TIZER'S SCIENCE NEWS

[Stanley]

Heard the news item about an inhaler that contains a gene that aids mucus to flow from the lungs. Intended mainly for Cystic Fibrosis sufferers. Not a permanent replacement of the gene but evidently a leap forward in treating anyone with a defective gene. They think the technique may be of value in other cases as well. If it works, what good news for many people with CF.

[Tizer]

The greater use of the inhaler route instead of tablets, medicines and injections is a welcome development and it's being applied to vaccines too. Great for India and Africa etc, to avoid dirty needles.

[Stanley]

I hadn't thought about that. Is the Salk vaccine still given on sugar lumps?
I was listening to the latest WHO warnings about antibiotic misuse and wondered whether one route to AB resistance, not finishing a prescribed course, couldn't be addressed by implanting a slow release pellet, like they can do with birth control medication. My mind goes back to the days when we 'caponized' male chicks by implanting a slow release hormone pellet.

[Tizer]

Such things have been under development since the 1990s but I think most attention has been on slow release antibiotics in implantable devices such as heart valves rather than on simply a means of getting the drug into the bloodstream. An example of what you are describing is this patent:
http://www.google.com/patents/US5874098

[Stanley]

A question. All my life I had a crackling noise in the vertebrae of my neck when I rotated my head while leaning it backwards. I was told it was air in the joints and never worried about it. However, when I ditched my long-standing regime of an aspirin every day first thing in the morning the crackling vanished. Over the last week or two I have been taking a 200mg Ibuprofen in the mornings to alleviate the pain in my knee that persisted after a sciatica storm caused by displacing a nerve in my bad back by coughing. I notice that the crackling has returned. No big problem but it intrigues me, is the crackling a product of air bubbles? Have the anti-inflammatories aggravated it?

[Tizer]

Sorry, I missed your post until now - that problem again of them disappearing too quickly. The `cracking' sound is usually due to sudden expansion of gas as the joints move and pull surfaces apart. The joints fit together closely and have very smooth lubricated surfaces but a gas pocket can open as the joint moves. It's like when you pull a suction pad off a smooth surface and the sharp noise is a pressure wave like a mini thunderclap or an aircraft breaking the sound barrier (but thankfully a lot quieter!). The anti-inflammatories must be changing the conditions between the joint surfaces in such a way that more energy is needed to break the suction, hence a louder crack.

[Stanley]

Thanks for that Tiz. Makes sense. Despite my aversion to taking pills, I took daughter Janet's advice and am taking two a day at 12 hour intervals to keep a slow anti inflammation process going and I think it may be improving my knee. Onward and upward!

[Bodger]

Natural plastic, for drug deliverey
http://www.prw.com/subscriber/headlines ... t=1&id=727

[Stanley]

News this morning in the Lancet (Oncology) of a new treatment for prostate cancer using high frequency sound waves. Said to have less side effects than other treatments.

[Tizer]

Controversy has increased over the new coins replacing our copper-nickel (`silver') coins. The present ones are 75% copper, 25% nickel but the rising price of copper has driven a move to steel plated with nickel. To bring the new coins to the same weight as the old ones they have been made thicker but this has meant vending machines, parking meters etc have all had to be altered at great expense. Now there is more trouble. Dermatologists have told the British Medical Journal that the new coins could cause problems for people with nickel allergy or eczema. There has been no health assessment in the UK but the Swedish national bank has said the coins constitute an unacceptable risk. More on this BBC link: LINK

[Stanley]

Bumped up

[Stanley]

I caught an interesting snippet on R4 about the fact that our DNA still shows the effects of ancient viruses. Does this mean that DNA can be modified by immune reactions?

[Tizer]

I'm glad you mentioned that, I bookmarked the BBC News web page story on Tuesday to remind me to post about it here then got deflected by domestic issues. It's very interesting and will open up a lot of other research, especially with respect to cancer and health in general, and for genetics and even for armchair philosophers like us. The work has been going on for some years now and has been reported in journals but this is the latest step involving study of the DNA of "38 mammals including humans, mice, rats, elephants and dolphins". It doesn't mean there are viruses loose in our body cells but that over millions of years viruses that infected our ancestors have gradually had their DNA become absorbed as a standard part of human DNA. You can read along the DNA strand and identify patches that are identical with certain viruses.

Viruses are composed of DNA or RNA with nothing more than a fragile envelope around each `virion' (virus particle) and are a very effective stripped down infective agent. Once in our body they enter the cells and use our own DNA-replicating mechanism to make more virus which is then released from the cells to spread the infection to other individuals. The present research shows that some of the viruses in the past abandoned jumping from individual to individual and managed instead to stay within the human cells and reproduce as part of the human DNA (they lost the gene called `Env' which was responsible for transfer). They are known as endogenous retroviruses and account for half of what we previously called `junk DNA', the 98.5% of our DNA that doesn't have any obvious function in human life.

Some of the viral DNA may be beneficial to us - one of the patches of viral DNA codes for a protein that aids development of the placenta, but little is known of their effects. So far, there seem to be no adverse results of their presence in our DNA. It does raise interesting philosophical questions. If there is so much more virus DNA in our genome than `true' human DNA, is the human race a virus that has conquered the Earth and will infect the universe? If you think of the endogenous retrovirus as being like an Internet virus that allows its maker to take over your computer, have humans been taken over by the maker of the endogenous retrovirus? Heather should be writing a sci-fi novel about all this!

The BBC story is here: LINK

[Whyperion]

Bacteria also are known to take on bits of DNA and use some of it as 'useful' other bits get carried around doing nothing observable, it originates from other bacteria and from viruses.

Does virus DNA in human DNA also explain the passing on of ' faulty ' DNA pairs or half pairs as genetic inherited diseases.

Are viruses the only 'pure' form of DNA or have they too picked up bits of host DNA along their divide modifications ?

[Stanley]

Fascinating stuff Peter. I love the idea of us being a virus that in the end might spread beyond earth. I wonder if someone out there is looking for a way to stop us doing that?
I remember reading a story about scientists who were doing an experiment in which they subjected particles in a vacuum tube to magnetic forces and watched the patterns evolve into clusters, some of which joined to create larger particles. It was decided to abandon the experiment. They pulled the switch and then one speculated that what they had seen was a model of the birth of a tiny universe, was it possible that they had just destroyed a whole evolving system on an incredibly small scale with a vastly accelerated rate of development?

[Tizer]

The `faulty DNA' is a result of us being bombarded by cosmic particles. Someone on the radio this last week said that, on average, a 10p coin would be hit by one cosmic particle every minute.

As for viruses picking up other DNA, I think the answer is "Why not?" There may an influenza virus out there with a full DNA blueprint for a human being as part of its `junk' DNA (the virus is probably wondering why it's burdened with such useless stuff!).

Stanley's story reminds me of a Terry Pratchett story where the university wizards set up a glass globe and get a little universe started. They home in on a planet and watch it develop. Plant and animal species come and go, then one species begins to be dominant - a species of crab that builds houses and roads, drives around in little carts and probably dreams about going to the stars. Then BANG, one of those bigger-than-dust asteroids hits and everything is rebooted, another animal begins to develop, an ape that eventually does make it to the stars. But the ape never realises that there had been a very advanced crab civilisation dominating the world because there is no evidence left of its presence. There is a moral there...we humans think we know a lot of what lived on this planet in the past but the truth is that we know nowt much. Just because we've got some fossils to look at, we think that tells us a full story. But it's a bit like having a few pages that have dropped out of a bible and using them to try to piece together the meaning of religion. There could have been all sorts of other organisms and civilisations and we haven't detected their traces yet. The Earth is a big place....

[Stanley]

Lovely dense post! Being an Adams fan I immediately think of Hitch Hiker's Guide to the galaxy where it turns out that it's actually white mice who have been running planet Earth but we never noticed....
I love these off-beat views of creation which contain quite fundamental questions posed in fantasy form.

[Stanley]

What looks like good news this morning. A blood test to identify risk of cancer. (LINK)

[Tizer]

It's linked with advances in epigenetics which I described in a post on the archived site some time ago but I can't retrieve it yet. It's an example of how good scientists are always sceptics (even though climate change deniers try to claim they are the only sceptics!). It was thought that all inheritance was through DNA but scientists kept testing this theory to check whether there was any other way, and they eventually found it in epigenetics. It's explained in these web pages:

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/ ... pi_learns/

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/ ... heritance/

[Bruff]

I'm not entirely convinced that a blood test to identify one's risk of cancer, or indeed one's risk of any (serious) medical complaint, is a good thing per se for two reasons.

The first I guess is philosophical. I would argue that a part of what makes life bearable and society functional, is that we do not know, any of us, what is round the corner. If we all knew for example, that we would end up with an incurable and terminal disease at some pre-determined point in the future, or God forbid we advanced our knowledge to the extent that all things being equal we would slip our mortal coil on date xx/xx/xxxx, then future society may likely be beggared by the traumatised and desparate as these dates approached.

The second is more practical, in that we may well find ourselved denied life opportunities due to the knowledge that in time we will develop 'x' - I'm thinking about insurance, work opportunities, for example if we have a predisposition to a particular occupational disease/illness, and so on.

Basically, knowledge is not always a 'good thing', and advances in science are increasingly a matter for public debate and ethics as much as the 'science' itself.

Richard Broughton

[Tripps]

This is a first Richard - I agree with everything you have written.

[Stanley]

A valid point of view I think Richard and it bothers me as well. I suppose the fault lies not in the science but the uses we put it to. Remember the misgivings the scientists had when they saw the first atomic explosion. " I am become a destroyer of worlds" Even worse than core dilemmas like this is the cynical use the bodies like insurance companies or even individual employers put the capabilities to predict to. I doubt if there is an answer.....
Off piste I know but what are your views on the views expressed by the workers in the Border Agency that the basic problem with the immigration queues is staff cuts and drafting in 'emergency' teams is not the answer.

[Bruff]

It's an interesting situation, and I think complicated. There have been staffing reductions in the BA, but whether this is the root cause of the current problems is open to question though certainly I would think it has had some effect. Other factors are present though, not least the numbers of people who fly into this country and the well known capacity issues at particularly Heathrow (but not just LHR, Liverpool John Lennon is similarly well known for being a bottleneck with long queues). Also, the risk-based system adopted by the BA has been dropped and this may be a factor. Related to this, we live in interesting times and security checks etc are onerous these days.

If this is to be 'sorted' then all these factors are a part of the mix and so a strategic solution is needed. I wouldn't have thought sorting the one would be the best way to a solution.

Richard Broughton

[Tizer]

Richard, I sympathise with your views about knowing in advance one's risk of disease and death etc and I don't really want to know these things. But....do we have a right to deny others the opportunity to know these things, if they should so wish? Perhaps we have a moral right, or even a moral duty, to save others from what we believe to be `bad for them'. And perhaps we don't. Ain't philosophy confusing!

[Stanley]

Isn't it. I have no problem with the simple moral questions connected with how you manage your personal life but when you get to ones like your illustration I tend nowadays to ignore them simply because I've heard arguments for and against all my life and recognise a Gordian Knot when I see it! Quite safe to leave it to the next generation.