The Raelian Movement
for those who are not afraid of the future : http://www.rael.org
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Frozen Flies May Yield Secrets for Human Organ Transplants
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100819112122.htm
ScienceDaily (Aug. 20, 2010) — When kitchens become infiltrated with
fruit flies, especially during the dog days of summer, homeowners
might wish that the flying pests would just turn to ice.
The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster does boast apowerful genetic
system making it an ideal organism to test a cool new discovery: how
an enzyme regulates body energy levels. Shutting off this molecular
thermostat could result in a newfound cold tolerance that has multiple
applications, including extending the 24-hour window donated organs
now have for optimum use.
Thanks to a $385,419 grant from the National Institute of Health, a
team of Rutgers-Camden biologists is working to engineer cold tolerant
fruit flies and ultimately human cells within the next three years.
This research breakthrough can be credited to Daniel Shain, a
professor of biology at Rutgers-Camden, who has traveled the globe
seeking knowledge on how ice worms don't just survive in glaciers, but
thrive. When Shain identified a key enzyme that helps ice worms do
this -- AMP phosphatase -- he tapped Nir Yakoby, an expert Drosophila
geneticist and assistant professor of biology at Rutgers-Camden, to
create this cold-tolerant fruit fly.
"The goal is to make human cells survive on ice. Twenty-four hours on
ice is pushing it and many people die waiting," says Shain, who is
scheduled to travel to Tibet next year to observe ice worms in the
vicinity. "We're lucky to have an expert Drosophila geneticist on
campus to test this genetic switch."
Not just the ice worm lives on ice; the Rutgers-Camden research team,
which includes undergraduate and graduate students, observed how other
organisms, like bacteria, fungi, and algae, also are breaking through
their internal thermostats.
"Shain accomplished this switch in mono-cell organisms and now we are
going further up into the evolutionary tree to a more complex
species," offers Yakoby, who joined the Rutgers-Camden faculty last
year after conducting postdoctoral research at Princeton University's
Lewis Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. "If we can get these
human cells to survive on ice, we should expect organs to do the same.
Organs are just a collection of cells."
A graduate of the University of New Hampshire, where he earned both
his bachelor's and master's degrees, Shain earned his doctorate from
Colorado State University and held a postdoctoral fellowship through
the national Institute of Health at the University of
California-Berkeley.
Yakoby, who earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Hebrew
University in Israel, teaches genetics at Rutgers-Camden. Both Shain
and Yakoby are active members of the Rutgers-Camden Center for
Computational and Integrative Biology, which offers doctoral and
graduate programs and strives to determine the quantitative
organizational principles of complex biological systems, using a
combination of theoretical and experimental approaches.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by
ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Rutgers University.
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"Ethics" is simply a last-gasp attempt by deist conservatives and
orthodox dogmatics to keep humanity in ignorance and obscurantism,
through the well tried fermentation of fear, the fear of science and
new technologies.
There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history,
it is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations.
On the contrary, let us embrace Science and the new technologies
unfettered, for it is these which will liberate mankind from the
myth of god, and free us from our age old fears, from disease,
death and the sweat of labour.
Rael
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