The Australian winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine is leveraging her discovery to market a test which will help people know their true health status and biological age.
Elizabeth Blackburn won her award, along with two other researchers, for her work on telomeres, pieces of DNA which cap chromosomes and keep cells from ageing too soon. She discovered the telomerase enzyme which repairs the telomeres. Long telomeres are associated with longer life expectancy; short telomeres with shorter life expectancy.
She says that it is impossible to predict how much longer people have to live, but shorter telomeres may indicate bad health. Telomere length is associated with stress, for instance. Doctors could intervene earlier to prevent disease. Dr Blackburn has said that her discovery "sort of translates into a fountain of youth; the number of years of healthy living is related to telomere length. We…
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“Alzheimer’s has been portrayed as the ‘disease of the century’ that is poised to have a near catastrophic impact on the world’s healthcare system as the population ages,” Professor Johnstone said.
“This representation of the disease—along with other often used terms such as ‘living dead’, a ‘funeral that never ends’ and a ‘fate worse than death’—places Alzheimer’s as a soft target in the euthanasia debate because it plays to people’s fears of developing the disease and what it symbolises. It positions Alzheimer’s as something that requires a remedy; that remedy increasingly being pre-emptive…
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Following the highly publicised pre-emptive double mastectomy of Hollywood celebrity Angelina Jolie, it has emerged that a 53-year-old British man has become the first in the world to have a pre-emptive removal of his prostate. He discovered that he had a “faulty” BRCA2 gene which is associated with breast and prostate cancer and asked his surgeon to remove it.
Initially the doctors were reluctant as he appeared to be completely healthy. The operation also entails some risk and has side-effects: infertility and possibly permanent incontinence and sexual dysfunction. However a biopsy did detect some microscopic malignant changes and the doctors went ahead.
The surgeon, Roger Kirby, told the London Sunday Times that even in this case, he would not normally operate.
“But given what we now know about the nature of BRCA2, it was definitely the right thing to do for this patient. A number of these BRCA families have now…
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Last week we reported that researchers at the Oregon Health and Science University had finally cloned human embryos and successfully extracted embryonic stem cells. The study was published in the leading journal Cell and greeted with great jubilation. This was a feat which scientists agreed was possible but was proving unexpectedly difficult. The last time the claim was made, by South Korean Hwang Woo-suk in 2005, it turned out to be a colossal fraud which embarrassed leading journals and dampened enthusiasm for “therapeutic cloning”.
Unfortunately, the most recent paper has also been criticised for image duplication, evoking the nightmarish Hwang scandal. "It's a shame that this important area of research has come under scrutiny once again," Kevin Eggan of Harvard University told ScienceInsider. The researchers say that the duplication was unintentional and that these minor errors will not affect the validity of the results.
Inferno: Robert Langdon is back with a globe-trotting thriller in which the symbologist has to decode clues left in a map of Dante’s masterpiece by a recently-deceased evil genius before one-third of the world perishes. Oops, we are about to give away too much of the plot. Suffice it to say that the master of transmuting highbrow trivia, European travel guides and clunky prose into dollars has framed transhumanism as the most dangerous threat to the future of mankind.
Brown says that transhumanism is a movement to change the destiny of humanity through genetic engineering. In Inferno, the villain is obsessed with over-population and creates a virus which will make one-third of the world’s population infertile, thus reducing the population dramatically in a single generation. From an interview in Timet, it appears that Brown himself believes that the…
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This 25-minute documentary by Al-Jazeera presents a balanced view of the campaign for euthanasia in Australia. No presentation will satisfy everyone, but this one, "Licence to Kill", presents articulate folk on both sides of the question. Philip Nitschke's do-it-yourself suicide classes are spine-tingling. Much better than YouTube kitty videos. (Some nice shots of the Opera House, too.)
Hollywood celebrity Angelina Jolie was hailed this week for her bravery in revealing that she has had a preventative double mastectomy. The New York Times published her explanation as a scoop on its op-ed page:
“For any woman reading this, I hope it helps you to know you have options. I want to encourage every woman, especially if you have a family history of breast or ovarian cancer, to seek out the information and medical experts who can help you through this aspect of your life, and to make your own informed choices.”
Susceptibility to breast and ovarian cancer runs in Jolie’s family. Her mother died at 56 of breast cancer and she carries the BRCA1 gene. Doctors told her that she had an 87% chance of contracting breast cancer. After the operation, she said, the risk is now only 5%.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) goes on sale on May 22 after more than a decade of revision by 1,500 experts. As the bible of psychiatry, it is enormously influential. Based on its diagnoses, patients will be able to claim sickness benefits, insurance and compensation. Drug companies can market new products. Odd behaviour will become a medical problem.
The purpose of DSM-5 is to enable doctors to make more reliable diagnoses of mental disorders by setting strict criteria. But most of the commentary that has accompanied its launch has been negative. As The Economist notes, “In the eyes of many critics it is a vehicle for misdiagnosis, overdiagnosis, the medicalisation of normal behaviour and the prescription of a large number of unnecessary drugs.”
The research, conducted by Oregon Health and Science University and published in Cell, involved the replacement of the nucleus of a normal egg cell with that of a skin cell. This procedure is known as somatic cell nuclear transfer. A few days after this, stem cells were extracted from the embryo.
The stems cells from cloned embryos are used to create tissue genetically identical to the DNA of the patient. This means that procedures like organ transplants could be performed without a risk of rejection.
The researchers are sceptical that the embryos could be developed into viable babies. They did not implant the embryos and said they had no intention of doing so. They said that this technique had been tried on…
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Is bioethics compatible with democracy? This is not a question that surfaces very often in policy debates featuring prestigious bioethicists. However, in a provocative column in The Guardian, Nathan Emmerich, a young bioethicist, asks whether bioethicists are turning into a priestly caste:
“In a secular age it might seem that the time for moral authorities has passed. However, research in the life sciences and biomedicine has produced a range of moral concerns and prompted the emergence of bioethics; an area of study that specialises in the ethical analysis of these issues. The result has been the emergence of what we might call expert bioethicists, a cadre of professionals who, while logical and friendly, have, nevertheless, been ordained as secularpriests.
Negative attitudes towards Alzheimer’s disease are undue influence on the euthanasia debate, 
Following the highly publicised pre-emptive double mastectomy of Hollywood celebrity Angelina Jolie, 
