British Parliament defies public outrage to allow human-animal embryos for research

Daily Mail | May 20, 2008

By James Chapman

Millenia of moral, religious and scientific belief were defied last night by MPs who voted to allow the creation of human/animal embryos.

In a landmark move which isolates Britain in the western world, they backed Government proposals which herald the dawn of a new era of experimentation.

Despite fierce objections, politicians placed the need for greater medical understanding above the dangers of tinkering with the essence of life - even though many leading scientists argue that hybrid embryos are unlikely to bring
promised cures.

Opponents warned that the decision had made Britain a ‘rogue state’ and pointed to 21 other countries where such moves had been banned.

Catholic Church leaders have condemned the use of hybrid embryos as ‘monstrous’ and say tinkering in such a way is immoral.

Even fertility expert Lord Winston - who supports the Government’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill - has said it would not greatly matter if scientists were not allowed to engineer human/animal embryos for medical experiments.

But Gordon Brown urged MPs to back the work, saying it is a ‘moral endeavour’ which could save thousands of lives by producing treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

An amendment to the Bill, attempting to block the creation of such embryos as a source of cells for research, was defeated by 336 to 176.

Last night MPs also rejected a proposal to outlaw the creation of saviour siblings, which are babies born from embryos selected because they are a tissue match for a brother or sister with a genetic condition.

They voted 163 in favour of the ban and 342 against - a healthy majority of 179 for the Government measure.

But a string of ministers either abstained or voted against the Government in the first of two days of debate which will determine the future of embryo research, IVF treatment and abortion. Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly, Defence Secretary Des Browne and Welsh Secretary Paul Murphy, all Catholics, backed attempts to ban the creation of hybrid embryos.

Today up to seven ministers are expected to join about 200 MPs backing a lower time limit on abortions carried out for social rather than medical reasons.

The Government is increasingly nervous that MPs will reject the Government’s position that no change to the current threshold of 24 weeks is justified.

The outcome is almost impossible to predict, since MPs have been given a free vote. But there is also concern among Labour whips that a plan to abolish the requirement for IVF clinics to take account of a child’s need for a father might be defeated.

Scientists developing hybrid embryos say they will provide an alternative source of stem cells - basic cells which can develop into many different types of tissue - for use in medical research. Currently, they have to rely on donated human embryos.

Chinese scientists were the first to create human-animal embryos. In 2003 a team at the Shanghai Second Medical University fused human cells with rabbit eggs.

But many countries have banned such research, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany and Italy. Others, including Austria, Norway and Tunisia do not allow embryo research at all.

In yesterday’s debate Tory MP Edward Leigh, leading the revolt against the Government’s plans for hybrid embryo experiments, warned that they would ‘tear down the ultimate boundary between human and animal’.

He said 21 other countries had specifically banned the creation of hybrid embryos.

‘In many ways we are like children playing with landmines without any concept of the dangers of the technology that we are handling. In terms of embryology research, we will almost be like a rogue state. The reason the public have been misled, cruelly in many cases, into thinking that this type of research could lead to early cures is because of exaggeration, misleading information or hyperbole.’

But Labour backbencher Chris Bryant said that opponents’ arguments were similar to those originally used by church leaders to oppose the smallpox vaccine. They argued that cows should not be used in medical research affecting humans.

MPs voted by 336 to 176, majority 160, against a ban on all hybrid embryos. The Commons then rejected an attempt to ban the use of so-called ‘true hybrids’, which would be 50 per cent human and 50 per cent animal. Voting was 286 to 223, majority 63.

The chief executive of the Medical Research Council, Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, welcomed the result, saying it would keep the UK at the forefront of embryo research. ‘The public can have confidence in the tight regulations that govern embryo and stem cell research,’ he said.

As Parliament geared up for today’s historic abortion vote, campaigners wrote to all MPs urging them to take note of opinion polls suggesting that a majority of voters - particularly women - back a reduction of the time limit. MPs could face an unprecedented U.S.-style campaign designed to make their views on abortion a crucial issue at the next election.

A powerful alliance of pro-life and religious groups is planning to target individual MPs who refuse to back moves to reduce the legal time limit for terminations.

Today’s vote on abortion is the first in Parliament since 1990 and the first time many MPs have had to make a choice one way or another on the issue. Amendments have been tabled to the Bill seeking to bring the current 24-week deadline for abortion down to 20 or 22 weeks in the light of the latest scientific evidence.

Terminations would continue to be permitted right up to birth if an unborn child is thought to have a range of disabilities.

Pro-life MPs from all three main parties argue a reduction is necessary because medical advances mean premature babies born before 24 weeks now have a reasonable chance of surviving. They also want to introduce a five-day period of ‘informed consent’, during which women wanting a termination would be advised to reflect on their decision.

Pro-choice MPs, by contrast, are seeking to liberalise abortion laws with rival amendments. They would allow only one doctor to approve an abortion, rather than the two currently required.

Last night, the Alive and Kicking campaign group - an umbrella organisation which includes the Christian Medical Fellowship, Pro-Life Alliance, the Guild of Catholic Doctors, LIFE, the Evangelical Alliance, and the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship - wrote to MPs urging them to back a 20-week limit.

The group, which represents more than a million people, also gave them notice of a highly controversial campaign focusing on their views and voting records.

It has launched a website, www.aliveandkickingcampaign.org, to highlight how MPs vote today. This also details MPs’ Parliamentary-majorities to indicate where pro-life voters might be able to influence the result at the next election. ‘There are many marginal seats across the political divide and we will ensure that our membership’s votes count positively,’ the group told MPs.

The move will appal pro-choice campaigners, who will see it as little more than blackmail. But the alliance hopes that enough MPs who do not have strong views either way will be persuaded to skip today’s Commons vote.

With between 150 and 200 MPs expected to back a reduction in the law in a free vote, turnout will be a key factor in whether it can succeed.

Conservative leader David Cameron and most of his shadow ministers have indicated their support for the legal time limit for abortion to be reduced by up to a month.

Pressure has mounted on the Government to review the law amid concern at a rise in the number of terminations. There are now more than 200,000 abortions a year in England and Wales, up from 175,000 in 2002.

Stalin’s space monkeys

Legend has it that the institute, which opened in 1927, was born of a secret Soviet plan to create a man-ape hybrid that would become a Soviet superman and propel the Soviet Union ahead of the West. The Soviet elite, goes the apocryphal tale that has appeared widely in Russian media, wanted to create a prototype worker that would be inhumanly strong and mentally dulled, to carry out the gruelling work of industrialising the vast expanses of newly Sovietised territory.

Independent | Apr 15, 2008

From the old railway station, now a hollow shell covered in weeds, a long concrete stairway, sheltered by sub-tropical foliage, winds from the centre of Sukhumi up to a collection of buildings, many pocked with bullet holes or crushed by bombs.

The first thing that registers is the putrid smell of animal faeces, then from inside one building comes a primeval squawking that sounds like a child being tortured. Cage after cage of distraught-looking monkeys come into view, nearly 300 in all, gnawing at mandarins and scampering around their enclosures.

This is what remains of the Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy, the first primate testing centre in the world, and possibly the site of a macabre Stalinist experiment to breed a human-ape hybrid. Set amid palm trees and lush greenery on a hill just outside the centre of Sukhumi, it was once the envy of the West. Its behavioural and medical experiments set it at the forefront of groundbreaking medical discoveries, and trained monkeys for space travel.

But the years of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, then the Georgian-Abkhaz war, took a heavy toll on the centre. Most of its scientists left to set up a new centre in Russia, along with most of the monkeys that were not killed. What is left today is a disturbing shadow of the institute’s former glory.

Legend has it that the institute, which opened in 1927, was born of a secret Soviet plan to create a man-ape hybrid that would become a Soviet superman and propel the Soviet Union ahead of the West. The Soviet elite, goes the apocryphal tale that has appeared widely in Russian media, wanted to create a prototype worker that would be inhumanly strong and mentally dulled, to carry out the gruelling work of industrialising the vast expanses of newly Sovietised territory.

Scientists at the institute today admit that these experiments did go on at the institute, though they deny it was part of any overarching plan for the creation of a new race. The tests were performed by Ilya Ivanov, an eminent Russian biologist who had also collaborated with the Pasteur Institute in Paris. About the turn of the century he had perfected the technique of artificially inseminating mares, and had also produced cross-breeds between various different species. Then, Europe was alive with ideas of eugenics, and the Soviets were out to prove once and for all that Darwinism had superseded religion.

“Professor Ivanov started these experiments in Africa and continued them here in Sukhumi,” says Vladimir Barkaya, who started at the institute in 1961 and is now scientific director. “He took sperm from human males and injected it into female chimpanzees, although nothing came of it.” Professor Barkaya denies monkey sperm was used on human females, although letters were apparently received by the institution by people of both sexes offering to participate in the experiments.

In time, the institute evolved from science fiction to evidence-based practice. Work at the institute was instrumental in the creation of a Soviet polio vaccine, and its scientists worked on all the major diseases of the 20th century.

One man’s name is synonymous with the centre. Boris Lapin was born in 1921 and after a heroic turn in the Second World War, started work at the Sukhumi monkey colony in 1949. In 1959 he was appointed director of the institute, and ran it up until 1992, when during the Abkhaz-Georgian war he fled along with the majority of employees and monkeys across the border to Russia. Despite being in his late eighties, he still runs the institute set up at Adler in Russia.

“My biggest achievement over all this time is that we were able to build the institute up from scratch again,” he says, from his Adler office, plastered with photographs of famous visitors to the Sukhumi institute over the years, from Nikita Khrushchev to Ho Chi Minh.

In the 1950s, as Professor Lapin was taking over, word got out to the rest of the world about the uses to which monkeys were being put at Sukhumi. “At the time of Sputnik, there was a huge amount of curiosity in the West about what else the Soviets might have up their sleeves in the fields of science and technology,” says Douglas Bowden, an American primatologist who has co-operated with the Sukhumi, then Adler centres since 1962. An expert commission headed by President Dwight Eisenhower’s personal doctor went to the Soviet Union in 1957 and visited Sukhumi. “They were so impressed with what they found there that when they came back to the US they recommended to Eisenhower that a similar institute should be set up in the US.” In the end, seven centres were set up in the US.

As time went on, the centre also became closely involved with the Soviet space programme, training six monkeys to send into space. “We had to make sure they were intelligent monkeys to perform all their duties in space,” Professor Lapin says. “Not every monkey was capable of that sort of thing.” After the monkeys blasted off, the centre’s employees would watch them on television at Sukhumi.

Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was a disaster for scientists across the vast empire. They went from the pride of the country to being neglected and unfunded. “They were terrible times,” says Professor Barkaya. “Many monkeys died, and many people too. We had nothing to feed the monkeys with, and there was no electricity or heating. Many of them simply froze to death.”

Violeta Agrba, who was the acting director of the institute during the war, while Professor Lapin was arranging the transfer to Adler, says: “I remember walking around the cages in the winter of 1992, during the war, and seeing a baboon shivering in his cage. It was so sad. But even though we couldn’t do any medical work, and there was a war on, we all came to work every day.” Professor Agrba once found an unexploded shell on the conference table in her office. There was a huge hole in the ceiling.

The centre also had 1,000 monkeys that lived freely in a special zone in the mountains in the south of Abkhazia, where they were monitored and their behaviour studied. When the war started, many died in the crossfire; some were stolen by troops and used as mascots. “Some are still alive,” Professor Agrba says. “But after everything that happened in the war, they are so scared of people they don’t approach anyone. We need to do a helicopter survey and find the remaining ones, but there’s no money for that.”

Today, the centre at Sukhumi, where a few staff who refused to leave during the war have bravely remained and tried to resurrect their scientific work, is struggling to get back on its feet. A German scientist who worked with the institute before the war and took pity on their situation ships them medicines and equipment each year. But most of the best employees went to Alder, and the monkeys seem to have nothing to eat except mandarins.

“The level we had before is very difficult to attain now,” Professor Barkaya says. “But while we used to write to people asking to co-operate with them, now they’re again coming to us. We had an interesting proposition from St Petersburg, from a company that has produced medicine to reduce blindness in old people. They’ve tested it on dogs and horses and now they want to test it on monkeys.”

The Adler centre in much better shape, with all the most modern equipment and is still at the forefront of medicine, working on stem-cell research and birdflu vaccines, and testing the effects of radiation on monkeys in preparation for a manned flight to Mars. “We’ve discovered that their immune systems are severely weakened by the radiation given off by solar flares,” says Professor Agrba. “Now we need to see how serious this is and how long it lasts.”

But even at Adler, the financial situation isn’t easy. “One girl used to work here as a lab assistant and got paid 3,000 roubles (£65) a month,” Professor Agrba says. “She left to work selling blankets in the market and now she makes 15,000 roubles (£325).”

Obtaining new monkeys is almost impossible now, with most countries banning their export. The days when Professor Lapin and colleagues would simply fly to Nigeria and spend weeks negotiating with tribes for the purchase of monkeys, as happened in the 1960s, are long gone. The Adler institute has a breeding programme, which ensures that its population of 3,700 monkeys is refreshed each year. But for Sukhumi, with just 286 monkeys, inbreeding is a serious problem.

The staff at both centres is split between dignified octogenarians with decades of scientific experience, and budding young scientists. The middle ground is missing. “It’s a problem across the former Soviet Union,” Professor Barkaya says. “The generation of scientists who came of age during perestroika went into business. Now there is again an interest in science, and it’s left to us to pass on our knowledge as best we can to the younger generation to ensure the good work continues.”

Ethical concerns that would undoubtedly surround such ventures in Europe are absent both in Abkhazia and in Russia. Neither institute has any security; the thought of animal rights protesters attacking does not even occur to the scientists.

“Of course, we’re aware of the ethical difficulties,” says Professor Lapin. “But in some cases monkeys are the only animals we can use. Thalidomide was tested on mice and other animals but not on monkeys, and you remember what happened there.”

Scientist makes clone of himself from skin cells

Telegraph | Jan 18, 2008

By Nic Fleming

A scientist is believed to have become the first person to create a clone of himself.

Fertility doctor Samuel Wood and colleagues created three early-stage embryos by replacing the DNA of donated eggs with his own and another man’s genetic material from skin cells.

It is the first time cloned human embryos has been produced from adult cells, and raises the prospect that further embryos could be used to provide stem cells tailored to any patient.

Although the embryos only lived for five days, the breakthrough is seen as an important step towards new treatments for incurable diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

In 2005 Prof Woo Suk Hwang at Seoul National University in South Korea claimed to have produced human embryonic stem cells, the research was later shown to be fraudulent.

The only confirmed cloned human embryo was created by a team at Newcastle University, however this was made by cloning human embryonic stem cells that are not routinely available from patients.

Dr Miodrag Stojkovic, a member of the Newcastle team and co-editor of the journal Stem Cells, which published the research yesterday, said: “These researchers have for the first time developed cloned embryos up to blastocyst [five-day-old embryo] stage using adult cells as donor cells.

“This is a key advance in the development of patient-specific stem cell lines for therapeutic and drug development purposes.

“Although these results are preliminary since no stem cell lines have been derived from the cloned embryos, this may now be attempted.”

The researchers from the Stemagen Corporation based in La Jolla, California, used 29 eggs donated by three women in their early twenties.

Using a technique known as somatic cell nuclear transfer - involving hollowing out an egg and injecting it with the nucleus of a cell from a donor - they grew five early-stage embryos consisting of 40 and 72 cells. Three of these contained DNA from either Dr Wood or the other man who provided skin cells.

Asked whether it was true that Dr Wood was one of the men who gave skins cells to produce the clones, a spokesman for Stemagen, said: “Yes, that is true. It stands to reason, we had to use somebody’s skin cells and the review board said it should not be a patient who might be given false hope.”

Dr Stephen Minger, a stem cell expert at King’s College London, said: “This is academically interesting research that shows that another group have managed to create clone human embryos using nuclear transfer.

“Disappointingly the researchers did not go on to do the next step - to create embryonic stem cell lines from cloned embryos.

“The community is waiting to baited breath to see if anyone can do both steps together.”

However pro-life groups accused the scientists of reducing human embryos to nothing more than a factory of spare parts.

John Smeaton, of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said: “We have got scientists wandering around in an ethical wilderness, completely forgetting about matters of justice relating to our fellow human beings.”

CDC to Investigate Morgellons Mystery Skin Disease

 

Sufferers Say Mysterious Colored Fibers Grow on Their Skin, Like Hair

Those living with Morgellons disease describe a mysterious fibrous material running through their skin. 

ABC | Jan 16, 2008

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced today that it is launching a study to learn about an unexplained condition that causes people to feel as if they have foreign substances growing from their bodies.

People with the condition, referred to as Morgellons disease, say they have fibers and other inorganic material growing out of their skin.

“We earnestly want to learn more about this unexplained illness, which affects the lives of those who suffer from it,” said Dr. Michele Pearson, principal investigator leading the study for the CDC, in a press release. “Those who suffer have questions, and we want to help them.”

“We have a team of epidemiologists, laboratorians and pathologists to carry out the study,” Pearson said.

The study will be conducted in conjunction with Kaiser Permanente’s Northern California Division of Research. For more information, CLICK HERE to visit the CDC’s Unexplained Dermopathy Web site.

Watch the story tonight on “Nightline” at 11:35 p.m. ET and “Good Morning America” Thursday at 7 a.m.

In 2006, a number of Morgellons sufferers told ABC News in interviews that when they consulted doctors, they received diagnoses they called wrong or dismissive. Brandi Koch, the wife of former Major League Baseball player Billy Koch, said that she felt as if she were living in a horror movie, claiming she had colored fibers coming out of her skin.

Koch, of Clearwater Beach, Fla., said that her life was good until one day in the shower when she noticed something strange — tiny fibers running through her skin.

“The fibers look like hair, and they’re different colors,” Koch said.

Koch said she knows that what she experienced “sounds crazy,” but it’s true. “If I had a family member call me up and say, ‘I have this stuff,’ I’d say, ‘I’m sending a straitjacket over. You need some help,’” she said.

Anne Dill described a similar condition. Looking at Dill’s life in Florida, she seemed to be living the American dream — her three daughters excelled in sports and were straight-A students.

But life in the Dill household was far from idyllic. Anne’s 40-year-old husband, Tom, died in January 2006, and she believes his death was due to a contagious illness that has infected her entire family.

Dill described her family’s skin: “There’s this fibrous material. It’s in layers.” Dill said the skin on their hands was particularly bad, very swollen and itchy, and said it felt as if bugs were crawling underneath the skin.

Consulting Doctors

Dr. Greg Smith of Gainesville, Ga., has been a pediatrician for the past 30 years. He claimed that a fiber was coming out of his big toe, and he had video footage to prove it.

“It felt like somebody stuck a pin in my toe and wiggled it, and it just continued to hurt,” Smith told ABC News in 2006.

He said he never thought he had bugs. “I’ve certainly had those crawling sensations, and the fibers which come out of the skin are really bizarre, and really odd.”

Smith was handed over to a hospital psychiatrist when he went to the emergency room complaining of a fiber in his eye. He admits that he, too, would be skeptical if a patient came to him with the same story.

“I would wonder if they’d taken their medicine that day. It makes no sense. It’s totally bizarre. It’s something that — just telling the story is so outlandish on the face of it — that no one would believe it,” Smith said. Dill’s doctor told her to stop scratching, even though many of her sores were in places she could not reach.

Koch went to the Mayo Clinic, where doctors didn’t believe that the fibers she’d brought them had grown from her body.

“I saw the infectious disease doctor, and I showed him some samples that I had and he snickered,” she said. “I can’t go through another doctor blowing me off or looking at me like I’m crazy. I know I’m not.”

Dr. Vincent DeLeo, chief of dermatology at New York’s St. Lukes-Roosevelt Medical Center, weighed in on what he’d say to someone who came to him with this condition. “I don’t think this is any different than many patients I’ve seen who have excoriations and believe that there is something in their skin causing this,” he told ABC News in 2006.

DeLeo said the open lesions were most likely a result of scratching the skin.

Relying on Your Own Research

But biologist Mary Leitao refused to accept the medical skepticism surrounding Morgellons.

Leitao’s son, Drew, was just 2 years old when Leitao noticed an odd sore on his lip that would not heal.

“He very simply said ‘bugs,’ and he pointed to his lips,” said Leitao.

Leitao never expected to find herself at the center of a medical storm. But when her son complained about the strange sore, the biologist, who once ran the electron microscope at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, did what any scientist would do. She took a closer look.

“What I saw were bundles of fibers, balls of fibers,” Leitao says. “There was red and blue.” Even stranger, they glowed under ultraviolet light.

Armed with research, Leitao took her son to a doctor at one of the country’s leading hospitals. He dismissed her tale of fibers and wrote to her pediatrician, saying that her son needed Vaseline for his lips and that his mother needed a thorough psychiatric evaluation.

Undaunted, Leitao began poring through medical literature looking for clues. What she discovered was a 17th-century reference to a strange disease with “harsh hairs” called “Morgellons.”

She named the strange fibers Morgellons disease and put the information on a Web site, Morgellons.org. At the time of her interview in 2006, more than 4,500 people had contacted Leitao, claiming they had Morgellons-type symptoms. The name stuck, and the disease was featured on the television show “ER.”

But do these fibers grow from inside the body, as Morgellons patients believe, or do they come from the external environment — a kind of lint — as the medical skeptics say?

Searching for an Answer

Forensic scientist Ron Pogue at the Tulsa Police Crime Lab in Oklahoma checked a Morgellons sample against known fibers in the FBI’s national database. “No, no match at all. So this is some strange stuff,” Pogue said in 2006. He thought the skeptics were wrong. “This isn’t lint. This is not a commercial fiber. It’s not.”

The lab’s director, Mark Boese, said the fibers are “consistent with something that the body may be producing.” He added that, “These fibers cannot be manmade and do not come from a plant. This could be a byproduct of a biological organism.”

Dill said she looks at pictures of her family and finds them unrecognizable. “My kids have to see not only their dad but their mom disintegrating, and that’s gotta be really scary.”

While they wait for evidence that they hope will convince the medical community to take them seriously, some Morgellon’s sufferers wear pink bracelets that say, simply, “Fortitude.”

 Related

Weird X-Files skin disease treated as a psychological disorder

FDA: Cloned Cow Is ‘Safe and Traditional’

NPR | Jan 15, 2008

The Food and Drug Administration is saying meat and milk from cloned cows are as safe as they are traditional. But how do they taste and will they turn us into mutated creatures?

FDA Finds Meat, Milk from Clones Safe to Eat

by Dan Charles

A January 2008 report by FDA scientists concludes that meat and milk from cow, pig and goat clones and their offspring are as safe to consume as food from noncloned animals.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced Tuesday that meat and milk from cloned animals are safe to eat.

Critics immediately denounced the FDA’s conclusions, saying the agency ignored the ethical problems with cloning.

Cloning creates a genetic copy of an animal, so making clones of a cow that produces an amazing amount of milk, for example, could be quite lucrative. Several companies are trying to make a business out of cloning; those animals could then be used for breeding.

FDA scientists studied the chemical composition of meat and milk from clones and decided that it’s identical to what’s on the market already. The European Food Safety Authority, in a draft report last week, came to a similar conclusion.

But opponents of cloning pointed to other data in the report, showing that the cloning process creates many animals that cannot survive.

Also, many clones are unnaturally large when they’re born, which can harm their surrogate mothers.

But FDA officials say their job is just to look at food safety, not ethics.

Researchers Create New Rat Heart in Lab

NY Times | Jan 13, 2008

By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN

Medicine’s dream of growing new human hearts and other organs to repair or replace damaged ones received a significant boost on Sunday when University of Minnesota researchers reported success in creating a beating rat heart in a laboratory.

Experts not involved in the Minnesota work called it “a landmark achievement” and “a stunning” advance. But they and the Minnesota researchers cautioned that the dream, if it is ever realized, is still at least 10 years away.

Dr. Doris A. Taylor, the head of the team that created the rat heart, said that she followed a guiding principle of her laboratory — “give nature the tools and get out of the way.”

“We just took nature’s own building blocks to build a new organ,” Dr. Taylor said of her team’s report in the journal, Nature Medicine.

The researchers removed all the cells from a dead rat heart, leaving the valves and outer structure as scaffolding for new heart cells injected from newborn rats. Within two weeks, the new cells formed a new beating heart that conducted electrical impulses and pumped a small amount of blood.

With modifications, scientists should be able to grow a new human heart by taking stem cells from a patient’s bone marrow and placing them in a cadaver heart that’s been prepared as a scaffold, Dr. Taylor said in a telephone interview from her laboratory in Minneapolis. The early success “opens the door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas — you name it and we hope we can make it,” she said.

“Doris Taylor’s work is one of those maddeningly simple ideas that you knock yourself on the head, saying why didn’t I think of that,” said Todd N. McAllister, of Cytograft Tissue Engineering of Novato, Calif. His team has used a snippet of a patient’s skin to grow blood vessels in a laboratory and then implanted them to restore blood flow around a patient’s damaged arteries and veins.

The field of tissue engineering has been growing rapidly. For many years, doctors have used engineered skin for burn patients. Engineered cartilage is used for joint repairs. Researchers are investigating use of stem cells to repair cardiac muscle damaged by heart attacks. Also, new bladders grown from a patient’s own cells are being tested in the same patients.

Dr. Taylor is a newcomer to tissue regeneration. She began her professional career at the Albert Einstein Medical School in the Bronx investigating gene therapy and then cell therapy. She said she switched to tissue regeneration when she realized the limiting step in trying to generate an organ was not the number of cells needed, but the complexity of creating a three-dimensional structure.

“The heart is a beautiful organ, and it’s not one that I thought I’d ever be able to build in a dish,” Dr. Taylor said.

Her view changed about three years ago when she recalled that cells are removed from human and pig heart valves before they are used to replace damaged human ones. As she contemplated replacing the old rat cells with new ones, Dr. Taylor followed another of her mantras: “trust your crazy ideas.”

Progress came in fits and starts. “We made every mistake known, did every experiment wrong and had to go back and do them right,” Dr. Taylor said.

She poured detergents like those in shampoos in the rat’s arteries to wash out the heart cells and then injected neonatal cardiac cells. The first two detergents she tested failed. But a third concoction led to a clear, translucent scaffold that retained the heart’s architecture.

After injecting the young rat heart cells into a scaffold, she stimulated them electrically and created an artificial circulation as the equivalent of blood pressure to make the heart pump and produce a pulse. The steps also helped the cells mature. Tests like examining slices of the heart under a microscope showed they were living cells.

To test the biological compatibility of the new hearts, the team transplanted them into the abdomen of unrelated live rats. The hearts were not immediately rejected. A blood supply developed. The hearts beat regularly. And cells from the host rats moved in and began to re-line the blood vessels, even growing in the wall of the hearts.

Dr. Taylor is now conducting similar experiments on pigs as a step toward human work. “Working out the details in a pig heart made a lot more sense” because the anatomy of the porcine heart is the closest to humans and pigs are plentiful, she said.

“The next goal will be to see if we can get the heart to pump strongly enough and become mature enough that we can use it to keep an animal alive” in a replacement transplant, Dr. Taylor said.

As for human hearts, the best-case scenario would be to obtain them from cadavers, remove their cells to make a scaffold and then inject bone marrow, muscle or young cardiac cells from a patient. The process of repopulating the scaffold with new cells would take a few months, she said.

Full Story

“Seeds of Destruction, The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation”

Global Research | Jan 2, 2008

Reviewing F. William Engdahl’s “Seeds of Destruction” - by Stephen Lendman (Part I)

by Stephen Lendman

Today, we’re all lab rats in an uncontrolled, unregulated mass human experiment the results of which are unknown. Once GM seeds are introduced to an area, the genie is out of the bottle for keeps.

Bill Engdahl is a leading researcher, economist and analyst of the New World Order who’s written on issues of energy, politics and economics for over 30 years. He contributes regularly to publications like Japan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Foresight magazine, Grant’s Investor.com, European Banker and Business Banker International. He’s also a frequent speaker at geopolitical, economic and energy related international conferences and is a distinguished Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization where he’s a regular contributor.

Engdahl also wrote two important books - “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order” in 2004. It’s an essential history of geopolitics and the importance of oil. Engdahl explains that America’s post-WW II dominance rests on two pillars and one commodity - unchallengeable military power and the dollar as the world’s reserve currency combined with the quest to control global oil and other energy resources.

Engdahl’s newest book is just out from Global Research: “Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation” and subject of this review. It’s the diabolical story of how Washington and four Anglo-American agribusiness giants plan world domination by patenting life forms to gain worldwide control of our food supply and why that prospect is chilling. The book’s compelling contents are reviewed below in-depth so readers will know the type future Henry Kissinger had in mind in 1970 when he said: “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.”

Remember also, this cabal is one of many interconnected ones with fearsome power and ruthless intent to use it - Big Banks controlling the Federal Reserve and our money, Big Oil our world energy resources, Big Media our information, Big Pharma our health, Big Technology our state-of-the-art everything and watching us, Big Defense our wars, Big Pentagon waging them, and other corporate predators exploiting our lives for profit. Engdahl’s book focuses brilliantly on one of them. To fully cover its vital contents, this review will be in three parts for more detail and to make it easily digestible.

Part I of “Seeds of Destruction”

In 2003, Jeffrey Smith’s “Seeds of Deception” was published. It exposed the dangers of untested and unregulated genetically engineered foods most people eat every day with no knowledge of the potential health risks. Efforts to inform the public have been quashed, reliable science has been buried, and consider what happened to two distinguished scientists.

One was Ignatio Chapela, a microbial ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In September, 2001, he was invited to a carefully staged meeting with Fernando Ortiz Monasterio, Mexico’s Director of the Commission of Biosafety in Mexico City. The experience left Chapela shaken and angry as he explained. Monasterio attacked him for over an hour. “First he trashed me. He let me know how damaging to the country and how problematic my information was to be.”

Chapela referred to what he and a UC Berkeley graduate student, David Quist, discovered in 2000 about genetically engineered contamination of Mexican corn in violation of a government ban on these crops in 1998. Corn is sacred in Mexico, the country is home to hundreds of indigenous varieties that crossbreed naturally, and GM contamination is permanent and unthinkable - but it happened by design.

Chapela and Quist tested corn varieties in more than a dozen state of Oaxaca communities and discovered 6% of the plants contaminated with GM corn. Oaxaca is in the country’s far South so Chapela knew if contamination spread there, it was widespread throughout Mexico. It’s unavoidable because NAFTA allows imported US corn with 30% of it at the time genetically modified. Now it’s heading for nearly double that amount, and if not contained, it soon could be all of it.

The prestigious journal Nature agreed to publish Chapela’s findings, Monasterio wanted them quashed, but Chapela refused to comply. As a result, he was intimidated not to do it and threatened with being held responsible for all damages to Mexican agriculture and its economy.

He went ahead, nonetheless, and when his article appeared in the publication on November 29, 2001 the smear campaign against him began and intensified. It was later learned that Monsanto was behind it, and the Washington-based Bivings Group PR firm was hired to discredit his findings and get them retracted.

It worked because the campaign didn’t focus on Chapela’s contamination discovery, but on a second research conclusion even more serious. He learned the contaminated GM corn had as many as eight fragments of the CaMV promoter that creates an unstable “hotspot.” It can cause plant genes to fragment, scatter throughout the plant’s genome, and, if proved conclusively, would wreck efforts to introduce GM crops in the country. Without further evidence, there was still room for doubt if the second finding was valid, however, and the anti-Chapela campaign hammered him on it.

Because of the pressure, Nature took an unprecedented action in its 133 year history. It upheld Chapela’s central finding but retracted the other one. That was all it took, and the major media pounced on it. They denounced Chapela’s incompetence and tried to discredit everything he learned including his verified findings. They weren’t reported, his vilification was highlighted, and Monsanto and the Mexican government scored a big victory.

Ironically, on April 18, 2002, two weeks after Nature’s partial retraction, the Mexican government announced there was massive genetic contamination of traditional corn varieties in Oaxaca and the neighboring state of Puebla. It was horrifying as up to 95% of tested crops were genetically polluted and “at a speed never before predicted.” The news made headlines in Europe and Mexico. It was ignored in the US and Canada.

The fallout for Chapela was UC Berkeley denied him tenure in 2003 because of his article and for criticizing university ties to the biotech industry. He then filed suit in April, 2004 asking remuneration for lost wages, earnings and benefits, compensatory damages for humiliation, mental anguish, emotional distress and coverage of attorney fees and costs for his action. He won in May, 2005 but not in court when the university reversed its decision, granted him tenure and agreed to include retroactive pay back to 2003. The damage, however, was done and is an example of what’s at stake when anyone dares challenge a powerful company like Monsanto.

The other man attacked was the world’s leading lectins and plant genetic modification expert, UK-based Arpad Pusztai. He was vilified and fired from his research position at Scotland’s Rowett Research Institute for publishing industry-unfriendly data he was commissioned to produce on the safety of GMO foods.

His Rowett Research study was the first ever independent one conducted on them anywhere. He undertook it believing in their promise but became alarmed by his findings. The Clinton and Blair governments were determined to suppress them because Washington was spending billions promoting GMO crops and a future biotech revolution. It wasn’t about to let even the world’s foremost expert in the field derail the effort. His results were startling and consider the implications for humans eating genetically engineered foods.

Rats fed GMO potatoes had smaller livers, hearts, testicles and brains, damaged immune systems, and showed structural changes in their white blood cells making them more vulnerable to infection and disease compared to other rats fed non-GMO potatoes. It got worse. Thymus and spleen damage showed up; enlarged tissues, including the pancreas and intestines; and there were cases of liver atrophy as well as significant proliferation of stomach and intestines cells that could be a sign of greater future risk of cancer. Equally alarming - this all happened after 10 days of testing, and the changes persisted after 110 days that’s the human equivalent of 10 years.

GM foods today saturate our diet. Over 80% of all supermarket processed foods contain them. Others include grains like rice, corn and wheat; legumes like soybeans and soy products; vegetable oils; soft drinks; salad dressings; vegetables and fruits; dairy products including eggs; meat and other animal products; and even infant formula plus a vast array of hidden additives and ingredients in processed foods (like in tomato sauce, ice cream and peanut butter). They’re unrevealed to consumers because labeling is prohibited yet the more of them we eat, the greater the potential threat to our health.

Today, we’re all lab rats in an uncontrolled, unregulated mass human experiment the results of which are unknown. The risks from it are beyond measure, it will take many years to learn them, and when they’re finally revealed it will be too late to reverse the damage if it’s proved GM products harm human health as independent experts strongly believe. Once GM seeds are introduced to an area, the genie is out of the bottle for keeps.

Full Story

Alert over the march of the ‘grey goo’ in nanotechnology Frankenfoods

 

Daily Mail | Jan 5, 2008

By SEAN POULTER

A breed of Frankenfood is being introduced into human diet and cosmetics with potentially disastrous consequences, experts said last night.

Academics, consumer groups and Government officials are warning that the arrival of nanotechnology threatens dangerous changes to the body and the environment.

The particles it uses are so small - 80,000 times thinner than a human hair - that they can pass through membranes protecting the brain or babies in the womb.

Nano health supplements, such as antioxidants, are already on the market while the first of hundreds of new foods are expected to arrive in the next 12 months.

However, the products are being introdeduced without any regulation or independent assessment to ensure they are safe - mirroring the controversy over the launch of GM foods ten years ago.

Some critics have talked of the threat of the creation of a “grey goo” of tiny particles with hidden harmful properties.

Prince Charles has said it would be “surprising” if the technology did not “offer similar upsets” to thalidomide - the morning sickness drug that caused children to be born with deformed limbs.

Professor Vicki Stone, Professor of Toxicology at Napier University in Edinburgh, is concerned about unforeseen side effects.

“We know very little about the ability of nanoparticles to move around the body, to accumulate or to be excreted, or their potential to cause toxic effects in organs,” she said.

However, nanotech advocates have remarkable claims for the technology. For example, foods are in development that are said to stave off the aging process.

On a more trivial level, they suggest it would be possible to create a fizzy drink that changes flavour according to the number of times the can is shaken.

The consumer group Which? is about to launch a nanotech campaign arguing that consumers need to be consulted on the risks and benefits before it is too late.

The food and farming department Defra has published an independent report which admits there are serious gaps in safety data.

It warns: “There could be very significant implications for business and the wider community if potential risks are not identified and managed before any harm to the environment or human health may be done.”

The report - Characterising the Risks Posed by Engineered Nanoparticles - states there is a shortage of research money.

It says the resulting absence of basic information about the particles means “it will be difficult or impossible to develop any general understanding of nanoparticle toxicology”.

The report adds: “Transfer across biological barriers - e.g. to the brain or foetus - should be studied. Research into how long these tiny particles persist in the body is urgently needed.”

It warns that work assessing human toxicology is being hamstrung by “profound difficulties in accessing relevant funding for these longer term projects”.

Research by Which? found six out of ten people (61 per cent) have never heard of nanotechnology.

Sue Davies of Which? said: “The benefits that nanotechnologies can offer consumers are really exciting.

‘But before the market is flooded with products, it’s crucial the Government addresses the lack of scientific understanding about how some nanoparticles behave.”

The European Food Safety Authority last year held a conference on the future of food.

Dr Donald Bruce, an expert on food and ethics, told delegates that the arrival of nanotech foods has many similarities with GM products.

US corporations attempted to introduce GM before an effective safety regime could be established.

“One of the things to ask is do we need the benefits claimed by the producers?’ he said. ‘Also there is the underlying notion that we are tampering with nature.”

Environment minister Phil Woolas admitted there were gaps in knowledge, but denied the Government was failing to provide enough research cash.

Tiny particles that have generated great hopes and growing concerns

Nanotechnology involves using a substance in particles that are so small that the substance takes on new properties.

The name of the technology comes from the size of the particles - one nanometre in diameter - a millionth of a millimetre. Reduced to this size, materials can suddenly show very different and unexpected properties.

For example, an opaque substance such as copper becomes transparent, or an inert metal such as platinum becomes a catalyst and triggers chemical reactions.

Advocates argue that such particles can be organised to work together to deliver specific effects in a piece of equipment or in the human body.

They can be used to build miniature hard drives that have an immense memory, so allowing further miniaturisation and sophistication of products such as computers and mobile phones.

Washing machines have been developed that release silver nanoparticles that will kill bacteria in dirty washing.

Sun creams have been created so they become transparent rather than chalky white.

In medicine, it is claimed that nanotechnology will allow the creation of drugs that reach and treat a problem quickly.

Manufacturers are working on nanotech foods and supplements that are also designed to deliver specific health benefits.

Similarly, firms are working on developing anti-ageing foods, where nanotech particles associated with renewing the skin from the inside could be included in everyday products such as yoghurt, spreads or breakfast cereals.

The technology promises huge riches for firms which develop winning applications.

One of the first group of nanoparticles being utilised are fullerenes - tiny hollow carbon balls and tubes. They are very heat resistant, strong and conduct electricity.

The football-shaped C60 fullerene is being used in some anti-ageing products. The creams are said to reduce fine lines and firm the skin.

C60 has some antioxidant properties in that it kills the rogue chemicals which damage cells. However, a high dose can itself damage cells.

Some nano particles are known to mimic the harmful effects of asbestos on the lungs. Consequently, they have the potential to trigger lung cancer if inhaled.

Eco-friendly kangaroo farts could help global warming: scientists

“It would seem that men and women need a common motivation, namely a common adversary, to organize and act together in the vacuum such as motivation seemed to have ceased to exist or have yet to be found. The need for enemies seems to be a common historical factor…

Bring the divided nation together to face an outside enemy, either a real one or else one INVENTED for the purpose…

Democracy will be made to seem responsible for the lagging economy, the scarcity and uncertainties. The very concept of democracy could then be brought into question and allow for the seizure of power.

In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. The real enemy [of the elites and their minions] then is humanity itself.”

- “The First Global Revolution” (1991) published by the Club of Rome. Members of the Club of Rome include: Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Bill Gates, George Soros and author of the Kyoto Protocols Maurice Strong.

Eco-friendly kangaroo farts could help global warming: scientists

AFP | Dec 6, 2007

SYDNEY (AFP) — Australian scientists are trying to give kangaroo-style stomachs to cattle and sheep in a bid to cut the emission of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, researchers say.

Thanks to special bacteria in their stomachs, kangaroo flatulence contains no methane and scientists want to transfer that bacteria to cattle and sheep who emit large quantities of the harmful gas.

While the usual image of greenhouse gas pollution is a billowing smokestack pushing out carbon dioxide, livestock passing wind contribute a surprisingly high percentage of total emissions in some countries.

“Fourteen percent of emissions from all sources in Australia is from enteric methane from cattle and sheep,” said Athol Klieve, a senior research scientist with the Queensland state government.

“And if you look at another country such as New Zealand, which has got a much higher agricultural base, they’re actually up around 50 percent,” he told AFP.

Researchers say the bacteria also makes the digestive process much more efficient and could potentially save millions of dollars in feed costs for farmers.

“Not only would they not produce the methane, they would actually get something like 10 to 15 percent more energy out of the feed they are eating,” said Klieve.

Even farmers who laugh at the idea of environmentally friendly kangaroo farts say that’s nothing to joke about, particularly given the devastating drought Australia is suffering.

“In a tight year like a drought situation, 15 percent would be a considerable sum,” said farmer Michael Mitton.

But it will take researchers at least three years to isolate the bacteria, before they can even start to develop a way of transferring it to cattle and sheep.

Another group of scientists, meanwhile, has suggested Australians should farm fewer cattle and sheep and just eat more kangaroos.

The idea is controversial, but about 20 percent of health conscious Australians are believed to eat the national symbol already.

“It’s low in fat, it’s got high protein levels it’s very clean in the sense that basically it’s the ultimate free range animal,” said Peter Ampt of the University of New South Wales’s institute of environmental studies.

“It doesn’t get drenched, it doesn’t get vaccinated, it utilizes food right across the landscape, it moves around to where the food is good, so yes, it’s a good food.”

It might take a while for kangaroos to become popular barbecue fare, but with concern over global warming growing in the world’s driest inhabited continent, Australians could soon be ready to try almost anything to cut emissions.

. . .

Related

Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says
Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet’s recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human-induced—cause, according to one scientist’s controversial theory. In 2005 data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide “ice caps” near Mars’s south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.

The truth about global warming - it’s the Sun that’s to blame
Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research. A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes. This just shows, that even if CO2 was the cause of the current warming trend (which it isn’t), the premise that warming will keep spiraling out of control is totally unsubstantiated

Anger over new foot-and-mouth virus leak at same source of summer outbreak

The Merial lab has just has its licence for using live viruses for vaccine production renewed

The Times | Nov 23, 2007

by Valerie Elliott

New questions about the competence of the Government were being raised by opposition parties today after another leak of live foot-and-mouth virus from the source of the summer outbreak.

There is particular irritation that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs took two days to disclose the discovery of a new leak and then for Hilary Benn, the Rural Affairs Secretary, to slip out the information by written answer.

Peter Ainsworth, the Conservative rural affairs spokesman, has written an urgent letter to Mr Benn asking a series of questions about the incident.

He is angry that Mr Benn failed to come to the Commons to face questions about the matter and that instead he chose to release a written statement to Parliament after the deadline passed for Opposition parties to request an emergency oral statement from ministers.

The virus itself has not leaked into the environment and so a new foot-and-mouth disease outbreak is unlikely. But farmers and MPs are concerned about the inspection regime at Pirbright and some are questioning whether the facility is fit to handle live virus.

Derrick Pride, from Elstead, Surrey, who lost his 64 cattle in the August outbreak, was extremely concerned by the news. He is attempting to rebuild his business and restock his farm, and his farm shop is already open.

He said: “If it has got out, it’s very worrying. They said that they had carried out adequate bio-security checks. Obviously if the virus is still getting out they haven’t.”

The leak happened only two weeks after the Government renewed the licence of Merial Animal Health, the pharmaceutical company at Pirbright, to use live viruses for vaccine production, on November 6.

The National Farmers’ Union said in a statement today: “It is extremely concerning that part of the system at Merial has failed. However, we have been reassured by Defra that the secondary decontamination systems have worked effectively and that no live virus escaped into the environment.”

The union is pressing ahead with a claim for compensation against the Government for the losses suffered by farmers in the August outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Surrey and papers have been served.

Urgent maintenance work on faulty effluent pipes and manhole covers at Pirbright had been completed and a new facility was also in place to heat treat waste from virus production. The ground above the drains is also now a controlled area and anyone entering it has to follow strict cleansing and disinfecting regimes.

Effluent from the plant also now enters a chemical treatment facility that deactivates any virus, and this equipment is monitored and tested daily.

Full Story

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