Category Archives: Life Science

Placebo Effect

In fact the new study added nothing (and it was ridiculously badly reported): we already knew that antidepressants perform only marginally better than placebo, and the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) guidelines has actively advised against using them in milder depression since 2004. But the more interesting questions are around placebo.
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Another study from 2002 looked at 75 trials of antidepressants over the past 20 years, but looked only at the response in the placebo arms of the trials, and found that the response to placebo has increased significantly in recent years (as has the response to medication): perhaps our expectations of those drugs have increased, or perhaps, conversely to our earlier example, the trial designs have become systematically more flattering. I’m giving you tenuous data, on an interesting area, because I know you’re adult enough to cope with ambiguity.

Scientists Reconsider Autism

Webcast – In My Language – about what gets considered thought, intelligence, personhood, language, and communication, and what does not.

Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know

This movement is being fueled by a small but growing cadre of neuropsychological researchers who are taking a fresh look at the nature of autism itself. The condition, they say, shouldn’t be thought of as a disease to be eradicated. It may be that the autistic brain is not defective but simply different — an example of the variety of human development. These researchers assert that the focus on finding a cure for autism — the disease model — has kept science from asking fundamental questions about how autistic brains function.

A cornerstone of this new approach — call it the difference model — is that past research about autistic intelligence is flawed, perhaps catastrophically so, because the instruments used to measure intelligence are bogus. “If Amanda Baggs had walked into my clinic five years ago,” says Massachusetts General Hospital neuroscientist Thomas Zeffiro, one of the leading proponents of the difference model, “I would have said she was a low-functioning autistic with significant cognitive impairment. And I would have been totally wrong.”
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And that hurts autistic people, Dawson says. She makes a comparison with blindness. Of course blind people have a disability and need special accommodation. But you wouldn’t give a blind person a test heavily dependent on vision and interpret their poor score as an accurate measure of intelligence. Mottron is unequivocal: Because of recent research, especially the Raven paper, it’s clearer than ever that so-called low-functioning people like Amanda Baggs are more intelligent than once presumed.The Dawson paper was hardly conclusive, but it generated buzz among scientists and the media. Mottron’s team is now collaborating with Massachusetts General Hospital’s Zeffiro, a neuroimaging expert, to dig deeper.

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Ancient Sea Monster

Sea reptile is biggest on record

A fossilised “sea monster” unearthed on an Arctic island is the largest marine reptile known to science, Norwegian scientists have announced. The 150 million-year-old specimen was found on Spitspergen, in the Arctic island chain of Svalbard, in 2006. The Jurassic-era leviathan is one of 40 sea reptiles from a fossil “treasure trove” uncovered on the island. Nicknamed “The Monster”, the immense creature would have measured 15m (50ft) from nose to tail.
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Unfortunately, there was a small river running through where the head lay, so much of the skull had been washed away. A preliminary analysis of the bones suggests this beast belongs to a previously unknown species.

Funding Medical Research

Cheap, ‘safe’ drug kills most cancers

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe. It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar.

Until now it had been assumed that cancer cells used glycolysis because their mitochondria were irreparably damaged. However, Michelakis’s experiments prove this is not the case, because DCA reawakened the mitochondria in cancer cells. The cells then withered and died

The University of Alberta is raising funds to further the research. Some look at this and indite a funding system that does not support research for human health unless there is profit to be made. Much of the blame seems to go to profit focused drug companies. I can see room for some criticism. But really I think the criticism is misplaced.

The organizations for which curing cancer is the partial aim (rather than making money) say government (partial aim or public health…), public universities (partial aim of science research or medical research…), foundations, cancer societies, private universities… should fund such efforts, if they have merit. Universities have huge research budgets. Unfortunately many see profit as their objective and research as the means to the objective (based on their actions not their claims). These entities with supposedly noble purposes are the entities I blame most, not profit focused companies (though yes, if they claim an aim of health care they I would blame them too).

Now I don’t know what category this particular research falls into. Extremely promising or a decent risk that might work just like hundreds or thousands of other possibilities. But lets look at several possibilities. Some others thoughts on where it falls: Dichloroacetate to enter clinical trials in cancer patients, from a previous post here – Not a Cancer Cure Yet, The dichloroacetate (DCA) cancer kerfuffle, CBC’s ‘The Current’ on dichloroacetate (DCA), Dichloroacetate (DCA) Phase II Trial To Begin (“Like hundreds (if not, thousands) of compounds being tested to treat cancer, DCA was shown by Michelakis’ group earlier this year to slow the growth of human lung tumors in a preclinical rodent model.”).
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Your Inner Fish

photo of Neil Shubin

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin. A great piece from the University of Chicago, Fish out of Water, provides a good preview to the book:

What are the leading causes of death in humans? Four of the top ten causes—heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and stroke – have some sort of genetic basis and, likely, a historical one. Much of the difficulty is almost certainly due to our having a body built for an active animal but the lifestyle of a spud.
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The problem is that the brain stem originally controlled breathing in fish; it has been jerry-rigged to work in mammals… This works well in fish, but it is a lousy arrangement for mammals.
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The example from microbes is not unique. Judging by the Nobel Prizes awarded in medicine and physiology in the past 13 years, I should have called this book Your Inner Fly, Your Inner Worm, or Your Inner Yeast. Pioneering research on flies won the 1995 Nobel Prize in medicine for uncovering a set of genes that builds bodies in humans and other animals. Nobels in medicine in 2002 and 2006 went to people who made significant advances in human genetics and health by studying an insignificant-looking little worm (C. elegans). Similarly, in 2001, elegant analyses of yeast (including baker’s yeast) and sea urchins won the Nobel in medicine for increasing our understanding of some of the basic biology of all cells. These are not esoteric discoveries made on obscure and unimportant creatures. These discoveries on yeast, flies, worms, and, yes, fish tell us about how our own bodies work, the causes of many of the diseases we suffer, and ways we can develop tools to make our lives longer and healthier.

Two of my more controversial posts have been: Evolution is Fundamental to Science and Understanding the Evolution of Human Beings by Country. Evolution is not controversial scientifically. Just as gravity is not. Obviously this understanding is far from universal however.

But it is just a matter of time: similar to Galileo Galilei and heliocentric cosmology. See: Galileo’s Battle for the Heavens – Copernican System – Galileo). We now sit maybe 100 years after Galileo’s death (based on the evidence available in support of each scientific theory). At some point the evidence is accepted and life continues. Though I must admit it, I find it a bit disappointing how long it is taking for some people to accept the evidence of evolution. But I probably need to learn to be more patient – I have been told that more than once. All I can do is try to help present some small amount of the great work so many scientists have done to advance our knowledge. And here I am talking about evolution – for the 28% of those in the USA that couldn’t provide the answer that earth revolves around the sun, in 1998, well, they need much more help than I can provide.

Bacteria Can Transfer Genes to Other Bacteria

From page 115 of Good Gems, Bad Germs:

Microbiologists of the 1950’s did not appreciate the stunning extent to which bacteria swap genes… In 1959 Japanese hospitals experience outbreaks of multidrug-resistant bacterial dysentery. The shigella bacteria, which caused the outbreaks, were shrugging off four different classes of previously effective antibiotics: sulfonamides, streptomycins, chloramphenicols, and tetracyclines… In fact, the Japanese researches found it quite easy to transfer multidrug resistance from E. coli to shingella and back again simply by mixing resistant and susceptible strains together in a test tube.

Virus Engineered To Kill Deadly Brain Tumors

Yale Lab Engineers Virus That Can Kill Deadly Brain Tumors

A laboratory-engineered virus that can find its way through the vascular system and kill deadly brain tumors has been developed by Yale School of Medicine researchers, it was reported this week in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Each year 200,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with a brain tumor, and metastatic tumors and glioblastomas make up a large part of these tumors. There currently is no cure for these types of tumors, and they generally result in death within months.
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“Three days after inoculation, the tumors were completely or almost completely infected with the virus and the tumor cells were dying or dead,” van den Pol said. “We were able to target different types of cancer cells. Within the same time frame, normal mouse brain cells or normal human brain cells transplanted into mice were spared. This underlines the virus’ potential therapeutic value against multiple types of brain cancers.”

Pretty cool. Too bad these press releases never quite live up to the initial promise. Still this one is very cool, if it can succeed in helping even a small percentage of people it will be a great breakthrough. It is also just cool – using a virus to kill tumors – how cool is that?

Bats Are Dying in North-East USA

Vet College scientists aid investigation of why bats in Northeast are mysteriously dying By Krishna Ramanujan

Bat specialists from the New York State Department of Conservation (NYSDEC) have found 15 sites, up from four discovered last year, with sick bats: one in Massachusetts, two in Vermont and 12 in New York between Albany and Watertown. To help diagnose the problem, NYSDEC scientists are sending samples to Beth Buckles, assistant professor of biomedical sciences in Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine.

The affected bats are mostly little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus), among the most common North American bats. Other affected bats include the endangered Indiana bat (Myotis Sodalis), the northern long-eared bat (Myotis septentrionalis) and the eastern pipistrelle (Perimyotis subflavus). The bats live year round in the general area of study and usually hibernate each winter in the same caves.

Buckles and colleagues are conducting postmortem exams of organs and tissues and testing for signs of inflammation, bacteria, viruses and toxins. So far, the researchers do not yet know what is causing the massive casualties, Buckles said. “We have some good leads. We are continuing to look for infectious causes and are developing protocols to assess the bats’ metabolic states. They may not have enough fat to make it through the winter,” she said.

Many of the sick bats have a white fungus growing on their faces, are very thin and are congregating near to the cave entrances, a habit of ill bats. But it is “unprecedented” to find so many sick bats grouped near cave entrances, said Buckles. In two caves the researchers studied last year — that together had an estimated 18,000 bats — up to 97 percent died. The caves found this year may hold between 150,000 and 200,000 bats, many of them sick.

Related: Nectar-Feeding Bats – Bye Bye Bees

Leafhopper Feeding a Gecko

Some of this stuff is just fun. The leafhopper feeds on the sap of the tree. And the Gecko will stop by and wait to be fed. The narrator explains that scientists have not determined why this happens, perhaps the Gecko keeps aware predators? That seems somewhat flimsy as a guess to me but what do I know. The narrator does say that the sweet honeydew is what remains from the sap once the leafhopper has extracted the protein.

Some Bacteria Might Fight Cancer

Cancer and the bacterial connection

today, some scientists think Coley had it right: Germs can teach our bodies how to fight back against tumors. Dr. John Timmerman, a cancer immunotherapy expert at UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center, says this revolution has produced “the most exciting sets of compounds in cancer immunolog
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The studies also imply that our cleaner, infection-free lifestyles may be contributing to the rise in certain cancers over the last 50 years, scientists say, because they make the immune system weaker or less mature. Germs cause disease but may also fortify the body, a notion summed up in a 2006 report by a team of Canadian researchers as “whatever does not kill me makes me stronger.”
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Other groups have been experimenting with injections of other types of heat-killed bacteria, including Myobacterium vaccae, a tuberculosis relative. In two studies in January’s European Journal of Cancer, researchers report that these bacteria may help fight certain lung and renal cancers.

The rich interplay of complex systems are often very difficult to grasp simply. I discusses this concept in the post on the excellent book, Parasite Rex.