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Huge medical experiment begins
The world’s largest medical experiment was launched this week in the Cheshire town of Altrincham in the UK, when hundreds of volunteers gave blood and DNA to the controversial new genetic database, Biobank.
In all 3,000 men and women aged between 40 and 69 are likely to take part in trials, the vanguard for an estimated 500,000 individuals who will take part in the £60m project.
Volunteers not only gave DNA to Biobank, but provided details of their medical history, answered questions about their smoking, drinking, eating and exercise habits and were measured for blood pressure and weight.
This army of “guinea pigs” will be tracked for their rest of their lives, providing invaluable information, even after they have died, that will be stored on computers at Manchester University. This database will be used, say Biobank’s promoters, the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust, to unravel the genetic and environmental causes of all common diseases including cancer, heart disease and brain ailments.
In turn, that data should lead to development of new drugs and treatments. As the Nobel prizewinner geneticist Sydney Brenner put it: “Biobank will be the future of medical research.”
But the programme has attracted criticism from researchers and groups who say Biobank is not only a colossal waste of resources but is too cumbersome and unwieldy to achieve its stated goals. “Links between genes and diseases like heart disease or schizophrenia are made all the time,” said Helen Wallace, of the watchdog group GeneWatch.
“In the end, only one in a hundred of these claims stands up to scrutiny. Biobank’s results will be useless or, worse, misleading.” — Dawn/The Guardian News Service (c) London Observer
Dispute over cloned sheep
The scientists who produced Dolly, the world’s first cloned sheep, are at loggerheads over who deserves credit for the breakthrough. The debate was ignited by an admission last week from Prof Ian Wilmut — the scientist widely credited for the research — that he did not create the animal after all.
Speaking at an employment tribunal in Edinburgh, Prof Wilmut said he did not develop the technology or conduct the experiments, and played only a supervisory role. The birth of Dolly in July 1996 was regarded as a leap forward in cloning technology and triggered a surge of similar efforts to clone other animals.
The work was published in Nature in 1997 and rapidly made Prof Wilmut, who led the research group at the Roslin Institute, one of the most high-profile scientists in the world.
At the tribunal in which one of Prof Wilmut’s colleagues, Prim Singh, alleges bullying, the scientist said he did not play a trivial role in the project to clone Dolly and coordinated the work, but added that 66 per cent of the credit should go to Prof Keith Campbell, a co-author on the 1997 paper.
But researchers close to the project told the Guardian that the scientists involved still have major disagreements over who deserves credit for cloning Dolly. According to one source, all the credit for the breakthrough should go to Prof Campbell, who left the Roslin Institute shortly after the paper was published.
Drink of champions
For decades, biochemists and physiologists in the dog-eat-dog world of sports drink technology have struggled to find the perfect elixir — the right balance of carbohydrates, electrolytes, protein and fluid to keep athletes in peak form after various types of exercise.
So it was big news when exercise kinesiology professor Joel Stager and co-workers at Indiana University in Bloomington declared they had stumbled upon the perfect drink for elite cyclists recovering their energy after strenuous exercise. That beverage was chocolate milk.
In three trials administered at one-week intervals, nine male cyclists performed a strenuous workout then drank one of three drinks. One group got standard 2 per cent chocolate milk, another drank fluid- and electrolyte-replenishing Gatorade and a third group Endurox R4, a specially formulated beverage with a “patented 4 to 1 ratio of carbohydrates to protein” and other ingredients aimed at replenishing muscle glycogen stores and helping rebuild muscle.
Then, after a rest period, the cyclists exercised again, this time to exhaustion. The study, published in the February issue of the International Journal of Sports Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, and funded in part by the dairy industry, reported that cyclists who drank chocolate milk at the break were able to continue cycling about 50 per cent longer than those who drank Endurox R4 and about equally as long as those who drank Gatorade. — Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times
Sun storms
Space storms are heading our way. Astronomers have announced that the next five or six years will see some of the most intense solar fireworks witnessed on Earth in recent times.
The good news is that these electrical eruptions will bring intense displays of the Northern and Southern Lights to low latitudes. Areas, including southern England, which normally never witness such glories, can expect to see major auroral events glittering in the night skies.
On the down side, solar storms can also disrupt power generators and electronic instruments. In the past, communication satellites have been wrecked by solar storms and on one occasion a storm triggered a major power-cut across most of Canada.
The latest forecast predicting space storms is from a team of researchers led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in the US and is based on studies of the Sun’s regular cycles of activity.
Every 11 years, solar flares and sunspots reach a maximum and so, as a consequence, do auroral displays. Vast fluxes of electrical particles are blasted across space and batter Earth’s upper atmosphere. — Dawn/The Guardian News Service
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