Longevity Medicine

How to Live to 100 – Health

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:50:40 +0000

Source:
http://www.usnews.com/Topics/tag/Subject/l/longevity/rss

The Big Chill: Winter Skincare

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:50:38 +0000

Seeing dry patches on your skin? Does your skin feel blotchy and unsightly? Are you waking up looking older than you feel? If you have answered yes to some of the above you are suffering from &ldquo…Source:
http://wwww.examiner.com/RSS-3174-Longevity-Examiner

An Online Chat With Aubrey de Grey and S. Jay Olshansky

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:50:06 +0000

Science recently hosted a live chat event with researchers Aubrey de Grey and S. Jay Olshansky, public figures who have debated their views on longevity science a number of times over the last seven years or so. The logs and viewer comments from the event remain available for those interested in viewing the discussion, but note that it takes a little while for the widget containing them to load.

Live Chat: The Science of Antiaging

Jennifer Couzin-Frankel: And here’s a question from Roy: Does the paper titled “Clearance of p16 positive senescent cells delays ageing-associate disorder” published in Nature January, 2011, prove the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS’s) validity, i.e. extend lifespan by remediating damage? If so, are their other examples of experimental validation of SENS in animal models?

Aubrey: Roy: that paper is a great proof of concept for one component of SENS, the benefits of removing “death-resistant” cells. The experiment didn’t show life extension, but it wasn’t expected to, because to do that you have to fix all the things that limit lifespan, not just one of them. Yes, there are various other examples, such as the elimination of amyloid in mouse models of Alzheimer’s and the introduction of stem cells (or the stimulation of their division) in various tissues. We’ll see more of this soon, that’s for sure.

…

Jennifer Couzin-Frankel: An interesting question from Morten: Why do you want to live longer (as I understand it at least de Grey is after living longer)? What can’t you accomplish in a life time?

Aubrey: Morten: this is the most insidious misunderstanding of the work that I and other biomedical gerontologists do. We are NOT working to extend life for the sake of extending life. We are working to postpone the ill-health of old age, which will probably have the side-effect of extending life, but it’s no more than that, a side-effect. I personally have no idea how long I want to live, [any] more than I have an opinion on what time I want to go to the toilet next Sunday. In both cases I know I’m going to have better information nearer the time, so it’s idiotic to even think about it. However, I can tell you that I have at least 1000 years of backlog already (books to read, films to se…) – don’t you? If not, why not?

S. Jay Olshansky: Morton. The goal of research in this area in my view is not to extend life. The goal is to extend healthy life. If we live longer, I consider that a bonus. However, I would encourage you to be asking the same question of those now working to combat heart disease, cancer, and stroke, and those who experience these conditions. Why [do] we all want to live longer? I believe what we are talking about here are interventions that enable us to live our lives healthy for as long as possible.

…

Comment From Guest: Couldn’t you guys be focusing on pain control, quality-of-life and ending poverty and depression in the elderly?

S. Jay Olshansky: [Think] about this for a moment. In 1900 life expectancy at birth was about 45. Now it’s about 80 for women and 76 for men. We gained 30 years of life — most healthy. Wasn’t that worth it? It’s hard to imagine the goal of extending healthy life as being harmful in any way — it would enable people to remain working longer if they want, or retire healthier for a longer time period. Health also begets wealth for individuals and populations. Goodness — why are we working so hard to combat heart disease and cancer then?

There’s a lot more there to look through; you should certainly read the whole thing.

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

Falling Heart Disease Rates

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:50:03 +0000

From the Independent: “It is one of medicine’s mysteries: what has caused Britain’s plummeting rate of heart disease over the last decade? Deaths from heart attacks have halved since 2002 and no one is quite sure why. Similar changes have occurred in countries around the world but the death rate in England, especially, has fallen further and faster than almost anywhere. … The researchers looked at 840,000 men and women in England who had suffered a total of 861,000 heart attacks between 2002 and 2010. Overall, the death rates fell by 50 per cent in men and 53 per cent in women. … For the last 70 years we have been in the grip of a heart disease epidemic that began in the 1940s, rose to a peak in the 1970s and then began to fall. All Western countries were affected and all followed broadly the same pattern. … researchers conclude that just under half the decline in heart attack death rates in England over the last decade is due to better hospital treatment; the rest is due to changes in lifestyle and the widespread use of pills to lower cholesterol and blood pressure.” One might theorize that – at the high level – increased heart disease across the last seven decades is a consequence of the fat and sedentary lifestyles that tend to accompany increases in wealth across the board, while reductions are largely due to improvements in medical technology.

Link: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/the-curious-case-of-the-vanishing-killer-6294626.html

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

On Growth Hormone and "Smaller is Better"

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:49:56 +0000

Here is an open access PDF format mini-review on what is known of growth hormone and aging – that less of it is generally better: “A recent report of virtually complete protection from diabetes and cancer in a population of people with hereditary dwarfism revived interest in elucidating the relationships between growth, adult body size, age-related disease and longevity. In many species, smaller individuals outlive those that are larger and a similar relationship was shown in studies of various human populations. Adult body size is strongly dependent on the actions of growth hormone (GH) and the absence of GH or GH receptor in mice leads to a remarkable extension of longevity. Many mechanisms that may account for, or contribute to, this association have been identified. It is suggested that modest modifications of the diet at different ages may extend human healthspan and lifespan by reducing levels of hormones that stimulate growth.”

Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22261798

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

A Culture of Controlling, Malicious Timidity

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:49:53 +0000

The course of our future lives, our health and longevity, is swayed by a population of timid mice – but malicious mice, ever ready to use state force to punish and hold back anyone they see as being insufficiently timid. These are people who support the ball and chain of centralized regulation of medical research, people who fear all change, people who fear everything they don’t understand, and people who rush to prevent anyone else from enjoying the freedom to undertake personal risk in the course of advancing progress. This describes the vocal mainstream of Western culture: risk-averse, ignorant, and enamored of control for its own sake: a dangerous combination for those who pull upon the strings of law and regulation.

As I have often remarked in the past, freedom is absolutely essential to progress in medicine: the freedom for researchers to attempt goals as they see fit; the freedom for anyone to fund the research and clinical development they desire; the freedom for people to take personal risks in the use of medical technology; the freedom for groups to create an unhampered marketplace in medicine, in which technologies are rapidly sifted for those with the greatest benefit. These are all simply parts of economic and personal liberty, something that is in extremely short supply in the medical industry.

So the mice stamp their little feet, and the impersonal engines of government – the unaccountable employees of bureaucratic bodies such as the FDA – move to prevent us all from undertaking rapid development in medicine, on penalty of jail. For our own good, supposedly.

If anti-aging drugs are possible, they will require dangerous – and ethically troubling – clinical trials. … If anti-aging medicine is to become a reality, then the various theories about how to halt or reverse the aging process will require testing on human subjects. Carrying out such tests will place unprecedented pressure on the rules protecting human participants in clinical trials. I suspect, then, that human guinea pigs for anti-aging trials will come disproportionately from the poor and disempowered. … The rich and powerful will be looking to do away with rules that they perceive as denying them millennial life spans.

Those would be the rules preventing terminal cancer patients from choosing to up and pay for their own personal trial of a promising therapy-in-development – forcing them to die without any recourse. The rules that make formal clinical trials so lengthy and expensive that many potential therapies are simply never developed or tried by humans, and those that are might be a decade in the slow regulatory grind from readiness to actual availability. The rules that raise the costs of medicine too high for those poor folk that the author seems to be concerned about. Regulation of medicine, which raises costs, disrupts the effective market mechanisms of progress, and prevents people from using potential therapies that are technologically feasible and ready to field-test, is a morally bankrupt affair.

But this is the culture we live in, sad to say: one in which vague and poorly articulated discomfort with potential future inequities are given more consideration than the ongoing massive toll of death and suffering that we should be working day and night, as fast as possible, to prevent. A toll of 100,000 lives every day, and the hundreds of millions who are crippled, diminished, and in pain. Instead we get institutions like the FDA, whose staff toil to prevent new medicine from ever seeing the light of day. The mice would close their eyes and drown the world in blood just to feel a little better in their own vague sense of disquiet: they are the very worst of humanity, not even willing to acknowledge the fearsome costs of their own timidity.

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

Creating Smooth Muscle Cells from Skin Cells

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:49:48 +0000

Here is another example of work on creating patient-specific cells to order, one of the necessary building block technologies needed for an industry that constructs organs and other larger masses of tissue in the body: researchers have “discovered a method of generating different types of vascular smooth muscle cells (SMCs) – the cells which make up the walls of blood vessels – using cells from patients’ skin. … Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the world. These deaths are mainly caused by the hardening and subsequent blockage of blood vessels due to the accumulation of fatty materials, a condition called atherosclerosis. As not all patients are suitable for conventional stenting or bypass treatment, an option in the future may be to grow new blood vessels to bypass their own blocked vessels. The [team] worked with embryonic stem cells and reprogrammed skin cells, collectively known as human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), which have the potential to form any cell type in the body. They discovered a method of creating all the major vascular smooth muscle cells in high purity using hPSCs which can also be easily scaled up for production of clinical-grade SMCs. This is the first time that such a system has been developed and will open the door for comparative studies on different subtypes of SMCs to be carried out, which are otherwise extremely difficult to obtain from patients.”

Link: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-01-cambridge-team-smooth-muscle-cells.html

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

Creating Alzheimer’s Neurons from Stem Cells

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:49:43 +0000

The principle use of stem cells in the near future is actually research, not therapy – generating diseased cells to order will lower the cost of better understanding the mechanisms of disease and age-related conditions. For example: “scientists have, for the first time, created stem cell-derived, in vitro models of sporadic and hereditary Alzheimer’s disease (AD), using induced pluripotent stem cells from patients with the much-dreaded neurodegenerative disorder. … It’s a first step. These aren’t perfect models. They’re proof of concept. But now we know how to make them. It requires extraordinary care and diligence, really rigorous quality controls to induce consistent behavior, but we can do it. … We’re dealing with the human brain. You can’t just do a biopsy on living patients. Instead, researchers have had to work around, mimicking some aspects of the disease in non-neuronal human cells or using limited animal models. Neither approach is really satisfactory. … With the in vitro Alzheimer’s neurons, scientists can more deeply investigate how AD begins and chart the biochemical processes that eventually destroy brain cells associated with elemental cognitive functions like memory. Currently, AD research depends heavily upon studies of post-mortem tissues, long after the damage has been done. … The differences between a healthy neuron and an Alzheimer’s neuron are subtle. It basically comes down to low-level mischief accumulating over a very long time, with catastrophic results. … The researchers have already produced some surprising findings. … In this work, we show that one of the early changes in Alzheimer’s neurons thought to be an initiating event in the course of the disease turns out not to be that significant.”

Link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120125131029.htm

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

2012 Buck Symposium, March 1st at the Buck Institute

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:49:37 +0000

This year’s Buck Symposium, an event hosted by the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, will be held on March 1st. The Institute is very much a part of the mainstream of biogerontology, wherein frank talk of extending human life span is rare, and the public relations tends to focus on age-related diseases and length of healthy life within the current human life span:

At the Buck Institute, world-class scientists work in a uniquely collaborative environment to understand how normal aging contributes to the development of conditions specifically associated with getting older such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, cancer, stroke, heart disease, diabetes, macular degeneration and glaucoma. Our interdisciplinary approach brings scientists from disparate fields together to develop diagnostic tests and treatments to prevent or delay these maladies.

Some of their work has application to more useful research programs, however, those that aim directly to extend human life and reverse aging – such as SENS. That said, the program for the event is attractive, and in the speakers list you’ll see a few noted researchers who are in fact public supporters of SENS, such as Irina Conboy.

The 2012 Buck Symposium: Stem Cell Research and Aging provides a stage for key players in the rapidly developing areas of stem cell research and the basic biology of aging to share their research, findings and thoughts. Some of the world’s most influential and respected investigators from diverse background, in fields such as development, diseases, stem cell biology and model systems will be sharing their ideas, sparking new dialog, new alliances and promising collaborations.

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

Early Trials of Embryonic Stem Cells to Treat Degenerative Blindness

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:49:30 +0000

From the New York Times: “A treatment for eye diseases that is derived from human embryonic stem cells might have improved the vision of two patients. The report, published online in the medical journal The Lancet, is the first to describe the effect on patients of a therapy involving human embryonic stem cells. … The results [come] from the second clinical trial involving the stem cells, using a therapy developed by Advanced Cell Technology to treat macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness. … Both patients, who were legally blind, said in interviews that they had gains in eyesight that were meaningful for them. One said she could see colors better and was able to thread a needle and sew on a button for the first time in years. The other said she was able to navigate a shopping mall by herself. … esearchers at Advanced Cell Technology turned embryonic stem cells into retinal pigment epithelial cells. Deterioration of these retinal cells can lead to damage to the macula, the central part of the retina, and to loss of the straight-ahead vision necessary to recognize faces, watch television or read. Some 50,000 of the cells were implanted last July under the retinas in one eye of each woman in operations that took about 30 minutes. … Before the treatment, the woman with Stargardt’s was able to see the motion of a hand being waved in front of her but could not read any letters on an eye chart. Twelve weeks after the treatment, she was able to read five of the biggest letters on the eye chart with the treated eye, corresponding to 20/800 vision, according to the paper.”

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/business/stem-cell-study-may-show-advance.html

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

On Stem Cells and Their Aging and Potential Rejuvenation

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:49:25 +0000

An interview with a researcher: “Advances in the study of stem cells have fueled hopes that someday, via regenerative medicine, doctors could restore aging people’s hearts, livers, brains and other organs and tissues to a more youthful state. A key to reaching this goal – to be able to provide stem cells that will differentiate into other types of cells a patient needs – appears to lie in understanding ‘epigenetics,’ which involves chemical marks stapled onto DNA and its surrounding protein husk by specialized enzyme complexes inside a cell’s nucleus. These markings produce long-lasting changes in genes’ activity levels within the cell – locking genes into an ‘on’ or ‘off’ position. Epigenetic processes enable cells to remain true to type (a neuron, for instance, never suddenly morphs into a fat cell) even though all our cells, regardless of type, share the same genetic code. But epigenetic processes also appear to play a critical role in reducing cells’ vitality as they age. … Aging seems to involve a gradual deterioration of function as cells and tissues are exposed to stresses either from outside the body, such as chemicals we ingest or irradiation from the sun, or from inside the body, such as free radicals, produced every moment when cells are making energy. These myriad insults can, among other things, alter a cell’s epigenetic settings, resulting in changed patterns of gene activity that diminish the cell’s overall ability to function. … Although some aspects of cellular aging – DNA mutations, for instance – would be difficult to ‘reset,’ we and others have done experiments suggesting that many of the characteristics of old cells and tissues can indeed be reversed, restoring them to a more youthful state. Much of our work has focused on stem cells, and in particular on the changes that occur with age and that reduce stem cells’ ability to maintain or repair tissues. Our findings fit nicely with the idea that some of the causes of aging are epigenetic in character, as opposed to actual damage to genes. Most importantly, our data suggest that cells and tissues can be rejuvenated without losing their specific characteristics – old muscle stem cells, when rejuvenated, remain muscle stem cells rather than become some more generic, undifferentiated cell.”

Link: http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2012/january/5q-rando-0123.html

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

Testing Autophagy as a Mechanism of Longevity for Exercise

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:49:16 +0000

Exercise extends healthy life in laboratory animals, but not maximum life span as is the case for calorie restriction. In longer lived species such as our own, that difference may be slight: present evidence suggests exercise and calorie restriction to have broadly similar – though very different in detail – effects on life expectancy. The end results are probably in the same ballpark, and quite possibly achieved through an overlapping set of mechanisms. That said, while exercise is certainly good for you, I’ve yet to see a study on exercise that reproduces similar eye-opening changes in underlying biomarkers of health to those found in human calorie restriction practitioners. Exercise is “merely” great for health, as opposed to amazingly superb for health.

So, obviously, the sensible thing to do is both exercise regularly and practice calorie restriction. Based on the weight of evidence, this is the 80/20 of what can be done today to optimize health for the long term in a basically healthy individual. The complement to this approach is doing your part to ensure that medical technology produces methods of rejuvenation in time to help you in later age when good health practices are no longer enough to stave off significant degeneration and risk of death.

There is a school of thought that places the processes of autophagy front and center when it comes to natural methods of adjusting metabolism for length of health and life. Autophagy is the process by which cells break down damaged components, the first step in recycling and replacement: fewer damaged components at any given time is a good thing, and so more autophagy should also be a good thing. You might recall a demonstration that autophagy is essential to the life span and health benefits of calorie restriction, for example.

I notice that scientists are suggesting that autophagy is similarly important to the health and life span benefits produced by regular exercise:

Dr Levine and her team were testing a theory that exercise works its magic, at least in part, by promoting autophagy. This process, whose name is derived from the Greek for “self-eating”, is a mechanism by which surplus, worn-out or malformed proteins and other cellular components are broken up for scrap and recycled.

To carry out the test, Dr Levine turned to those stalwarts of medical research, genetically modified mice. Her first batch of rodents were tweaked so that their autophagosomes – structures that form around components which have been marked for recycling – glowed green. After these mice had spent half an hour on a treadmill, she found that the number of autophagosomes in their muscles had increased, and it went on increasing until they had been running for 80 minutes.

To find out what, if anything, this exercise-boosted autophagy was doing for mice, the team engineered a second strain that was unable to respond this way. Exercise, in other words, failed to stimulate their recycling mechanism. When this second group of modified mice were tested alongside ordinary ones, they showed less endurance and had less ability to take up sugar from their bloodstreams.

There were longer-term effects, too. In mice, as in people, regular exercise helps prevent diabetes. But when the team fed their second group of modified mice a diet designed to induce diabetes, they found that exercise gave no protection at all.

Autophagy is one of a number of potential mechanisms by which exercise improves long term health. You might look back at a post from the archives for more:

Physical inactivity is increasingly recognized as modifiable behavioral risk factor for cardiovascular diseases. A partial list of proposed mechanisms for exercise-induced cardioprotection include induction of heat shock proteins, increase in cardiac antioxidant capacity, expression of endoplasmic reticulum stress proteins, anatomical and physiological changes in the coronary arteries, changes in nitric oxide production, adaptational changes in cardiac mitochondria, increased autophagy, and improved function of sarcolemmal and/or mitochondrial ATP-sensitive potassium channels. It is currently unclear which of these protective mechanisms are essential for exercise-induced cardioprotection. … A better understanding of the molecular basis of exercise-induced cardioprotection will help to develop better therapeutic strategies.

Source:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/latest_rss_feed.cfm

Colon Cancer Screening Needed Less Than Every 5 Years

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:49:15 +0000

Colon Cancer Screening Needed Less Than Every 5 Years – Colon cancer is easily treated if found early enough, but it appears current recommendations for scope screening every 5 years is unnecessarily frequent.

Sigmoidoscopy screening for colon cancer is recommended every five years for people over 50, however a new study found that screening that often may be unnecessary.

Sigmoidoscopy screening allows a doctor to identify polyps, or small growths, in the colon that could turn into cancer. Other colon cancer screening methods include fecal occult blood testing, which identifies blood in the stool, and colonoscopy, which examines the entire colon (sigmoidoscopy only examines the lower part).

While the American Cancer Society recommends that adults over 50 receive sigmoidoscopy screening every five years and a fecal occult blood test annually, some say this may be overly aggressive.

According to experts, it could take up to 15 years for polyps to develop into cancer and it may be that a one-time sigmoidoscopy screening is enough for those at average-risk. Read more…

AyurGold for Healthy Blood

Source:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/integratedmedicine

India leaves China behind in biotechnology sector

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:49:15 +0000

Indians should really smile when they read this. India has left China behind by miles in the arena of biotechnology. With India developing as a leading biotech region in the Asian region it is expected to leave behind China for the first time with regards to the area planted with biotechnology crop. The area under cultivation with biotechnology crop in 2006 in India has tripled as compared to last year and now the area under cultivation in India stands at 3.8 million when compared to 3.5 million in China. Quality seeds coupled with good biotechnology have made India stand strong. India is adopting biotechnology in a huge manner for meeting their growing need for fuel, fiber and food. 2007 will witness India investing $80 million in national chain of research laboratories. As per RNCOS report: Indian Biotechnology Market Outlook (2006)’, biotech will greatly influence the Indian agriculture sector by developing a large number of GM seeds. Amplifying at the rate of 28.09% from 2005, the Indian biotech industry is believed to reach the level of US$ 5 Billion by 2010 end. Is China sitting with closed eyes and why has India been able to defeat it in the arena of biotechnology, this is a question which only China can answer well. Via newswiretoday

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http://www.biotechblog.org/rss.xml

Anti-inflammatory effects of Carbon Monoxide

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:49:15 +0000

We all know that Carbon Monoxide (CO) is a highly poisonous gas formed by the incomplete combustion of carbon or a carbonaceous material, but it is also known for its anti-inflammatory effects. To shed some more light on the anti-inflammatory effect of CO, a study was conducted by Harvard University and the University of Pittsburgh. The researchers claim to have solved the mystery behind this. The study which appears in the April issue of The FASEB Journal, shows that the anti-inflammatory effects of carbon monoxide is due to its reaction with the cell’s mitochondria. FASEB said in its release: The researchers say the mitochondria react to low levels of carbon monoxide by releasing chemical signals that reduce or shut down the body’s inflammatory response — raising the possibility for the development of new anti-inflammatory therapies. The report further states that inhaled medical grade carbon monoxide has been successfully tested on animals in a number of applications, including organ transplantation, vascular injury, inflammatory bowel disease and organ injury resulting from severe blood loss. Source.

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Now the heart can be bioengineered piece by piece!

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:49:15 +0000

Technology and medical science have converged to give birth to ‘prototypes’ of all cardiovascular structures! Thanks to the researchers at the University of Michigan. They have helped engineer the prototypes of heart muscle, tri-leaflet valves, blood vessels, cell-based cardiac pumps and tissue engineered ventricles. According to them, today, it’s possible to engineer the heart piece by piece! But, they also noted, hurdles still remain before the products of this tissue engineering are ready to be implanted in patients as replacements for diseased or malformed structures. Ravi Birla, director of the University of Michigan, Artificial Heart Laboratory, and Louise Hecker, a graduate student in the University of Michigan, Department of Cell & Developmental Biology have analyzed the technologies used to engineer the heart. They’ve not just analyzed what was happening at the University of Michigan, but in other labs worldwide as well. Regenerative Medicine has just published their article under the title — Engineering the heart piece by piece: state of the art in cardiac tissue engineering.

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http://www.biotechblog.org/rss.xml

New kind of wild orange with the sweetest strains of the native fruit being bred

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:49:15 +0000

A good news for orange lovers. The Australian market is soon to get a new kind of wild orange in its shelves. It will be made by developing tissue cultures. Though, the development and the research on it is in its primary stages, scientists at the Australian Arid Lands Botanic Gardens have started working hard on it. The Australian Arid Lands Botanic Gardens are located in the Upper Spencer Gulf of South Australia. The scientists developing the new kind of orange are optimistic that the new version of the region’s native orange will be sweeter, rather the sweetest, compared to both the Capparis Mitchelli (the native orange) and the common oranges found anywhere. So, keep your fingers crossed to taste the sweetest strain of the native orange.

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http://www.biotechblog.org/rss.xml

Organ transplants can look easy with tissue engineering

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:49:14 +0000

There can be some respite for people suffering from organ failures as tissue engineering can come to their rescue. It can make organ transplant look so easy as people with damaged organs can purchase them over the counter in a similar manner as buying medicines. One’s own organ could be re grown for replacement. Though this may look unbelievable but it is achievable. Drs Cornelia Kasper and Frank Stahl of Hannover University stated: The idea of organs one day being freely available ‘off the shelf’ is still an aspiration today. The need is great, however, and patients are of course very eager to have personalized treatment from organ designers using tissue engineering. Building block principle can be applied to the tissue culture or organ type and the differentiation could be used through appropriation growth. Probably in the future we might see a one size fits all approach and lives of millions of patients looking for organ replacement might be saved quite easily. Via allafrica

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Scientists working on a pill to increase human lifespan

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:49:14 +0000

Scientists are working on a pill which could lead to healthier lives and if they succeed it would be possible to increase the lifespan of an average human being by thirty years with the aid of the pill. It is being said that thyroxine hormone can boost metabolism and at the same time lead to a longer lifespan. Tests are being conducted on mice and if the right dose is determined then the life span of human beings would increase by thirty years. The scientists have not been able to figure out the right dose till yet because if thyroxine in high doses is administered it could lead to life threatening health problems. Aberdeen university scientists conducted study on mice and they found out that mice which had a high metabolic rate lived for a longer period of time. It’s just that the right level of thyroxine has not been determined but when the right level is decided it would help human beings lead to a healthy and long life. Via paktribune

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Access to safety results of GM crop field trial tests in India denied to Greenpeace

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:49:14 +0000

Even the Right to information act or RTI could not help Greenpeace in India. RTI activists tried using this right for getting information on the safety tests of GM crops but their request was rejected on the plea that disclosure of the information could harm the competitive position of the company developing these crops. Information was sought on the field trial locations and allergenicity and toxicity data related to the rice, brinjal and other crops being tested. Though information on location was revealed but access to other set of information was denied. Greenpeace and other farmer organizations are not satisfied with the manner in which the trials are being conducted and they fear that gross violations have been conducted while conducting the tests. On the other hand GEAC states that field trials were being conducted keeping in view all the biosafety and regulatory norms in mind but it seems that there is something fishy since the government is hiding certain results on pretext of safety. The government should come up with a clear picture or it might become difficult to make the people accept GM crops. Via hindu

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