Biotechnology

After a decade of painstaking research, federal and university scientists have reconstructed the 1918 influenza virus that killed 50 million people worldwide. Like the flu viruses now raising alarm bells in Asia, the 1918 virus was a bird flu that jumped directly to humans, the scientists reported. To shed light on how the virus evolved, the United States Department of Health and Human Services published the full genome of the 1918 influenza virus on the Internet in the GenBank database.

This is extremely foolish. The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb, and in two ways revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous.

The main objectives of the project are (i) to develop versatile, inexpensive, and easy-to-use diagnostic tools for health, environmental and other applications based on the measurement of molecular interactions (ligand-receptor interactions) by integrated micro- and nano-cantilever sensors and (ii) to test the developed diagnostic tools in two specific health care applications, namely (1) the detection of tumour markers in clinical diagnosis and (2) the high-sensitivity detection of proteins, providing a verification of the project's achievements and initiating a generation of innovative products with significant market potential. The proposed project capitalizes on the mechanical properties of micro- and nano-mechanical structures (cantilevers) to measure molecular (ligand-receptor) interactions.

Already being intensely studied as an agent for cleaning up toxic waste, a strain of bacteria has now surprised researchers with its ability to build conducting nanowires.

The long, very thin wires are unprecedented in biological systems, says the microbiologist who discovered the bacteria and the wires' conductivity. They completely change science's understanding of how microbes handle electrons, he said.

Derek Lovley and his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst, Mass.) reported observing and measuring the conductivity of long wires, 3 to 5 nanometers in diameter, emanating from the Geobacter bacteria.

Recently, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America recently gave its imprimatur to a new buzzword: Generation Rx. Its annual report on what Americans think of controlled substances showed that for the first time, more teenagers are abusing prescription painkillers than are using a variety of common illicit drugs.

What are these prescription drugs being used for? Some of them mimic the effects of street drugs. For instance, the pain reliever Oxycontin, when stripped of its coating, can produce a heroinlike high. The consequences of this kind of abuse are familiar. Antidrug advocates have warned for decades that drugs impair not only users' health but also their work. Drug-induced torpor even earned its own name: amotivational syndrome. Timothy Leary's flameout on the Harvard fast track probably frightened more middle-class parents than the warnings of J. Edgar Hoover.

But there is an aspect of prescription drug abuse mentioned only briefly in the report: ingesting to excel, not rebel. There's now a hypermotivational syndrome, use of prescription drugs not to escape the commanding heights of education and the economy but to attain them.

Radioactive fallout from nuclear tests serves as measuring stick.

If wisdom comes with age, then brain cells are some of the wisest in the body: researchers have applied carbon dating to DNA to confirm that cells in the brain live longer than most others.

This is a new application for the technique, which is traditionally used in archaeology and palaeoanthropology to pinpoint the age of fossils.

Carbon dating looks at the ratio of radioactive carbon, which is naturally present at low levels in the atmosphere and food, to normal carbon within an organism. While a creature lives, eats and breathes, its ratio of radioactive to normal carbon will equal that of its environment. But when it dies, this ratio will fall, as the carbon-14 decays.

Radioactive carbon decays slowly, such that a given amount of carbon-14 halves every 6,000 years. So detecting the subtle change in the ratio of normal to naturally occurring radioactive carbon over just a few years is incredibly hard.

But Jonas Frisén of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, says it can be done if one takes advantage of the signal left by nuclear testing, which spewed high levels of carbon-14 into the air during the Cold War.

Henry Harpending is about to titillate the world's conspiracy theorists with one of the most politically incorrect academic papers of the new millennium.

Why, he and his colleagues at the University of Utah asked, have Jews of European descent won 27 per cent of the Nobel Prizes given to Americans in the past century, while making up only 3 per cent of the population? Why do they produce more than half the world's chess champions? And why do they have an average IQ higher than any other ethnic group for which there's reliable data, and nearly six times as many people scoring above 140 compared with Europeans?

Prof. Harpending suggests that the reason is in their bloodline — it's genetic.

The 61-year-old anthropologist's explanation is not easily dismissed, but it crosses into the territory scientists fear most.

A microneedle had squeezed out all the genetic material from a freshly harvested human egg. Now, in the shadows of a darkened laboratory, a technician in a blue jumpsuit prodded and probed the egg's outer membrane on Monday morning, seeking to introduce a skin cell from a patient with an immune deficiency.

Finally, on the third probe, the rubbery wall gave way. Magnified 250 times on a black-and-white screen, the egg could be seen making room for the new skin cell, with its new genetic code.

"I never destroy any life during my process," said Dr. Woo Suk Hwang, the laboratory director, his eyes flashing above his surgical mask as he gave a reporter a rare look at the controversial human-cell transfer process developed at this small lab on the sixth floor of Building No. 85 at Seoul National University.

To his supporters, Dr. Hwang's report on May 20 that he had created new colonies of stem cells that matched the DNA of their donors was a major leap toward the dream of growing replacement tissues for conditions like spinal cord injuries, juvenile diabetes and congenital immune deficiencies.

If you walk into the office of a scientist, chances are you'll see a white board hanging on the wall covered in scrawls. A molecular biologist's white board might be covered by hideous tangles of protein chains. A geophysicist might doodle India crashing into southern Asia.

The scribbles of Dr. Michael Gazzaniga, the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth, are more metaphysical. Arrows travel from a pair of eyes into a cartoon brain, finally ending at the word "Apple." Another picture bluntly sums up the modern debate over free will, with a stick figure's head labeled "Brain," and two bubbles point toward it - one labeled "Judge" and the other "Neu" - short for neuroscience. Floating uncertainly off to one side is a third bubble that asks, "Mind?"

Big questions are Dr. Gazzaniga's stock in trade. In the 1980's he helped found cognitive neuroscience, a discipline designed to find out how the mind emerges from the brain. Today, at age 65, he continues to oversee a busy lab where brain scans offer clues to how we unconsciously create theories to explain the outer world and our inner lives.

A new class of drug may increase alertness without any of the jitteriness of over-stimulation, suggest the results of a small clinical trial released this week.

A compound dubbed CX717, a member of the new class called ampakines, significantly improved performance on tests of memory, attention, alertness, reaction time and problem solving in healthy men deprived of sleep.

The study was carried out by Julia Boyle at the Sleep Research Centre at the University of Surrey, UK, and her colleagues on behalf of Cortex Pharmaceuticals Inc., based in Irvine, California, US.

How the functioning of X chromosomes differs in women and men may help to explain biological differences between the sexes, according to a new study by researchers from Duke and Pennsylvania State Universities.

The researchers, writing today in the journal Nature, said the results implied that women make higher doses of certain proteins than men, which could result in differences in both normal life and disease. A second paper presented an analysis of the X chromosome's DNA, in which an international team of scientists found 1,098 genes.

Together, the two papers may explain some of the behavioral and biological differences among women, and perhaps between women and men, according to an article in Nature about the study.

It would be hard to imagine improving on the intelligence of computer engineer Bjoern Stenger, a doctoral candidate at Cambridge University. Yet for several hours, a pill seemed to make him even brainier.

Participating in a research project, Stenger downed a green gelatin cap containing a drug called modafinil. Within an hour, his attention sharpened. So did his memory. He aced a series of mental-agility tests. If his brainpower would normally rate a 10, the drug raised it to 15, he said.

"I was quite focused," said Stenger. "It was also kind of fun."

The age of smart drugs is dawning. Modafinil is just one in an array of brain-boosting medications — some already on pharmacy shelves and others in development — that promise an era of sharper thinking through chemistry.

These drugs may change the way we think. And by doing so, they may change who we are.

Long-haul truckers and Air Force pilots have long popped amphetamines to ward off drowsiness. Generations of college students have swallowed over-the-counter caffeine tablets to get through all-nighters. But such stimulants provide only a temporary edge, and their effect is broad and blunt — they boost the brain by juicing the entire nervous system.

The new mind-enhancing drugs, in contrast, hold the potential for more powerful, more targeted and more lasting improvements in mental acuity. Some of the most promising have reached the stage of testing in human subjects and could become available in the next decade, brain scientists say.

Silicon Valley tycoons, Nobel laureates and Hollywood celebrities are backing a measure on California's Nov. 2 ballot to devote $3 billion to human embryonic stem cell experiments in what would be the biggest-ever state-supported scientific research program in the country.

The measure — designed to get around the Bush administration's restrictions on the funding of such research — would put California at the very forefront of the field. It would dwarf all current stem cell projects in the United States, whether privately or publicly financed.

Proposition 71 promises to be one of the most contentious election issues in California, pitting scientists, sympathetic patients who could benefit from stem cells and biotechnology interests against the Roman Catholic Church and conservatives opposed to the research because it involves destroying days-old embryos and cloning.

For a glimpse of what post-human athletes may look like beginning in the 2012 or 2016 Olympics, take a look at an obscure breed of cattle called the Belgian Blue.

Belgian Blues are unlike any cows you've ever seen. They have a genetic mutation that means they do not have effective myostatin, a substance that curbs muscle growth. A result is that Belgian Blues are all bulging muscles without a spot of fat, like bovine caricatures of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The $3-billion measure puts California in the forefront of an ongoing national debate.

An initiative that would have state taxpayers underwrite $3 billion worth of research into using embryonic stem cells to develop cures for Alzheimer's and other debilitating diseases qualified for the Nov. 2 ballot Thursday, propelling California to the forefront of a national battle at the intersection of science and morality.