Category Archives: Health Care

Harvard Plans Life Sciences Campus

Harvard Unveils Plans for 250 Acre Stem Cell and Life Sciences Campus:

During the first 20 years of the expansion, Harvard would build 4 million to 5 million square feet of buildings and create at least 5,000 jobs, university officials said. Construction in Allston could begin this summer when Harvard hopes to break ground on a 500,000-square-foot (46,450-square-metre) science complex that will house the school’s stem-cell researchers and other institutes. The science complex, university officials said, would be the nucleus for new interdisciplinary research and is expected to go a long way toward boosting Boston’s economy by encouraging partnerships with biotechnology firms that may displace the region’s long-fading manufacturing base.

5,000 jobs is a huge number (even looking out 20 years). Manufacturing is still a huge economic factor (for the USA and the world) but investing in creating science and engineering centers of excellence is critical in determining where strong economies and good jobs will be 30+ years from now. They don’t explain what those 5,000 jobs are, but it seems that thousands could be for science and engineering graduates. The value of that to Boston’s economy is huge.

Evolved for Cancer?

Evolved for Cancer? by Carl Zimmer:

In cancer, cells play the role of organisms. Cancer- causing changes to DNA cause some cells to reproduce more effectively than ordinary ones. And even within a single tumor, more adapted cells may outcompete less successful ones.
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Tumor suppressor proteins are among the most effective defenses against cancer. Studies suggest that some of these proteins prevent cancer by monitoring how a cell reproduces. If the cell multiplies in an abnormal way, the proteins induce it to die or to slip into senescence, a kind of early retirement. The cell survives, but it can no longer divide. Tumor suppressor proteins play a vital role in our survival, but scientists have recently discovered something strange about them: in some respects, we would be better off without them.

Can Brain Exercises Prevent Mental Decline?

Last month we posted about: Short Mental Workouts May Slow Decline of Aging Minds. Now here is another article on the same topic: Little proof that brain exercises can prevent mental decline by Alice Dembner

Richard Suzman, who oversees behavioral and social research at the National Institute on Aging, said the downside of using the programs include “harm to the wallet or false hope,” or health setbacks if people spend time brain-training instead of getting physical exercise. But others say, despite the lack of evidence, that the programs may be worth trying, particularly in conjunction with other activities that may help with brain health such as a healthy diet, exercise, managing stress, and keeping up social contacts.
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And only last month did the first rigorous study suggest that brain training could positively affect daily-life activities and might delay age-related declines in everyday functioning. Even in that large, government-funded study, the evidence was far from conclusive.

In the original post we mentioned: “Another Paper Questions Scientific Paper Accuracy (just a reminder that the conclusions of many studies are not confirmed in future studies).” That is always important to keep in mind, even though we don’t post that reminder every time.

Human Embryo Hybrids

Embryo hybrids are used to grow human stem cells (for a few days) in eggs from animals. Public debate on embryo hybrids

Allowing DNA from humans and animals to be mixed should be put to a public debate, a regulatory body has said.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which oversees embryo research and fertility treatment, said the research could fall under its remit and would not be prohibited by law after a meeting of experts on Wednesday.

Door left open for creation of hybrid embryos:

Two teams of British scientists have applied for licences to create “hybrid” embryos that would be about 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent animal to produce embryonic stem cells — the body’s building blocks that can grow into all other types of cells.
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They want to use stem cells to understand and develop therapies for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cystic fibrosis, motor neurone disease and Huntington’s. The hybrid embryos would be destroyed within 14 days when they were no bigger than a pinhead.

Epidemic of Diagnoses

Edited version from our managment improvement blog.

What’s Making Us Sick Is an Epidemic of Diagnoses by Dr. Welch, Dr. Schwartz and Dr. Woloshin:

For most Americans, the biggest health threat is not avian flu, West Nile or mad cow disease. It’s our health-care system.

True, and probably the biggest economic threat too.

But it also leads to more diagnoses, a trend that has become an epidemic.
This epidemic is a threat to your health. It has two distinct sources. One is the medicalization of everyday life. Most of us experience physical or emotional sensations we don’t like, and in the past, this was considered a part of life. Increasingly, however, such sensations are considered symptoms of disease.

When I read:

But the real problem with the epidemic of diagnoses is that it leads to an epidemic of treatments. Not all treatments have important benefits, but almost all can have harms.

I just think: tampering!

Scientists Knock-out Prion Gene in Cows

Scientists Announce Mad Cow Breakthrough by Rick Weiss

Scientists said yesterday that they have used genetic engineering techniques to produce the first cattle that may be biologically incapable of getting mad cow disease. The animals, which lack a gene that is crucial to the disease’s progression, were not designed for use as food. They were created so that human pharmaceuticals can be made in their blood without the danger that those products might get contaminated with the infectious agent that causes mad cow.

That agent, a protein known as a prion (pronounced PREE-on), can cause a fatal human ailment, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, if it gets into the body. More generally, scientists said, the animals will facilitate studies of prions, which are among the strangest of all known infectious agents because they do not contain any genetic material.
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Prions remain poorly understood, but experiments suggest that it takes just one bad one to ruin a brain. That’s because a badly folded prion in the brain can strong-arm normal, nearby prions, turning good prions bad.

Single Gene Could Lead to Long Life

Single Gene Could Lead to Long Life, Better Mental Function by Charles Q. Choi:

The CETP gene variant makes cholesterol particles in the blood larger than normal. The researchers suggest smaller particles can more readily lodge in the lining of blood vessels, leading to fatty buildups, which are a risk factor for heart attacks and strokes.

Whether or not this gene variant protects the brain by preventing this buildup, or through some other mechanism, remains uncertain, says Barzilai. Future research should also investigate whether this gene has an effect on dementia associated with Alzheimer’s disease, says pathologist and human geneticist George Martin at the University of Washington.

Pharmaceutical companies are currently developing drugs that mimic the effect of this gene variant, says Barzilai. Unfortunately, one known as torcetrapib, manufactured by Pfizer, was pulled in December due to increased death and heart problems among study subjects, “but others in development aren’t seeing that, so it might just have been a problem with that drug,”

Short Mental Workouts May Slow Decline of Aging Minds

Short Mental Workouts May Slow Decline of Aging Minds, Study Finds by Shankar Vedantam:

the brief training sessions seemed to confer enormous benefits as many as five years later. That would be as if someone went to the gym Monday through Friday for the first two weeks of the new year, did no exercise for five years, and still saw significant physical benefits in 2012.
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The researchers also showed that the benefits of the brain exercises extended well beyond the specific skills the volunteers learned. Older adults who did the basic exercises followed by later sessions were three times as fast as those who got only the initial sessions when it came to activities of daily living, such as reacting to a road sign, looking up a number in a telephone book or checking the ingredients on a medicine bottle — abilities that can spell the difference between living independently and needing help.

Related: Feed your Newborn Neurons – Another Paper Questions Scientific Paper Accuracy (just a reminder that the conclusions of many studies are not confirmed in future studies) – Virus may be eating your brain

Mind controls body in extreme experiments

Mind controls body in extreme experiments by William J. Cromie, Harvard University Gazette:

During visits to remote monasteries in the 1980s, Benson and his team studied monks living in the Himalayan Mountains who could, by g Tum-mo meditation, raise the temperatures of their fingers and toes by as much as 17 degrees. It has yet to be determined how the monks are able to generate such heat.

The researchers also made measurements on practitioners of other forms of advanced meditation in Sikkim, India. They were astonished to find that these monks could lower their metabolism by 64 percent. “It was an astounding, breathtaking [no pun intended] result,” Benson exclaims.

To put that decrease in perspective, metabolism, or oxygen consumption, drops only 10-15 percent in sleep and about 17 percent during simple meditation.

In my opinion, much more evidence is needed to take these claims seriously but still it is interesting.

Bed Bugs, Science and the Media

Media Criticism – the bed bug story

Since I discovered that I have bed bugs I have been touring around the internet doing research right from day one and what I have discovered is that the media is doing a terrible job of covering the bed bug story, and as a result many of the bed bug blogs I have read are full of misinformation which echoes this bad reporting in the media. One of the most common themes in the media stories you will read if you do a search for news articles on bed bugs is that we have bed bugs because DDT was banned, thus forcing us to use ‘weak chemicals’ against bed bugs. This is false. Bed bugs developed resistance to DDT in the 1940s
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I recommend tenting your bed, because you see a bed bug is not a super bug, the bug of steel, it is just a bug, and it is a bug that is used to being foiled by humans who do all the thinking in that symbiotic relationship, which is why bed bugs have evolved to be so damned sneaky in the hopes of getting away with all that biting.

I like the idea of avoiding pesticides, but I am not sure this is sufficient. Still I like the idea of presenting alternative ideas to pesticides as the first option. Extension services at many universities have great information, on a wide variety of topics, and in general are not overly biased toward commercial solutions (like business may be). They often have applied scientific thinking, run experiments and examined existing research on the topics for which they provide information.