Haunting the Web Since 1999
To me, children of the atom: A scientific study suggests that progeny of older men are more prone to mutations like autism, schizophrenia, telekinesis, and whatnot. “A man aged 29.7 at the time he fathered a child contributed 63 new mutations on average to his offspring, the authors found, and a man aged 46.2 contributed 126 mutations — a doubling, the authors calculated.” My biological clock is ticking like this…
On the subject of HIV, it looks like the enemy of our enemy is our friend: In a stunning feat of gene therapy, scientists have used a disabled version of HIV to successfully defeat leukemia. “Mr. Ludwig’s doctors have not claimed that he is cured — it is too soon to tell — nor have they declared victory over leukemia on the basis of this experiment, which involved only three patients…But scientists say [this] may signify a turning point in the long struggle to develop effective gene therapies against cancer…In essence, the team is using gene therapy to accomplish something that researchers have hoped to do for decades: train a person’s own immune system to kill cancer cells.”
“‘We believe this vaccine will someday be used to prevent breast cancer in adult women in the same way that vaccines prevent polio and measles in children,’ Vincent Tuohy, Ph.D., the study’s principal investigator and an immunologist at the Lerner Institute, told WOIO. ‘If it works in humans the way it works in mice, this will be monumental. We could eliminate breast cancer,’ he added.“
Some good news for the day: Scientists at the Cleveland Clinic believe they may have zeroed in on a vaccine for breast cancer. “The key, Tuohy said, is to find a target within the tumor that isn’t typically found in a healthy person. In the case of breast cancer, he and his team targeted a-lactalbumin, a protein found in the majority of breast cancers, but not in healthy women, except during lactation. Therefore, the vaccine can rev up a woman’s immune system to target a-lactalbumin, stopping tumor formation without damaging healthy breast tissue.”
O brave new world that has such bacteria in it: Scientists unveil their first synthetically-created, self-replicating cell. “Although the cell is primitive and lacks its own membrane, the techniques developed to create it promise groundbreaking advances in gene engineering and the rise of designer genomes. The achievement also raises ethical questions, not only about the creation of artificial life but the legitimacy of patenting it.”
In the Boston Globe, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow examines the past, present, and future of the placebo effect. “You’re talking about many, many, many millions of dollars a year in drug treatment costs…If [doctors] can produce approximately the same therapeutic effect with less drug, then it’s obviously safer for the patient, and I can’t believe they wouldn’t want to look into doing this.’“
“To create melanin particles tiny enough to squeeze through the liver, lungs, and spleen, Dr. Dadachova and her team layered several coats of synthesized melanin on silica particles. The particles, once injected into mice, clung onto bone marrow, as the researchers intended.“
It’s in the air, for you and me…By way of the always illuminating Dangerous Meta, scientists find a possible way to make people radiation resistant via melanin nanoparticles. “Clinical trials testing the melanized particles on cancer patients may begin two or three years. Dr. Dadachova also surmises that the technique has potential for protecting astronauts against radiation exposure.“
Also in the Brave New World dept. and by way of a friend, The Economist takes a gander at new “bioprinter” technology. “As for bigger body parts, Dr Forgacs thinks they may take many different forms, at least initially. A man-made biological substitute for a kidney, for instance, need not look like a real one or contain all its features in order to clean waste products from the bloodstream.“
“Is it conceivable that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s doctors knew he had widespread cancer in 1944 and still let him run for his fourth term as president? New research makes this astounding argument — and claims that the physician who supposedly told the truth about Roosevelt’s death in 1970 was in fact continuing the deception he had helped create.” Slate‘s Barron Lerner evaluates new claims that FDR may have suffered — and died — from cancer.
“How plausible is this research? If Roosevelt indeed had a hemianopsia, it suggests a brain mass, and melanoma would be as likely a cause as any…But all of these symptoms have other possible explanations…Perhaps most important, there is no smoking gun: In all of the documents Lomazow and Fettman unearthed, neither Bruenn nor FDR’s other doctors ever used the word cancer. Still, Lomazow and Fettman’s research is of great importance.”
“Anything that doesn’t taste like tobacco, other than menthol, is out. If you thought you could get around the ban by rolling your own cigs with flavored paper, sorry, that’s banned too.” The FDA ban on clove cigarettes goes into effect today. [Official statement.] Somewhere amid the stoops, corridors, and crannies of Adams House, the Djarum-stained ghost of my college self is now that much more disaffected.
“Much ink has been spilled on the question of why so many writers are alcoholics. Of America’s seven Nobel laureates, five were lushes–to whom we can add an equally drunk-and-disorderly line of Brits: Dylan Thomas, Malcolm Lowry, Brendan Behan, Patrick Hamilton, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, all doing the conga to (in most cases) an early grave…In fact none of these authors would write much that was any good beyond the age of 40, Faulkner’s prose seizing up with sclerosis, Hemingway sinking into unbudgeable mawkishness.“
By way of Dangerous Meta, The Economist‘s Tom Shone considers the artistic merits of novelists sobering up. “The radiance of late Carver is so marked as to make you wonder how much the imperturbable gloom of late Faulkner, or the unyielding nihilism of late Beckett — like the cramped black canvases with which Rothko ended his career — were dictated by their creators’ vision, and how much they were simply symptoms of late-stage alcoholism. This suspicion is open to the counter-charge: this contentment and bliss is all very well, but readers may simply prefer the earlier, messed-up work.“