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The creature with the key to immortality?

Science Photo Library

By BBC

Sea anemones are a common sight on many coastlines, and despite their brightly coloured appearance it seems they may have more common with humans than people realise. What’s more, researchers are wondering whether the creatures could hold the secret to eternal life, writes Mary Colwell.

The wicked queen in the tale of Snow White is famous for her rhetorical question: “Mirror Mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” But her dream of eternal youth is an elusive one – as the years roll by the human body slowly but surely shrinks, sags and droops as cells mutate and die. Hearing, mobility, mental agility, muscle and brain mass all decline.

The queen is on a trajectory common to most living organisms, apart, that is, from a humble, often overlooked creature of the seashore – the sea anemone.

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The 2015 Nobel prizes: Physiology or medicine

By The Economist

Despite what the romantic poets would have you believe, the natural world is not a friendly place. It is full of dangerous creatures, and some of the most dangerous are the smallest: the bacteria, viruses and parasites that between them debilitate and kill millions of people every year. But it is possible, with a bit of cunning, a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, to turn a bit of nature against itself—to humanity’s benefit. And it is for exactly this sort of work that Sweden’s Royal Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2015 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine.

The three winners are William Campbell, Satoshi Omura and Tu Youyou. Drs Campbell and Omura were honoured for their discovery of avermectin, a drug that kills the parasitic worms responsible for river blindness and lymphatic filariasis, which between them infect about 125m people worldwide. Dr Tu—who originally trained in traditional Chinese medicine—discovered artemisinin, a drug that helps kill the parasite that causes malaria. Around 200m people are thought to be infected with malaria, and about half a million die each year.

Dr Omura is a microbiologist by training. His research at Kitasato University, in Japan, focused on a genus of bacteria called Streptomyces, which were known to produce complex chemicals that seemed to be able to weaken and kill rival micro-organisms. (Streptomycin, an early antibiotic and one of the first effective treatments for tuberculosis, is, as its name suggests, derived from Streptomyces. Selman Waksman, its discoverer, won the Nobel prize for medicine in 1952). Dr Omura developed ways of growingStreptomyces bacteria in the lab, allowing him to systematically culture thousands of strains and screen them to see whether any of those compounds might hold medical promise.

Dr Campbell, then of Drew University in New Jersey, heard of Dr Omura’s work and managed to obtain samples of his most promising bugs. An expert in parasite physiology, he was able to demonstrate that a certain chemical extracted from Dr Omura’s bacteria was indeed effective at killing parasites in animals. It was isolated and dubbed avermectin; after further lab work, a slightly chemically modified version called ivermectin was produced for human consumption. These days ivermectin is listed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on its List of Essential Medicines, which catalogues the drugs that even the most basic medical system needs.

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Researchers massively edit the genome of pigs to turn them into perfect human organ donors

Editors-in-Chief Franco J. DeMayo and Thomas Spencer, Biology of Reproduction

By John Hewitt

One benefit of the closeness between pigs and humans is the potential to be organ donors. There are however, just a few nagging uncertainties that still stand in the way. The big one, the possibility of porcine endogenous retroviruses (PERVs) getting reactivated inside the human organ recipient, is no longer the concern it once was. That comes thanks to the recent groundbreaking work of the one-man army of genetics, George Church, and his lab at Harvard. The latest news, just reported in Nature, is that the group was able to use CRISPR gene-editing techniques to inactivate 62 PERVs in pig embryos.

The one other big concern is rejection of donor organs by the human immune system. Church has reportedly tackled that problem too, by modifying over 20 genes in additional embryos that make the proteins that irritate our immune cells. Although many of these proteins typically reside on the cell surface, they can also be interior proteins which ultimately get chopped up into representative ‘tags’ that are exposed at the surface. We don’t yet know exactly which genes these all are (and they will hopefully soon be published), but one might be able to make a few good guesses.

Researchers in China, have also had recent successes in making multiple CRISPR edits to pig genomes. They were even able to combine the technique with somatic cell nuclear transfer (the method used correct various mutations in the creation of multi-parental embryos) without mosaic mutation or any of the usual undesirable ‘off-target’ effects. Perhaps the most arresting news from the Chinese pig geneticists has been their creation of custom pet rainbow micropigs. Not only are these pigs miniature due to inactivation of one copy of their growth hormone receptor gene, but they can be ordered in different colors.

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Editorial: Masters of the World

In this issue of IAI News the battleground is science. We believe science is rational. But, like the Church it once fought, it has its own establishment and theories to defend. Has it become the new church, with beliefs tended by the faithful and heretics excluded from publication? Or is this a travesty of an institution that has brought so many advances? The UK’s most brilliant moral philosopher, Mary Midgley leads the charge. Here she challenges our unquestioning belief in the authority of the physical sciences. Science, argues Midgley, has replaced religion as the dominant authority of our age. How did it happen, she asks, and why does it matter?   Defending the power of science are particle physicist Tara Shears and chemist Peter Atkins. Shears praises the universal clarity of mathematics, while Atkins argues that one day science will be able to explain all of existence – that includes art, music, and even religion. To add fuel to the fire, we reach back into our archives where ph...

Understanding others’ thoughts enables young kids to lie

© carballo / Fotolia

By Association for Psychological Science

Kids who are taught to reason about the mental states of others are more likely to use deception to win a reward, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The findings indicate that developing “theory of mind” (ToM) — a cognitive ability critical to many social interactions — may enable children to engage in the sophisticated thinking necessary for intentionally deceiving another person.

“Telling a lie successfully requires deliberately creating a false belief in the mind of the lie recipient, and ToM could provide an important cognitive tool to enable children to do so,” the researchers write.

Research suggests that children begin to tell lies somewhere around ages 2 and 3, and studies have shown a correlation between children’s theory of mind and their tendency to lie. Psychological scientists Genyue Fu of Hangzhou Normal University in China, Kang Lee of the University of Toronto in Canada, and colleagues wanted to see if they could find causal evidence for a link between the two.

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Stem cell trial aims to cure blindness

By Fergus Walsh

Surgeons in London have carried out a pioneering human embryonic stem cell operation in an ongoing trial to find a cure for blindness for many patients.

The procedure was performed on a woman aged 60 at Moorfields Eye Hospital.

It involved “seeding” a tiny patch with specialised eye cells and implanting it at the back of the retina.

The London Project to Cure Blindness was established a decade ago to try to reverse vision loss in patients with age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

Ten patients with the wet form of AMD will undergo the procedure.

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This Week in Science: October 11th, 2015

Compiled by Mario Gruber

The Scientific Way to Cut a Cake

Technology





Photo credit:

Cake by Lisarlena via Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY-SA-3.0.

When you cut a cake to produce a slice like the one in the picture above, you're actually performing a non-optimal cut. Why? If you don't eat the rest immediately, the inner surfaces of the remaining cake are exposed to the air, drying it out.

The War On Science

Editor's Blog





Photo credit:

AsapSCIENCE screenshot/YouTube

Carl Sagan once said, "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology."

Despite science being appreciated and understood more widely now than in any other period of human history, the past decades have seen politicians, investors and society turn their back on science.

Cat Eyes Provide Solution For Looking Inside Nuclear Reactors

Technology





Photo credit:

Nuclear reactor at Reed College by Don McCullough, via Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0

Researchers from Lancaster University in England have developed a camera that is able to see the radiation emitted by nuclear reactors. The team, led by Jonathan Beaumont, has drawn inspiration from the eyes of cats and believes this technology will boost safety and efficiency in nuclear power plants, as well as provide necessary assistance in case of nuclear disaster emergencies.