Author: jplucas

Stem cell therapies for diseases such as Parkinson’s and diabetes could eventually be developed without destroying human embryos, following landmark experiments that have turned back the clock on adult tissue to make powerful master cells.

Adult skin cells have been genetically reprogrammed into stem cells like those from human embryos, with the potential to form any kind of human tissue, by two independent research teams from Japan the United States.The twin achievements pave the way for a new approach to stem cell therapy that skirts some of the ethical and practical problems that have limited its progress to date.

MILWAUKEE (AP) â?? He refuses to own a TV, doesn’t read newspapers, hates stories about himself and talksthisfast on the rare occasions he does speak to reporters. Jamie Thomson, Wisconsin’s stem cell pioneer, does not suffer fools lightly, so you’d better get to the point and avoid personal questions.

“I’m a very private person,” he warns.Or at least he would like to be. This may be wishful thinking by a man seen as a possible Nobel Prize contender, who at age 39 made a discovery that landed him on the cover of Time magazine and prompted President Bush’s first national television address.

Scientists have made ordinary human skin cells take on the chameleon-like powers of embryonic stem cells, a startling breakthrough that might someday deliver the medical payoffs of embryo cloning without the controversy.

Laboratory teams on two continents report success in a pair of landmark papers released Tuesday. It’s a neck-and-neck finish to a race that made headlines five months ago, when scientists announced that the feat had been accomplished in mice.

The “direct reprogramming” technique avoids the swarm of ethical, political and practical obstacles that have stymied attempts to produce human stem cells by cloning embryos.

In a major advance, UW-Madison researchers say they have genetically reprogrammed human skin cells to create cells indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells.

This significant scientific achievement also potentially remakes the tumultuous political and ethical landscape of stem cell biology, as human embryos may no longer be needed to obtain the blank slate stem cells capable of becoming any of the 220 types of cells in the human body.

The new technique would avoid without the ethical and legal constraints that now hamper stem cell use use by scientists. Another major advantage of using reprogrammed skin cells is that any cells developed for therapeutic purposes can be customized to the patient.

In the quest to treat difficult diseases, researchers have created human embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos or using hard-to-get eggs. The technique may prove to be easier, cheaper, and more ethically appealing than an alternative approach that requires cloning.

Two separate teams of researchers say they have sidestepped the cloning method and reprogrammed mature human cells into a primordial, embryonic-like state. Those cells were then transformed into other tissue types, such as heart cells. The long-term hope is that such freshly-created tissue may, for example, be used to heal a heart-attack patient.

Unlike cloning, “the wonderful thing about this approach is that it’s easy. You’re going to see lots and lots of labs give it a try,” predicts Robert Blelloch, a stem cell biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who has performed his own reprogramming experiments. He says he read the latest studies but wasn’t involved in them.

Two teams of scientists are reporting today that they turned human skin cells into what appear to be embryonic stem cells without having to make or destroy an embryo â?? a feat that could quell the ethical debate troubling the field.

All they had to do, the scientists said, was add four genes. The genes reprogrammed the chromosomes of the skin cells, making the cells into blank slates that should be able to turn into any of the 220 cell types of the human body, be it heart, brain, blood or bone. Until now, the only way to get such human universal cells was to pluck them from a human embryo several days after fertilization, destroying the embryo in the process.

The ship that will soon drill deep into an underwater earthquake zone completed its first science mission on 16 November. Chikyu , the world’s largest research drilling vessel, finished the initial 8-week leg of its research programme with only minor glitches.

“It’s a great site and it drilled well,” says Harold Tobin of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the chief scientists on the expedition.

While the general definition of asthma is simple, its fundamental causes are still being debated in the medical community. However, some contributing factors are known. Asthma can be inherited and exposures to allergens early in life are believed to put a child at risk. Mothers who smoke during pregnancy increase the odds of delivering an asthmatic child.

Adding to the complex mystery of the disease is a study published by American Thoracic Society in the November issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, which questions the positive effects of breast-feeding for babies of asthmatic mothers.

“Longer breast-feeding in infancy is associated with improved lung function in later childhood, with minimal effects on airflow in children of non-asthmatic mothers,” wrote Dr. Theresa Guilbert of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Arizona Respiratory Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “However, longer breast-feeding in children of a mother with asthma demonstrates no improved lung growth and significant decrease in airflows later in life.”

An Iranian scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has found a way to substitute artificial sweeteners with natural ones.

Fariba Asadi has found a new method for the mass production of the sweetest natural material in the world.

Asadi has applied a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to study the structure function relationships in brazzein analogs and their interactions with the sweet receptor.

It takes ice — and lots of it — for Thomas Gaisser to do his job.

And it can’t be just any old ice from a freezer — even one with the most sophisticated filter.

To catch what Gaisser is after, you need the purest ice on Earth.

That’s what has landed Gaisser and a team of University of Delaware researchers in one of the iciest, coldest, most austere places on the planet: the South Pole.

They’re after neutrinos — subatomic particles produced during cosmic explosions a very long time ago that are so small, they can pass through solid objects and never collide with molecules.

While a stressful family environment in childhood has long been blamed for various psychological effects later in life, new research suggests that hostile situations at home may also have big physical implications for young girls.

In a study released Thursday, researchers at the University of Arizona and the University of Wisconsin-Madison looked at families of 227 preschool children, following them as they progressed through middle school. Specifically, the researchers looked for the first hormonal signs of puberty in these children.