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January 2008
Advance Could Enable Gay Women to Have Own Babies
The Telegraph of London says a team of researchers at the University of Newcastle has asked for permission to turn a woman’s bone marrow cells into sperm.
The research would raise the possibility that lesbian couples could bear their own biological children.
The team, led by microbiologist Karim Nayernia, has already created sperm cells from a female human embryo, and from a man’s bone marrow cells.
Nayernia has said his work is aimed at helping patients harness the disease-curing potential of their own stem cells. Still, New Scientist suggests a reproductive revolution is coming soon.
Are we ready? Is this another case of science getting ahead of ethical considerations?
Science and Your Smokes
It seems like just yesterday Philip Morris was insisting that cigarettes were not nicotine delivery devices. God forbid they be regulated as a drug.
How times change. For the past year the tobacco giant has supported FDA regulation. A Senate committee has passed one version; a house companion slumbers amid Bush administration opposition.
Philip Morris’ international arm, meanwhile, has publicly admitted the company can control how much addictive nicotine and tar its cigarettes actually deliver. Yes, Virginia Slim, there’s science behind them coffin nails.
Enter stage left the CEO of Philip Morris International, Andre Calantzopoulos, brazenly puffing away on Philip Morris’ newest invention: Marlboro Intense, as described in Tuesday’s (1/29) Wall Street Journal.
Journal reporter Vanessa O’Connell says Marlboro Intense is a short, extra-potent cigarette designed for busy people. In other countries.
“The idea behind Intense is to appeal to customers who, due to indoor smoking bans, want to dash outside for a quick nicotine hit but don’t always finish a full-size cigarette,” O’Connell writes.
Of course, addicts will have to fly to Turkey to get their Intense fix for the moment. Rollouts are planned for 50 some other markets.
But it won’t be sold in the United States.
It’s part of a raft of new nicotine delivery devices that Philip Morris will roll out once its separation from parent company Altria is complete, possibly Wednesday.
According to WSJ’s O’Connell: “The move would free the tobacco giant’s international operations of legal and public-relations headaches in the U.S. that have hindered its growth. The separate entity, for example, would be exempt from U.S. tobacco regulations and out of reach of American litigators. Importantly its practices would no longer be constrained by American public opinion, paving the way for broad product experimentation.”
Why is Philip Morris so focused on emerging markets?
The WSJ suggests that once unfettered from U.S. regulation, its scientists can experiment more freely. Consider also that the United States is a shrinking market for Philip Morris. The percent of adults who smoke has fallen from 42 percent to about 20 percent since 1965, according to the American Cancer Society.
Still, that’s about 45 million people in this country.
For what it’s worth, you smokers, about 12 million premature U.S. deaths can be blamed on that habit since 1964, the ACS says.
From the society’s “Cancer Facts and Figures 2007”
“Smoking accounts for at least 30 percent of all cancer deaths and 87 percent of lung cancer deaths.”
“Smoking is associated with increased risk of at least 15 types of cancer: nasopharynx, nasal cavity and paranasal sinuses, lip, oral cavity, pharynx, larynx, lung, esophagus, pancreas, uterine cervix, kidney, bladder, stomach and acute myeloid leukemia.”
And this just in, from the WSJ: “Recent Marlboro launches include Marlboro Mix 9, a high-nicotine, high-tar cigarette introduced in Indonesia last July. PMI is poised to export the clove-infused Mix 9 to other Southeast Asian markets as soon as this year.”
Isn’t global trade grand? Read the entire WSJ story here.
And share your thoughts below. Did you try to quit this year? How’s it going?
Great News for Cheap Geeks
Have you ever wanted to read an article from a scientific journal only to bump into those obnoxious screens that say you must cough up $20 first or subscribe?
It happens to me virtually every day. But not for long, thank you Congress.
When our elected officials passed this year’s budget in December, they slipped a little zinger into the anemic appropriation for the National Institutes of Health, the agency that funds more medical research than any other.
It said that if scientists want to keep getting their federal grants, they will have to send a copy of their research articles to Pub Med, the centralized NIH research library. Those articles will then be made available to the public (the people who paid for the research) for free.
Cue the happy geek music.
This is great news for curious people, although the journals are pretty worried. You can read more about the details here.
If you haven’t ever used it, I highly recommend Pub Med. I like it better than Google Scholar. Go to www.pubmed.gov and put in a key health word that interests you, like Lipitor, celiac, Alzheimer’s, Viagra or vitamin D. See what you find. I think the site is a blast.
I’d rather spend a night reading the latest abstracts on fetal brain development or the allergic response than watching another episode of Dancing With the Stars. But that’s just me.
We’ll have to wait until April for the new rule to kick in, unfortunately. It has been voluntary since 2005, but only about one in ten scholarly papers follows the suggestion. So that cool paper in Nature Medicine about how a lifetime of salt abuse can cause hypertension? You’ll have to buy it. For now.
What do you think? Should research papers produced with tax dollars be openly available to anyone? Or should we all just stick our thumb in our ears and go back to watching America’s Next Hot Starbucks Barista? Wow. Nice foam.
Too Cold for a Lizard
Photo by Tim Chapman, Miami Herald
Last week’s cold snap caused a bit of drama in Plasmid’s back yard.
We found a 3-foot-long iguana floating lifelessly in the E-4 canal. Normally, it would munch passion flowers and lounge on our pond apple branches — when it wasn’t fleeing from our hound dog. Oddly, the prone iguana remained a brilliant green — not at all dead looking.
Friends from south Delray Beach reported similar carnage the morning temperatures fell into the 30s. There were lifeless iguanas littering their dock. They bundled the cold creatures up in garbage bags and put them by the curb, for trash pickup.
Thanks to the Miami Herald, we now know the iguanas probably weren’t dead. They just needed an electric blanket.
The horror!
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