You have an excellent supply of stem cells right behind your eye

As we age, vision problems are unavoidable. Age-related macular degeneration breaks down a thin layer of cells in the back of your eye — the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) — on the way to causing vision loss.

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Bizarre case of the woman who says she went from age 23 to 73 in 'a few days'

These pictures may look like an attractive woman in her 20s and her grandmother.
But they are said to be the same person – apparently taken just days apart.
The young Vietnamese woman at the centre of the improbable medical case, Nguyen Thi Phuong, claims the transformation may have come about because of an extreme allergy to seafood.
Nguyen, 26, says she developed this puffy face and sagging skin in 2008 but was too poor to seek treatment. Earlier this month, doctors said they would examine her free of charge.
Nguyen’s husband, carpenter Thanh Tuyen, insists the story is true and his love has not faded for his once-beautiful wife.

Rapid ageing: A mystery condition has apparently   caused Nguyen Thi Phuong's face to sag and wrinkle over a matter of day.

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Here are some I made earlier (Image: Susumu Nishinaga)

FOR the first time viable mouse sperm have been grown outside the testes. If the technique can be repeated with human sperm, it could lead to new ways of treating infertile men.

Takuya Sato at Yokohama City University in Japan and colleagues extracted germ cells from the testes of newborn mice that had not yet begun producing sperm. They placed the cells in agarose gel soaked in nourishing chemicals and hormones such as fetal bovine serum and testosterone. The team had first engineered the mice so that a protein only present in fully grown sperm would fluoresce green. Sure enough, around one month later, the team spotted the glowing protein in nearly half of their samples.

Sato's team then fused the sperm with eggs from female mice and created healthy embryos. When these embryos were implanted into females they produced healthy offspring which were able to mate and give birth to their own pups.

The team also confirmed that the testes tissue could be frozen and thawed without damage (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature09850).

"People have been trying to do this for years, but it takes an awful lot of trial and error," says Erwin Goldberg, a cell biologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, who was not involved in the study. The key to the team's success, Goldberg says, was patience: they kept mixing chemicals in the lab until they found exactly the right recipe to keep testes cells alive in a petri dish and satisfy all their nutritional requirements.

Earlier studies using different methods achieved similar, but less promising results. In 2006, Karim Nayernia at the University of Newcastle, UK, transformed stem cells from mouse embryos into sperm cells but most of the offspring died prematurely.

If researchers could convert germ cells from an infertile man into sperm cells, they might be able to pinpoint exactly where something goes wrong in the sperm's development and fix it, says Martin Dym, a reproductive biologist at Georgetown University in Washington DC.

The technique could also help prepubescent boys with cancer, who are not yet producing mature sperm, by growing sperm cells that can be frozen before radiation therapy.

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Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman:How Did We Get Here

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5
Everywhere we look, life exists in both the most hospitable of environments and in the most extreme. Yet we have only ever found life on our planet. How did the stuff of stars come together to create life as we know it? What do we really mean by ‘life’? And will unlocking this mystery help us find life elsewhere?

About 4.6 billion years ago, our solar system resembled a giant cloud of swirling cosmic dust, hydrogen and other gases. As with the thousands of other such clouds in our galaxy, some of these molecules began condensing, gathering and creating their own gravity.

Eventually these small clumps formed what became our sun — a star surrounded by a quickly moving, flat disc made up of the cloud’s leftovers. These leftovers also developed into our solar system’s planets, asteroid belt and other interstellar bodies.

Earth’s relative proximity to the sun meant that gases were largely burned away in those early days, leaving a rocky, metal-rich planet made from planetesimals, or smaller cosmic bodies. These same planetesimals also may have brought water and gases later. Often made of ice, they helped to plant the seeds for what would become a fertile, water-rich planet with a healthy atmosphere, capable of protecting life from the sun’s harmful rays.

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Coast To Coast: Ancient and Suppressed Discoveries

Coast to Coast AM 06-17-2010

Explorer and archaeologist Jonathan Gray discussed discoveries that demonstrate advanced ancient technology. Because such artifacts don't match current academic beliefs they are often suppressed, with evidence destroyed or hidden, he said, citing the Smithsonian Institution, and countries such as Peru, America, Israel, New Zealand, France, and Australia as being involved in covering-up evidence.

Some of the suppressed ancient discoveries he highlighted:

•A kind of glassware in Egypt and Peru that can be bent like plastic.
•Screen projectors used in Egyptian temples, with movement and sound simulation.
•Artifacts and buildings left on the moon-- Chinese records speak of trips to the moon.
•The 'Black Knight' satellite-- ancient races talked about putting up satellites.
•An ancient underground complex discovered in Southern California that included star charts on aluminum sheets.
•Micro-techology found in Russia, with some objects as small as 1/1000th of an inch.
•Maps of the ancient world that showed Antarctica as free of ice and populated.
Gray also spoke about his challenge to the work of Zecharia Sitchin, who contends that an ET race, the Annunaki, visited Earth from the planet Nibiru. Sitchin's translations of Sumerian cuneiform does not match the accepted dictionary meanings, he commented.
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Scientists Create Synthetic Organism

By ROBERT LEE HOTZ

Heralding a potential new era in biology, scientists for the first time have created a synthetic cell, completely controlled by man-made genetic instructions, researchers at the private J. Craig Venter Institute announced Thursday.

Tom Deerinck and Mark Ellisman, National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research, 

University of California, San Diego

Scanning electron micrographs of M. mycoide

"We call it the first synthetic cell," said genomics pioneer Craig Venter, who oversaw the project. "These are very much real cells."
Created at a cost of $40 million, this experimental one-cell organism, which can reproduce, opens the way to the manipulation of life on a previously unattainable scale, several researchers and ethics experts said. Scientists have been altering DNA piecemeal for a generation, producing a menagerie of genetically engineered plants and animals. But the ability to craft an entire organism offers a new power over life, they said.

The development, documented in the peer-reviewed journal Science, may stir anew nagging questions of ethics, law and public safety about artificial life that biomedical experts have been debating for more than a decade.
"This is literally a turning point in the relationship between man and nature," said molecular biologist Richard Ebright at Rutgers University, who wasn't involved in the project. "For the first time, someone has generated an entire artificial cell with predetermined properties."

David Magnus, director of the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics, said, "It has the potential to transform genetic engineering. The research is going to explode."
Leery of previous moral and ethical debates about whether it is right to manipulate life forms—which arose with the advent of cloning, stem-cell technology and genetic engineering—some researchers chose neutral terms to describe the experimental cell. Some played down the development.
"I don't think it represents the creation of an artificial life form," said biomedical engineer James Collins at Boston University. "I view this as an organism with a synthetic genome, not as a synthetic organism. It is tough to draw where the line is."

For the first time, scientists have created a synthetic cell, heralding a new era in biology. Shelly Banjo talks to Robert Lee Hotz about the huge implications of this development.

The new cell, a bacterium, was conceived solely as a demonstration project. But several biologists said they believed that the laboratory technique used to birth it would soon be applied to other strains of bacteria with commercial potential.

"I think this quickly will be applied to all the most important industrial bacteria," said biologist Christopher Voigt at the University of California, San Francisco, who is developing microbes that help make gasoline.
Several companies are already seeking to take advantage of the new field, called synthetic biology, which combines chemistry, computer science, molecular biology, genetics and cell biology to breed industrial life forms that can secrete fuels, vaccines or other commercial products.
Synthetic Genomics Inc., a company founded by Dr. Venter, provided $30 million to fund the experiments and owns the intellectual-property rights to the cell-creation techniques. The company has a $600 million contract with Exxon Mobil Corp. to design algae that can capture carbon dioxide and make fuel.

At least three other companies—Amyris Biotechnologies in Emeryville, Calif.; LS9 Inc. in San Francisco; and Joule Unlimited in Cambridge, Mass.—are working on synthetic cells to produce renewable fuels.
Although patents on single genes now face legal challenges, Dr. Venter said he intends to patent his experimental cells. "They are pretty clearly human inventions," he said.

Before making their work public, the researchers said, they briefed White House officials, members of Congress and officials from several government agencies. Within minutes of Thursday's announcement, the House Energy and Commerce Committee announced it would hold a public hearing on the new technology next week.
Environmental groups also reacted quickly. Friends of the Earth issued a statement asking the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration "to fully regulate all synthetic biology experiments and products," while ETC Group, a group based in Canada, called for a global moratorium on synthetic biology.

There was no immediate reaction from Roman Catholic and Protestant groups that have questioned such developments in the past. There was some support. "It is very much within divine mandate that we do these things," said theologian Nancey Murphy, who studies Christianity and science at the Fuller Theological Seminary, a multidenominational Christian seminary in Pasadena, Calif.
The announcement Thursday was the culmination of a project Dr. Venter and his colleagues have pursued since 1995. In a series of peer-reviewed papers, the group has published the interim technical steps. So far, that research has withstood scrutiny.

J. Craig Venter Institute

Daniel G. Gibson at the J. Craig Venter Institute,
who was the lead researcher on the Science paper
announcing creation of the first synthetic cell

The latest research was reviewed by a panel of independent scientists, but no one has duplicated the team's experiment. Other researchers working on different approaches in the field found the report credible and said it combined a series of prior advances.
"They are pulling all the pieces together," said Drew Endy, a biologist at Stanford University who is president of the BioBricks Foundation, a nonprofit consortium organized by researchers from Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California to make the DNA tools of synthetic biology freely available.
To make the synthetic cell, a team of 25 researchers at labs in Rockville, Md., and San Diego, led by bioengineer Daniel Gibson and Mr. Venter, essentially turned computer code into a new life form. They started with a species of bacteria called Mycoplasma capricolum and, by replacing its genome with one they wrote themselves, turned it into a customized variant of a second existing species, called Mycoplasma mycoides, they reported.

Bloomberg News

J. Craig Venter, chief executive officer of Synthetic Genomics Inc.

To begin, they wrote out the creature's entire genetic code as a digital computer file, documenting more than one million base pairs of DNA in a biochemical alphabet of adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. They edited that file, adding new code, and then sent that electronic data to a DNA sequencing company called Blue Heron Bio in Bothell, Wash., where it was transformed into hundreds of small pieces of chemical DNA, they reported.
To assemble the strips of DNA, the researchers said they took advantage of the natural capacities of yeast and other bacteria to meld genes and chromosomes in order to stitch those short sequences into ever-longer fragments until they had assembled the complete genome, as the entire set of an organism's genetic instructions is called.
They transplanted that master set of genes into an emptied cell, where it converted the cell into a different species.

“ What makes a big part of this possible is the enormous increase in computing power over the last few years, and it's what will continue to make advances like this appear at a faster clip. The singularity approaches. ”

— Kevin Carpenter

 

"We make a genome from four bottles of chemicals; we put that synthetic genome into a cell; that synthetic genome takes over the cell," said Dr. Gibson. "The cell is entirely controlled by that new genome."
The scientists didn't give the new organism its own species name, but they did give its synthetic genome an official version number, Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0.
To set this novel bacterium—and all its descendants—apart from any natural creation, Dr. Venter and his colleagues wrote their names into its chemical DNA code, along with three apt quotations from James Joyce and others. These genetic watermarks will, eventually, allow the researchers to assert ownership of the cells. "You have to have a way of tracking it," said Stanford ethicist Mildred Cho, who has studied the issues posed by the creation of such organisms.
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Humans could regrow body parts like some amphibians

Regrowing amputated limbs, broken backs and even damaged brains could one day be a reality after scientists discovered a gene that is key to the almost magical ability.

Researchers have found that the gene p21 appears to block the healing power still enjoyed by some creatures including amphibians but lost through evolution to all other animals.

By turning off p21, the process can be miraculously switched back on.
Academics from The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia found that mice lacking the p21 gene gain the ability to regenerate lost or damaged tissue.
Unlike typical mammals, which heal wounds by forming a scar, these mice begin by forming a blastema, a structure associated with rapid cell growth.
According to the Wistar researchers, the loss of p21 causes the cells of these mice to behave more like regenerating embryonic stem cells rather than adult mammalian cells. This means they act as if they creating rather thane mending the body.
Their findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide solid evidence to link tissue regeneration to the control of cell division.
They turned off the gene in mice which had damaged ears and they regrew them. While they say it is early days, there is nothing theoretically different about applying the same process to humans.
Professor Ellen Heber-Katz, the lead scientist, said: "Much like a newt that has lost a limb, these mice will replace missing or damaged tissue with healthy tissue that lacks any sign of scarring.
"While we are just beginning to understand the repercussions of these findings, perhaps, one day we'll be able to accelerate healing in humans by temporarily inactivating the p21 gene.
"In normal cells, p21 acts like a brake to block cell cycle progression in the event of DNA damage, preventing the cells from dividing and potentially becoming cancerous.
"We propose that any future therapy would involve turning off p21 transiently during the healing process and only locally at the wound site. This might be done through locally applied drugs. This should minimise any side effects."
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The future of medicine has arrived

For the first time, the genetic cause of a disease has been revealed by sequencing the patient's genome. The consequences, says Jeremy Laurance, could be enormous.

Doctors hailed a landmark in the advance of personalised medicine yesterday with the first case in which the sequencing of a patient's complete genome revealed the genetic cause of his disease.

The advance demonstrates for the first time that the technology of gene sequencing, touted as the future of medicine for a decade, is robust enough to yield clinically significant results. Fewer than 10 people in the world have had their personal genomes completed, and most of these were done as an intellectual exercise.

But the technology may herald a new era of medical neurosis rather than a new dawn of better health. Learning in advance of the risk of suffering diseases in the future might help prevent their occurrence, but would also lead to a lifetime spent worrying about them.

The latest advance solves a 20-year puzzle for the patient, James Lupski, who as vice chairman of molecular and human genetics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, also led the research.

Dr Lupski inherited a rare condition which affects the nerves in the hands and feet called Charcot-Marie-Tooth syndrome from his parents. In 1991 he and his team identified the first genetic mutation that gave rise to the disease and 40 more genes have since been implicated by other researchers. But none of them accounted for the disorder that affects Dr Lupski himself and some of his siblings.

To help Dr Lupski in his quest, Richard Gibbs, director of the Human Genome Sequencing Centre, offered to sequence all of his genome. The researchers found two "compelling" mutations in the gene SH3TC2, among those known to be implicated in the syndrome, which caused the condition in him. The results are published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

Dr Lupski said he had known he had a genetic disease for 40 years, but now he knew the gene at fault. "This is the first time we have tried to identify a disease gene in this way. Currently we only know the function of 5 to 10 per cent of the approximately 25,000 genes in our genome that it takes to make a human being. What this paper tells us is that the data are robust enough that we can start to use it to interpret clinical information in the context of the genome sequence," he said.

Unlocking the secrets of the genetic code for individuals to reveal their risk of developing specific diseases has been limited by the high cost. But it is falling dramatically. Decoding the complete genome of Nobel prize winner James Watson, joint discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, in 2008, cost $1 million (£600,000). Dr Lupski's genome was sequenced for $50,000 (£30,000). An editorial in the NEJM says the "spectacular" reductions in cost will continue, as a result of competition and innovation, and will be "at most one tenth of the current cost" within two years. Even today, using a different technique that shrinks the target for sequencing (covering 1 per cent of the genome but which still accounts for 90 per cent of all mutations with large effects), the cost of decoding Dr Lupski's genome could have been achieved for $4,000 (£2,800). "It is increasingly clear that the cost is fast approaching a threshold at which DNA sequencing will become a routine part of the diagnostic armamentarium," the journal says.

However, the new developments raise a host of ethical questions. Among them is how information about genetic risks of disease should be presented to individuals, and what the implications may be for insurance and employment.

Women affected by the genes BRCA1 and 2, which are known to raise the lifetime risk of breast cancer to 80 per cent, can protect themselves by having regular mammograms or by opting for prophylactic surgery to remove the breasts.

But for Huntingdon's disease, an inherited progressive neurodegenerative disorder, there is no cure. Alerting people affected by the gene that causes the disease means they live for longer under its cloud. While some may prefer to know, others may want to live in ignorance, until their symptoms develop. Couples trying for a child may wish to know if the foetus is affected so they can opt for abortion if they choose.

The Association of British Insurers agreed a moratorium on the use of genetic test results in 2001, which has twice been extended and is now due to expire in 2014.

The moratorium allows consumers to obtain insurance for themselves and their families without having to disclose adverse results of predictive genetic tests that might indicate a risk of serious disease in the future.

Single gene mutations that cause more than 2,000 mostly rare diseases have been identified so far. Mutations in multiple genes that increase the risk of common diseases are also being discovered.

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