Friday, August 31, 2012
Posts resume Saturday
Posts resume Saturday! I'm getting ready for Labor Day weekend tomorrow (Friday.)
Monday, August 27, 2012
Mysterious AIDS-like disease discovered
From CBS News: Mysterious AIDS-like disease discovered
(AP) Researchers have identified a mysterious new disease that has left scores of people in Asia and some in the United States with AIDS-like symptoms even though they are not infected with HIV.
The patients' immune systems become damaged, leaving them unable to fend off germs as healthy people do. What triggers this isn't known, but the disease does not seem to be contagious.
This is another kind of acquired immune deficiency that is not inherited and occurs in adults, but doesn't spread the way AIDS does through a virus, said Dr. Sarah Browne, a scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
She helped lead the study with researchers in Thailand and Taiwan, where most of the cases have been found since 2004. Their report is in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.
"This is absolutely fascinating. I've seen probably at least three patients in the last 10 years or so" who might have had this, said Dr. Dennis Maki, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
It's still possible that an infection of some sort could trigger the disease, even though the disease itself doesn't seem to spread person-to-person, he said.
The disease develops around age 50 on average, but does not run in families, which makes it unlikely that a single gene is responsible, Browne said.
Some patients have died of overwhelming infections, including some Asians now living in the U.S., although Browne could not estimate how many.
Kim Nguyen, 62, a seamstress from Vietnam who has lived in Tennessee since 1975, was gravely ill when she sought help for a persistent fever, infections throughout her bones and other bizarre symptoms in 2009. She had been sick off and on for several years and had visited Vietnam in 1995 and again in early 2009.
"She was wasting away from this systemic infection" that at first seemed like tuberculosis but wasn't, said Dr. Carlton Hays Jr., a family physician at the Jackson Clinic in Jackson, Tenn. "She's a small woman to begin with, but when I first saw her, her weight was 91 pounds, and she lost down to 69 pounds."
Nguyen was referred to specialists at the National Institutes of Health who had been tracking similar cases. She spent nearly a year at an NIH hospital in Bethesda, Md., and is there now for monitoring and further treatment.
"I feel great now," she said Wednesday. But when she was sick, "I felt dizzy, headaches, almost fell down," she said. "I could not eat anything."
AIDS is a specific disease, and it stands for acquired immune deficiency syndrome. That means the immune system becomes impaired during someone's lifetime, rather than from inherited gene defects like the "bubble babies" who are born unable to fight off germs.
The virus that causes AIDS — HIV — destroys T-cells, key soldiers of the immune system that fight germs. The new disease doesn't affect those cells, but causes a different kind of damage.
Browne's study of more than 200 people in Taiwan and Thailand found that most of those with the disease make substances called auto-antibodies that block interferon-gamma, a chemical signal that helps the body clear infections.
Blocking that signal leaves people like those with AIDS — vulnerable to viruses, fungal infections and parasites, but especially micro-bacteria, a group of germs similar to tuberculosis that can cause severe lung damage. Researchers are calling this new disease an "adult-onset" immunodeficiency syndrome because it develops later in life and they don't know why or how.
"Fundamentally, we do not know what's causing them to make these antibodies," Browne said.
Antibiotics aren't always effective, so doctors have tried a variety of other approaches, including a cancer drug that helps suppress production of antibodies. The disease quiets in some patients once the infections are tamed, but the faulty immune system is likely a chronic condition, researchers believe.
The fact that nearly all the patients so far have been Asian or Asian-born people living elsewhere suggests that genetic factors and something in the environment such as an infection may trigger the disease, researchers conclude.
The first cases turned up in 2004 and Browne's study enrolled about 100 people in six months.
"We know there are many others out there," including many cases mistaken as tuberculosis in some countries, she said.
(AP) Researchers have identified a mysterious new disease that has left scores of people in Asia and some in the United States with AIDS-like symptoms even though they are not infected with HIV.
The patients' immune systems become damaged, leaving them unable to fend off germs as healthy people do. What triggers this isn't known, but the disease does not seem to be contagious.
This is another kind of acquired immune deficiency that is not inherited and occurs in adults, but doesn't spread the way AIDS does through a virus, said Dr. Sarah Browne, a scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
She helped lead the study with researchers in Thailand and Taiwan, where most of the cases have been found since 2004. Their report is in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.
"This is absolutely fascinating. I've seen probably at least three patients in the last 10 years or so" who might have had this, said Dr. Dennis Maki, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
It's still possible that an infection of some sort could trigger the disease, even though the disease itself doesn't seem to spread person-to-person, he said.
The disease develops around age 50 on average, but does not run in families, which makes it unlikely that a single gene is responsible, Browne said.
Some patients have died of overwhelming infections, including some Asians now living in the U.S., although Browne could not estimate how many.
Kim Nguyen, 62, a seamstress from Vietnam who has lived in Tennessee since 1975, was gravely ill when she sought help for a persistent fever, infections throughout her bones and other bizarre symptoms in 2009. She had been sick off and on for several years and had visited Vietnam in 1995 and again in early 2009.
"She was wasting away from this systemic infection" that at first seemed like tuberculosis but wasn't, said Dr. Carlton Hays Jr., a family physician at the Jackson Clinic in Jackson, Tenn. "She's a small woman to begin with, but when I first saw her, her weight was 91 pounds, and she lost down to 69 pounds."
Nguyen was referred to specialists at the National Institutes of Health who had been tracking similar cases. She spent nearly a year at an NIH hospital in Bethesda, Md., and is there now for monitoring and further treatment.
"I feel great now," she said Wednesday. But when she was sick, "I felt dizzy, headaches, almost fell down," she said. "I could not eat anything."
AIDS is a specific disease, and it stands for acquired immune deficiency syndrome. That means the immune system becomes impaired during someone's lifetime, rather than from inherited gene defects like the "bubble babies" who are born unable to fight off germs.
The virus that causes AIDS — HIV — destroys T-cells, key soldiers of the immune system that fight germs. The new disease doesn't affect those cells, but causes a different kind of damage.
Browne's study of more than 200 people in Taiwan and Thailand found that most of those with the disease make substances called auto-antibodies that block interferon-gamma, a chemical signal that helps the body clear infections.
Blocking that signal leaves people like those with AIDS — vulnerable to viruses, fungal infections and parasites, but especially micro-bacteria, a group of germs similar to tuberculosis that can cause severe lung damage. Researchers are calling this new disease an "adult-onset" immunodeficiency syndrome because it develops later in life and they don't know why or how.
"Fundamentally, we do not know what's causing them to make these antibodies," Browne said.
Antibiotics aren't always effective, so doctors have tried a variety of other approaches, including a cancer drug that helps suppress production of antibodies. The disease quiets in some patients once the infections are tamed, but the faulty immune system is likely a chronic condition, researchers believe.
The fact that nearly all the patients so far have been Asian or Asian-born people living elsewhere suggests that genetic factors and something in the environment such as an infection may trigger the disease, researchers conclude.
The first cases turned up in 2004 and Browne's study enrolled about 100 people in six months.
"We know there are many others out there," including many cases mistaken as tuberculosis in some countries, she said.
Friday, August 24, 2012
Male Scientist Balancing Act
From Inside Higher Ed: Male Scientist Balancing Act
DENVER
– Numerous studies have focused on how women in academic science
balance their quest for career advancement with their family
responsibilities. A study released here at the annual meeting of the
American Sociological Association (by researchers who have done
considerable research on women in science) turns to male scientists, and
asks how they balance work and home responsibilities.
The scholars conducted in-depth interviews with 74 physicists and biologists who are graduate students or faculty members at prestigious universities, and the results illustrate options that male scientists have that many female scientists who have or want children lack. A majority of men studied who have families organized their lives in decidedly unequal ways with regard to family and home duties. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most traditional male scientists are older (and more successful). But the study finds that many male scientists starting their careers (and whose wives work outside the home) do not attempt to have equal responsibility for raising children or managing homes.
The findings are significant, the authors write, because scientific disciplines are “greedy” about time commitments, and young scientists in particular are expected to work well above 40 hours a week. Further, these men are the colleagues of women (and those voting on hiring or tenuring women) trying to advance in science. (The authors are Elaine Howard Ecklund of Rice University, Sarah Damaske of Pennsylvania State University, Anne E. Lincoln of Southern Methodist University and Virginia Johnston White of Rice University.)
Based on their interviews, they divide the male scientists into four groups: pursuing autonomy, egalitarian partners, neo-traditional dual earners, and traditional breadwinners.
Those pursuing autonomy (15 percent) are academics who (single or married) have opted not to have children. As such, they do not face the same pressures as those with children to balance child-rearing responsibilities.
The nearly one-third of those studied in the egalitarian category talked in their interviews of many of the same pressures that female scientists with families experience -- especially "extreme hours and intricate schedules." Many of these men were married to women who were also on the tenure track, and under similar pressures. Many discussed the need to sacrifice (especially sleep and leisure time) to try to make it all work.
While the men described desires to move ahead professionally, they noted that they couldn’t work as they did before they had children. "I am not nearly as productive as I used to be.... And it's hard because I used to work here till whenever I wanted to and then I’d go home and I could work at night, now I kind of get home, put the kids to bed.... No academic institution is particularly -- that I know of -- is particularly great for family.... The people that do best in academia, sadly, often are those who don’t have [the responsibility of] child care."
The "neo-traditional" group of men (22 percent of the sample) was disproportionately made up of graduate students. These men have wives who work outside the home, and the wives are primarily responsible for the home front. The paper says that the men repeatedly stressed that their wives made the decision to organize life in this way, but the authors question how free a choice was involved.
"[I]t appears that men overemphasize their wife’s decision as a 'choice,' when in reality their wife’s choice to care for the children is constrained by her husband’s schema of children as primarily ‘her issue,’ ” the authors write. “For example, a physics graduate student argues that even though the trajectory of both his and his fiancĂ©e's careers have changed for family considerations, his wife chose to allow her trajectory to change even more than his. He indicates that his wife, who is currently in graduate school in a humanities discipline, would want to stay at home to raise their children when they are young: ‘I think that my timeline for taking and not taking jobs is not going to be as dependent on when I have kids. I think that’s going to be more dependent on my future wife because she hopes to not be working when the children are very, very young. That means that she wants to -- there’s certain times in the career track when it’s better or worse to take time off…. So that’s her issue.'"
Others talked about women being "burdened" by child-bearing, but with the understanding that this burden benefited the careers of male scientists, the authors write.
"That these graduate students and faculty members distance themselves from child care and home care is illustrative of a general trend among men in the transitional dual-earner model. These men portray decisions about child rearing as made entirely by their wives, rather than joint decisions, which has the effect of rhetorically -- and possibly practically -- removing them from the responsibility of care-work," the authors write.
And then there are the traditional breadwinners, who made up 30 percent of the sample, and who were the most likely to be tenured and older. These men were married to wives who did not work outside the home, and many said that they were able to better focus on science because they didn’t have to worry about much of anything at home.
Some of those interviewed expressed awareness of how they benefited. “For me it’s a little easier because I have a wife that has stayed home and taken care of [the children]. I imagine it would be much much more challenging if I didn’t have a spouse that was planning on staying home,” said one.
But others seemed decidedly less sympathetic to the impact of their choices. Asked, “Do you think that having children then is difficult to manage with being a scientist?” one physicist said, “No, absolutely not. That’s why you have a wife.”
The scholars conducted in-depth interviews with 74 physicists and biologists who are graduate students or faculty members at prestigious universities, and the results illustrate options that male scientists have that many female scientists who have or want children lack. A majority of men studied who have families organized their lives in decidedly unequal ways with regard to family and home duties. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most traditional male scientists are older (and more successful). But the study finds that many male scientists starting their careers (and whose wives work outside the home) do not attempt to have equal responsibility for raising children or managing homes.
The findings are significant, the authors write, because scientific disciplines are “greedy” about time commitments, and young scientists in particular are expected to work well above 40 hours a week. Further, these men are the colleagues of women (and those voting on hiring or tenuring women) trying to advance in science. (The authors are Elaine Howard Ecklund of Rice University, Sarah Damaske of Pennsylvania State University, Anne E. Lincoln of Southern Methodist University and Virginia Johnston White of Rice University.)
Based on their interviews, they divide the male scientists into four groups: pursuing autonomy, egalitarian partners, neo-traditional dual earners, and traditional breadwinners.
Those pursuing autonomy (15 percent) are academics who (single or married) have opted not to have children. As such, they do not face the same pressures as those with children to balance child-rearing responsibilities.
The nearly one-third of those studied in the egalitarian category talked in their interviews of many of the same pressures that female scientists with families experience -- especially "extreme hours and intricate schedules." Many of these men were married to women who were also on the tenure track, and under similar pressures. Many discussed the need to sacrifice (especially sleep and leisure time) to try to make it all work.
While the men described desires to move ahead professionally, they noted that they couldn’t work as they did before they had children. "I am not nearly as productive as I used to be.... And it's hard because I used to work here till whenever I wanted to and then I’d go home and I could work at night, now I kind of get home, put the kids to bed.... No academic institution is particularly -- that I know of -- is particularly great for family.... The people that do best in academia, sadly, often are those who don’t have [the responsibility of] child care."
The "neo-traditional" group of men (22 percent of the sample) was disproportionately made up of graduate students. These men have wives who work outside the home, and the wives are primarily responsible for the home front. The paper says that the men repeatedly stressed that their wives made the decision to organize life in this way, but the authors question how free a choice was involved.
"[I]t appears that men overemphasize their wife’s decision as a 'choice,' when in reality their wife’s choice to care for the children is constrained by her husband’s schema of children as primarily ‘her issue,’ ” the authors write. “For example, a physics graduate student argues that even though the trajectory of both his and his fiancĂ©e's careers have changed for family considerations, his wife chose to allow her trajectory to change even more than his. He indicates that his wife, who is currently in graduate school in a humanities discipline, would want to stay at home to raise their children when they are young: ‘I think that my timeline for taking and not taking jobs is not going to be as dependent on when I have kids. I think that’s going to be more dependent on my future wife because she hopes to not be working when the children are very, very young. That means that she wants to -- there’s certain times in the career track when it’s better or worse to take time off…. So that’s her issue.'"
Others talked about women being "burdened" by child-bearing, but with the understanding that this burden benefited the careers of male scientists, the authors write.
"That these graduate students and faculty members distance themselves from child care and home care is illustrative of a general trend among men in the transitional dual-earner model. These men portray decisions about child rearing as made entirely by their wives, rather than joint decisions, which has the effect of rhetorically -- and possibly practically -- removing them from the responsibility of care-work," the authors write.
And then there are the traditional breadwinners, who made up 30 percent of the sample, and who were the most likely to be tenured and older. These men were married to wives who did not work outside the home, and many said that they were able to better focus on science because they didn’t have to worry about much of anything at home.
Some of those interviewed expressed awareness of how they benefited. “For me it’s a little easier because I have a wife that has stayed home and taken care of [the children]. I imagine it would be much much more challenging if I didn’t have a spouse that was planning on staying home,” said one.
But others seemed decidedly less sympathetic to the impact of their choices. Asked, “Do you think that having children then is difficult to manage with being a scientist?” one physicist said, “No, absolutely not. That’s why you have a wife.”
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Israeli Women Ahead in Science Poised to Lead in Biotech
From Bloomberg News: Israeli Women Ahead in Science Poised to Lead in Biotech
“It makes you feel that in the life-sciences field, a woman can make a mark,” says Nistenpover, a bio-medical engineering major at the university in Haifa who plans to work in bio-mechanics or bio-materials research.
Women outnumber men in biology and related sciences in higher education in Israel. That could give women an advantage as the government and private investors put increasing amounts of money into the life-sciences industry, one of the country’s fastest growing sectors, collecting the most venture capital money in the first half of this year.
Hiring and promoting women could also give startups an edge because women still have to work harder and be smarter than men to succeed, says Hagit Messer-Yaron, president of the Ra’anana- based Open University and the Ministry of Science’s chief scientist from 2000 to 2003.
“The women that make it to the top usually have to prove themselves and overcome hurdles that are above and beyond what men are required to do,” Messer-Yaron says. “When these women make it as managers, they are over-achievers and can help these companies succeed.”
While most high-tech employees are male, women comprise 60 percent to 70 percent of the biotechnology workforce, according to Nisha Group, a recruiting firm based near Tel Aviv.
Still, men dominate upper management. Women hold about 13 percent of chief executive officer positions in companies in the Tel Aviv Biomed index and less than 5 percent in the Tel Aviv Technology index, according to data analyzed by Bloomberg.
That’s destined to change in biotech, says Ora Dar, head of the life sciences sector at the Office of the Chief Scientist in the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor.
“As this field matures, you are going to see women increasingly taking executive positions,” says Dar, whose team of about 100 evaluators, who decide what projects and incubators to finance with taxpayer money, is more than 70 percent female. “It’s a matter of experience.”
“Women traditionally are not the main breadwinners in the family and can afford to pursue a PhD, whereas men have more pressure to go out and make a high salary, says Anat Cohen- Dayag, president and CEO of Compugen Ltd. (CGEN), which was founded by members of an Israeli army intelligence unit that designed software to break codes. The Tel Aviv-based company uses algorithms to trawl private and public databases to discover proteins that may have the ability to treat diseases.
Cohen-Dayag is one of three female CEOs in the Tel Aviv Biomed index. The others are Kinneret Livnat Savitsky of BioLineRx Ltd. (BLRX), which develops clinical stage therapeutic pharmaceutical drugs, and Pnina Fishman of Can Fite Biopharma (CFBI) Ltd., which is focusing on treatments for autoimmune diseases and cancer.
Most of the companies in the sector are very young, with little or no revenue, according to Uri Geiger, managing partner at Herzliya-based Accelmed, which invests in medical-device makers. Of the more than 1,000 life-science companies in Israel, 57 percent are focused on medical devices, Geiger says, with the remainder in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, health information technology and other small fields.
Metallo-Therapy Ltd., which is developing a new method for cancer diagnosis by delivering nano-liposomes to tumor cells, recently received a $4 million investment from Moshe Arkin, former CEO of Agis Industries Ltd. and Perrigo Co. (PRGO)’s vice chairman. Amal Ayoub, Metallo-Therapy’s founder and CEO, says she thinks one reason is that she’s female -- and Arab.
Galit Zuckerman, founder of Medasense Biometrics Ltd., which is working on an automated, non-invasive pain monitoring diagnostic device, says women are taking life sciences jobs as academic positions are increasingly hard to find. ‘
‘You have all these women with growing expertise in biology,’’ she says. “It’s only natural that they increasingly market that knowledge.”
Every week, Daniella Nistenpover
sits down in a lecture hall for one class in neurophysiology and
another in biological processes, and sees a sea of women.
That’s not the case when the 22-year-old takes courses in
the theory of electrical circuits or differential equations at
the predominantly male Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.
She says it’s evidence that she’s picked the right career. “It makes you feel that in the life-sciences field, a woman can make a mark,” says Nistenpover, a bio-medical engineering major at the university in Haifa who plans to work in bio-mechanics or bio-materials research.
Women outnumber men in biology and related sciences in higher education in Israel. That could give women an advantage as the government and private investors put increasing amounts of money into the life-sciences industry, one of the country’s fastest growing sectors, collecting the most venture capital money in the first half of this year.
Hiring and promoting women could also give startups an edge because women still have to work harder and be smarter than men to succeed, says Hagit Messer-Yaron, president of the Ra’anana- based Open University and the Ministry of Science’s chief scientist from 2000 to 2003.
“The women that make it to the top usually have to prove themselves and overcome hurdles that are above and beyond what men are required to do,” Messer-Yaron says. “When these women make it as managers, they are over-achievers and can help these companies succeed.”
Executive Positions
Israel got the nickname “startup nation” in a 2009 book with that title. It has about 60 companies on the Nasdaq Stock Market, the most of any country outside North America after China. The high-tech industry accounts for 47 percent of manufactured exports.While most high-tech employees are male, women comprise 60 percent to 70 percent of the biotechnology workforce, according to Nisha Group, a recruiting firm based near Tel Aviv.
Still, men dominate upper management. Women hold about 13 percent of chief executive officer positions in companies in the Tel Aviv Biomed index and less than 5 percent in the Tel Aviv Technology index, according to data analyzed by Bloomberg.
That’s destined to change in biotech, says Ora Dar, head of the life sciences sector at the Office of the Chief Scientist in the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor.
“As this field matures, you are going to see women increasingly taking executive positions,” says Dar, whose team of about 100 evaluators, who decide what projects and incubators to finance with taxpayer money, is more than 70 percent female. “It’s a matter of experience.”
More Pressure
More women than men earn science degrees in Israel, according to Lizi Shoov London, partner and managing director of the Biomedical and Cleantech division at Nisha Group outside Tel Aviv. About 58 percent of biology doctorate degrees awarded in 2010 were to women, a study by Israel’s Council for Higher Education found. That compares to women earning 44 percent of equivalent degrees in the U.S., according to the National Center for Education Statistics.“Women traditionally are not the main breadwinners in the family and can afford to pursue a PhD, whereas men have more pressure to go out and make a high salary, says Anat Cohen- Dayag, president and CEO of Compugen Ltd. (CGEN), which was founded by members of an Israeli army intelligence unit that designed software to break codes. The Tel Aviv-based company uses algorithms to trawl private and public databases to discover proteins that may have the ability to treat diseases.
Working Mothers
The industry is a good fit for working mothers like herself, she says. ‘‘Because of its academic characteristics, the culture in the industry has traditionally been more permissive, enabling more flexible hours, which has enabled women to juggle career and family.’’Cohen-Dayag is one of three female CEOs in the Tel Aviv Biomed index. The others are Kinneret Livnat Savitsky of BioLineRx Ltd. (BLRX), which develops clinical stage therapeutic pharmaceutical drugs, and Pnina Fishman of Can Fite Biopharma (CFBI) Ltd., which is focusing on treatments for autoimmune diseases and cancer.
Most of the companies in the sector are very young, with little or no revenue, according to Uri Geiger, managing partner at Herzliya-based Accelmed, which invests in medical-device makers. Of the more than 1,000 life-science companies in Israel, 57 percent are focused on medical devices, Geiger says, with the remainder in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, health information technology and other small fields.
Venture Capital
The share of the government research and development budget allocated to health-related companies almost doubled in the last decade to 26 percent from 14 percent, according to Israel Chief Scientist Avi Hasson, head of the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor fund that invests as much as $500 million a year.
Biomedical companies attracted the most venture capital in
the first half of this year, according to IVC-KPMG, which tracks
the industry. The $240 million represented 26 percent of all the
venture capital invested in startups in the period, more than in
the previous year, a IVC-KPMG survey found.
Orbimed Healthcare Fund Management, a New York-based
investment management firm focused on health-care, started the
Orbimed Israel Partners $222 million fund in Israel in April
with partial government investment, while the Tel Aviv venture
capital firm Pontifax Ltd. raised $88 million for bio-medical
investments last year. Metallo-Therapy Ltd., which is developing a new method for cancer diagnosis by delivering nano-liposomes to tumor cells, recently received a $4 million investment from Moshe Arkin, former CEO of Agis Industries Ltd. and Perrigo Co. (PRGO)’s vice chairman. Amal Ayoub, Metallo-Therapy’s founder and CEO, says she thinks one reason is that she’s female -- and Arab.
‘Only Natural’
‘‘Being an Arab woman was actually an advantage,” says Ayoub, who has a doctorate in biomedical engineering form Ben Gurion University. “It got Arkin’s attention.”Galit Zuckerman, founder of Medasense Biometrics Ltd., which is working on an automated, non-invasive pain monitoring diagnostic device, says women are taking life sciences jobs as academic positions are increasingly hard to find. ‘
‘You have all these women with growing expertise in biology,’’ she says. “It’s only natural that they increasingly market that knowledge.”
Monday, August 20, 2012
No sex please, we are humans: UK-Indian genetics expert says immaculate conception is possible
This is an op-ed piece, but it raises some interesting points.
If life can be created artificially, will that destroy the husband and wife dynamic and the family dynamic? I don't think so.
From Daily Mail Online India: No sex please, we are humans: UK-Indian genetics expert says immaculate conception is possible
If life can be created artificially, will that destroy the husband and wife dynamic and the family dynamic? I don't think so.
From Daily Mail Online India: No sex please, we are humans: UK-Indian genetics expert says immaculate conception is possible
Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it … The wonderful Cole Porter song, Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall In Love, lists many of the species who enjoy pairing off: 'Even Pekineses at the Ritz do it!'
The Pekineses are not alone: 99.9 per cent of higher animal species reproduce themselves sexually. Species capable of reproducing themselves without contact between male and female are in the distinct minority.
Whiptail lizards and some hammer-head sharks apparently do it. Or rather, don’t do it. But so far no one has written a song about them and their lonely sexual endeavours.
But a research geneticist from Imperial College London, Aarathi Prasad, has tried to do the next best thing. Not only has she written a celebration of those eccentric creatures who are capable of reproducing by themselves without sexual contact, she controversially claims that sexless reproduction is the way of the future for humans, too.
A generation ago, test-tube babies were the stuff of science fiction: now, we accept these things as realities. In the same way, suggests Prasad, we could well be looking at a future in which human babies could be born without any sperm donors, let alone contact between the sexes. The future is sexless.
Since her publicity photographs show a beautiful young woman with bare shoulders posing coquettishly for the camera, some readers might feel that Aarathi Prasad is teasing them just a little.
But her book, Like A Virgin, is exploring a fundamentally serious theme, and one at the heart of Western liberal thinking. It is that we human beings are in control of our own destiny, and there is nothing sacred or special about life itself.
This is because we live in a world where science means we can manipulate everything — even the process of reproduction. Indeed, the central tenet of her story is that virgin births are now almost within the grasp of science. Can she really be serious?
And while she watches our jaws drop, she reminds us not to be prejudiced. If women can do it, why not men, she asks.
Already, in Australia, they have pioneered an artificial womb — a plastic container specially designed to hold fluids and bacteria found in natural wombs. Admittedly the creatures being developed in this artificial womb are grey nurse sharks — but, where sharks lead, humans could follow.
According to Prasad, it will one day be technically possible for a man to develop a child in one of these ‘wombs’ without the co-operation of any female partner.
Probably, by now, you are beginning to echo Captain Mainwaring’s words to his corporal in Dad’s Army: ‘I think you’re getting into the realms of fantasy here, Jones.’
But Prasad points out that science has already developed artificial sperm. And that such sperm has produced offspring. How far behind can be the synthetic egg?
So far the synthetic sperm has been confined to Japanese laboratory mice, resulting in a baby mouse called Kaguya in 2004.
Kaguya was conceived after the genetic content of an egg from a young mouse was modified to make it appear as if it were sperm, which was then used to fertilise a mature egg from another mouse.
Kaguya was the lucky one which survived from 371 synthetically fertilised eggs. But the point is that science will ensure the technique improves, and it may become viable for human use.
Prasad’s book also comes up with all kinds of freak case histories which appear to suggest that a virgin birth might not be beyond the bounds of science as new techniques develop.
She tells of cases where growths in the ovaries simulate the properties of a foetus. We read of weird ‘ovarian teratomas’ (tumours which grow from unfertilised egg cells) which can develop humanoid features such as teeth and hair.
One such malformation discovered inside a young Japanese virgin in 2003 had a doll-like body with an eye which had lashes.
The idea is that with more understanding of the processes behind these freakish cases, we could learn how to reproduce without the aid of any partner. Prasad warns such research may well be necessary. Infertility is on the rise in the world, she claims — which means that the normal means of reproducing the human race could actually be under threat in the very long term.
She warns that the Y chromosome — the strand of DNA which helps shape the male of any species — is ‘hurtling down the evolutionary road towards extinction’. Research has shown that the genetic information contained on it has been disintegrating over time.
And, if that is the case, if the Y chromosome really is dying out, then does this not mean that the human race itself is slowly dying out — unless scientists can devise artificial means for the human race to reproduce itself?
And is it not clear that, if this were to happen, the human race will opt for Prasad’s idea of virgin birth?
Like so many scientists, Aarathi Prasad believes long-held taboos and traditions should be cast aside in the name of progress.
She wants us to drop all our prejudices about sex, sexual difference, reproduction and foetuses, and to allow science to develop in any way it chooses.
‘Why can’t a man be a mother?’ she asks. ‘Why do we care so much about what it means to be a 'mother' rather than to be a 'parent'?
‘By all reasonable estimates, in the near future we will conquer the tyranny of the womb. The question remains if we can also conquer the tyranny of human prejudice, too.’
Of course, she is being contentious so that her spirited book will sell. But Prasad is not a neutral research scientist: she is an out-an-out liberal campaigner in favour of taking research on human embryology and fertilisation as far as it will go.
In her vision of the world, it is only fuddy-duddies who would question why anyone — elderly women, men, you name it — should not become pregnant if they choose to indulge the whim.
She is a brilliant scientist, and I know nothing about her subject. But the greatest problem facing this planet isn’t the slight dip in human fertility in the West. Rather, as any third world charity worker will tell you, it is the vast problem of overpopulation, especially in parts of the world scarcely capable of feeding themselves.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the issue is not that a few selfish older ladies or gay men cannot have babies. It is that the babies who have already been born in vast numbers do not have enough to eat. Prasad’s book provides a very strong example of how scientists can ignore the blindingly obvious in an attempt to brainwash us.
No doubt there are some people who love to contemplate the brave new world in which the messy business of relationships between the sexes is done away with.
They probably rejoice at the idea of a future in which human beings are made from artificial sperm; a future where the ‘best’ baby is selected from 371 fertilised laboratory eggs and the others are chucked away.
If Aarathi Prasad is to be believed, such a concept does not belong to the realms of fantasy, but is, on the contrary, just round the corner.
For Prasad and those who think like her, it goes without saying that science offers us choice, and choice is always a good thing. But is it?
Would we really have a better world if we had been able to select our children in the way we might choose a pet in a shop? Is there not something healthy and adventurous about accepting what comes?
Is there not something creepy — almost Nazi — about the idea of trying to create for ourselves a perfect child who does not inherit Uncle Sid’s dyspepsia, Aunt Mavis’s wonky teeth, and those weird knees from Charles’s side of the family? Does not the attempt to make babies into designer items remove any of the adventure of being born?
Yet, above all, is there not something sinister and joyless about the notion of going it alone when it comes to reproducing ourselves?
In the old myth about the Garden of Eden, God says that ‘it is not good for man to be alone’. Modern science disagrees. It thinks there is nothing wrong with this.
A generation ago, we watched families breaking up in large numbers for the first time, and the breakdown of marriages. Nearly every observer of society agrees that this was calamitous, especially in the less privileged parts of our cities, where lack of family structure is the major background and cause of crime, psychological dislocation, and anti-social behaviour.
What appears to be a scientific exploration is actually a political tract, saying that we can do without a patriarchal, male-dominated society, do without Dad, without family, without any of the structures which have hitherto shaped the human destiny.
The subtitle of Prasad’s thesis is How Science Is Redesigning The Rules Of Sex. To my mind, this book is not so much redesigning the rules of sex as suggesting sex as we know it should be abolished.
It is a good example of something purporting to be a work of science but is, in fact, as brimful of prejudice as any religious text, and as biased as any loony tract.
The author is a clever geneticist, and I know nothing. But I very much doubt whether human beings ever will be able to reproduce without the time-honoured meeting of male and female. But even if she is right, how boring life would be without the mutual attractions of the sexes, and the complexities, joys and frustrations of family relationships
UNC professor, students piece together model of prehistoric reptile
From News Observer: UNC professor, students piece together model of prehistoric reptile
Alison the rauisuchian was a reptile to be
reckoned with in her day, the Late Triassic, and in her neighborhood –
the spot in supercontinent Pangea that became southern Durham County.
She weighed nearly a ton, and she and her fellow rauisuchians prowled at the top of the food chain until they disappeared at the end of the Triassic, to be succeeded by dinosaurs.
She’s no small shakes in the annals of North Carolina fossil-dom, either. Since her discovery in a Durham County brick quarry by two UNC-Chapel Hill students in 1994, she’s been hailed as one of the state’s most important finds.
She weighed nearly a ton, and she and her fellow rauisuchians prowled at the top of the food chain until they disappeared at the end of the Triassic, to be succeeded by dinosaurs.
She’s no small shakes in the annals of North Carolina fossil-dom, either. Since her discovery in a Durham County brick quarry by two UNC-Chapel Hill students in 1994, she’s been hailed as one of the state’s most important finds.
She’s the first rauisuchian (“raw ih SOO kee un”) found in eastern
North America, though there have been others in the U.S. West and
elsewhere. She’s the only one of her particular species ever found.
Dr. Hans-Dieter Sues, Smithsonian Institution senior scientist and curator of vertebrate paleontology, helped with early research carried out by Dr. Joseph G. Carter, paleontology professor in UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of Geological Sciences.
The rauisuchian’s discovery, along with its captured prey, “provided unexpected new insights into Late Triassic life in what is now eastern North America,” Sues says.
At work in the lab
Now, some of Carter’s students are finishing the first complete rendition of Alison in polyurethane, readying her for a broad public debut. It’s expected to be finished during the fall semester and hopefully will go on display within this next year, perhaps at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. The actual bones are already there, under lock and key.
Though there’s no way to determine sex, in scientific parlance, she’s Portosuchus (genus) alisonae (species), named by students for the late Alison L. Chambers, their companion on many a paleontology field trip.
To students bending her ribs and putting her tailbone together like a jigsaw puzzle, she’s just plain Alison.
Student Maria Connolly asked the assembled heads bent over the polyurethane skeleton one recent morning if they knew why Alison is so trim.
It’s her metabolism, Connolly cracks. She’s dead!
That’s not all, chimes in Carter, a transplanted Kansan who echoes the Coroner’s pronouncement on the Wicked Witch in “The Wizard of Oz.”
“Not only merely dead,” he quotes. “But really most sincerely dead.”
Two-hundred-and-twenty-one million years dead, give or take 5 million.
Ah, but when she was alive! She wore armor plates on her neck, back and breast, was about 11 feet long, and likely stood upright at least part of the time.
A nickname for a rauisuchian is “bear croc” – it looks like a crocodile, prowls like a bear. Though they’re not ancestors of the dinosaur, Carter says, “It was Nature’s first attempt to build a dinosaur-like predator.”
Head uplifted, massive jaws open, eye sockets unseeing, she looms above her builders. On a table nearby, her yet-unattached hands are lifted in an unintended but touching gesture of supplication.
Previous students did an incomplete reconstruction in 2000; it substituted painted Plexiglas for the bones missing when Alison was unearthed. After a campus showing, this first replica was relegated to the lab while Carter and students researched Alison’s rauisuchian relatives and used their findings to create the missing parts .
A determination to keep Alison in North Carolina led Carter to take on the arduous task of overseeing her reassembly 18 years ago, even though his specialty is invertebrates. (He’s currently coordinator of an international effort to create the most complete family tree ever assembled for bivalves – clams, oysters, and the like.)
But no way, he says, was he going to send Alison out-of-state. “This is part of North Carolina’s heritage.”
Had her bones left, she’d be as unknown to most North Carolinians as the state’s other big vertebrate fossil find – a Late Triassic crocodile-like creature, a rutiodon, found in the 1800s in Durham County. It’s in the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Quarry discovery
Alison came to light when Carter student Brian Coffey and roommate Marco Brewer spotted some bone chips, then an anklebone, as they hiked the quarry. They felt that this was something big, and when they hauled the anklebone in to Carter, he agreed.
“When I saw it, I thought it must be another rutiodon,” he says.
A large part of the class went back to the quarry, and subsequently found part of the skull, a couple of teeth, the entire neck, most of the shoulders, two arms complete with hands, the collarbone, breastplate, part of the hip, part of the back, most of both legs including the feet, part of the tail, and many ribs.
“It was one of the most complete rauisuchians ever discovered,” says Carter. And it was articulated – the bones positioned just as they’d been in life.
The crab-like hand with a locked-together thumb and forefinger ending in a sharp claw meant that they had stumbled upon an entirely new species.
The creature was found lying in what was once a lake, on top of captured prey. The spenosuchian crocodylomorph beneath her “looked like an alligator in its head, long skinny legs like a greyhound,” Carter says. Subsequently researched by the Smithsonian’s Sues, it was yet another new species, grallator, this one of the genus Dromicosuchus.
Not only that, Alison’s stomach area contained remains of four other small Triassic creatures, one of which, Carter says, was “second, second, second cousin” to a reptile thought to be an ancestor of mammals.
Carter theorizes that having killed its dinner, the rauisuchian was trying to drag it out of the lake when it got stuck in the mud and died.
To test his cause-of-death theory, he tried to walk in the similar sediment of nearby Jordan Lake when the water was low. “I tried to see how sticky it was. If you got both legs stuck in there, you’re in deep trouble.”
‘Show and tell’
Carter wears Hawaiian shirts to class, has a poster of Indiana Jones in his office and, like his students, appreciates but is not overwhelmed by their weighty task. Teaching paleontology, he says, “is like having ‘show and tell’ every day.”
“It’s just fun to talk about new discoveries. People have an inherent desire to know about the world they live in.”
Usually, he says, reconstructing a major fossil find is undertaken only by experts in museums. But Alison’s promise of being “a really marvelous teaching tool” prompted him to break tradition and involve undergraduates, even his freshman-seminar students planning to study English, philosophy and the like.
Other experts like Sues and Dr. Paul E. Olsen of Columbia University joined in the research and subsequent paper-writing, as did graduate students Karen Peyer and Stephanie E. Novak.
But it was undergraduates who hauled Alison’s skeleton, surrounded by petrified mud, out of the quarry in chunks. “It’s like these bones were encased in concrete,” Carter says.
Some of them, compressed by millions of years’ worth of sand, fell into pieces. “You have to know where they were, and then glue them back together again.”
Sure, the 300 students who’ve worked on Alison have made some mistakes, he says in a later conversation. “Just like today,” when a rib being bent broke instead.
“Sometimes, you’ve got to break a bone to build a skeleton,” he says.
Dr. Hans-Dieter Sues, Smithsonian Institution senior scientist and curator of vertebrate paleontology, helped with early research carried out by Dr. Joseph G. Carter, paleontology professor in UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of Geological Sciences.
The rauisuchian’s discovery, along with its captured prey, “provided unexpected new insights into Late Triassic life in what is now eastern North America,” Sues says.
At work in the lab
Now, some of Carter’s students are finishing the first complete rendition of Alison in polyurethane, readying her for a broad public debut. It’s expected to be finished during the fall semester and hopefully will go on display within this next year, perhaps at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. The actual bones are already there, under lock and key.
Though there’s no way to determine sex, in scientific parlance, she’s Portosuchus (genus) alisonae (species), named by students for the late Alison L. Chambers, their companion on many a paleontology field trip.
To students bending her ribs and putting her tailbone together like a jigsaw puzzle, she’s just plain Alison.
Student Maria Connolly asked the assembled heads bent over the polyurethane skeleton one recent morning if they knew why Alison is so trim.
It’s her metabolism, Connolly cracks. She’s dead!
That’s not all, chimes in Carter, a transplanted Kansan who echoes the Coroner’s pronouncement on the Wicked Witch in “The Wizard of Oz.”
“Not only merely dead,” he quotes. “But really most sincerely dead.”
Two-hundred-and-twenty-one million years dead, give or take 5 million.
Ah, but when she was alive! She wore armor plates on her neck, back and breast, was about 11 feet long, and likely stood upright at least part of the time.
A nickname for a rauisuchian is “bear croc” – it looks like a crocodile, prowls like a bear. Though they’re not ancestors of the dinosaur, Carter says, “It was Nature’s first attempt to build a dinosaur-like predator.”
Head uplifted, massive jaws open, eye sockets unseeing, she looms above her builders. On a table nearby, her yet-unattached hands are lifted in an unintended but touching gesture of supplication.
Previous students did an incomplete reconstruction in 2000; it substituted painted Plexiglas for the bones missing when Alison was unearthed. After a campus showing, this first replica was relegated to the lab while Carter and students researched Alison’s rauisuchian relatives and used their findings to create the missing parts .
A determination to keep Alison in North Carolina led Carter to take on the arduous task of overseeing her reassembly 18 years ago, even though his specialty is invertebrates. (He’s currently coordinator of an international effort to create the most complete family tree ever assembled for bivalves – clams, oysters, and the like.)
But no way, he says, was he going to send Alison out-of-state. “This is part of North Carolina’s heritage.”
Had her bones left, she’d be as unknown to most North Carolinians as the state’s other big vertebrate fossil find – a Late Triassic crocodile-like creature, a rutiodon, found in the 1800s in Durham County. It’s in the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Quarry discovery
Alison came to light when Carter student Brian Coffey and roommate Marco Brewer spotted some bone chips, then an anklebone, as they hiked the quarry. They felt that this was something big, and when they hauled the anklebone in to Carter, he agreed.
“When I saw it, I thought it must be another rutiodon,” he says.
A large part of the class went back to the quarry, and subsequently found part of the skull, a couple of teeth, the entire neck, most of the shoulders, two arms complete with hands, the collarbone, breastplate, part of the hip, part of the back, most of both legs including the feet, part of the tail, and many ribs.
“It was one of the most complete rauisuchians ever discovered,” says Carter. And it was articulated – the bones positioned just as they’d been in life.
The crab-like hand with a locked-together thumb and forefinger ending in a sharp claw meant that they had stumbled upon an entirely new species.
The creature was found lying in what was once a lake, on top of captured prey. The spenosuchian crocodylomorph beneath her “looked like an alligator in its head, long skinny legs like a greyhound,” Carter says. Subsequently researched by the Smithsonian’s Sues, it was yet another new species, grallator, this one of the genus Dromicosuchus.
Not only that, Alison’s stomach area contained remains of four other small Triassic creatures, one of which, Carter says, was “second, second, second cousin” to a reptile thought to be an ancestor of mammals.
Carter theorizes that having killed its dinner, the rauisuchian was trying to drag it out of the lake when it got stuck in the mud and died.
To test his cause-of-death theory, he tried to walk in the similar sediment of nearby Jordan Lake when the water was low. “I tried to see how sticky it was. If you got both legs stuck in there, you’re in deep trouble.”
‘Show and tell’
Carter wears Hawaiian shirts to class, has a poster of Indiana Jones in his office and, like his students, appreciates but is not overwhelmed by their weighty task. Teaching paleontology, he says, “is like having ‘show and tell’ every day.”
“It’s just fun to talk about new discoveries. People have an inherent desire to know about the world they live in.”
Usually, he says, reconstructing a major fossil find is undertaken only by experts in museums. But Alison’s promise of being “a really marvelous teaching tool” prompted him to break tradition and involve undergraduates, even his freshman-seminar students planning to study English, philosophy and the like.
Other experts like Sues and Dr. Paul E. Olsen of Columbia University joined in the research and subsequent paper-writing, as did graduate students Karen Peyer and Stephanie E. Novak.
But it was undergraduates who hauled Alison’s skeleton, surrounded by petrified mud, out of the quarry in chunks. “It’s like these bones were encased in concrete,” Carter says.
Some of them, compressed by millions of years’ worth of sand, fell into pieces. “You have to know where they were, and then glue them back together again.”
Sure, the 300 students who’ve worked on Alison have made some mistakes, he says in a later conversation. “Just like today,” when a rib being bent broke instead.
“Sometimes, you’ve got to break a bone to build a skeleton,” he says.
Friday, August 17, 2012
A Curiousity! Girl, 15, Named Mars Rover Years Ago
From CBS Los Angeles: A Curiousity! Girl, 15, Named Mars Rover Years Ago
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — For the past eight months, scientists have been anxiously watching Curiosity barrel closer and closer to the red planet.
Were you ever curious how the Mars landing rover got it’s name? We were.
Rachel Kim, reporting for CBS2 and KCAL9, found the person who named the $2.5 billion project and one-ton roving lab, and it was someone most unlikely.
“I’m 15 and I’ll be a sophomore,” says Clara Ma.
Yup. Her.
Ma, from Kansas, tells Kim as a 6th grader sitting in science class, she loved to ask questions. You could say she was always a bit…curious.
“I saw an article about the Mars Rover and how you can name it and how the girl who named the two Mars Rovers before me, she had entered a contest and won. And I thought that would be an amazing thing for me to try and do.”
Until 2009, the rover was just known as Mars Science Laboratory.
More than 9,000 students from around the country entered the contest.
Ma says, “I feel so proud that I named the Rover and they chose my name.”
After Ma was selected winner in 2009, she came to JPL to see how and where Curiosity was built. She got to even sign her name on the machine as it was being assembled.
While other kids might dream of their names being up in lights, Ma’s name will be rolling around on Mars. How’s that for star-struck!
It’s been three years since she named Curiosity. Maybe she’s just coming back to Earth. “Just getting to be there for the whole proces was amazing, mind-blowing.”
She’s anticipating smooth sailing but acknowledges she will be a bit nervous. “But I’ll also be really excited at the same time. I hope everything goes well, I really really do. I’ll just be on the edge of my seat.”
Ma will return to Kansas soon. But she’s saying so long to JPL — not goodbye. She smiles, “I’d love to work at JPL some day.”
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — For the past eight months, scientists have been anxiously watching Curiosity barrel closer and closer to the red planet.
Were you ever curious how the Mars landing rover got it’s name? We were.
Rachel Kim, reporting for CBS2 and KCAL9, found the person who named the $2.5 billion project and one-ton roving lab, and it was someone most unlikely.
“I’m 15 and I’ll be a sophomore,” says Clara Ma.
Yup. Her.
Ma, from Kansas, tells Kim as a 6th grader sitting in science class, she loved to ask questions. You could say she was always a bit…curious.
“I saw an article about the Mars Rover and how you can name it and how the girl who named the two Mars Rovers before me, she had entered a contest and won. And I thought that would be an amazing thing for me to try and do.”
Until 2009, the rover was just known as Mars Science Laboratory.
More than 9,000 students from around the country entered the contest.
Ma says, “I feel so proud that I named the Rover and they chose my name.”
After Ma was selected winner in 2009, she came to JPL to see how and where Curiosity was built. She got to even sign her name on the machine as it was being assembled.
While other kids might dream of their names being up in lights, Ma’s name will be rolling around on Mars. How’s that for star-struck!
It’s been three years since she named Curiosity. Maybe she’s just coming back to Earth. “Just getting to be there for the whole proces was amazing, mind-blowing.”
She’s anticipating smooth sailing but acknowledges she will be a bit nervous. “But I’ll also be really excited at the same time. I hope everything goes well, I really really do. I’ll just be on the edge of my seat.”
Ma will return to Kansas soon. But she’s saying so long to JPL — not goodbye. She smiles, “I’d love to work at JPL some day.”
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