I got an email yesterday about a blood drive going on here at Northwestern. I’ve never given blood before, but it seems like a good, charitable thing to do, so I think I’m going to see if I can make it. I’m a complete newbie when it comes to all this — I don’t even know my own blood type — so I thought I’d do some research. Are there risks? How much positive impact would my act of giving blood have? (Read more…)

Who thought that Ebay would be the place to get a deal on getting your genome sequenced? From now through May 4, Knome, a Boston-based genome sequencing company, is auctioning off a “Genome Sequencing Experience.”  Starting bid: $68,000, more than $30K off the regular list price. Here’s a link.

The auction is being held to raise awareness of (and money for) the X Prize Foundation’s Archon X PRIZE for Genomics (AGXP), “a global competition that will award $10 million to the first person or team that can sequence 100 human genomes within 10 days at a cost of no more than $10K per genome.”

It will be interesting to see if anyone bids. Sure, it would be exciting to have your complete genetic code on a USB thumb drive. But the amount of clinically useful information you would glean is small, probably not more than you would learn via a thorough family history. As this New York Times article points out, the interplay between genes, environment, and health is a complex one. It will take many years for researchers to sort it out.

There’s also the issue of cost. The price of DNA sequencing has fallen dramatically in recent years. The human genome project, started in 1990 and completed in 2003, cost $3 billion. Just a couple of years ago, the cost of sequencing a human genome fell to $350K, then to under $100K today. Some predict that the $10K genome is just a year or two away. So by waiting just a bit you could save considerable cash, while letting the science develop.

Given these uncertain financial times, I would not be surprised if nobody bids. Were I running the auction, I’d instead sell $20 lottery tickets for the prize. Sell 5,000 tickets (which I’ll bet you could do relatively quickly), and you’ve raised $100K. A $20 genome would be a deal, indeed.

On a related note, one part of the “Genome Sequencing Experience” is a private dinner with Harvard geneticist and sequencing pioneer, George Church (read this Wired article on Church’s work). You can hear Church speak for free on May 11 or May 12 at Northwestern as part of the Silverstein Lecture Series.

Some of you may have seen the film, Who killed the Electric Car (2006), a documentary about the rise and fall of electric cars in the United States. For those who haven’t, you should definitely see it – as much as it is biased, it makes some good points about where our electric cars went. However, a return to electricity-powered cars is coming; hybrids are just one step down that road. The main issues people had with the electric cars of old were the lack of range, problems of recharging and battery replacement, and overall market penetration. For manufacturers, that was the ever-present question – if they made these electric cars, would people buy them? First and foremost is always money. However, to achieve what Obama’s administration has been working toward, freedom from energy dependence and a course change away from eco-damaging energy sources, we are going to need changes on every step of the way: changes in attitude, changes in energy sources and efficiency of transfer, changes in social norms, changes in how we get around.

Perhaps most shocking is the way our society has shifted itself towards personal transportation – commuters going to work are driving cars by themselves, fuel efficiency is among the lowest standards in the world, and there is a general dislike of public transit compared to European nations. EEStor, a Texas based company, is working with Zenn motors, a company devoted to efficient and clean cars, to produce a battery and consequently an electric car able to meet society’s needs. The battery, called an EESU, is a ceramic ultracapacitor, a different technology than our current lithium-ions that address many of the weaknesses of the li-ion batteries. Lightweight, easily recycled, high energy capacity and low recharge time, these EESU batteries are ideal for making electric cars viable. According to company press releases, it would only require $9 worth of electricity for an EESU-powered vehicle to travel 500 miles with zero emissions, versus $60 worth of gasoline in an average combustion engine car (average 22mpg, fuel prices based on 2004 averages). EESUs carry 10 times the power of traditional lead acid batteries without the toxic chemicals and materials. EESUs could very well be the return of the electric car. More on this next week.

We took a family visit to Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium last weekend. What a great trip. With more than 30,000 critters representing 1500 unique species of water-living or loving animals to see and learn about, the Shedd really does have something for everyone.

The line of people waiting to get into the aquarium was well over 300. With a gusty northeast wind blowing off the lake, it was a very cold wait to say the least.  Amazingly, people were sticking it out. While the optimist in me says that this is prima facie evidence of the public’s interest in biology and the natural world more broadly, the reality is that the kids in line probably wouldn’t let their parents leave. (Read more…)

What is “peak energy”, and does it exist? What effect does it have on the global community’s drive to develop sustainable energy technologies?

Peak energy is the theoretical proposition that at some point – past, current, or future – our capability to extract and process fossil fuels will reach a maximum, and then start to decrease until reserves are wholly depleted. Peak energy has become a widely discussed and disputed subject as carbon emissions and alternative energy have become ubiquitous topics in today’s society.

The idea was first introduced in the 1950s, when M. King Hubbert proposed that the production of a fuel roughly follows a bell curve, with a distinct maximum – and hence, a distinct total reserve of fuel that is known to exist and be economically feasible to extract. This idea has become widely accepted, despite that substantial historical evidence points to a more adaptive theory most notably defended by Morris Adelman at MIT. His proposal is that Hubbert’s peak energy theory posits two major flaws: (1) humans will never know, or be able to know, the entire supply of fuels that exists on earth, a value that is required or assumed in Hubbert’s model, and (2) the model neglects that development of technologies will continue to expand the reserves in a balance with demand and cost.

Proponents of both theories cite historical reserves and production data as evidence in support of their respective positions. (Read more…)

An inspiring segment on last night’s episode of 60 Minutes profiled the work of DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) “Revolutionizing Prosthetics” program, a $100 million project intent on advancing a field that, in some respects, hasn’t changed much in more than 50 years.

The piece concentrated on the DARPA-funded DEKA arm, developed by inventor Dean Kamen and his team of 40 engineers. Size and comfort were key issues in designing the limb. The final product is the size of an average person’s arm, weighs around nine pounds, and is buffered from the wearer’s body by small balloons that expand and deflate as pressure on the arm changes (the balloons inflate when the wearer picks up something heavy, and deflate when the arm is at rest).  Controlling the arm using their shoulders and pedals in a specially designed shoe, volunteers demonstrated their ability to pick up and drink from a soda bottle and eat a grape.

The end of the segment touched on the future of prosthetic control, featuring Duke University engineer Jonathan Kuniholm. Kuniholm, who lost his forearm in Irag, demonstrated his ability to control a prosthetic hand using the nerves still intact in the remaining part of his arm. These nerves send out small electrical signals, which a processor in a prosthetic arm can be trained to interpret.

Similar work is being done here by Northwestern faculty member Todd Kuiken and his research team at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. They are using an exciting new procedure called targeted reinnervation to reroute nerves that used to control a missing limb to different, intact muscle areas (rerouting nerves that used to control an amputee’s arm to his or her chest muscles, for example). These reinnervated muscles can then communicate with a prosthesis, again allowing the wearer to control their limb intuitively. Click here to read an SiS article on the Kuiken team’s work.

We’ve all heard the expression, “Every cloud has a silver lining.”  Well, what about mushroom clouds?

With credit to Science’s David Grimm for the pun, there is a silver lining here as well. The more than 500 atomic bombs detonated above ground from 1951 to 1963 led to a chemical “labeling” of our ecosystem, which is now being used by scientists to answer key questions in developmental biology. The most recent use of the technique was to determine if heart cells are capable regenerating themselves during one’s lifetime. (Read more…)

According to BBC News, testing is currently underway for a treatment of stem cells that can be injected directly into the body and guided to damaged points via magnets and guiding magnetic nanoparticles in the blood stream. By injecting the magnetic nanoparticles into the stem cells, the researchers at Keele University are able to move the stem cells anywhere in the body, solving the problem of how to focus the regenerative aspects of the cells. (Read more…)

My last posting, asking whether the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine should be shuttered, has generated some interesting comments. The most interesting was provided by reader Alexandria Kung, who suggested that any movement to banish NCCAM constitutes medical ethnocentrism (see the fifth comment here). Her idea is that westernized medicine is not the only way to heal people, and that we need something like NCCAM to investigate healing approaches from other cultures and traditions. We have more common ground than might be expected.

In my response, I would like to be clear that I strongly believe a proposition that I’ve learned is viewed skeptically by many in the complementary medicine community: science is not just another religion.

That is, the results of science cannot be viewed with the same relativism that would be appropriate when considering, say, different moral attitudes about wasting water in desert versus temperate cultures. Science is a method of inquiry for obtaining understanding about natural phenomena. (Read more…)

Following up on James Wilson’s earlier post, I, too have experienced the “… and this is global warming?” remark from friends and strangers alike. When I call people on this statement – and these are educated people, mind you – they cite their “evidence.” Most recently, it’s that Chicago’s 2008-09 winter was the 24th-coldest on record since 1872. (Read more…)