August 8, 2004
“We’ve discovered the
secret of life” – Francis Crick, 1953
Scientist Who Unlocked Secret of DNA Dies at 88
“‘We wish to suggest
a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). This
structure has novel features which are of considerable
biological interest.’
With this unassuming
statement, Francis Crick, who died yesterday, aged 88, and his
collaborator James Watson, sent molecular biology in a radical
new direction while simultaneously launching the new field of
genetics.
“In the 50 years
since, the discovery has proved to be among the greatest in the
history of science, providing the platform for a deeper
understanding of every living organism.
“Crick, who died at
Thornton hospital in San Diego, had been suffering from colon
cancer.
“‘I will always
remember Francis for his extraordinarily focused intelligence
and for the many ways he showed me kindness and developed my
self-confidence,’ Watson said.
“‘He treated me as
though I were a member of his family. Being with him for two
years in a small room in Cambridge was truly a privilege. I
always looked forward to being with him and speaking to him, up
until the moment of his death. He will be sorely missed.’
“Born in
Northampton, Crick was a distinguished research scientist and
former president of the Salk Institute in San Diego. Watson
worked with Crick in the early 1950s at Cambridge University.
Their work on DNA resulted in their receiving a share of the
Nobel prize in 1962….”
The Guardian – Friday July 30, 2004
For an account of
the discovery of the DNA double helix by Watson and Crick,
including recollections by both men and commentary on the
consequences of their work,
link to NPR and select the fourth audio clip.
Gene patents — who
should “own” the human genome?
Navigating a Patent
Minefield
“Researchers in Iowa
have come up with a plan to get critical genetic tests to
patients at risk for rare but devastating eye diseases. It’s
working now, but they worry their plan could be a legal time
bomb.
“Edwin Stone and Val
Sheffield, professors at the University of Iowa, have discovered
links between 15 genes and certain eye diseases, which means
genetic tests could be developed for the diseases. But often the
scientists find the genes or parts of them have already been
patented. Any diagnostic test involving a patented gene could
infringe on someone’s intellectual property.
“Most of the genes
are linked to diseases that affect a small number of people, too
few to make tests based on the genes commercially viable. So
Stone and Sheffield had an idea: Why not just ask the patent
holders for permission to test patients?
“So far, no one has
said no. The Iowa clinic is now offering 22 genetic tests at
around $200 per gene (complete tests can cost up to $1,000). But
it’s not always clear who might own intellectual property
associated with one of their tests, and Stone and Sheffield
worry that without legislation to protect them, their good luck
could run out….”
Wired News: Aug. 04, 2004
Building a biotech
mecca…Biopolis…
Singapore Wants
You!
The
future-friendly city-state has an offer bioscientists can’t
refuse: unrestricted research, top-notch equipment, and
limitless funds. (Just leave your chewing gum at home.)
“…Singapore is
treating hundreds of scientists like free agents, promising
first-class laboratories, top-notch equipment, and more than
enough money to pursue work that’s not fundable, or is too
controversial, back home. The government is investing more than
$2 billion into research of all stripes, hoping to attract
leaders in therapeutic cloning, drug discovery, cancer research,
and other areas, bioscience all-stars who will in turn help
build a local community that will bolster the economy.
“So far, it’s
working. A third of the almost 4,000 science PhDs here are
foreigners, many with impressive résumés. Edison Liu, former
director of the US National Cancer Institute’s Division of
Clinical Sciences, moved in 2001 to head the Genome Institute of
Singapore. Japanese cancer researcher Yoshiaki Ito brought his
entire Kyoto University team to Singapore’s Institute of
Molecular and Cell Biology in 2002. Nobel Prize-winning
molecular biologist Sydney Brenner splits his time between the
Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego and advising
Singapore on how to attract more people like him.
“Exhibit A in
Singapore’s quest is Biopolis, a $300 million, 2
million-square-foot complex taking shape just outside of
downtown. When complete by year’s end, Biopolis will include
institutes specializing in bioinformatics, genomics, molecular
biology, and nanotech….”
Wired Magazine (Issue 12.08) – August 2004
Maggots join leeches
as FDA approved “medical devices”…
Maggots Make Medical Comeback
“Think of these
wriggly little creatures not as, well, gross, but as miniature
surgeons: Maggots are making a medical comeback, cleaning out
wounds that just won’t heal.
“Wound-care clinics
around the United States are giving maggots a try on some of
their sickest patients after high-tech treatments fail.
“It’s a therapy
quietly championed since the early 1990s by a California
physician who’s earned the nickname Dr. Maggot. But Dr. Ronald
Sherman’s maggots are getting more attention since, in January,
they became the first live animals to win Food and Drug
Administration approval—as a medical device to clean out wounds.
“A medical device?
They remove the dead tissue that impedes healing ‘mechanically,’
FDA determined. It’s called chewing….”
CNN.com – August 3, 2004
Need Title
Pandora’s Baby
A review by Daniel
Callahan
Pandora's Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies
Sparked the Reproductive Revolution,
by Robin Marantz Henig (Houghton
Mifflin, 2004)
“Of all the human
biological capacities, procreation is one of the strangest….We
all want [children] and when, now and then, someone does not,
that is taken as prima facie evidence of derangement. A desire
not to have children is now common among many married couples
and no less so among many cohabiting couples; and the number of
such couples grows all the time.
“Yet if couples of
that kind can display a striking singlemindedness, it is as
nothing compared with the infertile couple desperate to have a
child. The childless will often go to endless trouble and great
expense, and put up with a regimen of medicine and
self-discipline that can make military boot camp look easy.
While surely not the only means of relieving infertility, in
vitro fertilization (IVF) is now probably the most widely, and
routinely, used. What was, through most of the 1970s, a highly
controversial line of research, condemned by the pope and many
moralists and theologians, and treated with suspicion by
physicians and research scientists, now elicits little ethical
or scientific interest. It worked. End of story. At most there
are now some calls for a reform of fertility clinics, for the
most part unregulated, but the fact that it has taken so many
years for those calls to arise is itself testimony to the high
place infertility treatment has achieved in modern medicine.
“Robin Marantz Henig
tells the story of the emergence and growth of IVF in an
interesting and nuanced way, and it is a story well worth
telling. As she accurately puts it, the American IVF effort
‘reveals what can happen when society faces a new and
frightening technology: how it is first greeted with resistance
and expectation of the worst, then with grudging permission,
then with acceptance, and finally with incorporation so
seamlessly into the culture that no one even notices it any
more.’…”
Commonweal – January 30, 2004
Taking a closer look
at the assisted reproduction industry…
Big Business, Big Risks?
Critics Say
Infertility Treatments Need More Regulation
“Infertility
treatment is a $4 billion-a-year business that uses
controversial drugs and experimental techniques, and yet is
virtually unregulated. Thousands of women each year turn to it
in hopes of having a baby, but many scientists, ethicists and
policymakers now believe safety concerns are not keeping pace
with the rapid growth in the industry.
“Kelli and Bob
Yonker of Dallas are typical of most couples who try ‘assisted
reproduction.’ They’ve spent months on a grueling drug regimen
with a price tag of $30,000.
“‘They always talk
about their positive results, and they don’t really tell you the
negatives,’ said Kelli.
“‘When you go to
these doctors they expect the money immediately,’ said Bob.
‘There’s no payment plan.’
“And for them—no
baby.
“In fact, according
to a recent report, the vast majority—73 percent—of assisted
reproduction treatments fail to produce a baby. Serious
questions are being raised about safety and the very loose
regulation of the industry.
“The report by the
President’s Council on Bioethics calls for much stricter
controls, charging that many infertility researchers are moving
‘from the experimental’ stage ‘to clinical practice with
relatively little oversight’ or understanding of the long-term
health effects….”
ABCNEWS.com – August 2, 2004
Getting end-of-life
questions right: Is this life beyond saving? Is this life
worth saving?
Patient Wins Right-to-life Ruling
Analysis by Geoff
Adams-Spink
A
patient has won his legal battle to ensure that doctors
do not withdraw nutrition against his wishes when he is no
longer able to communicate.
“Leslie Burke was
effectively asking the court to rule that he, not a doctor, is
best placed to decide whether his life should be prolonged by
medical intervention.
“He is now in his
forties and has known since he was a teenager that he has a
progressive condition which is very likely to mean that he will
need artificial feeding and hydration.
“What worried Mr.
Burke was the possibility that doctors could make a decision to
withdraw artificial nutrition and hydration - or ANH - on the
assumption that his quality of life as a disabled person was too
low to merit prolonging it….”
BBC
News Online – July 30, 2004
For a discussion of
the Burke case and the broader issue of “futile care,” see the
article, “Suing for the
Right to Live,” by attorney Wesley Smith in
The Weekly Standard (March 11, 2004).
Sorting
out the ethics of genetic testing…
Birth-defect
Tests Bewilder Both Doctors, Parents-to-be
Preventable
problems still plague the convoluted, ethically complicated
prenatal-screening system.
“When Karen Coveler
and her husband began trying to have a child, she told her
obstetrician that she wanted to take all the DNA tests she could
to determine whether she was at risk of passing on a genetic
disease to her child. Based on her Ashkenazi Jewish background,
Coveler was offered 10 tests, all of which were negative, and
she had a normal pregnancy.
“It was not until
her son, Benjamin, was born that she discovered he was deaf. And
it was not until a few weeks later that she learned a simple
blood test could have alerted her to that possibility even
before conception.
“‘They told me the
test is not offered because the condition is not considered to
be “severe” or “life-altering,” which I find very difficult to
swallow,’ said Coveler, 30, of Houston. ‘It certainly has been
life-altering for myself and my son.’
“Coveler says she
would not trade Benjamin, now a year old, for the world. But she
is one of many people demanding to know why screening tests for
certain genetic conditions, including deafness, mental
retardation and breast cancer, are not being offered to
them—even, in some cases, when they ask.
“Too many
health-care providers, critics say, have not educated themselves
about the genetic tests that could benefit their patients.
Others, pressed for time, simply don’t communicate what can be
complex information.
“And some choose not
to inform their patients of certain tests they have deemed
inappropriate, making a value judgment about abortion,
disabilities or risk that patients say they have a right to make
for themselves….”
The New York Times – August 3, 2004
Worth considering…
“There
are people who say they wish Christianity to remain as a
spirit. They mean very literally, that they wish it to remain
as a ghost. But it is not going to remain as a ghost. What
follows this process of apparent death is not the lingering of
the shade; it is the resurrection of the body. These people are
quite prepared to shed pious and reverential tears over the
Sepulchre of the Son of Man; what they are not prepared for is
the Son of Man walking once more upon the hills of morning.
These people, and indeed most people, were…quite accustomed to
the idea that the old Christian candle-light would fade into the
light of common day. To many of them it did quite honestly
appear like that pale yellow flame of a candle when it is left
burning in daylight. It was all the more unexpected, and
therefore all the more unmistakable, that the seven-branched
candle-stick suddenly towered to heaven like a miraculous tree
and flamed until the sun turned pale. But other ages have seen
the day conquer the candle-light and then the candle-light
conquer the day. Again and again, before our time, men have
grown contented with a diluted doctrine. And again and again
there has followed on that dilution, coming as out of the
darkness in a crimson cataract, the strength of the red original
wine.”
“At least five
times…the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each
of these five cases it was the dog that died. How complete was
the collapse and how strange the reversal….”
The
Everlasting Man, by G. K. Chesterton (Image Books, 1955),
pp. 263-64, 260-61.
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