Recent Interesting Science Articles (November ’08)

Three science articles for this month, one on an exciting new development in the ongoing quest for a real cure for AIDS, one on nuclear energy, and the last one on a theoretical attempt to create a scenario right out of Jurassic Park.

In the AIDS-related news, The Wall Street Journal reports the case of a doctor, Gero Hütter, who managed to functionally cure a patient of the disease at the Charité Medical University in Berlin, Germany despite not being an AIDS specialist. Instead, Dr. Hütter is a hematologist, a specialist in diseases of the blood and bone marrow, and his patient suffered from leukemia as well as AIDS.

To understand what happened in this case, it is first necessary to understand that some humans are naturally immune to HIV. This is because they carry a mutation that prevents a molecule called CCR5 from appearing on the surface of their cells. CCR5 is also the molecule that HIV binds to in order to gain access to cells. To test his theory, Dr. Hütter specifically chose a donor who had inherited this mutation from both of his parents for a bone marrow transplant into his patient. A standard part of the procedure consisted of using powerful drugs and radiation treatments to kill off the patient’s own bone marrow cells and many immune-system related cells before introducing the transplanted bone marrow.

Two years after the surgery, the doctors having failed to detect any traces of HIV in the patient, declared the patient to be functionally cured of AIDS. It is immediately apparent of course, that this does not constitute a definitive cure for the disease in any conventional sense, because bone marrow transplant is such a painful, costly and drastic measure. But it does point the way towards more general ways of genetically manipulating patients in other ways to gain that mutation and thereby be rid of the disease.

Next, the famed US government laboratory at Los Alamos has announced that mini nuclear reactors that could fit in someone’s backyard could soon be available for sale within the next five years. The reactors would be completely sealed in concrete, buried underground and would only need to be refuelled every 7 to 10 years. It is estimated that a single such reactor would be sufficient to power about 10,000 homes and would cost about US$25 million. In Malaysian ringgit, that comes to about RM9,000.00 per home, which seems to be a pretty good investment if it can really provide uninterrupted power for at least 7 years.

To allay safety concerns, the company planning to deploy the technology, Hyperion Power Generation, has claimed that the reactor is based on a safe, 50-year old design and contains no weapons-grade material or moving parts. Personally, I’d say the device seems tailor-made for energy-intensive industries, aluminium smelting plants for example, that don’t want to rely on a public utility for a regular supply of electricity. Also a good choice for anyone wanting to build their own impenetrable vaults to survive the apocalypse.

Finally, The New York Times reports on a team based at the Pennsylvania State University who claim that it might be possible to recreate a mammoth, extinct for 60,000 years. The scientists have already recovered parts of the mammoth’s genome from clumps of preserved mammoth hair and believe that there would be no technical obstacles to decoding the full genome, given sufficient funding.

Of course, having the full genome is a far cry from having a real mammoth, but the team speculates that having already identified that the mammoth’s genes differ at some 400,000 sites from that of a modern African elephant, it should be possible to take the cell of a living elephant, convert the necessary genes at the 400,000 sites to that of a mammoth and turn the cell into an embryo, at which point it would be brought to term by an elephant. If such a project should prove feasible, inevitably the next question that arises is what about resurrecting a Neanderthal, the ancient human species driven to extinction by modern humans? But that understandably is a project that is fraught with even more ethical concerns and one best left to another article.

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