Conquering cancer with implants
Instead of surgery or toxic drugs what if doctors could simply implant tools in our bodies to do the work internally?
Scientific American: New tool that can be implanted in the body to kill cancer. One team of researchers has been able to vanquish tumors in mice by implanting bioengineered disks filled with tumor-specific antigens, and another has developed magnetized nanodiscs to induce cancer cells destroy themselves.
China approves its first GM rice
China has approved its first strain of genetically modified (Bt) rice for commercial production.
Check Biotech: Not official yet apparently as the Chinese government has not officially published the information and officials at the Agricultural Ministry’s biosafety office declined to comment. But according to two scientists involved in the project The Chinese Ministry of Agriculture’s Biosafety Committee issued biosafety certificates to pest-resistant Bt rice.
http://greenbio.checkbiotech.org/news/exclusive_top_rice_producer_china_approves_gmo_strain
Rise of the medibots
It may not be the nano-sized autonomous bots roaming your body fixing dodgy parts and eliminating disease, but this article in New Scientist reveals what nanotechnologies are or soon will be helping achieve in the field of robotic medicine.
It may not be the nano-sized autonomous bots roaming your body fixing dodgy parts and eliminating disease, but this article in New Scientist reveals what nanotechnologies are or soon will be helping achieve in the field of robotic medicine. The first generation of mini-bots may indeed infiltrate our insides with the role of taking tissue samples, delivering drugs or installing medical devices.
‘Big cosmetics’ hiding use of nanoparticles in make-up
The use of nanotechnology is common in some top-selling cosmetics – but don’t expect to find anything about it on the label.
This is one of the few media stories on this Friends of the Earth report that attempt to add appropriate context to the story
Cancer danger from stem cell treatment
An Australian man may be first to get cancer from stem cell treatment in overseas clinic. This has prompted calls for better education.
Today’s The Age newspaper reports on fears that a Victorian man with leukemia may be the first Australian to get cancer as a result of stem cell treatment from a private clinic overseas.
This has prompted calls for better public education about stem cell therapy and the so called “Stem Cell Tourism” operators, that are largely unregulated and few have any published evidenced about the efficacy of their treatments. Essentially, if you decide to cough up the large sums of money to cover the treatment you are taking part in an experiment. There is little, if any, evidence that the treatment they provide works.
GNTIS has posted a blog on this in the past and provided links to information to help people assess these clinics and know what questions to ask to make them more informed of what they are getting themselves into. The Australian Stem Cell Centre is playing a key role in this education process and has a large amount of information on its web site.
The Age reports that patient advocacy groups are meeting stem cell experts in Canberra today to discuss a coordinated approach to public education on overseas experimental treatments.
Jason Major
US increases investmnet in nanosafety
The US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) is increasing its investment in understanding the potential health, safety and environmental issues related to nanoparticles
Nanowerk: http://www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=13626.php
The NIEHS will award about $13 million over a two-year period, through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to bolster the NIEHS’s ongoing research portfolio in the area of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs).
Wastewater algae turned to fuel
New Zealand: Minister opens the world’s largest wastewater algae to bio-crude oil demonstration project.
Science Alert: http://tiny.cc/gQFK7
The process creates value at every step – it treats wastewater, recovers wastewater nutrients as fertiliser, removes carbon dioxide from flue gas, and creates biofuel.
Reply to Organic Centre report on GM crops
PG Economics Ltd has, in quick time, posted a comprehensive critique of the Organic Centre’s recent report, “Impacts of genetically engineered crops on pesticide use: the first thirteen years” by Charles Benbrook.
It was a quicker riposte than I expected, but the ‘he says-she says’ game starts again
PG Economics Ltd, who has done other reports investigating the worth of GM crops, has posted a comprehensive critique of the Organic Centre’s recent report, “Impacts of genetically engineered crops on pesticide use: the first thirteen years” by Charles Benbrook.
Obviously they are happy with the analysis of the Bt crops, but disagree on the methodology and analysis of the data overall. The key point PG Economics seem to be making is that Benbrook makes too many personal assumptions and poor extrapolations of the data that make his analysis unreliable.
Full report can be downloaded from here
Jason Major
Unlocking the potential of C4 rice
ANU researchers are searching genes linked to photosynthetic pathways with potential applications in the development of more efficient crops. If we can use GM technology to make these pathways (and hence plants) more efficient, will this be acceptable to the general public?
The following has been reprinted with permission from Australian National University’s Science Wise Magazine. The full article can be viewed here. I have reprinted it because of all the media chatter and high profile people such as United Nations secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon’s comment that failure at next month’s international climate change negotiations would result in a rise in hunger. In my community presentations on GM foods, even people who have relatively high concerns about GM foods will tend to find acceptable GM crop examples I present that are drought tolerant. I would be curious to know that if the ANU research below leads to the creation of GM crops altered to have a more efficient photosynthetic pathway would such crops be acceptable to the public and why or why not?
Unlocking the potential of C4 rice (ScienceWise November/December 2009)
The United Nations Food Agency recently announced that over the coming 40 years the world’s food production will need to rise by 70% in order to feed the growing population. Failure to achieve this is likely to result in widespread famine. This in turn, may well lead to unrest that spreads well beyond the borders of the most affected nations, so in reality, it’s likely to become everyone’s problem. The difficulty the world faces in addressing this is that most of the viable agricultural land is already used to capacity and production is limited by other factors such as water availability. The general consensus amongst scientists is that the only practical way to avert catastrophe is to enhance the photosynthetic yield per leaf area of food crops. In other words, to create more efficient plants.
Most plants, including many staple foods like rice, turn sunlight into sugar using what’s known as the C3 photosynthetic pathway. In this process gaseous CO2 is combined with an enzyme called RuBisCO to create sugar. However RuBisCO can and often does, combine with oxygen instead of CO2, leading to a loss of efficiency particularly at higher temperatures.
Some more recently evolved plants have developed an alternate photosynthetic pathway called C4 that avoids this loss of efficiency by using some additional chemistry to saturate the RuBisCO enzyme with CO2 and starve it of oxygen. This avoids wasteful oxygen combinations and under most environmental conditions, leads to a higher sugar yield in the plant. Scientists believe that if they can introduce this C4 photosynthesis to rice, they may be able to create cultivars that produce more crop per area than existing rice without consuming more water or fertilizer.
One scientist studying the possibilities of C4 rice is Professor Susanne von Caemmerer of the Research School of Biology. Professor von Caemmerer is working on a project with the International Rice Research Institute, sponsored by a $10m grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. The ultimate aim of this work is to create C4 rice with a substantially better yield than existing plants, but this is a hugely complex task requiring multiple steps.
The basic idea is to look at millions of mutant seedlings of both C3 rice and C4 sorghum. Scientists expect the random mutations to cause some of the rice to move towards the C4 pathway and some of the sorghum to partially revert to the C3. If they can identify which specimens these transformations take place in, they can analyse their genomes and compare them to conventional rice and sorghum. Seeing both the C3-C4 and C4-C3 switch should help them to isolate the genes responsible for the two photosynthetic pathways.
“Ultimately, this is a gene discovery project. We’re hoping to isolate mutants that appear to switch photosynthetic pathways. What we can then do is look at the genome of those plants and try to identify which genes are responsible for C4. This would be a huge help to another arm of the project in which scientists would directly splice those genes into existing rice cultivars,” says, Professor von Caemmerer.
Jason Major
Own stem cells can treat heart disease
A stem cell study for heart disease showed the first evidence that transplanting a potent form of adult stem cells into the heart muscle of subjects with severe angina results in less pain and an improved ability to walk.
Eurekalert: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-11/nu-yos111709.php