So how much federal funding was invested in this Nobel Award?  According to the National Institutes of Health, approximately $32 million between the three researchers. To the average reader, this sure sounds like a lot. But when you consider that an average 4-year research grant to support a small lab can easily total $1.5 million, and many labs have two or more, it’s actually a bargain.

It’s also worth pointing out that the economic burden of cancer illness and deaths in 2004 alone was nearly $200 billion.

The recognition that telomeres play an important role in aging and cancer – which was not foreseen – serves as yet another reminder why research dollars invested in “basic research” are dollars invested wisely.

As an aside, every time I think of telomeres I recall one of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits, “Stand Up and Win.” It’s the one featuring Jerry Seinfeld as M.C. of a game show. The winner receives a year’s supply of the plastic thingies that protect the ends of shoelaces. Seinfeld exclaims, “They don’t have a name!”

GFP has the natural property of absorbing invisible ultraviolet light and producing green light – a discovery made in 1961 by Osamu Shimomura (who also shared the 2008 Nobel Award with Roger Tsien and Chalfie).

Chalfie’s “aha” moment, in 1989 at a department seminar, was a recognition that the light-producing properties of GFP could be harnessed as a sort of molecular flashlight.

It works like this: the gene for GFP is inserted alongside a gene, let’s say, that encodes a protein involved in the formation of the neural system. GFP “tags” the protein of interest, allowing it to be followed in real time inside living cells, with UV light as the trigger. It’s an incredibly powerful technique for revealing how and when genes are turned on, and how proteins move inside the cell.

In Chalfie’s case, he uses the tiny soil worm C. elegans as a model for human neuron development. C. elegans and the GFP technique have proven invaluable for studies in areas as diverse as neuroscience, organ development, and cancer.

Below is a nice 10-minute video from BBC News, telling the GFP story. It includes a few clips of live, green worms.

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For the technically inclined, video of Chalfie’s Nobel acceptance speech is here. The 2009 Nobel awards will be given in early October.

Turns out Allerca’s claims of a sniffle-free kitty are suspect, to say the least (see this 2006 article from The Scientist, and this ABC News report). There’s never been an independent, peer-reviewed study actually showing that the company’s cats come close to delivering on their promise. The company instead cites its own studies, complete with “scientific” data on their website.

Upon closer examination, however, this data is unquestionably shoddy. Have a look at the photograph of one of the company’s test results (called a western blot) showing the molecular differences between allergen proteins produced by normal cats (lanes 1 and 2) and the Allerca hypoallergenic cats (in lanes 3, 4, and 5). The banding patterns for control cats should be similar, assuming their genetic makeup is the same; likewise for hypoallergenic cats.  But are the patterns for the hypoallergenic cats too similar?

As pointed out by Scientist article commenter Quentin Vicens, the banding pattern in lane 3, rotated by 180 degrees, appears to be suspiciously similar to that in lane 5. Have a look. It’s the scientific equivalent of putting Britney Spears’ head (inverted) on someone else’s body, with a little blending powder courtesy of Adobe Photoshop thrown in.  In other words, it’s pretty clear the data aren’t real.  If this were a federally funded study, you can bet charges of scientific misconduct would be brought.

These cats are $5,000 to $27,000 a pop, yet may be no more “hypoallergenic” than a cat at the local shelter – there’s really no way for the consumer to know. As genetic technologies make their way further and further into popular society, it really is incumbent upon the scientific community to call out suspect companies or bogus applications as they pop up. The idea that “athletic ability” is revealed by 23andme’s $399 genetic testing service falls squarely into this category.

Consumers have already filed multiple complaints against Allerca and its parent company, Lifestyle Pets. The Better Business Bureau gives them a rating of “F.”

Did I mention that the Allerca cat received a “Best Inventions of 2006″ award from Time Magazine?  Evidently nobody checked the science.

Catveat emptor.

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.

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.

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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.

In the past two postings I’ve talked about my experience working with the Science Entertainment Exchange, which aims to improve the quality of science in movies and other forms of entertainment by connecting movie and TV people with scientists who have expertise in something related to their story lines. In my last posting, I addressed some creative ways in which scientists and engineers can be helpful in this endeavor. In this posting, I will address how the entertainment industry can further the agenda of scientists and engineers.

Ten years ago, while I was doing my PhD in neuroscience at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, the ABC TV news show “Primetime Live” decided to do an exposé on wasteful government funding of science. Their strategy was to ask the main funding agencies for a list of the titles of currently funded projects and pick the ones that sounded the most “out there.” Since my lab was studying prey capture in weakly-electric fish, the project I was working on got picked. Luckily, the executive producer was well informed about science and after trips to several of the labs, where he found that the selected projects had excellent justifications, they switched the tone of the show. It became about how seemingly strange and obscure basic science projects have led to revolutions in our understanding of everything from genetics to brain plasticity.

Amusingly, it seems like they didn’t tell their main wasteful-spending critic about the shift in tone. Former congressmen Ernest Istook from Oklahoma (a Republican) dismissed each research project in turn. For our project, Sam Donaldson (who’s toupee sits as a reminder of one neglected corner of scientific research) said to Istook: “How electric fish attack their prey, we’re spending money looking at that” Istook shook his head and responded “You know, that is really curious….humans don’t go around making attacks with electricity underwater….it just doesn’t work that way” (click here to view the video).

This kind of populist anti-science pandering is a recurring phenomenon. One recent example is Sarah Palin’s remarks during a speech in October: “Where does a lot of that earmark money end up anyway? […] You’ve heard about some of these pet projects they really don’t make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.”

The entire genetics revolution occurred because of research on fruit flies started over 50 years ago. Given that her child has a genetic disorder that scientists do research on using fruit flies (I kid you not), her attack is darkly ironic. Professor John Carlson from Yale University, who organized the 50^th Annual Fly Meeting in Chicago that just finished on Sunday, told me over dinner last week that he had invited Palin to the meeting. Her staff was to get back to him on that, but not surprisingly never did.

The fact that such attacks can gain traction (45.7% of traction, if you count the popular vote for McCain-Palin this past election) shows how far we have to go in terms of educating the public about research. Increasing the quality and content of science in entertainment is one small part of the solution. One of the areas of research we told the TRON-2 producers about–to help with difficult but key dramatic transition in the movie–is a new branch of physics which several investigators at Northwestern work on. Should that make it into the movie, this will increase the awareness of the public for this kind of work and make it slightly less likely to become the target of ignorant political attacks.

By increasing the quality of the portrayed science, one can foresee a slow process of increased scientific “situation awareness” in mass culture. In such a climate, people may be able to think more critically about Palinesque pseudo-expose’s of scientific programs. The short-sighted turn away from basic science to translational research, which represents a failure of science education on a large scale, may be helped. Massively irrational practices and beliefs, such as creationism and homeopathy, may be less likely to spread.

For these reasons, I hope that the National Academy’s Science and Entertainment Exchange is successful in getting a mutually beneficial dialogue started between scientists and story tellers. Having recently heard that our input to the makers of TRON 2 has had a significant impact on the storyline, I’m optimistic that the effort will pay off.

The goal of this blog is to share Northwestern University’s broad range of scientific interest and perspective. Accordingly, we’ve assembled a group of thoughtful individuals representing the university community: scientists & non-scientists, staff, faculty, and students.

You can read about my background here.  In a nutshell, I come from an eclectic mix of biochemistry, molecular biology, hockey, and art. And I’m passionate about communicating science with the public.

Why? For starters, it’s just plain fun. Science is truly a discipline always on the edge. Walk into a research lab – doesn’t matter if it’s chemistry, physics, or biology – and it’s possible you’ll witness an experiment being done for the first time in the history of man. Of course, it may fail miserably. Such is the process of science. Yet when it works, it leads to new experiments and collaborations, which lead to things like cancer therapies, the internet, solar panels, and tankless hot water heaters (homeowners, you need one of these).

It’s also true that scientists have an obligation to to inform and educate the public at large. Much of the basic research done at universities across the country is funded by your money (the taxpayer-funded budget for the National Institutes of Health last year was ~ $29 billion). It’s only reasonable that you ask, “What advances has my money helped support?”

Public policy also enters into the equation. We collectively need to make tough decisions about how to move forward on issues like stem cell biology and climate change. Key to making informed decisions is a basic understanding of 1) the problem, 2) available solutions, and 3) the downstream consequences. For any given issue, perfectly rational and educated people will disagree about 1-3. It happens all the time in labs, town halls, and pubs across the globe. The key is having a scientific understanding of the problem, along with its moral, legal, and social implications.

We hope this blog will highlight the issues and encourage the debate.  Please join us!

Several years back I taught an undergraduate seminar course on society and genetic technologies. Our liveliest discussion topics were often centered on a technique used by in vitro fertilization docs to screen embryos for genetic errors, known as preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD for short.

The technique was created for one primary reason – to allow couples with a family history of life-threatening genetic disease the opportunity to conceive a healthy child. By using in vitro fertilization to create embryos outside of the womb, in a petri dish, scientists can pluck a single cell from each of the developing embryos and test that cell’s DNA for errors. Some will carry the error, others not.  Those free of the defect can be implanted back into the mother and allowed to develop, hopefully, into a healthy baby.

An article in last week’s Wall Street Journal suggests that PGD will increasingly be used by parents who wish to tailor their soon-to-be child’s physical traits.  Sex.  Eye color.  Complexion. “Athletic ability.”

The idea that many of these traits can be “ordered up” is just bunk.  There is no genetic test for athletic ability or intelligence. Even eye and hair color, traits which we know are genetic, are complicated to predict.

The high cost of IVF and genetic testing – upwards of $20,000 -  will alone keep the number of “designer babies” low. One has to wonder, though, how many couples would take advantage of a cheap, easy way to choose the cosmetic traits or sex of their kids?  What if the cost were $200?

The $20,000 question: where does “reproductive freedom” end and a common moral standard begin?

Cleverly, researchers spliced the gene in a specific part of the goat genome so that the goats would only produce the protein in their milk. It’s relatively straightforward to isolate the protein drug from other milk proteins and package it for market.

Given that the “bio-pharming” approach has been discussed for decades, it will be interesting to see if the promises of cheaper and higher quality drugs come true.

However, some animal rights groups have expressed concern about the use of animals for drug production. Other groups are concerned about monitoring these transgenic animals, so that they do not enter the food supply.

Original Article

He also submitted a spit sample to 23andMe, a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company that promises information about not only disease risk, but also personal traits like food preference, athletic ability, and baldness. In Pinker’s case, the genetic test results were, well, flat-out wrong. Despite genetic predictions to the contrary, he likes coffee and beer, prefers hiking and cycling to squash, and has a full head of hair.

The article reinforces several important messages about our current understanding of the relationship between genes and health, personality, intelligence, and other complex traits. Most genetic tests provide only limited information about your odds of developing an illness, being bald, or preferring brussel sprouts over broccoli.  Both genes and our environment play a key role in shaping who we are. For a given illness or trait, there are likely hundreds, if not thousands of genes that, along with environment, make us who we are. Current research tools are not yet sophisticated enough to tease out many these relationships.

We will, no doubt, understand more about our genetic selves in the years to come; research initiatives like the Personal Genome Project and Northwestern’s NUgene project will hopefully shed new light on many genetic mysteries.  For the time being, as Pinker points out, if you want to know if you’re good at math, take a math test.  And the simplest genetic test is your family history.

Original Article