Technut News

Independent geneticist J. Craig Venter raced an international consortium of scientists to map the human genome in the 1990s. Now he’s putting the same cutting-edge science to work on today’s energy crisis, engineering a whole new generation of biofuels. In a rare in-depth interview, we talked to Venter recently about his latest project to save the world, as well as historical flubs, today’s presidential candidates and the future of genetics. —Chris Ladd

So how did you get from mapping the human genome to creating biofuels?
We considered the biggest issues facing society that we thought we could impact. What’s happening to the environment and getting weaned off oil and coal are the biggest issues out there.

Is it similar to the genome project? More daunting?
Nobody thought that such a massive project as sequencing the human genome could be undertaken by a single team, like we did. But that challenge is minor compared to trying to replace the 30 billion barrels of oil that we use globally each year, and the 3 billion tons of coal. The scale of that is beyond my imagination.

I think the real challenge won’t necessarily come from biology, because biology is infinitely scalable, but from engineering. [If we can overcome that,] we have the potential to stop using oil and coal hopefully within the next 10 to 20 years, and even start reducing the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.

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Craig Venter is a talented guy. I expect to hear more about him in the future.

For the first time, an experimental drug shows promise for halting the progression of Alzheimer’s disease by taking a new approach: breaking up the protein tangles that clog victims’ brains.

The encouraging results from the drug called Rember, reported Tuesday at a medical conference in Chicago, electrified a field battered by recent setbacks. The drug was developed by Singapore-based TauRx Therapeutics.

Even if bigger, more rigorous studies show it works, Rember is still several years away from being available, and experts warned against overexuberance. But they were excited.

“These are the first very positive results I’ve seen” for stopping mental decline, said Marcelle Morrison-Bogorad, director of Alzheimer’s research at the National Institute on Aging. “It’s just fantastic.”

The federal agency funded early research into the tangles, which are made of a protein called tau and develop inside nerve cells.

For decades, scientists have focused on a different protein — beta-amyloid, which forms sticky clumps outside of the cells — but have yet to get a workable treatment.

The drug is in the second of three stages of development, and scientists are paying special attention to potential treatments because of the enormity of the illness, which afflicts more than 26 million people worldwide and is mushrooming as the population ages.

The four Alzheimer’s drugs currently available just ease symptoms of the mind-robbing disease.

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By the looks of it, most of us won’t have to deal with this Alzheimer crap anymore by the time we get to senior age.

(not that I think ageing will still be an issue decades from now…)

George Church: sequencing 100,000 genomes

George Church is dyslexic, narcoleptic, and a vegan. He is married with one daughter, weighs about 210 pounds, and has worn a pioneer-style bushy beard for decades. He has elevated levels of creatine kinase in his blood, the consequence of a heart attack. He enjoys waterskiing, photography, rock climbing, and singing in his church choir. His mother’s maiden name is Strong. He was born on August 28, 1954.

If this all seems like too much information, well, blame Church himself. As the director of the Lipper Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School, he has a thing about openness, and this information (and plenty more, down to his signature) is posted online at arep.med.harvard.edu/gmc/pers.html. By putting it out there for everyone to see, Church isn’t just baiting identity thieves. He’s hoping to demonstrate that all this personal information — even though we consider it private and somehow sacred — is actually fairly meaningless, little more than trivia. “The average person shouldn’t be interested in this stuff,” he says. “It’s a philosophical exercise in what identity is and why we should care about that.”

As Church sees it, the only real utility to his personal information is as data that reflects his phenotype — his physical traits and characteristics. If your genome is the blueprint of your genetic potential written across 6 billion base pairs of DNA, your phenome is the resulting edifice, how you actually turn out after the environment has had its say, influencing which genes get expressed and which traits repressed. Imagine that we could collect complete sets of data — genotype and phenotype — for a whole population. You would very quickly begin to see meaningful and powerful correlations between particular genetic sequences and particular physical characteristics, from height and hair color to disease risk and personality.

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Within about 10 years, you might be drinking anti-aging enzymes with your bottled water. California biochemists have a plan to keep the world younger and healthier by using nanotech to deliver an enzyme called CoQ10 to our drinking water. This coenzyme is naturally produced by the body, but in smaller and smaller amounts as we age. And yet it’s vital for the body’s basic functioning, as it helps our cells convert sugars to energy. Perhaps if we boost its presence in our bodies as we age, our organs will remain productive and healthy for much longer.

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Making people healthier and younger, without them knowing about it.

How clever.
We can only hope that bionanotech will eventually also increase the nutritional value of our daily foods.

I eagerly await the day where cheap meat, mass-cloned from vat, contains nothing but healthy fats, carbs and proteins.

A new milestone was reached recently in the race to make fuel from algae a conventional oil alternative: high-octane gasoline that is compatible with any gas-guzzling vehicle. The feat was performed by Sapphire Energy, a company that manufactures “green crude”. Sapphire uses single-cell algae to produce a chemical mixture that contains extractable fuel for cars and other transport vehicles. While the green crude is chemically identical to crude oil, it is completely carbon neutral.

The algal energy doesn’t require the use of agricultural land and water, and it deliver 10 to 100 times more energy per acre than crop-based biofuels. The company hopes that their green crude will ultimately be injected into normal crude pipelines.

Fortunately for consumers, Sapphire isn’t the only company looking into “Oil 2.0“. Silicon Valley company LS9 is working on genetically modifiying single cell organisms to excrete carbon neutral oil. Like Sapphire’s green crude, the LS9 oil will also work in conventional vehicles.

Whether these efforts come to fruition as oil replacements remains to be seen—and it mostly hinges on questions of efficiency. But we should find out soon. Sapphire expects to start producing their green crude within 3 to 5 years.

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No matter how many years I run this blog… I keep being surprised at the technology-enabled possibilities at mankind’s disposal.

In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn’t shine.

Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today’s announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.

Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. “This is the nirvana of what we’ve been talking about for years,” said MIT’s Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science. “Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon.”

Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera’s lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun’s energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.

The key component in Nocera and Kanan’s new process is a new catalyst that produces oxygen gas from water; another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas. The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. When electricity — whether from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source — runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.

Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis.

The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and it’s easy to set up, Nocera said. “That’s why I know this is going to work. It’s so easy to implement,” he said.

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They sure make it sound revolutionary! I wonder if we’ll hear more of this in the future.

There are so many solar advances being made today, it makes your head spin.

I’d be surprised is none of them would eventually come through for humanity.

Also see this article.

Followups of this article can be found here, and here.

Scientists have found a way to overcome the problem of the human body rejecting animal parts used in transplants.

The work, by the University of Leeds, means the use of animal tissue such as blood vessels, tendons and bladders may become common in surgery.

Human organs for transplant are constantly in short supply, meaning long waits for many patients.

Currently, the use of animal tissue for human transplant is restricted, and of limited effectiveness.

For instance, chemically treated heart valves from pigs have been transplanted into patients for more than a decade, but have a limited life span as they are inert and cannot be populated by the patient’s own cells, and ruling out any possibility of repair to damage.

This poses a particular problem for young patients, as the valves do not grow with the child, and must be replaced frequently.

The Leeds team used a combination of freezing, chemical baths and ultrasound to strip the animal tissue of the cells and biological molecules that trigger a response from the immune system.

This left a biological scaffold which could then be populated by cells from a patient’s own body, creating a tissue which carries no risk of rejection, which can be repaired, and which can grow with the body.

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Scientists are hailing a new drug to treat aggressive prostate cancer as potentially the most significant advance in the field for 70 years.

Abiraterone could potentially treat up to 80% of patients with a deadly form of the disease resistant to currently available chemotherapy, they say.

The drug works by blocking the hormones which fuel the cancer.

The Institute of Cancer Research hopes a simple pill form will be available in two to three years.

Richard Pflaum talks about his trial of Abiraterone

An advanced clinical trial involving 1,200 patients around the world is currently under way, with more trials likely later this year.

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Drug dispenser?

Soon contact lenses won’t just correct eyesight; they could save your vision.

By applying electrically conductive, antibiotic nanosilver particles to contact lenses, researchers at the University of California, Davis, can continuously map the pressure inside a human eye while administering medication directly and painlessly into it.

The new lenses promise to advance understanding of diseases like glaucoma, the second leading cause of blindness worldwide, and could save the eyesight of millions, say the researchers.

“It would be really helpful to measure the pressure inside the eye continuously,” said Tingrui Pan, a professor at the University of California, Davis, and co-author of a paper describing the lenses in Advanced Functional Materials.

Pressure inside the eye, the leading indication of glaucoma, can vary widely from day to day, even minute to minute. Currently, doctors only measure pressure every few months (depending on the patient), said James Brandt, a physician at UC Davis who is involved in the research.

“Compare that to another chronic disease like diabetes, where we can have blood sugar measurements several times a day,” he added.

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My own contact lenses have been bugging the crap out of me for as long as I can remember.

Every time a new and better generation of contacts is brought to the market, my life gets a tiny bit more comfortable.

Just imagine… contacts that work with you, instead of against you.

UN report finds life is getting better for people worldwide – but that governments are failing to grasp the opportunities offered at ‘a unique time’. Geoffrey Lean and Jonathan Owen report

Humanity stands on the threshold of a peaceful and prosperous future, with an unprecedented ability to extend lifespans and increase the power of ordinary people – but is likely to blow it through inequality, violence and environmental degradation. And governments are not equipped to ensure that the opportunities are seized and disasters averted.

So says a massive new international report, due to be published late this month, and obtained by The Independent on Sunday. Backed by organisations ranging from Unesco to the US army, the World Bank to the Rockefeller Foundation, the 2008 State of the Future report runs to 6,300 pages and draws on contributions from 2,500 experts around the globe.

Its warning is all the more stark for eschewing doom and gloom. “The future continues to get better for most of the world,” it concludes, “but a series of tipping points could drastically alter global prospects.”

It goes on. “This is a unique time in history. Mobile phones, the internet, international trade, language translation and jet planes are giving birth to an interdependent humanity that can create and implement global strategies to improve [its] prospects. It is increasingly clear that the world has the resources to address our common challenges. Ours is the first generation with the means for many to know the world as a whole, identify global improvement systems, and seek to improve [them].”

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