, and every cell of the embryo, including its stem cells, is an exact genetic match of the adult.
The abiding questions, though, were: How did the egg reprogram the adult cell’s chromosomes? Would it be possible to reprogram an adult cell without using an egg?
About four years ago, Dr. Yamanaka and Dr. Thomson independently hit upon the same idea. They would search for genes that are being used in an embryonic stem cell that are not being used in an adult cell. Then they would see if those genes would reprogram an adult cell.
Dr. Yamanaka worked with mouse cells, and Dr. Thomson worked with human cells from foreskins.
The researchers found more than 1,000 candidate genes. So both groups took educated guesses, trying to whittle down the genes to the few dozen they thought might be the crucial ones and then asking whether any combinations of those genes could turn a skin cell into a stem cell.
“The number of factors could have been 1 or 10 or 100 or more,” Dr. Yamanaka said in a telephone interview from his laboratory in Japan.
If many genes had been required, the experiments would have failed, Dr. Thomson said, because it would have been impossible to test all the gene combinations.
As soon as Dr. Yamanaka saw that the mouse experiments succeeded, he began trying the same brute force method in human skin cells that he had ordered from a commercial laboratory. Some were face cells from a 36-year-old white woman and others were connective tissue cells from joints of a 69-year-old white man.
Dr. Yamanaka said he thought it would take a few years to find the right genes and the right conditions to make the human experiments work. Feeling the hot breath of competitors on his neck, he was in his laboratory every day for 12 to 14 hours a day, he said.
A few months later, he succeeded.
“We did work very hard,” Dr. Yamanaka said. “But we were very surprised.”
Afghans bitten hard by cellphone bug
Kelly Cryderman
From CanWest News Service
Sunday, November 25, 2007
In a country where roads are often impassable, travel is fraught with danger and recent history recalls many Afghans taking the long road to Pakistan just to make a call, the mobile phone is king.
Afghanistan's cellphone networks may be new and terribly unreliable, but they're spreading like wildfire across the country, aiding everyone from women entrepreneurs, to criminal gangs operating in the desert, to regular Afghans who previously couldn't call their relatives.
"It is due to this public call office that I am supporting my family," said Kandahar City resident Qudratullah, 24, who operates a tiny kiosk called a PCO where the many Afghans who can't afford cellphones can pay to make calls.
"I want to be a teacher or a businessman," said Qudratullah, who is able to pay for classes that would put him in Grade 10 in Canada and who, like many Afghans, has only one name.
Across the courtyard from Qudratullah's wooden shack is foodstuff shopkeeper Mohammed Anwer Zarif, who said just a few years ago he had to travel to Kabul, Herat or Pakistan to place his product orders. He said there was no other reliable way to communicate.
Now he can just call his suppliers when he needs a new shipment. "Then quickly they send the stuff," Zarif said.
The telecommunications industry was close to non-existent before the Taliban were overthrown in 2001. But there's room for tremendous growth now: Few land lines exist in Afghanistan and just four million of its 32 million inhabitants are mobile subscribers. "It's right at the heart of our investment promotion," said Omar Zakhilwal, president and CEO of the Afghanistan Investment Support Agency, which licenses and promotes businesses across the country.
There are many challenges, including that many Afghans live in areas without regular electricity to charge their phones. Fuel for the generators running the cellphone towers and hiring the security are expensive.
Still, a company called Etisalat became the fourth service provider in August and there's room for even more competition, Zakhilwal said.
The cellphone industry is growing, he said, because it realizes a quick profit relative to other businesses. Security, moreover, isn't as big a concern as in other sectors. Criminal elements or the Taliban, who regularly battle Canadian Forces in Kandahar province, know they need the cellphone towers that are springing up. "The insurgents in the south, in any part of the country, absolutely rely on the services of the mobile phone," Zakhilwal said. "It's a benefit for everyone, friends or foes."
Large parts of the country, where the central government has little or no control, are still racked with periodic violence. Many foreign companies are leery about doing business in Afghanistan.
But not so much for the mobile industry, Zakhilwal said. Five years ago, there was no investment in the sector, but next year it's poised to hit $1 billion US, he said.
It appears cellphones are also helping women who, six years after the fall of the Taliban, are still much less seen in public than men.
[email protected]
***
The incredible human nose
Reese Halter
Calgary Herald
Sunday, November 25, 2007
CREDIT: Herald Archive, Reuters
Smell was central to human evolution over the last seven million years, protecting us from rotten foods and poisons.
The human nose is miraculous. It is a complex organ of smell. In fact, one per cent of human genes are devoted to olfaction; smell was central to our evolution over the past seven million years.
The main role of smell is to protect humans from decaying foods and poisons. Foods that are indigestible tend to smell woody or musky and are made up of large molecules. Edible foods, on the other hand, have low molecular weights, which can be processed by our digestive enzymes.
The primary role of scent is not about sex.
Interestingly, the exact way the nose works -- that is, the way we smell -- is not fully understood. Scientists know there are receptor neurons continually shooting axons or neutral connecting wires up to the olfactory bulb -- the brain's control centre for smell.
There are at least 1,000 different receptors in the human nose that are able to distinguish between some 10,000 different molecules.
There are 112 known types of atoms. The human nose can detect most scent molecules because they are made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur.
Humans sneeze in order to shed viruses and things trying to get inside us.
When we breathe through our nose, we tend to breathe through only one side of it for a while, then for a while through the other side. The erectile tissue lining our nasal cavity works only one passage at a time. This is called the nasal cycle.
Smell information from the right side of the nasal passage is sent to the left side of the brain and vice versa. Incidentally, when you breathe from the left nasal passage your verbal skills increase significantly.
Women have a better sense of smell than men and it lasts longer. As humans age we experience a loss of smell. Epileptics show considerable smell loss. And loss of smell is one of the first symptoms of the onset of Parkinson's disease.
The loss of the sense of smell is known as anosmia.
An atom is made up of a cloud of electrons frenetically orbiting a hard core of protons and neutrons. All molecules pulse with vibrations. Those vibrations are the result of the electron string holding them together. In essence, molecules act like a musical instrument. Each emits its own unique set of
vibration notes.
Until about 10 years ago, scientists believed that the human nose was able to discern the scent of a molecule based solely from its shape.
In the late 1990s, a biophysicist named Dr. Luca Turin put forward a theory on the way the human nose functions -- it caused quit a buzz in the science community.
Turin used his obsession with perfume to redefine how the human nose functioned. He devised a scale of molecular vibration ranging between 0 and 4,000, or the number of times an electron bounced back and forth as it bonded one atom to another. Within just a few vibrations, a molecule can either smell of shoe leather or rose tea or shrimp shells.
Turin proposed that as the molecules enter the nose, electrons are met by microscopic electrical protein receptors, embedded in nasal flesh, and that the receptor holds the molecule and reads its vibration, not its shape.
Years of experimentation, tens of thousands of smells later and about a decade since the theory was first presented, it's finally starting to be accepted.
The scent of Tide laundry detergent, Clorox bleach, Calvin Klein, Channel, L'Oreal and Miyake all come from six huge corporations: International Flavors and Fragrances, Givaudan Roure, Quest International, Firmenich, Takasago, and Haarmann & Reimer. It is a $20-billion-a-year industry.
Armies of organic chemists create between 500 and 2,000 different new molecules at each company per year. About 20 interesting and strong molecules per company are used each year for a host of new products.
To me there is nothing as remarkable as natural scents of wild forests. My favourite pungent scent comes from the peppermint leaves of colossal montane Eucalyptus delegatensis or woollybutts of the Australian Victorian Alps.
Reese Halter is a conservation biologist. He can be reached through www.DrReese.com
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Kelly Cryderman
From CanWest News Service
Sunday, November 25, 2007
In a country where roads are often impassable, travel is fraught with danger and recent history recalls many Afghans taking the long road to Pakistan just to make a call, the mobile phone is king.
Afghanistan's cellphone networks may be new and terribly unreliable, but they're spreading like wildfire across the country, aiding everyone from women entrepreneurs, to criminal gangs operating in the desert, to regular Afghans who previously couldn't call their relatives.
"It is due to this public call office that I am supporting my family," said Kandahar City resident Qudratullah, 24, who operates a tiny kiosk called a PCO where the many Afghans who can't afford cellphones can pay to make calls.
"I want to be a teacher or a businessman," said Qudratullah, who is able to pay for classes that would put him in Grade 10 in Canada and who, like many Afghans, has only one name.
Across the courtyard from Qudratullah's wooden shack is foodstuff shopkeeper Mohammed Anwer Zarif, who said just a few years ago he had to travel to Kabul, Herat or Pakistan to place his product orders. He said there was no other reliable way to communicate.
Now he can just call his suppliers when he needs a new shipment. "Then quickly they send the stuff," Zarif said.
The telecommunications industry was close to non-existent before the Taliban were overthrown in 2001. But there's room for tremendous growth now: Few land lines exist in Afghanistan and just four million of its 32 million inhabitants are mobile subscribers. "It's right at the heart of our investment promotion," said Omar Zakhilwal, president and CEO of the Afghanistan Investment Support Agency, which licenses and promotes businesses across the country.
There are many challenges, including that many Afghans live in areas without regular electricity to charge their phones. Fuel for the generators running the cellphone towers and hiring the security are expensive.
Still, a company called Etisalat became the fourth service provider in August and there's room for even more competition, Zakhilwal said.
The cellphone industry is growing, he said, because it realizes a quick profit relative to other businesses. Security, moreover, isn't as big a concern as in other sectors. Criminal elements or the Taliban, who regularly battle Canadian Forces in Kandahar province, know they need the cellphone towers that are springing up. "The insurgents in the south, in any part of the country, absolutely rely on the services of the mobile phone," Zakhilwal said. "It's a benefit for everyone, friends or foes."
Large parts of the country, where the central government has little or no control, are still racked with periodic violence. Many foreign companies are leery about doing business in Afghanistan.
But not so much for the mobile industry, Zakhilwal said. Five years ago, there was no investment in the sector, but next year it's poised to hit $1 billion US, he said.
It appears cellphones are also helping women who, six years after the fall of the Taliban, are still much less seen in public than men.
[email protected]
***
The incredible human nose
Reese Halter
Calgary Herald
Sunday, November 25, 2007
CREDIT: Herald Archive, Reuters
Smell was central to human evolution over the last seven million years, protecting us from rotten foods and poisons.
The human nose is miraculous. It is a complex organ of smell. In fact, one per cent of human genes are devoted to olfaction; smell was central to our evolution over the past seven million years.
The main role of smell is to protect humans from decaying foods and poisons. Foods that are indigestible tend to smell woody or musky and are made up of large molecules. Edible foods, on the other hand, have low molecular weights, which can be processed by our digestive enzymes.
The primary role of scent is not about sex.
Interestingly, the exact way the nose works -- that is, the way we smell -- is not fully understood. Scientists know there are receptor neurons continually shooting axons or neutral connecting wires up to the olfactory bulb -- the brain's control centre for smell.
There are at least 1,000 different receptors in the human nose that are able to distinguish between some 10,000 different molecules.
There are 112 known types of atoms. The human nose can detect most scent molecules because they are made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur.
Humans sneeze in order to shed viruses and things trying to get inside us.
When we breathe through our nose, we tend to breathe through only one side of it for a while, then for a while through the other side. The erectile tissue lining our nasal cavity works only one passage at a time. This is called the nasal cycle.
Smell information from the right side of the nasal passage is sent to the left side of the brain and vice versa. Incidentally, when you breathe from the left nasal passage your verbal skills increase significantly.
Women have a better sense of smell than men and it lasts longer. As humans age we experience a loss of smell. Epileptics show considerable smell loss. And loss of smell is one of the first symptoms of the onset of Parkinson's disease.
The loss of the sense of smell is known as anosmia.
An atom is made up of a cloud of electrons frenetically orbiting a hard core of protons and neutrons. All molecules pulse with vibrations. Those vibrations are the result of the electron string holding them together. In essence, molecules act like a musical instrument. Each emits its own unique set of
vibration notes.
Until about 10 years ago, scientists believed that the human nose was able to discern the scent of a molecule based solely from its shape.
In the late 1990s, a biophysicist named Dr. Luca Turin put forward a theory on the way the human nose functions -- it caused quit a buzz in the science community.
Turin used his obsession with perfume to redefine how the human nose functioned. He devised a scale of molecular vibration ranging between 0 and 4,000, or the number of times an electron bounced back and forth as it bonded one atom to another. Within just a few vibrations, a molecule can either smell of shoe leather or rose tea or shrimp shells.
Turin proposed that as the molecules enter the nose, electrons are met by microscopic electrical protein receptors, embedded in nasal flesh, and that the receptor holds the molecule and reads its vibration, not its shape.
Years of experimentation, tens of thousands of smells later and about a decade since the theory was first presented, it's finally starting to be accepted.
The scent of Tide laundry detergent, Clorox bleach, Calvin Klein, Channel, L'Oreal and Miyake all come from six huge corporations: International Flavors and Fragrances, Givaudan Roure, Quest International, Firmenich, Takasago, and Haarmann & Reimer. It is a $20-billion-a-year industry.
Armies of organic chemists create between 500 and 2,000 different new molecules at each company per year. About 20 interesting and strong molecules per company are used each year for a host of new products.
To me there is nothing as remarkable as natural scents of wild forests. My favourite pungent scent comes from the peppermint leaves of colossal montane Eucalyptus delegatensis or woollybutts of the Australian Victorian Alps.
Reese Halter is a conservation biologist. He can be reached through www.DrReese.com
© The Calgary Herald 2007
November 27, 2007
After Stem-Cell Breakthrough, the Work Begins
By ANDREW POLLACK
If stem cell researchers were oil prospectors, it could be said that they struck a gusher last week. But to realize the potential boundless riches they now must figure out how to build refineries, pipelines and gas stations.
Biologists were electrified on Tuesday, when scientists in Japan and Wisconsin reported that they could turn human skin cells into cells that behave like embryonic stem cells, able to grow indefinitely and to potentially turn into any type of tissue in the body.
The discovery, if it holds up, would decisively solve the raw material problem. It should provide an unlimited supply of stem cells without the ethically controversial embryo destruction and the restrictions on federal financing that have impeded work on human embryonic cells.
But scientists still face the challenge of taking that abundant raw material and turning it into useful medical treatments, like replacement tissue for damaged hearts and brains. And that challenge will be roughly as daunting for the new cells as it has been for the embryonic stem cells.
“Even though we have this nice new sources of cells, it doesn’t solve all the downstream problems of getting them into the body in useful form,” said James A. Thomson of the University of Wisconsin, who led one of the teams that developed the stem cell substitutes. Dr. Thomson was also the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells, about a decade ago.
Still, the new discovery should accelerate progress — if only because with the ethical issues seemingly out of the way, more scientists and money will be drawn to the field.
There are two ways that stem cells can lead to treatments for diseases. Making replacement tissues for ailing organs is the direct way. But many scientists say the biggest impact of the new cells will be on the indirect way: using the cells to learn about diseases and then applying that knowledge to develop conventional drugs.
Using the new technique, scientists could take a skin cell from a person with a certain disease and generate stem cells. Those cells could then be turned into other cells, allowing the scientists to look at neurons from a person with Alzheimer’s disease, say, or heart cells from a person with heart failure. And a pharmaceutical company might get an early read on a new Alzheimer’s drug by trying it out on the newly created neurons.
“You cannot really go to a patient and say, ‘I want to study your brain,’” said Dr. Lorenz Studer, who works on neural stem cells at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. “For the first time it gets us access to these cells.”
Some scientists have been trying to make disease-specific embryonic cells by creating a cloned embryo of a person with the disease. But that effort requires women to undergo sometimes risky treatments to donate their eggs.
Some diseased cells, like those from a tumor biopsy, are already available for study, but those are from a person already sick. The new approach would allow scientists to watch the disease as it developed and potentially design drugs not just to treat it but to prevent it.
“This is a whole new way of thinking about how we might investigate human disease,” said Kenneth S. Zaret, program leader for cell and developmental biology at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.
Just this month, Israeli scientists reported in the journal Cell Stem Cell that they had created stem cell lines from embryos donated by families with a history of fragile X syndrome, a disease that leads to mental retardation and is caused by the silencing of a particular gene. Studying the stem cells, they got a better understanding of when and how this silencing occurred.
Still, it is not yet clear how useful this new approach will be. Will a neuron from an Alzheimer’s patient have to sit in a petri dish for 70 years before it becomes diseased? Or, as is the case with some diseases, will the neurons have to interact with other types of cells?
Moreover, scientists already have many tools to figure out causes of disease — imaging systems that can peer into cells, knockout mice, genome studies. But it is not always easy to translate knowledge about a disease into a treatment. And even if it were, it still takes years of testing in animals and people before a drug can reach the market.
The gene responsible for Huntington’s disease was discovered in 1993, but there is still no cure. And the decoding of the human genome, contrary to some early expectations, has not led to a burst of new drugs, at least not yet.
When it comes to the direct approach, creating replacement cells and tissues for transplants, there are many challenges for both cells. Scientists do not envision transplanting embryonic stem cells themselves, either the real ones or the new close imitations, because they could turn into tumors inside the body.
So the idea is to differentiate the stem cells into specific types of cells. Scientists have made progress in creating some cell types, like the dopamine-producing neurons that might treat Parkinson’s disease. Other cell types are proving more difficult, like insulin-producing islet cells to treat diabetes.
The transplanted cells must be very pure, because any remnants of the original stem cells might turn into tumors, said Dr. Steven A. Goldman, a neurologist at the University of Rochester. He and colleagues implanted dopamine-producing neurons derived from human embryonic stem cells into mice with Parkinson’s disease. While their symptoms improved, they all got brain tumors.
Another challenge is to get the cells to hook up correctly with what is already in the body. Scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden injected neural stem cells into rats with spinal cord injuries. The rats’ motor ability improved, but the implant prompted nerve growth in a way that made even a slight touch painful.
Despite the challenges, two biotechnology companies hope next year to begin the first clinical trials of therapies derived from human embryonic stem cells. Geron plans to test a type of neural cell as a treatment for spinal cord injuries, and Advanced Cell Technology wants to plant retinal epithelium cells into the eye to treat retina diseases.
The new cells have a big strike against them. They were made by inserting four genes into skin cells, causing the cells to revert back to a blank slate.
But the viruses used to carry the genes into the cells incorporate themselves into the cells’ DNA at random places, potentially causing mutations and cancers. And one of the genes used by the Japanese team is known to cause cancer.
The Food and Drug Administration “would never allow us to use those virally modified cells in patients,” said Dr. Robert Lanza, the chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology.
Scientists are exploring ways to reprogram the skin cells without those viruses. But any genetically engineered cell is likely to face scrutiny from the drug agency.
On the other hand, the new cells have one advantage over the embryonic cells. Stem cells can be derived from a patient’s own skin cells, so tissue made from those stem cells would not be rejected by the immune system. Trying to do that with embryonic stem cells would require cloning.
Another possible advantage could be fewer intellectual property restrictions. Some scientists working with embryonic stem cells say their work has been encumbered by the requirement to get a license from the patent holder, the University of Wisconsin.
Wisconsin is applying for patent protection on the new technique but does not intend to require academic scientists to get a license.
“They can do it in their own lab,” said Carl E. Gulbrandsen, the managing director of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the university’s patenting arm. “They don’t have to tell me about it, and I don’t really have to know.”
Despite all the remaining challenges, scientists say there is no denying the magnitude of the advance made last week. “It’s exciting, it’s seminal, it’s major — quite frankly I think it’s potentially Nobel-level,” said Dr. Kenneth R. Chien, director of the cardiovascular disease program at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. “But there’s still a lot more work to do.”
After Stem-Cell Breakthrough, the Work Begins
By ANDREW POLLACK
If stem cell researchers were oil prospectors, it could be said that they struck a gusher last week. But to realize the potential boundless riches they now must figure out how to build refineries, pipelines and gas stations.
Biologists were electrified on Tuesday, when scientists in Japan and Wisconsin reported that they could turn human skin cells into cells that behave like embryonic stem cells, able to grow indefinitely and to potentially turn into any type of tissue in the body.
The discovery, if it holds up, would decisively solve the raw material problem. It should provide an unlimited supply of stem cells without the ethically controversial embryo destruction and the restrictions on federal financing that have impeded work on human embryonic cells.
But scientists still face the challenge of taking that abundant raw material and turning it into useful medical treatments, like replacement tissue for damaged hearts and brains. And that challenge will be roughly as daunting for the new cells as it has been for the embryonic stem cells.
“Even though we have this nice new sources of cells, it doesn’t solve all the downstream problems of getting them into the body in useful form,” said James A. Thomson of the University of Wisconsin, who led one of the teams that developed the stem cell substitutes. Dr. Thomson was also the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells, about a decade ago.
Still, the new discovery should accelerate progress — if only because with the ethical issues seemingly out of the way, more scientists and money will be drawn to the field.
There are two ways that stem cells can lead to treatments for diseases. Making replacement tissues for ailing organs is the direct way. But many scientists say the biggest impact of the new cells will be on the indirect way: using the cells to learn about diseases and then applying that knowledge to develop conventional drugs.
Using the new technique, scientists could take a skin cell from a person with a certain disease and generate stem cells. Those cells could then be turned into other cells, allowing the scientists to look at neurons from a person with Alzheimer’s disease, say, or heart cells from a person with heart failure. And a pharmaceutical company might get an early read on a new Alzheimer’s drug by trying it out on the newly created neurons.
“You cannot really go to a patient and say, ‘I want to study your brain,’” said Dr. Lorenz Studer, who works on neural stem cells at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. “For the first time it gets us access to these cells.”
Some scientists have been trying to make disease-specific embryonic cells by creating a cloned embryo of a person with the disease. But that effort requires women to undergo sometimes risky treatments to donate their eggs.
Some diseased cells, like those from a tumor biopsy, are already available for study, but those are from a person already sick. The new approach would allow scientists to watch the disease as it developed and potentially design drugs not just to treat it but to prevent it.
“This is a whole new way of thinking about how we might investigate human disease,” said Kenneth S. Zaret, program leader for cell and developmental biology at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.
Just this month, Israeli scientists reported in the journal Cell Stem Cell that they had created stem cell lines from embryos donated by families with a history of fragile X syndrome, a disease that leads to mental retardation and is caused by the silencing of a particular gene. Studying the stem cells, they got a better understanding of when and how this silencing occurred.
Still, it is not yet clear how useful this new approach will be. Will a neuron from an Alzheimer’s patient have to sit in a petri dish for 70 years before it becomes diseased? Or, as is the case with some diseases, will the neurons have to interact with other types of cells?
Moreover, scientists already have many tools to figure out causes of disease — imaging systems that can peer into cells, knockout mice, genome studies. But it is not always easy to translate knowledge about a disease into a treatment. And even if it were, it still takes years of testing in animals and people before a drug can reach the market.
The gene responsible for Huntington’s disease was discovered in 1993, but there is still no cure. And the decoding of the human genome, contrary to some early expectations, has not led to a burst of new drugs, at least not yet.
When it comes to the direct approach, creating replacement cells and tissues for transplants, there are many challenges for both cells. Scientists do not envision transplanting embryonic stem cells themselves, either the real ones or the new close imitations, because they could turn into tumors inside the body.
So the idea is to differentiate the stem cells into specific types of cells. Scientists have made progress in creating some cell types, like the dopamine-producing neurons that might treat Parkinson’s disease. Other cell types are proving more difficult, like insulin-producing islet cells to treat diabetes.
The transplanted cells must be very pure, because any remnants of the original stem cells might turn into tumors, said Dr. Steven A. Goldman, a neurologist at the University of Rochester. He and colleagues implanted dopamine-producing neurons derived from human embryonic stem cells into mice with Parkinson’s disease. While their symptoms improved, they all got brain tumors.
Another challenge is to get the cells to hook up correctly with what is already in the body. Scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden injected neural stem cells into rats with spinal cord injuries. The rats’ motor ability improved, but the implant prompted nerve growth in a way that made even a slight touch painful.
Despite the challenges, two biotechnology companies hope next year to begin the first clinical trials of therapies derived from human embryonic stem cells. Geron plans to test a type of neural cell as a treatment for spinal cord injuries, and Advanced Cell Technology wants to plant retinal epithelium cells into the eye to treat retina diseases.
The new cells have a big strike against them. They were made by inserting four genes into skin cells, causing the cells to revert back to a blank slate.
But the viruses used to carry the genes into the cells incorporate themselves into the cells’ DNA at random places, potentially causing mutations and cancers. And one of the genes used by the Japanese team is known to cause cancer.
The Food and Drug Administration “would never allow us to use those virally modified cells in patients,” said Dr. Robert Lanza, the chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology.
Scientists are exploring ways to reprogram the skin cells without those viruses. But any genetically engineered cell is likely to face scrutiny from the drug agency.
On the other hand, the new cells have one advantage over the embryonic cells. Stem cells can be derived from a patient’s own skin cells, so tissue made from those stem cells would not be rejected by the immune system. Trying to do that with embryonic stem cells would require cloning.
Another possible advantage could be fewer intellectual property restrictions. Some scientists working with embryonic stem cells say their work has been encumbered by the requirement to get a license from the patent holder, the University of Wisconsin.
Wisconsin is applying for patent protection on the new technique but does not intend to require academic scientists to get a license.
“They can do it in their own lab,” said Carl E. Gulbrandsen, the managing director of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the university’s patenting arm. “They don’t have to tell me about it, and I don’t really have to know.”
Despite all the remaining challenges, scientists say there is no denying the magnitude of the advance made last week. “It’s exciting, it’s seminal, it’s major — quite frankly I think it’s potentially Nobel-level,” said Dr. Kenneth R. Chien, director of the cardiovascular disease program at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. “But there’s still a lot more work to do.”