An Impromptu Physics Lesson

Driving home from the grocery store Friday night, my daughter received an impromptu physics lesson on what happens when two bodies try to occupy the same space:

It was dark, very slipper and we were in the far right lane of a four-lane divided street. As we came up to an intersection with a side street, there were about six cars lined up in the left lane next to us to turn left. So when the teenanger anxious to get home and change her clothes for a night of clubbing decided to turn left right in front of us, she almost certainly couldn’t have seen us coming (hint, this is why her mother advised her previously that making a left turn there was not a good idea — this is a notorious set of intersections that results in an accident or two weekly during the winter).

As you can see, the damage wasn’t very extensive to our car, and even less to hers due to the relatively low speed (though this was my fifth or sixth accident — none of them my fault — and it’s always extraordinarily jarring to be traveling one minute and then colliding and stopping the next).

The main worry I had was initially for her safety. Everyone was fine my our car, but when I opened the driver side door, the kid had a total look of shock about her — she was answering my questions, but veerryy slowly. It took awhile of me repeating the same questions to her before I was satisfied she was just shook up emotionally rather than suffering any internal injuries or other problems that needed medical attention (well, she did sit around lighting up cigarettes afterward, much to my daughter’s horror — “she’s gonna die, daddy”).

The worst part, oddly enough, was waiting for a cop to show up. I took more than 90 minutes from the time I reported the accident to 911 before a police officer showed up. By that time my daughter was bouncing off the walls inside the car with ADHD-fueled boredom.

Leukemia Vaccine Effective in Mice

In October, researchers reported in the journal Nature Medicine of their successful tests of a DNA vaccine in mice. In January, further evidence from a trial of the vaccine demonstrated that it could protect at least some of the mice for very long periods of time.

The research focused on acute promyeloctyic leukemia which is currently treated with chemotherapy which cures about 75 percent of cases.

The researchers used a mice model of the disease, exposing one experimental group to the vaccine and another experimental group to the vaccine and chemotherapy. In half the mice receiving the combination of the vaccine and chemotherapy, half the mice lived an additional 300 days — the equivalent of 25 human years.

The vaccine uses fragments of a faulty gene found in cancer cells to train the immune system of the animals to recognize and destroy cancerous cells.

As lead researcher Dr. Rose Padua told the BBC, this sort of approach might one day help improve survival odds for those patients who don’t respond to chemotherapy alone,

Currently, despite a major improvement in the survival of APL patients, a cure is still not achieved in all patients. The DNA based vaccine has proven to induce protective immunity. This example of a target therapy in an APL animal model may provide us with an alternative therapy, which if translated to humans, will improve quality of life and survival rates for leukemia patients.

Obviously, any human application would still be many years away.

Source:

Hope for leukemia vaccine. The BBC, January 7, 2004.

DNA drug offers leukaemia hope. The BBC, October 20, 2003.

China Slaughters Thousands of Civet Cats in Wake of New SARS Case

Despite warnings from the World Health Organization that it would likely be counter-productive, Chinese officials move forward in early January with the slaughter of thousands of civets after a new case of SARS was discovered.

After discovering the first confirmed case of SARS in China in six months, authorities in the southern Guandong province ordered the mass slaughter of all civet cats. In all, somewhere between 4-10 thousand civits were killed.

The animals were slaughtered by drowning, electrocution, incineration and, in some reported cases, clubbing to death. Officials in the Guandong province announced there would be a $12,000 fine for anyone who was found trying to hide the animals. The civet cat is sold as a food delicacy in some parts of China.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization said the slaughter was premature and likely to be counter-productive. According to the WHO, the connection between civets and human cases of SARS has still not been definitively proven, although WHO concedes that civets do contract a disease that appears to be very similar to SARS.

Moreover, the WHO warned that if civets are carriers of SARS, methods of killing them like clubbing could end up potentially exposing more people to the disease than simply letting the animals live.

Ignoring the criticism, Guandong authorities supervised the January slaughter which also apparently spread to other animals, including badgers and rats.

Sources:

China steps up SARS civet cull. The BBC, January 9, 2004.

WHO criticises China cull plans. The BBC, January 5, 2004.

China follows Mao with mass cull Tim Luard, The BBC, January 6, 2004.

Mayo Clinic Researchers Observe Fusing of Human, Non-Human Cells in Living Body

The Mayo Clinic announced on January 8 that its genomics researchers demonstrated for the first time that human and non-human cells could naturally mix their genetic material in a living body. According to a press release from the Mayo Clinic announcing the discovery,

In the research reported today, Mayo Clinic investigators implanted human blood stem cells into fetal pigs. The pigs look and behave like normal pigs. But cellular analysis shows they have some human blood cells, as well as some cells that are hybrid — part human, part pig — in their blood, and in some of their organs. Molecular examination shows the hybrid cells have one nucleus with genetic materials from both the human and the pig. Importantly, the hybrid cells were found to have the porcine endogenous retrovirus, a distant cousin of HIV, and to be able to transmit that virus to uninfected human cells.

Jeffrey Platt, director of the Mayo Clinic Transplantation Biology Program, said the surprising results may help explain how some viruses can jump so quickly between humans and non-humans. In a press release statement, Platt said,

What we found was completely unexpected. This observation helps explain how a retrovirus can jump from one species to another — and that may speed discovery about the origin of diseases such as AIDS and SARS. The discovery may also help explain how cells in the circulation may become part of the solid tissue.

The Mayo Clinic findings will be published in March in the online Express edition of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal.

Source:

Mayo researchers observe genetic fusion of human, animal cells — may help explain origins of AIDS. Press Release, Mayo Clinic, January 8, 2004.

Animal Research Moves Multi-Strain Meningitis Vaccine Efforts Forward

Researchers at the University of Surrey recently announced they had created a strain of meningitis B that cannot cause the often-deadly symptoms of the disease and thus could eventually lead to the development of a vaccine against the disease.

Currently, there are viable vaccines for both A and C strains of meningitis but not the B strain. Moreover meningitis is a major problem in developing countries because vaccines for the separate A and C strains of the disease are relatively expensive.

The new finding could kill both problems at once — after injecting mice with the strain of meningitis B, they found that the immune system of the animals created antibodies for all three major strains of the disease. A single vaccine that could provide immunity to all three strains would be a major development in efforts to reduce meningitis cases around the world.

The researchers who announced this discovery emphasized that their genetically engineered strain of meningitis B is not a vaccine yet. Dr. Johnjoe McFadden, lead researcher on the project, told BBC News Online,

At the moment, it isn’t a vaccine. What we need to do is identify the proteins in this strain that cause this cross reaction. We hope we will be able to complete this work within three years. However, we need additional funding if we are to press ahead with this work. At the moment, we don’t have funding to take this research forward.

This advance was made possible thanks to the sequencing of N. meningitidis in 2000.

Sources:

Improved meningitis vaccine ready ‘within a decade’. The Guardian, Stewart Maclean, January 5, 2004

Hope For New Meningitis Vaccine. Medica.De, January 5, 2004.

Vaccine ‘could beat meningitis’. The BBC, January 6, 2004.

If You’re Missing a Dismembered Body, Please Call The Police At . . .

Two items on the front page of the hometown rag, the Kalamazoo Gazette, left Lisa and I scratching our heads over lunch.

First, the other day a dismembered body was found on the side of the road. Police still don’t know who the victim is or even what the cause of death was (autopsy was inconclusive). On the front page of the paper today is this item in regard to the case,

Police are asking whoever is responsible for leaving a dismembered body in a wooded area off South Westnedge Aenue to call them at …, send e-mail to … or write them at . . .

The other item announced new jobs in a local community with this headline,

Three Rivers gets Hummer axle job

We should all be so lucky.

And as bonus, I’ll just finish with the story of the alcoholic judge who has been the talk of the area ever since he crashed his car into a business.

The judge’s story goes something like this — he wasn’t drunk, he was straddling the console of the car to avoid getting mud from his shoes on the driver’s side floor. He pushes the wrong pedal and ends up driving into the store. Then, he flees the scene in the car not to avoid police but to go find the husband of the proprietor of the store. That search is unsuccessful, so he returns home. By this time he’s distraught and has his wife take his blood pressure. His blood pressure is very high, so he pours himself a glass of vodka to calm down. And that, of course, is why police find his blood alcohol level is over the legal limit when they arrive at his home later.

If you’ve ever seen a more bizarre explanation of drunk driving, the police would like you to call them at . . .