News Archives

The News: 4 August 2005: South Korean scientists report producing the first cloned dog.

The Background: Read about cloning mammals and the technique of somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).
The News: 19 May 2005: Korean scientists report greatly-improved success in making cloned human blastocysts from which to derive embryonic stem cells.

The Background: Read about somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) —their cloning technique — and embryonic stem cells.
The News: 3 February 2005: 59% of a group of patients receiving radioimmunotherapy for their B-cell cancer were disease-free after 5 years.

The Background: A description in the media of the drug as "liquid radiation" fails to do justice to the beauty of this treatment. Read about the drug and monoclonal antibodies.
The News: 17 December 2004: Tests reveal dioxin poisoning of Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko. The level of 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin or TCDD was 100,000 picograms (10-12 g) per gram of blood fat. This is the second-highest level ever found in a human.

The Background: Read about dioxins.
The News: The 2004 Nobel Prizes:
  • in Physiology or Medicine to Linda Buck and Richard Axel for their work unraveling the mechanisms of olfaction (smell).
  • in Chemistry to Irwin Rose, Aaron Ciechanover, and Avram Hershko for their discovery of the role of ubiquitin in protein degradation.
The Background: Read about olfaction and the ubiquitin/proteasome machinery.
The News: Another case of possible human-to-human transmission of "bird flu" reported. (29 September 2004).

The Background: Read about influenza and why the outbreak of bird flu is so troubling.
The News: Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, has died (28 July 2004).

The Background: In addition to discovering the double helix, he was instrumental in working out the genetic code and the roles of messenger RNA and transfer RNA in its expression.
The News: A team of Japanese and Korean scientists reports creating the first mammal (a mouse) by parthenogenesis ("virgin birth").

The Background: Link to a discussion of how they did it and the obstacles they had to overcome; includes links to related pages.
The News: A team of Korean scientists reports creating embryonic stem cells from a cloned human blastocyst (March 2004).

The Background: Link to a page discussing embryonic stem cells — includes links to related pages.
The News: The US FDA approves the first angiogenesis inhibitor for the treatment of cancer (February 2004).

The Background: Read about
The News: A case of "mad cow disease" (bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE) reported in the United States.

The Background: Read about BSE and other prion diseases.
The News: Flu season off to an early start in the United States.

The Background: Read about influenza: the disease, the viruses, the vaccines.
The News: Peter Agre, a graduate of Augsburg College in Minneapolis, MN, shares the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of aquaporins.

The Background: Read about aquaporins (and note that — contrary to most news reports — they are water channels in cell membranes, not "cell walls").
The News: On August 18, 2003, physicians in New York injected 3.5 x 109 copies of an adeno-associated virus (AAV) carrying a gene for the synthesis of GABA into the brain of a patient with Parkinson's disease.

The Background: Read about the use of AAV as a vector in gene therapy.
The News: Italian scientists clone a horse using a nucleus from a cell of the mother (so she gave birth to her identical twin!).

The Background: Read how somatic-cell nuclear transfer is used to create cloned animals.
The News: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves FluMist® – a live-virus vaccine against influenza that is given as a spray, not as an injection.

The Background: Read about influenza and weapons to fight it.
The News: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves a drug called bortezomib (Velcade®) (formerly known as LDP-341) to treat patients with multiple myeloma, a cancer of plasma cells. This drug is the first proteasome inhibitor to be used in human therapy. [13 May 2003]

The Background: Read about proteasome inhibitors and their role in blocking gene activity.
The News: Another strain of "bird flu" infects over 80 people (and kills one) in the Netherlands.

The Background: Read about influenza in both animals and humans.
The News: Charles Janeway, Jr., the "father" of the study of innate immunity, has died at age 60. (12 April 2003).

The Background: Read about innate immunity.
The News: A humanized monoclonal antibody produced by recombinant DNA technology shows promise against systemic anaphylaxis caused by peanuts. (11 March 2003).

The Background: Read about life-threatening systemic anaphylaxis and humanized monoclonal antibodies.
The News: The Hong Kong "bird flu" has reappeared (February 2003).

The Background: Read about this influenza virus.
The News: Dolly, the first sheep produced by cloning, is euthanized because of her physical ailments. (14 February 2003)

The Background: Read about the cloning procedure that produced Dolly.
The News: A second leukemia-like illness in French children treated by gene therapy causes the U. S. Food and Drug Administration to halt similar trials in the U.S. (14 January 2003)

The Background: Read details of the procedures and results in France.
The News: Rupert B. Billingham, a pioneer in the study of transplant biology and immunological tolerance, died on 16 November 2002.

The Background: Read about immunological tolerance.
The News: Birth of first cloned human baby is claimed (without any evidence presented) - supposedly by using the same procedure that produced the sheep Dolly.

The Background: Read about the cloning procedure that produced Dolly.
The News: Sydney Brenner, John Sulston, and H. Robert Horvitz win the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. [October 7, 2002] Brenner championed Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism. Sulston and Horvitz unravelled the genetic control of, and the importance of cell death (apoptosis) to, its development.

The Background: Read about C. elegans and apoptosis.
The News: Officials in the U. S. and France announce that they have halted trials of gene therapy for severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) [October 3, 2002]

The Background: Read details of these trials and the results to date.
The News: Injection of the hormone Peptide YY3-36 (PYY3-36) into human volunteers suppresses appetite for 12 hours. [August 2002]

The Background: Read about the hormonal control of appetite and the particular role of PYY3-36.
The News: Two more children with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) continue to live in good health after being treated by gene therapy. [28 June 2002]

The Background: Read about gene therapy procedures as well as details of these cases.
The News: [February 2002] The sterile male technique will be used in Africa against the tsetse fly, the vector of African sleeping sickness.

The Background: Read about the sterile male technique and Trypanosoma brucei the agent of African sleeping sickness.
The News: 1 February 2002: Scientists at Advanced Cell Technology announce the creation of embryonic stem cells starting with a monkey egg stimulated to develop by parthenogenesis.

The Background:
The News: The drug LDP-341 shows promise against multiple myeloma, a cancer of plasma cells.

The Background: LDP-341 is the first drug to target the proteasome. Link to discussion.
The News: Anthrax

The Background: How the anthrax toxin works.
The News: The 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine has been awarded to Leland H. Hartwell, R. Timothy Hunt and Paul M. Nurse for their discoveries of how the cell cycle is controlled.

The Background: Read about the cell cycle and some of the molecules that control it.
The News: 1.3 million chickens killed in Hong Kong to avoid another outbreak of the Hong Kong "bird flu" in humans.

The Background: Read about the 1997 outbreak.
The News: 16 May 2001. A panel of the National Institutes of Health recommends a more aggressive attack on reducing levels of "bad" cholesterol in people at risk of heart disease.

The Background: Read about cholesterol.
The News: 11 May 2001: The U. S. Food and Drug Administration approves Gleevec®, an ATP-mimic that shows promise against leukemias expressing the fusion protein bcr-abl produced by the Philadelphia chromosome.

The Background: Read about chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), the translocation that produces the Philadelphia chromosome, and its fusion protein.
The News: Spanish scientists make transgenic orange trees that produce fruit in one year instead of the usual 6-20 years. [March 2001]

The Background: Read
The News: Scientists report that electron micrographs reveal the presence of chains of magnetite grains, resembling those found in some bacteria here on earth, in a Martian meteorite. [9 March 2001]

The Background: Read about other claims for evidence of former life in the Martian meteorite ALH84001, and see how these chains of magnetite look in a earthly magnetotactic bacterium.
The News: Two groups report the sequence of the human genome.
  • the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (IHGSC) in the 15 February 2001 issue of Nature (called a "draft" sequence);
  • Celera Genomics, a company in Rockville, Maryland, in the 16 February issue of Science (called, somewhat less modestly, "The Sequence...).
The Background: Read a preliminary analysis (with many links to background information) of what we have - and have not - learned from these reports.
The News: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is advised to refuse blood donations from people who, since 1980, have lived 10 years in France, Portugal, or Ireland (or 6 months or more in the United Kingdom). (January 2001)
The reason: fear of possible transmission of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) ("Mad Cow" disease).

The Background: Read about vCJD and other prion diseases.
The News: Now the complete genome of the human pathogen, E. coli O157:H7.

The Background: Compare its genome with its harmless relative E. coli K-12 as well as with the genomes of other organisms.
The News: Gene discovered that causes the human circadian clock to run fast. (12 January 2001)

The Background: Read about the circadian rhythm in mammals and the sleep disorders it can cause.
The News: The first sequence of the genome of an angiosperm (Arabidopsis) is now complete. (14 Dec 2000)

The Background: Compare it with that of other organisms whose genomes are now complete.
The News: The anti-cancer drug Endostatin shows moderate promise in Phase I trials. (9 Nov 2000)

The Background: Fighting Cancer with Angiogenesis Inhibitors and how drug trials are conducted.
The News: Melatonin can set the circadian clock in some blind people. (12 Oct 2000)

The Background: Read about circadian rhythms in humans and other animals and about the hormone melatonin.
The News: Eric Kandel of Columbia University shares in this year's Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work on long-term potentiation (LTP). (9 Oct 2000)

The Background: Read about LTP.
The News: Health officials in Punta Arenas, Chile, urge their citizens to stay indoors during the day because of the intensity of ultraviolet light coming through the ozone hole - the largest ever recorded - over them. (9 Oct 2000)

The Background: Read about ozone (and view an ozone hole).
The News: RU-486 (Mifepristone) now approved for use in the United States. (29 Sep 2000)

The Background: Read about RU-486 at these two links: Sex Hormones and Progesterone
The News: Pigs have now been cloned. (7 Sep 2000)

The Background: Read about the potential - and the possible dangers - of using pigs as a source of organs for human transplants. [LINK]
The News: And still another complete genome: this time that of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. (31 Aug 2000)

The Background: Compare it with other genomes.
The News: Manufacturing problems are causing a shortage of influenza vaccine (in the very year that it had been hoped to get more people vaccinated). (11 Aug 2000)

The Background: Read about influenza and the need for periodic changes in the composition of the vaccine.
The News: Another complete genome: this time that of Vibrio cholerae. (3 Aug 2000)

The Background: Compare it with other genomes.
Read about the epidemics it can cause.
The News:

Sheep in the news:

  1. A U.S. federal judge says that a flock of sheep in Vermont must be destroyed because they may harbor a prion disease that could possibly infect humans. (3 August 2000)
  2. Transgenic sheep have been produced with a human gene inserted at a predetermined spot in the genome. The gene is expressed efficiently. (July 2000)
The Background:
  1. Read about prion diseases.
  2. Read how a human gene was inserted into a specific locus in the sheep genome.
The News: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) upgrades dioxin from a "probable" to a "known" human carcinogen. (June 2000)

The Background: Link to page on dioxin (which contains links to related subjects).
The News: Genome analysis reveals that Bacillus cereus, B. anthracis, and B. thuringiensis are the same organism! What gives them their different properties are the plasmids they have acquired. (June 2000)

The Background: Link to pages on (1) Bacillus thuringiensis, (2) other Gram-positive bacilli, (3) discussion of plasmids.
The News: French doctors use gene therapy to cure two boys of an X-linked form of severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) (28 April 2000)

The Background: How retroviral vectors are used in gene therapy.
The News: 6 cloned calves are born with - unlike the sheep Dolly - no evidence that their cells will have a limited life span. (28 April 2000)

The Background: Read how the cloning is done and the role of telomeres in the lifespan of cells.
The News: The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences sets new standards for vitamins C and E.

The Background: Read their current recommendations for all the major nutrients.
The News: 19 April 2000: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves linezolid (Zyvox®) - the first truly new antibiotic in 35 years.

The Background: Link to discussion of how it works and its significance in the battle against infectious bacteria.
The News: 24 March 2000: Another milestone in genome sequencing! = the "complete" (only the portions encoding proteins are done) genome of Drosophila melanogaster, the "fruit fly".

The Background: Compare its genome with the others that have been completely sequenced.
The News: 23 March 2000 in The New England Journal of Medicine: Blindness and anemia caused by 13 years on a strict vegan diet. The patient took no vitamin supplements and was deficient in vitamins B1,B12, (these two the most probable culprits), A, C, D, E, folic acid, and also in Zn and Se.

The Background: Read about the functions of vitamins and minerals in the diet.
The News: 15 March 2000: The first cloned pigs.

The Background: Read how they were made and the possible use of cloned pigs carrying human genes to supply needed organs for human transplantation..
The News: 10 March 2000: Another complete genome: Neisseria meningitidis - bacterium that causes outbreaks of meningitis.

The Background: Compare its genome with the others that have been completely sequenced.
The News: 15 January 2000: Researchers succeed in introducing 3 transgenes into rice enabling the plant to synthesize beta-carotene in the endosperm of its grains.

The Background: Read about (1) how transgenic plants are made (2) the importance of beta-carotene as a precursor to vitamin A (3) see the structure of beta-carotene
The News: 4 December 1999: An experimental drug - STI-571 - in Phase I clinical trials appears effective in treating chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML).

The Background: Read about the chromosomal and molecular basis of chronic myelogenous leukemia and the fusion protein bcr-abl that is the target of STI-571.
The News: 1 December 1999: Mapping the human genome: one-third done! 109 nucleotides of the 3 x 109 in the human genome have now been sequenced. These include the ~700 genes on chromosome #22.

The Background: Read about (1) DNA sequencing (2) human chromosomes (3) genome sizes
The News: Long-term potentiation (LTP) - thought by many to represent a model of learning and memory - involves structural as well as functional changes in the brain (Nature, 25 November 1999)

The Background: Read about LTP.
The News: 19 November 1999: Doctors find no remaining leukemic cells in the bone marrow of an 11-year old Massachusetts boy being treated for leukemia with an experimental drug, CMA-676. [But he died of his disease on April 28, 2000. His father committed suicide a few hours later. It's a long way from the lab to the bedside.]

The Background: CMA-676 is the first immunotoxin to show promise in the fight against cancer. Link for more on CMA-676 and other therapeutic uses for monoclonal antibodies.
The News: 19 November 1999: Another complete genome sequenced! Deinococcus radiodurans, a bacterium noted for its resistance to the damaging effects of ultraviolet and ionizing radiation.

The Background: More details and comparisons to other genomes
The News: 12 November 1999: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposes that food labels be required to list the amount of trans fatty acids present.

The Background: Read about trans fatty acids and food labeling.
The News: November 1999: The U. S. Food and Drug Administration approves Tamiflu® (oseltamivir) as a treatment for influenza (both types A and B). This oral drug targets the neuraminidase of the virus.

The Background: Link to: discussion of influenza.
The News: The Major Histocompatibility Locus (MHC) of humans has now been completely sequenced. It contains 128 working genes spread over 3,673,800 nucleotides.

The Background: Read about this region on chromosome 6 in Histocompatibility Molecules and about the role of their gene products in Transplantation Biology.
The News: "Smart gene" discovered! Transgenic mice that make extra amounts of NMDA receptors perform various tasks better than control mice.

The Background: Read about the role of NMDA receptors in learning and memory in Long-Term Potentiation (LTP)
The News: 11 October 1999: Dr. Günter Blobel wins the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries of the intrinsic signals that govern the transport and localization of proteins in the cell.

The Background: Read: Protein Kinesis: Getting Proteins to Their Destination.
The News:
  • 6 October 1999: Prostate specific antigen (PSA) is an inhibitor of angiogenesis.
  • 28 September 1999: Cancer patients can now volunteer to join phase I trials of endostatin.
The Background: Fighting cancer with angiogenesis inhibitors and clinical trials.
The News: 5 October 1999: A new type of influenza ("flu") vaccine that may provide longterm protection does well in animal tests.

The Background: Current vaccines have to be reformulated from year to year because of genetic changes in the target antigen. The new vaccine uses an antigen that does not change from year to year. Discussion of influenza and the problems with current vaccines.
The News: 5 October 1999: 11-year old Massachusetts boy to receive his first injection of an experimental drug, CMA-676, to treat his leukemia.

The Background: CMA-676 is the first immunotoxin to show promise in the fight against cancer. Link for more on CMA-676 and other therapeutic uses for monoclonal antibodies.
The News: 28 September 1999: Phase II clinical trials show linezolid (tradename = Zyvox), one of a new class of antibiotics called oxazolidinones, effective at treating certain (mostly hospital-acquired) infections that are resistant to vancomycin, the current "antibiotic of last resort".

The Background: Link to a discussion of antibiotics and the problem of antibiotic resistance.
The News: 16 September 1999: A group of physicians in England reports the results of a year-long trial of recombinant leptin in a young girl suffering from extreme obesity because of mutations in her leptin genes.

The Background: Link to: discussion of leptin.
The News: 22 September 1999: The U. S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves Synercid to treat certain (mostly hospital-acquired) infections that are resistant to vancomycin, the current "antibiotic of last resort".

The Background: Link to a discussions of antibiotics and the problem of antibiotic resistance.
The News: 17 September 1999: Medicaid officials debate whether to pay for an 11-year old Massachusetts boy to go to Seattle to be treated with an experimental drug, CMA-676, to treat his leukemia.

The Background: CMA-676 is the first immunotoxin to show promise in the fight against cancer. Link for more on CMA-676 and other therapeutic uses for monoclonal antibodies.
The News:Scientists working at MIT (Hahn et al, Nature, 29 July 1999) announce the conversion of normal human cells into cancer cells by transforming them with just 3 genes encoding
  • the active subunit of telomerase
  • the large T antigen of simian virus 40 (SV 40) which blocks the action of two tumor suppressor genes
  • the RAS oncogene

This feat is routine with mouse cells [View], but has not been accomplished before with human cells. Link to a comparison of the properties of normal and cancer cells grown in culture.

The Background: Follow the links indicated above.
The News: 27 July 1999: The U. S. Food and Drug Administration approves zanamivir as a treatment for influenza (both types A and B). This inhaled drug targets the neuraminidase of the virus.

The Background: Link to: discussion of influenza.
The News: 27 May 1999: The research team that created Dolly, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, report that her telomeres are only 80% as long as those in a normal one-year-old sheep.

The Background: Link to:
The News: 20 May 1999: Researchers from Cornell University report that pollen from corn plants carrying the transgene for Bt toxin is toxic to the larvae of the monarch butterfly. Monarch caterpillars do not feed on corn but can be poisoned by the toxin in corn pollen dusted on the leaves of their food (milkweed).

The Background: Link to:
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9 October 2005