Imagine

Imagine having a dream that, if fulfilled, could truly change the world for the better.  Now imagine that you have the knowledge, understanding and determination to possibly pull it off.  Why shouldn't you?  You've changed the world before.  Wouldn't it be amazing to live that kind of life?  Wouldn't it be amazing to change the world--for the better? 

Second Skin

Medical research seems to be the Meow focus of the week. In keeping with that theme (which I may or may not abandon with the next post--I like to keep you guessing), I found this article by Pallab Ghosh, a science correspondent with BBC News, which I thought rather interesting. It's about a new form of artificial skin, from UK-based company Intercytex, made with human cells and proteins, which has the potential to reduce scarring significantly in burn victims and people with chronic wounds. This could be a nice step up from the traditional method of robbing Peter to pay Paul, a.k.a. skin grafts. Wouldn't it be great to see researchers come up with a way to help burn victims that doesn't require cutting the skin from one part of their body in order to graft it into another, damaged location? Wouldn't it be even better if that way meant that the patient would end up less scarred as a result? Limited tests so far are promising:

In tests researchers cut an oval section of skin from the arms of six healthy volunteers and replaced it with their lab-grown skin.

After 28 days the artificial skin had remained stable and the wounds had healed with relatively little scarring.

Dr Paul Kemp, Intercytex's chief scientist, said: "I was very surprised at how quickly the wounds healed.

"If this continues in larger trials then it could revolutionise the way in which wounds and burns are treated in the future."

Dr Kemp has been working with Ken Dunn, a consultant surgeon at the burns unit at Wythenshawe Hospital in Manchester.

Mr Dunn said: "This particular product behaves like the patients' own skin.

"It seems to excite much less reaction than the other materials we are using at the moment.

"If this is borne out in larger clinical trials then we would be very interested in using it with our patient group."

This new form of artificial skin seems to be more promising than previous attempts to create a skin substitute. From what Ghosh says, the key seems to be the human elements from which the artificial skin is composed:

The skin is created from a matrix made up of fibrin, a protein found in healing wounds.

To this is added human fibroblasts - cells used by the body to synthesise new tissue.

In a process that effectively replicates the way the body makes new skin, the cells produce and release another protein, collagen, which makes the matrix more stable.

It is in this form that the "skin" is implanted into a wound.

The researchers say that because the matrix is in a stable form, it is more able to withstand changes that take place during the healing process.

The fact that the collagen is synthesised directly by the cells themselves also more closely mirrors the natural healing process.

This was just a small test, on healthy patients, but the results are good enough to warrant further research. I find myself wondering whether a product like this, if it really was a stable addition to the patient's own skin, and if it was tolerated well by most patients' immune systems, couldn't make a big difference in expanding the number of victims who could be saved after terrible burns. I don't really know anything substantial here, and I certainly couldn't tell you all the reasons that people die after being burned, but I do know that there is a certain point of no return, a percentage of the body's skin burned to a certain degree, that means they simply can't be saved. I wonder if having a ready-made supply of replacement skin on hand, just waiting to be grafted onto the victim's body, could up the survival rate for people who previously would have been considered impossible to save. Would a patient with a higher percentage of surface area damage be able to recover if the damaged skin were removed promptly and the new "skin" allowed to start healing right away? I have no clue, but I'm excited by the notion. Even if that is not the case, the rewards of finding a stable artificial skin are awfully high for the people who would get to go through life with much less scarring than with traditional methods, but I can't help hoping the rewards are even greater still, and that patients who would have been lost might one day be saved through the blessings of scientific advancement. It's all speculation on my part, but it's cheerful speculation, so I'm going to give myself permission to dream big.

The Obesity Gene

You know those annoying people who can eat anything they want without gaining a pound? They never have to think about whether they should have an extra piece of lasagna; for them it's all about whether they want another piece. They don't even have to go out and run a marathon after dinner, either. Skinny is just wired into them. My husband is one of these fortunate souls. People started telling him when he was twenty-five, "Just wait until you're thirty. Then you'll start padding up." Then it was, "Wait until you're thirty-five." "No really, wait until you're forty." We're now hearing the same rhetoric about forty-five, but I suspect that that age will also pass without the weight cascade that others portend. I'm not sure why people feel the need to promise that the pounds are just around the corner, but my guess is that it's just too annoying to watch his slender frame reaching for another cookie, knowing it won't settle anywhere on his body. It's just not fair, and they have to comfort themselves with the notion that someday he'll have the same struggles as everyone else.

Then there are the people at the other end of the spectrum. It seems they could live on a diet of celery and water, and still have to squeeze into their Levis at the end of the day. No amount of dieting really pays off. As soon as they eat anything with the least bit of flavor, they puff right back up, like a human air bag in a head-on collision with the refrigerator. These are the people who find my husband and others like him the most annoying. (Can you blame them?) Something does seem to be really off in this equation. How can some people be so naturally thin, and others so naturally padded? Most of us try to keep our weight in balance by some combination of reasonable caloric intake and exercise, but there are people at both ends of the weight chart who just don't fit the mold, and nothing seems to make them. Why is that?

I found an article at Eureka Alert! that might just explain why, and more to the point, also suggests what can be done about it. Scientists at the Mayo Clinic are learning that maybe the problem of obesity might just be the result of a specific gene--a gene that can, in effect, be turned off. Dr. Eduardo Chini says that genes play a role in obesity about 50 percent of the time. He and a group of researchers at the Clinic have been conducting studies on mice that indicate that a deficiency in CD38, a gene which helps regulate energy metabolism, protected the mice from becoming obese, despite high-calorie, high-fat diets. Let me restate that--not having this gene meant that the mice ate high-calorie, high-fat foods, and didn't gain weight:

Researchers studied two groups of mice: one with the gene CD38 and the other without. Each group was fed a high-calorie diet with 60 percent of calories from fat. In a second test, each group was fed a standard diet in which 4 percent of calories came from fat.

As a result, the body fat of mice that carried CD38 and were on a high-fat diet nearly quadrupled and their body weight almost doubled. After eight weeks on a high-fat diet, mice with CD38 began to show signs of glucose intolerance, one of the first indicators of diabetes onset. In addition, this group of mice lived for only four-to-six months compared to the second group of mice that lived for 12 months.

For the group of mice that did not carry CD38, their body fat and weight did not change even though they were on a high fat diet. These mice burned more energy, were leaner and otherwise healthy.

“These changes contributed to the ability of these mice to fend off weight gain despite a high-fat diet and lack of exercise. Together these results suggest that a CD38 deficiency has a protective effect against high-fat, diet-induced obesity,” Dr. Chini says.

Okay, it looks like those people (or at least mice) who are lucky enough to be deficient in this little obesity gene (I'm betting my husband is a member of that club) have a natural "immunity" to gaining weight, which is why lasagna doesn't last very long here at Chez Meow. Note, too, that the mice without the gene lived longer and were healthier--nice bonus winnings in the gene lottery, wouldn't you say? What about the people who are just bursting with CD38, though, the ones who hear the word lasagna and put on five pounds? What's the hope for them? Here's the part that could get some people excited. Apparently, CD38 can be suppressed, or its effects can, anyway:

Dr. Chini and colleagues also examined the effects of resveratrol in mice. Resveratrol is a naturally occurring substance found in some plants such as mulberries, peanuts and red grapes used to make wine. It has been marketed as a drug that mimics the effects of moderate exercise without the physical act of exercising and also as a longevity drug, despite the lack of evidence that resveratrol is safe and effective in humans.

From the evidence the mice provided, the marketing might not be entirely misleading, because, "Researchers found that mice with CD38 that were treated with resveratrol for two weeks were protected from high-fat, diet-induced obesity." Time to add peanuts and red wine to the grocery list, eh? It will be interesting to see where this goes. I've seen the ads for those "miracle" pills, the ones that promise that you can eat all you want, lay around on the couch, and end up with the body of a supermodel in just three months, and always assumed they were just another scam. Now, I still think they're probably a scam, but who knows, maybe scientists are on the trail of something that might give some hope to those folks who can't seem to win the battle of the bulge, no matter how hard they try. Hey, if suppressing the effects of the gene works in mice, why not see where it could lead for people? As long as they don't discover that CD38 also regulates breathing, or something. Suppressing breathing would be bad, and probably not helpful for that life-extension they were mentioning earlier.

Synthetic Biology II

There is some seriously next-level science going on in the world. Lee Silver at Newsweek has a fascinating article on where scientists are taking the quest to create build-your-own biological organisms, designed to do everything from growing hard-to-produce medicines, to acting as internal cancer-killing machines that live in your bloodstream and seek-and-destroy any and all tumors. Scientists envision synthetic biological critters which create plastic, wool or silk as a by-product, and "biodevices" that detect radiation, anthrax and other dangers. One of the goals with the most world-changing potential is a living organism that secretes fuel, "a self-sustaining, highly efficient biological organism that converts sunlight directly into clean biofuel, with minimal environmental impact and zero net release of greenhouse gases."

The kicker to all these lofty goals is that the biggest of them can be best accomplished if scientists come up with a way to manufacture life from scratch, rather than tinkering with the life that's already hanging around the planet. There's progress happening without that leap, but there's a lot of extra coding that gets in the way. There's also progress that's happening in the putting-the-building-blocks-together department. Scientists have done some amazing things:

They've forged chemicals into synthetic DNA, the DNA into genes, genes into genomes, and built the molecular machinery of completely new organisms in the lab—organisms that are nothing like anything nature has produced.

All of this, however, does not add the spark that makes something alive. They can mess like crazy with what's already there, but they haven't crossed the boundary into "creating life," although, that is certainly their aim. I will be really interested to see whether God allows scientists to put life into something where there was no life before. Sceptical, but interested. (It's still wouldn't be real creation. At a basic level, the matter of the universe was already created, regardless of what we do with it afterward.) According to Silver, scientists are on the brink, and they certainly are performing monumental feats with the newly acquired knowledge of genes and DNA and the like that has transformed science over the last half century. Will God grant them the ability to step beyond tinkering and into the realm of kick-starting life? I have no idea, and so I'm not as sanguine about all their grand schemes coming to fruition as some of the scientists who are working on synthetic biology seem to be, but even without that truly unique element, what they are already doing is astounding, even to the point of being scary.

There is so much good that could be done, but also an enormous amount of room for abuse, not the least of which is the potential for critters that have been tampered with running amuck in the world, doing things they weren't intended to do by the humans who are taking it upon themselves to redesign nature. Whether created by God and reconfigured by man, or entirely lab grown by human design (if God allows that barrier to be crossed), these human designers need to tread carefully. The idea of taking some newfangled critters, adding sunlight, and fueling the world is totally captivating, as is the notion of eliminating cancer, and the Newsweek article really is fascinating, but my alarm bells go off when I start reading about people whose attitude is that of James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA structure, who, as quoted by Silver, said, "If we don't play God, who will?" I'd be more comfortable if the people who are on this quest were a little more afraid of the outcome.

Hat tip: Instapundit

Scanning

A friend and reader, knowing my fondness for that special place where science and science fiction cross paths, sent me the link to this article in the Telegraph (a UK publication), titled, "'Star Trek' scanner may end need for biopsies." Oooh, ya got me already. Star Trek and real life medical gadgets? How fun!! Let's read on, shall we?

Scientists have moved closer to developing a Star Trek-type scanner that can identify the molecular indications of cancer and other diseases without surgery.

X-ray images contain patterns that can help doctors translate the genetic "language" of tumours, researchers have found.

The discovery, which has been compared to finding the "Rosetta Stone" that enabled archaeologists to read hieroglyphics, could bring the science fiction of Star Trek to life.

Dr Howard Chang, from the University of Stanford in California, a joint leader of the research, said: "In almost every episode of Star Trek there is a device called a tricorder, which they used non-invasively to scan living or non-living matter to determine its molecular makeup. Something like that would be very, very useful."

I think Dr. Chang wins the understatement award for the day. A device which could non-invasively scan any and all matter and determine its molecular makeup would be something on the order of revolutionary. Of course, doctors would love to be able to just point a machine at someone and instantly be able to tell if they have cancer, intestinal parasites, space cooties from the planet Mongo, or other various and sundry ailments, but the applications for devices like the ones in Star Trek becoming a reality would extend way beyond the realm of the medical. Need a rare metal that's crucial to your pursuit of a homemade anti-gravity device? Wouldn't it be great to have a gadget that could tell you right where the stuff was hiding? Of course it would. Need to know if there's anything living in that cave, before you go spelunking? Our handy dandy little gizmo could probably help keep you safe from cave critters--or at least aware of their existence. Oh, and it can analyze any rocks you find while you're crawling around in the dark, too, so just in case you find one of those rare loose diamonds lying around on the cave floor, you won't pass it by thinking that it's only broken glass. Not a bad little tool to have with you in the dark, eh? But wait; there's more. If you think that's useful, boy howdy could the folks at Homeland Security use a government-issue, super-sleuth version, too, for keeping us all safe from bad guys. Want to make sure there are no dirty bombs on board that freight liner that just pulled into harbor? Well, let's just offload everything right on past that Jumbo Tricorder and have ourselves a little molecular peak, shall we? No nuclear stowaways gettin' through here, sir! So, don't you worry your pretty little head.

Now, you know that here at the Meow we like to take little flights of fancy, and that what the Telegraph is reporting doesn't even come close to the kind of tricorder technology that would enable the Star Trek version of reality. (It is fun to play with the idea, though, isn't it?) What's really been happening is that scientists have discovered that x-rays contain more information than doctors have known about previously, and some of those scientists are learning how to read that information. Dr. Chang and his colleagues worked with human liver cancer samples, and found 28 image features, not previously recognized, which show up on scans, that correlate to specific molecular gene activity, related to the cancer. In fact, "More than 5,000 genes have altered levels of activity in cancerous tissue," and "...the researchers were able to reconstruct 80 per cent of gene expression in the livers simply by looking at standard CT scans." Dr. Chang and his associates are learning to recognize how what they see in the images from medical scans relates to the molecular activity in the tissue. They hope that in time medical tricorder-like technology could develop from what they are piecing together, and that doctors won't have to cut someone open to give them a cancer diagnosis.

What they've got so far might not be the amazing and magical medical know-it-all gadgetry that Bones and Dr. Crusher use to rid the universe of the ravages of disease, but it's one step closer to the day when cancer diagnosis will be done with a scan and not a scalpel (and hopefully progress will continue apace on a cure, too.) Who knows where it will lead? Once they start understanding all the things these images show them, how, long will it be before they can program a computer to understand them too? From there it could be only a hop, skip and a jump to the tricorders of our dreams, even the ones that protect us from terrorists and find us caches of diamonds just for crawling around in the dark. Why not? We might as well dream big.

Hat tip: Danny

First Aid First

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you were suddenly required to remember the CPR you learned in high school health class? What if the guy in the cubicle next to you suddenly collapsed from a heart attack? After you yell to someone to call 911, would you know how to be his "artificial heart" until the paramedics arrive? I have some vague recollection, and could probably get my hands in the right position, but would be pretty shaky on the details, like how hard to push down, and how often. Now, I could tell you the numbers right now, because I just read an article on the subject at Gizmag (100 beats per minute, and about four to five centimeters of compression), but that article also stated that most people don't retain the correct information for long after they have learned it. Gizmag says, "Only 6 months after learning life-saving CPR techniques, around 60 percent of first aiders - including doctors and nurses - forget how to do it correctly." Only six months. Wow. That makes the chances that I remember the details from sophomore health back in '79 accurately pretty darn remote.

Now, I probably ought to go take a CPR refresher course, but considering that the info might only last another six months before finding the sieve holes in my brain, it would be awfully nice if there were another option--something that might make all the potential heart attack victims in my vicinity a little safer. In fact, wouldn't it be great if people all over the globe (not just near me), in houses, stores, airplanes, office cubicles, and every other place we humans tend to inhabit, could be made just a little safer from what the World Health Organization says is the number one killer of both men and women around the world? I have a friend who recently survived a heart "episode" and it's made me much more aware of how important it is that people know what to do, and that I really don't. I'm sure most of us are getting more aware as we age that we don't have the answers for every emergency, while at the same time we are getting ever more likely to experience them. Some folks in Canada, though, have moved beyond awareness and onto solutions. They've come up with a gadget to add to the standard first aid kit that could save a lot of lives. It's not a magic pill, or portable defibrillator, but a glove:

The Canadian CPR Glove acts as a quick on-the-job refresher course, making sure the first aider administers the correct frequency and depth of chest compression. It's a simple and cheap device that has real potential to save lives if included in a first aid kit.

The black, one-size-fits-all CPR Glove features a series of sensors and chips that measure the frequency and depth of compressions being administered during CPR and outputs the data to a digital display.

How's that for an elegant solution to the memory problem? It's a small item, that's easy to store with the other aid supplies, yet it could make such a difference if it's ever needed. Gizmag says that in a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, fifty-nine percent of the time people didn't do enough compressions per minute to help the patient, and that nearly forty percent of the time the compressions weren't deep enough. Put the CPR Glove on the hand that's pushing on the victim's chest, however, and the glove itself will tell you if you're doing it right. Pretty slick, don't you think?

So who were the Smart People who came up with this life-saving notion? Students:

"We were brainstorming about what we could create for our final-year design project that would provide a real contribution," said inventor Corey Centen, a fourth-year student in electrical and biomedical engineering at McMaster. "We came across this study and recognized the importance of finding a solution."

Centen and classmate Nilesh Patel started working on the concept in September 2006 and developed a number of prototypes, bringing the size of components down each time. They wrote the programs and hand-fabricated the button-size computer chips that operate the glove. They even designed the pattern for the glove but turned to a professional seamstress to recommend fabric and stitch the glove together.

"We see the glove being available as part of any standard first-aid package," explains Patel, also a fourth-year electrical and biomedical engineering student at McMaster. "It is also ideal for CPR training and refresher courses. It would be easy to afford since the components are readily available and relatively inexpensive."

Cool, huh? I want one.

Turn Up The Happy Gas

Here's another slightly strange, but cool, medical breakthrough for you. This time around, our breakthrough involves upgrading techniques for abdominal surgery. Most of us are probably aware of how some surgeries have changed in recent years. Procedures that used to involve cutting a patient's abdominal wall clean open, to gain access to those reclusive internal organs, have been improved with the advent of laparoscopic surgery, where abdominal incisions are tiny, scars are miniscule and recovery time is much shorter than with traditional surgical methods. Such surgeries involve a laparoscope, a tiny camera inserted to examine the abdominal cavity so doctors can see what's going on and repair or remove damaged organs, via other tiny little incisions and long, flexible instruments. Such "keyhole" surgery has made necessary operations much easier for many a grateful patient. There's a new kind of surgery coming to operating rooms around the world, however, that eliminates the external incisions completely, leaves no visible scars, has minimal recovery time and doesn't even require general anesthetic.

Duncan Graham-Rowe, at NewScientist.com, says this revolutionary new technique is called transgastric surgery, or natural orifice translumenal endosurgery--NOTES for short. NOTES takes a whole new approach to the problem of getting inside a patient, quite literally. Instead of entering the abdomen through surgical incisions made externally in the skin and muscle walls, the cameras and surgical tools find their way into the abdominal cavity via the patient's mouth. An incision is made in the stomach from the inside; the surgical instruments pass into the abdomen through this opening, and tissue that needs to come out does so via exactly the same route that food goes in--in reverse, of course:

To some it may sound disgusting, to others the prospect of scar-free surgery may sound too good to be true. Either way it's coming. In the past couple of weeks three separate surgical teams say they have carried out NOTES procedures on humans - surgical firsts for both Europe and the US. And doctors in India say they have performed appendectomies through the mouth.

This transgastric procedure offers a lot of advantages to conventional, or even keyhole surgery: less pain (the stomach apparently has fewer nerve endings than the skin), less sedation (which Duncan-Rowe points out is good for the elderly and infirm), less risk of infection (theoretically), due to avoiding the bad bugs that live on the skin, as well as the disinfecting power of stomach acid, and--an important gain for the workaholics of the world--by far less recovery time:

"Even with keyhole surgery, patients stay off work for several days," says Lee Swanstrom, director of the Oregon Clinic in Portland, US, which specialises in gastrointestinal and keyhole surgery. "With NOTES they could go back to work the same day."

Good grief, that's fast. Gives a whole new meaning to "same day service." Now this last "advantage" might be a mixed blessing for some people who, for example, were hoping that their gall bladder surgery would help them avoid the big cubicle shuffle at the office, or going to the boss' daughter's ballet recital. Be that as it may, most of us would see a rapid spring back to full strength as a big plus. A few years ago, a friend and I had the same surgery performed, only mine was laparoscopic and hers was a full stomach incision. Her surgery came first, and I watched her long and painful recovery with a great deal of sympathy, because it was really hard. She suffered a lot. When it came time for my surgery, I was dreading a similarly unpleasant experience, but all that dread was wasted. While I still had a fairly long recovery time, mostly due to the five-and-a-half hours of general anesthesia the surgery entailed, there was very little pain, because of the tiny, tiny, unbelievably small incisions my doctor used to get at my innards. I'd take my surgery over my friend's hands down; if you added the less intense anesthesia, so the recovery could proceed even faster, that would just be all that much better.

Needless to say, the downside is the "ick" factor. Who really wants to have their appendix come out of their mouth? While they're somewhat awake, no less? I might request that the docs turn on the happy gas for that part of the procedure, although, now that I think about it, even that might not be necessary. When I had my surgery they put something in my IV to make me forget everything that happened from the time they wheeled me out of the waiting room till when I woke up in recovery. If you can't remember the icky bits, there's not really a need for the happy gas, is there? It was actually very frustrating to me that they stripped me of memories that I wanted. I find all this medical stuff fascinating, and probably would have watched the whole surgery, if that had been an option. To have a complete blank in my memory, when I had a prime opportunity for first-hand knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes in Surgery World is very frustrating. They didn't even film it for me, so that I could watch it after the fact!! To give the doctor credit, though, she did take some lovely photos of my insides, which I perused with great interest once the drugs wore off. That was of some comfort to me, even if I'd rather have the memories. I have to confess, though, I don't think even I would want to remember having my spleen come out my mouth. Turn up the happy gas, please (but shoot some video in case I change my mind.)

Pork Pancreas, Anyone?

So, how comfortable are you with the concept of animal tissue being transplanted into your body to replace your own failing organs? There are a lot of people on the "needing a transplant" list who really have no hope of a suitable organ becoming available. The list is too long for the number of human donors to keep up. However, according to Andy Coghlan at New Scientist, scientists right here in the U.S. are developing genetically engineered pigs to provide hearts, livers and kidneys to humans waiting for donor organs. People at the bottom of the list could find themselves with viable transplant options. They just can't be too choosy about the species of the donor!! I realize the whole pig thing makes this an out-of-the-question scenario for Muslims, but it is a decision that some of the rest of us may be called on to make at some point, as science progresses and global populations continue to live longer.

How about something a little less overwhelming than an entire organ? What if it were just a few cells to give a bit of help to a system that's falling down on the job? If you had diabetes, for example, would you let doctors implant pancreatic cells from a pig to help your insulin deficient system keep your blood glucose stable? Michael Helyer, a man from Auckland, New Zealand, was faced with that choice, and made the decision to be a guinea pig for medical science. (Sorry, the pun couldn't be avoided.) His doctors implanted the cells 10 years ago, hoping that they would produce the insulin his own pancreas was unable to supply. Their hopes did not go unanswered. The cells did not provide all the insulin that Helyer's body required, but the porcine cells did, indeed, set up their own little insulin-producing factory, helping to keep his blood sugar levels in check. Coghlan explains that the cells aren't putting out what they once did, but even now, 10 years later, at least some of Porky's cells are still bringing home the bacon, or the insulin as the case may be:

Though Helyer still has to inject himself with insulin, the amount he needed fell by up to a third in the year following the transplant. This effect then faded, but Helyer, who lives in Auckland, New Zealand, says his diabetes remains under better control - a claim supported by data showing that his blood glucose is more stable than before treatment.

The part I found most fascinating about this story is the way that the doctors kept the cells alive--and kept Helyer's body from recognizing the pig cells as foreign and moving in for the kill:

In 1996, LCT [Living Cell Technologies] injected 1.3 million capsules of alginate, a resin derived from seaweed, into Helyer's peritoneal cavity. Each capsule contained about 500 insulin-producing islet cells isolated from the pancreases of newly born piglets. "The alginate lets insulin out of the capsule and nutrients in, to keep the cells alive," explains Elliott. Importantly, it also hides the "alien" pig cells from the human immune system.

Coghlan goes on to add:

Recent samples taken from the capsules suggest that many of the cells are still alive, and a few were found to still produce insulin when exposed to glucose in the lab. Chemical analysis also showed that traces of pig insulin appeared in Helyer's blood shortly after he ate a large amount of glucose.

The fact that these cells are still kicking after all this time is giving doctors reason enough to do further trials. LCT is going to be implanting cells in 14 new people soon, and the new subjects could also receive a second dose of pig cells to see if this can counter the falling off of effectiveness experienced by Helyer.

It's pretty amazing that they found a way to hide the pig cells from Helyer's immune system. I found myself wondering whether the same technique might somehow prove useful in other transplants, even the ones where the donor is human. Naturally, it would be a lot harder to disguise a whole organ from all those pesky white blood cells. How do you take a heart, say, and convince the blood pumping through it that it really should pay no attention to the pig behind the curtain? You can't encase the innards of the heart in seaweed resin, after all.

It is encouraging, though, that they found a way to work around the whole immune system thing in this case, without turning the entire system down or off, as they currently have to do with human organ transplants. Perhaps they can learn from this technique, and come up with other solutions. The alternative is a never-ending regimen of anti-rejection medication. I have a friend waiting for a kidney right now, and she knows that when she gets it she'll be on a strict schedule of drugs to prevent her body from saying, "You don't belong here. Prepare to die." She's mentally prepped for the process though, because she gave one of her kidneys to her brother 20 years ago, and she's seen the routine first hand. One good thing about that is that, since she is a kidney donor herself, she automatically moves to the top of the recipient list as soon as she's medically cleared for transplant. So, she won't have to choose whether it's better to take a porcine kidney than wait for a human one that might never become available.

It's an interesting choice to face, don't you think? Apart from religious objections that would make accepting animal organs, or even a few cells, objectionable to some, for most of us there would probably be a certain "that's just not right" factor that would have to be reasoned through. Is it any different though, really, from human organ donation? Both are alien to you, right? So, what's the difference? I don't know, but for me, on an emotional level at least, there would be more to process if I received an animal organ, rather than a human one. I'm not saying I wouldn't take an animal organ--as my husband said when he read this, "If it work, it works." At the same time, I would be a tad more squeamish about it I suspect, however irrationally. Actually, I hope to circumvent the problem altogether, by never needing an organ transplant, but if I do, I'm hoping that science will have progressed to the point where they can simply grow me another organ in a lab, from my own stem cells, from my own bone marrow, or some such thing. I'd like to skip the whole "pig organ, or death" question. I don't really object to a few pig or cow cells in my body, but generally, I want to chew them as they go inside.

How about the rest of you? Any reaction?

Shedding Light On The Shadow Of Alzheimer's

Where did I put my car keys? I know I had them an hour ago. Well, they're not in my purse. Good grief! I have to be to the school at three. I have to find those keys. Okay, brain, think this through... What did I do when I got back from the store? I came in the front door, put my purse on the coffee table, went out again to bring in the groceries, set them on the counter, started to put them away, and then went to check the messages on the answering machine. What did I do then? Oh yeah--I called Jane back, and then went to get the permission slip for Peter's field trip. I can't forget, I have to bring the ice cream sandwiches for that. Oh my gosh!! I left the keys on the counter with the ice cream. What a dingbat I am!

Sound familiar? If it doesn't, I want to trade brains with you, please. I can't tell you the number of times I've had to play the "retracing game" to find something, or remember what I did yesterday. Generally, I have a pretty good memory, but we live in a world with a heck of a lot of input, and sometimes it gets hard to keep everything straight--especially things we've done so often that specific incidents tend to blur together, like bringing in the groceries. Most of us develop little tricks to keep ourselves from forgetting the things we need to mentally track. I'm a committed list maker, and Ked and I picked up the habit early in our marriage of putting things we need to take out of the house later right by the front door, or with our keys, so we can't leave home without noticing them (unless, of course, we forget the keys.) Last week, when daylight saving time rolled around, we set our clocks on Saturday morning so that we wouldn't forget later that night and wind up late for church the next day. Our little tricks usually work, and we manage to get by in the world without too many major memory lapses.

Some things are harder. Ked's great with names and faces. I, on the other hand, have given up hope that I will remember the name of someone when I first meet them, no matter how many times I repeat it in that first conversation. I could repeat a name so often that the person I'm meeting thinks I have obsessive-compulsive disorder, and still draw a complete blank the next time I see them. This can be rather humiliating, especially if I've done the OCD imitation on the previous encounter. Ked's weakness is a definite need for shopping and "to do" lists. If it's not written down, he will not remember it. It's that simple. (This is one of the reasons that I'm a committed list maker.) On the other hand, he can hear a tune once, and whistle it note for note twenty years later, so I suspect he's just not wasting brain cells on trivial things that can be just as easily stored in a list. That's a simple matter of priorities.

With our various memory failings, we sometimes have talked about what would happen if one or both of us started losing more and more of our capacity to remember anything. This is a topic that's close to home for us. Just a couple weeks ago Ked helped his parents move his grandparents into a care facility, because of the increasing onset of dementia. His mom has cared for both her parents for many years, as her dad succumbed to Alzheimer's and her mom to another form of dementia, until eventually her dad no longer even recognizes the woman he married over sixty-five years ago. Both of them had reached a stage where Mom could no longer provide all the physical care they needed, and she reluctantly has had to let them go to a place where they can receive the additional care they need. It's been hard for the family to watch vibrant, engaging people lose more and more of themselves, as their memories slowly have faded away.

The signs were small at first, maybe losing those car keys more often. Then it became more of a problem when they could find the keys, because Pappaw would go driving and sometimes couldn't remember how to get home. Finally, Mom and Dad started to have to find creative ways to keep them out from behind the wheel at all, for their own safety, and that of others. More and more of Mom's time became devoted to chauffeuring her parents, and cooking for them and cleaning for them, and taking care of their medicines, and dressing them, and so on, as they became increasingly less able to do these things for themselves. It was an enormous commitment, and an act of daughterly love and devotion.

It was also a sobering reality. Alzheimer's has some hereditary connections, and when both parents, or grandparents, have severe memory failure, you can't see it daily, or even sporadically, without thinking about whether their fate will also be yours. No one, of course, really wants to dwell on it, and I discourage my husband's lamentations over his own memory lapses. Just because he forgot the milk doesn't mean he's going to lose himself. However, we can't but be aware of the topic, and we watch documentaries on the subject occasionally, and read what comes our way with interest. We're glad to see that they are making progress all the time in the study of the brain generally, and dementia specifically. It helps us face future possibilities when we can also see future understanding, treatments, and potential cures.

It will probably be a long while before the brain is a completely open book. There's not a computer so complex in all the world, but doctors and scientists are making constant strides in reading its pages, and as they read it more thoroughly, they are slowly starting to learn how to keep the brain from losing its storehouse of memories and information. The more they see into it, the more they can see exactly what is going on, and the more they see what is going on, they more they can learn how to repair the damage when it stops working properly.

We've seen such things throughout the history of medicine. Body systems that were once a complete mystery are now much more clearly understood, and thus treated. In centuries past, the most brilliant doctors of their times didn't have the necessary understanding of organ functions, or bacterial and viral infections, or drug interactions to treat the things which our doctors now see as routine. Cancer used to be an automatic death sentence. Now it would be difficult, if not impossible, to go through life without knowing many, many cancer survivors. In the future, things which baffle our medical practitioners of today will be the routine treatments of the next generation. In my husband's family, of course, we hope that dementia will be one of those breakthrough cases. It is too late for the grandparents we love, and all we can hope for at this point is that they will be comfortable and happy and well cared for, but research goes on, and we hope it will not be too late for their children's generation.

One promising advance in the fight against dementia is new technology being developed for early detection--before symptoms even give the alert that something is going wrong in the brain. Gizmag has an article titled "New 3D Imaging technology promises early detection of Alzheimer’s and Dementia" that has encouraging news about progress in researchers' efforts to see inside the working of the brain:

Increasingly higher-resolution imaging techniques making major contributions to early detection are now being presented at the European Congress of Radiology (ECR 2007), held in Vienna from March 9 to 13, 2007, and attended by some 16,000 participants from 92 countries. University Professor Dr. Daniela Prayer from the Clinical Department for Neuroradiology at the Vienna University of Medicine states, “Although we cannot yet depict individual cells, we can image ultra-tiny bundles of fibre with high resolution. That is a spectacular breakthrough!”

Voxel-based morphometry allows for the volume of grey matter and white matter in the brain to be determined to the nearest cubic millimetre. A reduction in brain mass (atrophy) in certain areas indicates Alzheimer’s disease and in other areas, other forms of dementia, according to Professor Prayer. An MR study by Professor Dr. Riccardo della Nave and his colleagues at the University of Florence, for instance, found that certain degenerative phenomena occurring in the left thalamus and in a zone in the left cerebral cortex are the first signs of family-related Alzheimer’s disease. “These findings are quite valuable. They enable us not only to differentiate precisely but also to detect the patterns of the disease before symptoms even occur and to check the efficacy of new drugs, namely, whether they can really stop the loss of brain mass.”

This is just one of the new technologies the article describes. Another is magnetic resonance spectroscopy, which "allows a non-contact x-ray view of biochemical processes within the regions of the brain under examination." Neurologists can read these images and distinguish between Alzheimer's and normal aging, or other, milder forms of cognitive impairment. These new technologies are opening up the secrets of the brain, and allowing doctors to diagnose more accurately, and observe whether the treatments they are developing are effective. This will make their research so much more efficient and fruitful. If they can see direct evidence of whether they're on the right paths, it will allow them to charge ahead on the ones with the most promise, and walk away more quickly from the dead ends. The article concludes on this positive statement:

All in all, Professor Prayer notes, “the new methodological advances of magnetic resonance technology provide us with a hopeful view of the future in terms of the early diagnosis and efficacy testing of therapies for dementias. If this happens in the near future, the spectre of old-age dementia will lose much of its threatening effect.”

That would be a blessing of indescribable magnitude for our family.

Protecting The People Who Serve And Protect

Really Smart People just keep pushing the knowledge envelope, and making more and more progress on the medical front. Today's breakthrough announcement comes from New Scientist, which reports that there's a new drug in the works, at Hollis-Eden Pharmaceuticals of San Diego, California, to help prevent the effects of "acute radiation syndrome" in people exposed to radioactive material. The drug is 5-androstenediol, or AED, which is "an adrenal gland hormone." How it works involves stimulating the production of bone marrow, to replace that which gets killed off during radiation exposure, which in turn replaces the blood cells lost to that radiation, such as those which cause the blood to clot and fight infection. According to New Scientist, the loss of such blood cells is often the cause of death weeks after radiation exposure. This is a pretty big deal in real world application since it means, 'Emergency workers attending the scene of a "dirty" bomb or nuclear blast could soon have a drug to help protect them.'

Wow, they're basically talking about a radiation vaccine, in practical terms, anyway. That's such great news. Wouldn't it be wonderful if this drug could be perfected to the point where emergency workers responding to a situation involving nuclear materials could be assured of their own protection from radiation? They could simply do their best work rescuing people, and not have to take so many precautions for their own safety that they have to help fewer victims. Maybe they could even get rid of those bulky and hindering protective suits so they can work more efficiently--although, since I'm not a Really Smart Person, I don't know all the possible reasons for the protective gear. I'm sure heat is probably a big factor in the need to suit up as well. Maybe they can come up with a new treatment to make folks super-resistant to high temperatures, too. Anything seems to be possible these days. We're getting closer to Star Trek all the time. Anyway, one of the encouraging things about this new preventative drug is that it "...may even protect victims of a blast if administered quickly enough after exposure." So, they can protect the workers going in, and treat the victims coming out. I love Really Smart People.

A Beating Heart, Or A Reasonable Facsimile

I have been wanting to post about this ever since I first read about it four days ago at Futurismic. I'm finally getting a rest after several days of being hard at it in the back yard. What was once the equivalent of a mountain range of dirt, from our recent excavation, is now merely a rather noticeable hill. You think I'm exaggerating, but at one point the range was about five feet high, eight to ten feet deep, and about forty feet in total length. See--mountain range. We have been building raised beds to tuck the soil in, a twelve by twenty raised patio, and disbursing the rest to level out the yard. Boy howdy, am I tired, but happy to have been very productive. Now I'm feeling like I deserve a good long stretch in the merry, merry land of blogs (mine and all the others I've been missing for days.) All's right in my little world.

So what wonderful and amazing thing I have been waiting to get to for the last four days? Red Herring has news of an extra-cool medical breakthrough:

The first self-contained implanted artificial heart received U.S. government approval for patients who are all out of options and would otherwise die.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that Massachusetts-based Abiomed garnered the green light for their device that aims to prolong the life of those with advanced heart failure who are not eligible for a heart transplant and are unlikely to live more than a month without intervention.

Now someone whose heart is completely shot, but who can't get a regular transplant, for whatever reason (most likely that a donor heart simply isn't available, I would imagine), can opt for the artificial one. Well, let's say the folks with good insurance can opt for the artificial one. At $250,000 a pop, the price-tag is not for the faint of heart. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.) Since the artificial heart is implanted, the flesh and blood organ that's on the fritz is actually removed from the patient. The mechanical heart is a two pound monster, with a battery that's tucked into the abdomen. The charging process involves a power transfer coil and the patient's skin. Don't ask me how. That part isn't really intuitive, for the non-medically or mechanically trained (or maybe just me), and the article doesn't go into detail.

There are a few other limitations to the technology, besides price, which I'm sure will improve with time. One issue is size. The substitute heart, as I said, weighs in at two whole pounds right now, and is too large to fit into the chest cavity of most women. According to Red Herring, "Abiomed said it is developing a replacement heart that is 30 percent smaller, but has yet to start clinical trials." I would expect that the trend toward smallness that is the hallmark of technology (think cell phones and Ipods), would have the same effect on the artificial heart. Once the thing has been around for a while, and undergone the inevitable technological shrinkage, it'll probably make the Grinch's tiny ticker look oversized.

Another limitation that should get better with time is battery life. Right now, the internal battery can buy the patient about an hour away from a plug-in, enough time to wander around the hospital lobby for a bit of people watching. If you cart around an external back-up, the heart'll go two hours. Admittedly, that doesn't sound like much, but from what I've been reading about nanofiber batteries, pretty soon they'll probably be able to implant a battery the size of a postage stamp that will run the heart for the next decade. Two, if the patient doesn't take up jogging.

The Red Herring article looks at the medical results to date for patients fitted with this mechanical pumper. Right now the count of the patients who have actually opted for the artificial heart over the failing real one stands at 14. Most have gained a few months of life that they would not otherwise have known. One patient lived another 17 months, which is substantial when you consider what a breakthrough this is. One of the artificial heart recipients was even able to be discharged and go home.

I know that this doesn't necessarily sound all that exciting. We'd love to see every patient all better, and able to live out a full, healthy life. Most of these patients bought themselves a few more months of dreary walls and hospital food. However, they also helped in the progress of medicine, and those people who follow after them, who someday receive the smaller, refined, long-battery-life versions of this technology will be truly blessed because the first patients were willing to take the chance that what they went through would be worth it. Even for those who only gain a few months, that time could be so important. 17 months could be everything to that father who wants to be there for his daughter's wedding, or the mom who has a little more wisdom to pass to her children before she passes on herself. That's the benefit to patients in the short term. Over time, as the technology improves, the outcomes for patients are going to get better and better. This is a wonderful breakthrough.

"Sparkling Teeth" Gets A New Meaning

Here's a report on one of those nifty little scientific/medical innovations that I love so much. Not only does this one involve medical breakthroughs, but it has fireworks as well, another of my very favorite things. Well, okay, not exactly fireworks, more like sparklers, tiny ones at that, but let's not be picky. Zeeya Merali, at New Scientist, brings us up to date on a new miniature plasma torch, called a plasma needle, that could be of significant use for both dentistry and cancer treatment. Odd combo, you say? So do I, but, there it is. It seems that this plasma needle could one day replace the dentists drill, and also enable doctors to kill cancer cells and cauterize around a tumor, without damaging the surrounding tissue. The kicker is that the needle is said to be painless, and cold to the touch, despite the flaming plasma.

Physicist Eva Stoffels-Adamowicz, .."who is based at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands," is the needle's inventor:

Stoffels-Adamowicz came up with the idea for the needle while working with low-pressure plasmas, which are created in a vacuum. In order for the plasma to be used on people, she and her colleagues developed a plasma needle that works in air. The needle is a 50-millimetre-long tungsten wire housed in a quartz tube filled with gas. Driving a voltage through the needle generates a small plasma spark at its tip "like a children's sparkler", explains Stoffels-Adamowicz.

The scientists have found a way to generate a nitric oxide plasma using the needle, which, according to Merali, is something the body naturally uses to fight infection and inflammation and, "...when the nitric oxide plasma is produced using small amounts of energy and applied in short bursts, it can kill bacteria while leaving other living cells unharmed." It gets even spiffier, though, because the nitric oxide can also tell cancer cells to shut down:

Nitric oxide is also involved in cell messaging, so it can be used to trigger programmed cell death. Using higher-energy doses of plasma, in longer bursts, the team was able to target certain living cells and cauterise the tissue while leaving surrounding cells undamaged. "The plasma needle could be used to excise tumours or skin cancers," says Stoffels-Adamowicz. "It's surgery without cutting."

How neat is that? They're working on other ways to use the plasma as well, such as clearing blocked arteries, although for now it looks like the dentists will be getting first crack at it as a drill replacement. I posted last Thursday on some new tech advances that might lead to dentistry that actually helps people regrow damaged teeth; between that and the painless replacement to drilling, dentists may be getting a lot more popular in the near future. They might at least be losing the dread factor (something that could also be accomplished if patients were simply more diligent about flossing, but that's another subject altogether.)

Hat tip: Futurismic

Smile, It'll Grow Back

Hockey players, take heart. The day may be coming when the next tooth you break in the heat of battle won't be a permanent loss. According to New Scientist, engineers have created a small brace-like device that fits in the mouth and uses ultrasound to induce regrowth of damaged teeth.

Jie Chen and Ying Tsui, engineers at the University of Alberta in Canada, developed the miniature device after ultrasound stimulation encouraged damaged teeth and jawbone tissue to regrow in animals.

Tarek El-Bialy, who works in Alberta's medical faculty, was able to regrow teeth in rabbits with a larger device, but only when some tooth root remained in place.

Since the method works to regrow teeth when some root remains, I wonder if eventually this could become the standard treatment for tooth decay as well. That would be cool. Imagine, no more fillings that announce to the world just how lazy you were about oral hygiene as a child, and also wear out over time, requiring another round of Novocaine and drilling. Of course, someone is bound to discover that the low-power ultrasound pulses the device sends at the damaged tooth cause some other form of harm to some other part of the body, but that's a trivial matter that I'm sure another brilliant mind will find a way to overcome. In the meantime, hockey players (and maybe even children with a sweet tooth) can rest easy, knowing that their dental woes are only temporary. That's something to smile about.

Electricians, Nanoparticles, And Dancing

We’ve had electricians buzzing around here for the last couple of days. They’ve been amazing. Because we’re building a garage this summer (also known as a power tool recreation area), we needed to beef up our electrical system. We had to reroute the power where it comes into the house, because if you do any upgrading the city likes you to commit to a total overhaul. We put in a new meter with a main circuit shutoff up at the front of the house (the old one was in the back, with open wires that looped all the way around the building—scary and messy), and then ran a giant cable through the attic to a new circuit panel in the basement. By putting in a bigger panel, we will have room to expand the service into the garage, thus providing power to lots of lovely tools. Power tools. My eyes are glowing even as I type this.

This electrical upgrade went so smoothly. It was fun watching the experts at work. We had already replaced the panel once ourselves, about fifteen years ago. (We obviously did not upgrade enough, or we wouldn’t have had to repeat the process.) At the time, poverty made us brave, so my husband did most of the work himself, with a little consulting from an electrician we were acquainted with back then. The projects then and the project now were night and day. Ours took days, and we had to deal with the power being down for long stretches, some trial and error, a lot of frustrations, some damage to other systems on the side (plaster specifically), and an adequate, but not outstanding result. Theirs flowed like a waltz, intricate and precise. They were so fast, and so competent, and the results are so clean and orderly. They didn’t waste any effort, or damage any other parts of the house. Everything was purposeful and directed toward a specific goal. There was nothing random about how they did their job, and it made them an object lesson in efficiency. Our power was off for a sum total of two hours. Two hours--that’s efficiency for you.

So anyway, I started reading this article that I couldn’t help relating to the difference between our electrical fumblings and the productivity of the experts that we’ve witnessed over the last couple of days. It’s on a completely different subject, medical nanotech applications, but the lessons of efficiency hold, and the comparison to an intricate dance. In a report titled “Magnetic Field Acts as 'Remote Control' to Deliver Nanomedicine", Physorg.com reports on advances in efficiency in the fight against cancer (with potential applications for neurological and cardiac diseases as well), being developed at the University of Buffalo. It looks at nanoparticles as a delivery method for cancer fighting medicine, but with some interesting twists. As with any complicated dance, there are several steps involved.

The first is the development of the cancer treatment, in this case, photodynamic therapy. According to Physorg.com, Paras Prasad, Ph.D., is the executive director of UB's Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry in the UB College of Arts and Sciences:

According to Prasad, photodynamic therapy is one of the most promising treatments for cancer; it's also being investigated as a treatment method for cardiovascular, dermatological and ophthalmic diseases.

PDT exploits the propensity of tumors to retain higher concentrations of photosensitive drugs than normal tissues. When exposed to laser light, these drugs generate toxic molecules that destroy the cancer cells.

Interesting, huh? The drug makes toxins when lasered, and tumors hold onto the drug more than normal tissue, so the toxins get concentrated in the tumors when the laser is applied, thus sparing the normal tissue to a certain degree. Cool. The photosensitive drug is not totally limited to the cancerous tissue, though, which does result in some side effects, the main one being that the patient has a strong sensitivity to light for four to six weeks after treatment, from the drug accumulating in the skin. The article doesn't go into how that manifests, but I would assume we're at least talking about a high risk of sunburn. No doubt there is damage to non-cancerous tissue from the toxins released by the photosensitive drugs when the skin, and probably the eyes, are exposed to light. Finding a way to keep the drug from wandering to parts hither and yon would be a good thing.

This leads to steps two and three in the medical dance. Two is how to get the drug to the tumor in very small quantities, just sufficient to damage the cancer and not the surrounding tissue. Three is how to get the drug to head for and stay in the target area, and not wander off into healthy tissue, so the side effects can be minimal. Step two uses our old friends, nanoparticles. For this application the University of Buffalo team created nanocarriers, developed from polymer micelles (whatever they are), tiny receptacles designed to carry the medicine, and hold onto it well during transport. Step three is where the twist comes in. They added iron oxide nanoparticles inside the nanocarriers. So what, you say? This is where it gets neat. They discovered that if they apply a magnetic field to these iron oxide enhanced nanocarriers, they can direct them where they want them to go:

In the experiments, nanocarriers were shown to be efficiently taken up by cultured tumor cells in the area exposed to the magnetic field, as demonstrated by confocal microscopy.

While the team has demonstrated this concept with PDT drugs, Prasad said the technique would be useful in delivering gene therapy, chemotherapy or practically any kind of pharmaceutical treatment into cells.

"Because the nanocarriers proved to be significantly stable and because they retained the PDT drugs, we are optimistic that they will be able to deliver a wide range of therapies to tumors or other disease sites in the body without any significant loss in the circulatory system or in normal tissues," said Prasad.

They now move on to step four in this medical Waltz--in vivo testing, which is a fancy way of saying they're going live. Preliminary studies in animals indicate that the magnetic fields work in the body the same way as in the test tube, with the magnetic fields causing the medicine to accumulate at the tumor site. That's way exciting if you ask me. I've seen people suffering the effects of chemotherapy before, and it's really incredibly hard what some cancer patients go through. The more they develop ways to limit the effects of various drugs to just the targeted tissue, the better. Advances like these are such a blessing to the people who are already dealing with the trauma of life-threatening illness, and the pain and exhaustion that come with them. What a great thing for doctors to be able to limit the trauma of the treatment itself.

I just find it amazing all the things that science is discovering as they build more and more on existing knowledge. The dance gets more intricate and the dancers get more adept. The treatment they're developing at UB is so like the work that our electricians did this week, efficient, precise, and clean, without wasted effort, or damage to other systems. They're combining the knowledge of photodynamic drug therapy, nanoparticles, and magnetic field theory, and making the whole system work. There's more work to be done, I grant you, and it's not a two day job, like our electricians pulled off, but considering what they're doing, I think they deserve a little more time--at least a couple weeks.

Carbon Nanotubes--What Will They Think Of Next?

Carbon nanotubes are turning into the miracle cure for all problems scientific. Wikipedia says they "are cylindrical carbon molecules with novel properties that make them potentially useful in a wide variety of applications in nanotechnology, electronics, optics, and other fields of materials science. They exhibit extraordinary strength and unique electrical properties, and are efficient conductors of heat." I've read about them as the best hope for super-strong, super-lightweight cabling for space elevators, possibly enabling mankind to reach space without the pesky problems of lift-off and g-forces. Scientists are exploring their potential for use in medical applications, such as forming minuscule latticework for rejoining/regrowing severed nerves, and such out-there concepts as making nanobots to clean our blood. They are also considered one of the keys to the future extreme miniaturization of electronics (as if we need electronics to get much smaller--I can barely dial my cell phone now.)

Today's examination of the wonders of carbon nanotubes centers around this article I read at Livescience.com. At the University of California in Riverside they're working on carbon nanotube bone grafts, structures upon which the body would grow new bone and fuse it to existing bone. There are new advancements being made in the nanotube bone graft arena by virtue of a new purification process that removes the heavy metals from the nanotubes--heavy metals that are harmful to living tissue. This is apparently necessary because the bone grafts would be permanent, and the nanotubes would stay in the body. This differs from the piece I read about advances in reconnecting severed nerves in the brain. In that case, after the nerves regrow, the lattice of nanotubes breaks down and is flushed from the body through the urinary system.

In both of these scenarios, though, the whole concept is amazing. Imagine someone who has lost some portion of their bone to an accident, or because they had to have a tumor removed. Now think of them being able to regrow their own bone to replace the lost section, not donor bone, but theirs, without the rejection factor. Imagine a person who's had to have brain surgery not losing brain functionality due to nerve damage, because doctors are able to use nanotubes to make the nerves reconnect. It really is an exciting time to be observing the strides the scientific community is making. I wonder what's next.

Update: More coolness. Here's one answer to the "what's next" question. From Physorg.com--"Thin films of carbon nanotubes deposited on transparent plastic can also serve as a surface on which cells can grow. And as researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) and Rice University suggest in a paper published in the May issue of the Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, these nanotube films could potentially serve as an electrical interface between living tissue and prosthetic devices or biomedical instruments." They're talking about making prosthetic devices that can be controlled by nerve impulses, and send sensory data the other way. Wow.

Need A New Bladder? They Can Grow It For You

In a sci fi kind of future, which is looking less and less like fiction, and more and more like inevitability, we'll be able to recognize what's going on around us by recalling our favorite TV shows of the last half century. If we remember our Star Trek (any version), we will not be taken aback by asking our wall for dinner, or beaming from place to place, or growing a ready to transplant organ to be used in case of emergency. Yeah, but that's the future, right? Well, the future is now, at least where the bladder is concerned. Via The Speculist, I found an article in The Hindu that blew me away, about engineering human organs in the laboratory. I'm not going to go into the science of it all, but it's seriously cool. If you're interested, follow the link.