The Daily Brief

Some interesting developments in stem cell research:

The technique uses laboratory-grown human embryonic stem cells — such as the ones that President Bush has already approved for use by federally funded researchers — to “reprogram” the genes in a person’s skin cell, turning that skin cell into an embryonic stem cell itself.

The approach — details of which are to be published this week in the journal Science but were made public on the journal’s Web site yesterday — is still in an early stage of development. But if further studies confirm its usefulness, it could offer an end run around the heated social and religious debate that has for years overshadowed the field of human embryonic stem cell research.

Since the new stem cells in this technique are essentially rejuvenated versions of a person’s own skin cells, the DNA in those new stem cells matches the DNA of the person who provided the skin cells. In theory at least, that means that any tissues grown from those newly minted stem cells could be transplanted into the person to treat a disease without much risk that they would be rejected, because they would constitute an exact genetic match.

All fanciful speculation about a fountain of youth aside, this is exciting enough on its own.

Hat Tip: InstaPundit

I was watching Robert George, of the President’s Council on Bioethics, talk about this on C-SPAN this morning, and they had a nice graphic. I will try to find it, and post it as an update:

Now scientists are exploring methods for resetting the genetic switches inside various cells to the positions that will make them embryonic again. Both of the two major approaches now under study use existing embryonic stem cells (widely available from previously destroyed embryos and eligible for study using federal funds) to help ordinary cells become stem cells.

In one approach pioneered by Robert Lanza and colleagues at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass., researchers pluck single cells from eight-cell embryos — embryos so young they do not have stem cells yet.

Fertility doctors have known for years that early embryos seem unfazed by the removal of any one of their eight virtually identical cells, called blastomeres. In fact, it is common today to remove a single, representative blastomere from a laboratory-conceived embryo and test that cell for disease genes before deciding whether to transfer that embryo into a woman’s womb.

Working with early mouse embryos, the team has found that single blastomeres, when cultivated in dishes with embryonic stem cells, can become what appear to be embryonic stem cells themselves. Chemicals secreted by the embryonic cells apparently flip the right genetic switches in the blastomeres to make them act “stemmy.”

About a quarter to one-third of blastomeres treated this way can be coaxed to become embryonic stem cells or closely related embryo cells, said Lanza, who declined to release specific data pending publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

I would recommend catching this segment, when it’s up on C-SPAN’s website. Professor George strikes me as one of the more reasonable and pragmatic members of the bioethics panel.

This from BusinessWeek:

On June 6, a team of scientists will release results of a study that they believe could usher in a whole new way of treating heart disease. At a meeting for cardiologists, a surgeon from Lenox Hill Hospital in New York will describe what happened when stem cells taken from fetuses were injected into the hearts of 10 patients.

The patients in the study suffer from heart failure, a debilitating and as-yet incurable disease that afflicts 500,000 Americans. The data from the study can’t be unveiled quite yet, but Barnett Suskind, CEO of the Institute of Regenerative Medicine in Barbados, believes the results will “compel us to move forward with additional work.” Suskind, whose company provided funding for the study, says, “It’s absolutely a milestone.”

FRIENDLIER CLIMATE. Many more studies will have to be done before this treatment is anywhere near marketable. Still, Suskind’s enthusiasm underscores the growing interest in a controversial but therapeutically promising type of stem cell. So-called fetal-derived stem cells, such as those used in the recent heart study, aren’t subject to the same restrictions that limit federal funding for research on embryonic stem cells. But because fetal cells are taken from aborted fetuses, they conjure up much of the emotion that has characterized the current debate in Washington. Critics of stem-cell research, in short, oppose any such research that they believe it requires the destruction of human life.

Read the whole thing.

I thought I could eat fast. But I don’t hold a candle to the Star-Nosed Mole:

The star-nosed mole gives a whole new meaning to the term “fast food.”

A study published this week in the journal Nature reveals that this mysterious mole has moves that can put the best magician to shame: The energetic burrower can detect small prey animals and gulp them down with a speed that is literally too fast for the human eye to follow.

It takes a car driver about 650 milliseconds to hit the brake after seeing the traffic light ahead turn red. The star-nosed mole, operating in the Stygian darkness of its burrow, can detect the presence of a tasty tidbit, such as an insect larva or tiny worm, determine that it is edible and gulp it down in half that time.

“Most predators take times ranging from minutes to seconds to handle their prey,” says Kenneth C. Catania, assistant professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt, who conducted the study. “The only things I’ve found that come even close are some species of fish,” he says.

Perhaps I could enter one in next year’s Philidelphia Wing Bowl. 🙂

TNR’s Martin Peretz is on Summers’ side:

No one serious has called Summers a sexist. (Not even Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at MIT, who said that, if she hadn’t walked out, she would have fainted or barfed.) Which is appropriate, since sexism had nothing to do with his controversial statements. What led him to wonder whether there might be small genetic variations between men and women in quantitative capacity, I suspect, was his genuine surprise that women have not risen in the fields of physics, engineering, and mathematics as fast as he thinks they could and should. He isn’t in the least bit oblivious to the lingering prejudices against women in the academy. (After all, his mother is a retired professor of public policy at the Wharton School of Business and his “significant other,” Elisa New, is a professor of English at Harvard and a valued contributor to THE NEW REPUBLIC.)

Summers’s “problem” is that he submits every argument with a grain of evidence behind it to serious and scrupulous scrutiny. And this scares our supposedly daring academic culture, which lives in fear of what it refuses to know. As yet another of Curie’s biographers suggested, “She had survived because she had made men believe that they were not just dealing with an equal, but with an insensitive equal.” Summers knows that the age of such painful self-denial is gone, and good riddance. Still, the academy is the academy; it is not a community center. Students ought to know more than they do, and it is on Summers’s agenda that they will. No American university has yet truly grasped how the revelations of science touch on history and art, philosophy and poetry, and it is on Summers’s agenda that at least Harvard will try. In all this, he imperils the unexamined orthodoxies of the ensconced. And now, his enemies see a chance to counterattack. Let’s hope they fail and he succeeds.

I take Summers’ side as well. There exists precious little research on the matter. But, as John Stossel shows, what exists suggests strongly that, over the general population, there are indeed congenital cognative differences between the sexes:

Some scientists have already done research on gender differences. There was a study at the University of Rochester in New York, for example, where men and women were blindfolded and guided through tunnels under the campus. They were then asked to say where a particular building was. Men typically gave directions. Women typically couldn’t.

For a study at York University in Toronto, Ont., students were asked to wait in a cluttered room and then were asked elsewhere about its contents. Women typically gave detailed answers. Men typically couldn’t.

Even newborn boys and girls behave differently. June Reinisch, a psychologist and former director of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, says differences can be seen even in the first 72 hours of life: “Males startle more than females. If you give a little puff of air on their abdomen, they startle much bigger and (are) much more likely to startle than females, and females rhythmically mouth, they suck on their tongues, they move their lips and so forth, more than males do.” Is anyone going to tell me that 3-day-old infants have already been taught to conform to society’s preconceived gender roles?

But so little research exists because, since the “women’s movement”, the very consideration of such a proposition has been taboo.

Discover magazine has published their list of 100 Top Science Stories of 2004. Many of them I find quite exciting:

2. SpaceShipOne Opens Private Rocket Era
19. Two New Elements Discovered
36. New State of Matter Could Lead to Practical Superconductors
65. Black Holes Revealed As Forces of Creation
82. Astronomers Measure Cosmos Width: 156 Billion Light-Years
83. Atomic Clock Shrunk

Of course, their top one I don’t. Neither does Richard A. Galen:

“Evidence of global warming became so overwhelming in 2004 that now the question is: What can we do about it?”

* Deep in the article, Discover points out that Swiss researchers claim the summer of 2003 was “the hottest in Europe since 1500.”

* Wait. What? Since 1500? What was going on in 1500? Were oxen — the SUVs of the age — belching greenhouse gasses at an alarming rate? The Renaissance was in full bloom, but did Leonardo da Vinci code for global warming?

* Maybe there’s nothing we can — or need to — do. In the 42nd -biggest science story of the year, the Discover magazine editors, without any sense of irony, write that 620 million years ago, “the global Marinoan glaciation — a great environmental calamity … entombed the planet in ice for several million years.”

* A major shift in weather that apparently occurred without the interference of human — or almost any other type of — beings.

* The 77th-biggest scientific scoop of the year was that the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago caused a “nuclear winter” which allowed the land to begin warming after about five years but which kept deep ocean temperatures well below normal for “another two millennia.”

* If that is the case, then NASA’s recent announcement that an asteroid measuring a bit more than a quarter mile across might collide with the Earth on April 13, 2029, would repair whatever atmospheric damage the Mullmobile has been doing for the past five years.

* Last one: The 95th most important science story of 2004, according to Discover Mag, holds that 30,000 years ago, humans arrived in North America over a land bridge from Siberia which existed “before glaciers closed off the route at the height of the last ice age.”

* No global warming 30,000 years ago, no casinos on Indian reservations in 2004.

* See the pattern emerging here? Cold weather — bad. Warm weather — good.

* One of the few things former Vice President Al Gore and I agreed upon was whether or not there is global warming. We parted company in that I think global warming is a good thing. I don’t like cold weather. Most people don’t like cold weather.

* It’s why they made Florida.

As well as science projects, this competition may be right up your alley:

Enthusiasts on Friday unveiled an effort to establish an annual competition for space-elevator technologies, taking a page from the playbook for other high-tech contests such as the $10 million Ansari X Prize.

Many of the details surrounding the “Elevator:2010” challenge — including financing — still have to be fleshed out, however.

The project, spearheaded by the California-based Spaceward Foundation, would focus on innovations in fields that could open the way for payloads to be lifted into space by light-powered platforms. Such platforms, also known as climbers, would move up and down superstrong ribbons rising as high as 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) above Earth’s surface.

From fiction to fact
The space elevator concept goes back to vintage science fiction — with emphasis on the “fiction.” But in the past couple of years, researchers at institutions such as Los Alamos National Laboratory and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center have been looking into ways to turn the idea into reality.

‘We firmly believe that the set of technologies that underlie the infinite promise of the space elevator can be demonstrated, or proven infeasible, within a five-year time frame.’

If space elevators could actually be built, the cost of sending payloads into space could be reduced from $10,000 or more per pound (455 grams) to $100 or less — opening up a revolutionary route to the final frontier. Like the X Prize for private spaceflight, Elevator:2010 is aimed at jump-starting the revolution.

“We firmly believe that the set of technologies that underlie the infinite promise of the space elevator can be demonstrated, or proven infeasible, within a five-year time frame,” the Web site for the competition declares. “And hence our name. Elevator:2010. We promise to get an answer for you by then.”

In order to work, the elevator’s ribbons would have to be made of materials stronger than any that exist today; carbon nanotube composites are the current favorites. Conventional rockets would launch components of the elevator, which would be anchored to an Earth station to form a bridge to outer space.

Most of the current schemes call for the climbers to be powered by sunlight and/or intense artificial light focused onto photoelectric cells. The climbers would ride on the ribbons like rail cars.

Enlisting student teams
Elevator:2010 seeks to encourage technology development through annual contests that start small: One contest would pit climber prototypes against each other in races up a roughly 200-foot (60-meter) ribbon. A second contest would focus on developing better materials for the ribbons, and a third would encourage construction of power-beaming systems.

The first competition is tentatively scheduled for next June or July in the San Francisco Bay area, said Ben Shelef, a member of the Elevator:2010 team. That time frame would give student teams at universities enough time to build light-powered climbers — just as teams of engineering students build solar-powered vehicles during the school year for the American Solar Challenge.

“We’ve gotten feedback from the universities, so we know it’s feasible,” Shelef said. “It’s the same thing as the solar cars, but on steroids.”

The fastest-moving climber would earn its team a $50,000 prize, with a $20,000 second prize and a $10,000 third prize. The strongest ribbon would win a $10,000 first prize, and the best power-beaming system could win $10,000.

Details of the ribbon and power-beaming competitions have yet to be fleshed out, and the financial foundation of the entire challenge depends on sponsorships yet to be announced. The Silicon Valley mechanical design company where Shelef works, Gizmonics Inc., is listed as an initial sponsor.

Actually, if anyone is interested in talking to me about collaborating on this project, I have some ideas.

Hat Tip: Instapundit.