by Greg Miller For most people, it's trivially easy to reach for an object with one hand and keep the other hand still. But in people with a rare inherited condition, when the brain orders one hand to move, the other hand performs the same movement at the same time. Now scientists think they've found a gene mutation that's responsible for this "mirror movement" disorder. The find could yield insights into how the brain gets wired during development. The discovery is exciting, says Susan Ackerman, a neurogeneticist at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, who was not involved in the research. The mutation affects a receptor for a signaling molecule called netrin that is involved in one of the best-studied pathways in developmental neuroscience, she says, but all of that work has been done in animals such as mice, worms, and fruit flies. "To my knowledge, this is the first indication that it's really important in humans too." Mirror movements are a rare and puzzling phenomenon. Babies often exhibit mirror movements in which, for example, an intentional grasping movement with one hand or a kick with one leg is accompanied by a similar involuntary movement by the other side. But these anomalies almost never persist into adulthood, says Guy Rouleau, a neurologist at the University of Montreal in Canada. However, Rouleau and colleagues have recently identified two families—one in Iran and one in Canada—in which some individuals exhibit mirror movements as adults. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Laterality; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14027 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Nora Schultz HANDICRAFTS were never my strong point at school. For each project I attempted, I'd struggle with tools and techniques that didn't suit a left-hander like me, which often made me wonder why humans are wired to prefer using one side of the body over the other. Apart from a few wrist aches, though, my handedness hasn't been too much of a burden. Contrast this with the bad luck of a toad that fails to jump away from a snake approaching from its right, just because its right eye is much worse at spotting the danger than its left. Clearly, such asymmetry can have fatal consequences. All the more perplexing, then, that creatures across the animal kingdom - including mammals, birds, fish and invertebrates - prefer to use one paw, eye or even antenna for certain tasks, even though they may then be let down in crucial situations by their weaker side. The cause of this trait, called lateralisation, is fairly simple: one side of the brain, which generally controls the opposite side of the body, is more dominant than the other when processing certain tasks. Why would animal brains ever have evolved a characteristic that seems to put them in harm's way? Armed with a spate of ingenious cognitive tests, a group of animal psychologists think they've finally found the answer, in the shape of some previously overlooked benefits to a lopsided brain-body connection. Not before time. Up until the not-too-distant past, it had been broadly assumed that handedness was a uniquely human trait that evolved as a by-product of our amazing capacity for language. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Laterality; Evolution
Link ID: 14026 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Helen Briggs Brain surgery to treat Parkinson's disease is more effective than medication alone, a study has found. More than 300 patients in the UK were fitted with electrodes that deliver an electric current deep within the brain. The technique, known as deep brain stimulation, activates areas of the brain that control movement, improving symptoms such as tremors and stiffness. One person in every 500 has Parkinson's but surgery is generally used only as a last resort. Deep brain stimulation involves implanting a wire, with electrodes at its tip, into one of three areas of the brain. The wire is connected to a small "neurostimulator" unit rather like a pacemaker, which is implanted under the skin of the chest. This unit sends electrical impulses along the wire and into the brain. The impulses block the electrical signals that cause Parkinson's disease symptoms. The UK team investigated 366 patients, who received either surgery and medication, or medication alone. When followed up after a year, the researchers, based in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Oxford and London, found those who had undergone surgery reported a better quality of life. Writing in Lancet Neurology, they say surgery is an important treatment option for patients with Parkinson's. Professor Keith Wheatley of the University of Birmingham told the BBC: "It is not a cure. What it does is help control symptoms more than medication alone." The 10-year study, funded by the charity Parkinson's UK, the Medical Research Council and the Department of Health, is said to be the largest trial of its kind in the world. (C)BBC

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 14025 - Posted: 04.29.2010

By MAGGIE FOX WASHINGTON - Despite years of speculation about the best way to prevent Alzheimer's disease, there's no proof yet that anything can stave off the devastating and incurable brain breakdown, an expert panel has concluded. "We wish we could tell people that taking a pill or doing a puzzle every day would prevent this terrible disease, but current evidence doesn't support this," said Dr. Martha Daviglus of Northwestern University in Chicago, who chaired an independent panel meeting at the National Institutes of Health outside Washington. The group of experts looked at the dozens of studies that have suggested ways to prevent Alzheimer's — everything from doing puzzles to increasing social interaction — and found none were strong enough to constitute proof. Most of the studies that have been done show associations, but not cause and effect, Daviglus said. "These associations are examples of the classic chicken or the egg quandary. Are people able to stay mentally sharp over time because they are physically active and socially engaged or are they simply more likely to stay physically active and socially engaged because they are mentally sharp?" she asked. The 15 experts met under the NIH's state-of-the-science conference program, which aims to direct future research in an important study area. Copyright 2010 Reuters.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 14024 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Brandon Keim The most detailed genetic investigation ever of multiple sclerosis has produced more questions than answers. Using extremely fine-grained analytical tools, scientists compared genetic information in three sets of identical twins. One of each pair had MS, and the other didn’t — yet their genes proved essentially identical. “We find no smoking gun on the genetic level,” said National Center for Genome Resources geneticist Stephen Kingsmore, co-author of the study published April 28 in Nature. The research cost $1.5 million, and the scientists took 18 months to sequence 2.8 billion DNA units in each twin, and determine whether they came from the mother or father. Most genomic comparisons look for differences in a just handful of suspect genes, and even whole-genome approaches don’t differentiate between parental contributions. The researchers also analyzed the twins’ CD4 cells, a type of white blood cell that plays a central role in the development of MS. In these cells, the researchers sequenced epigenomes — chemical instructions that turn genes on and off — and transcriptomes, or a chemical record of genes that are actively coding proteins. Wired.com © 2009 Condé Nast Digital.

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14023 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower Imagine seeing better by thinking differently. That’s a vision with a future, according to Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer. Eyesight markedly improved when people were experimentally induced to believe that they could see especially well, Langer and her colleagues report in the April Psychological Science. Such expectations actually enhanced visual clarity, rather than simply making volunteers more alert or motivated to focus on objects, they assert. Langer’s new findings build on long-standing evidence that visual perception depends not just on relaying information from the eyes to the brain but on experience-based assumptions about what can be seen in particular situations. Those expectations lead people to devote limited attention to familiar scenes and, as a result, to ignore unusual objects and events. In perhaps the most eye-popping of Langer’s new findings, 20 men and women who saw a reversed eye chart — arranged so that letters became progressively larger further down the chart, with a giant “E” at the bottom — accurately reported more letters from the smallest two lines than they did when shown a traditional eye chart with the big letters on top. All volunteers had normal eyesight. These results reflect people’s expectation, based on experience with standard eye charts, that letters are easy to see at the top and become increasingly difficult to distinguish on lower lines, the researchers suggest. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 14022 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Liz Else What's so special about this centre? It opens this week at the University of Sussex, a university founded along interdisciplinary lines in the 1960s. Instead of single-discipline schools, there was, for example, the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, where I studied. It had a mixture of philosophers, psychologists, linguists and artificial intelligence researchers. Which disciplines are you bringing together? Mainly psychology, neuroscience, medical sciences including psychiatry, and informatics, computer science and AI. A key feature of the centre will be to integrate theoretical research and practical work into treatments for conditions ranging from coma to schizophrenia. One of the dominant theoretical approaches was championed by Francis Crick and Christof Koch, who wanted to take a pure, simple, conscious experience and match it to something going on in the brain. This correlational approach can leave you dissatisfied, however, because while someone can be conscious of, say, the redness of something, and we can see activity in a region of their brain, it doesn't tell us why that activity and the redness go together. It is very challenging. We think there is no such thing as an experience of pure redness. Every experience is composed of many different parts and influenced by many common things, but they are all bound together into an integrated whole - you, the person having the conscious experience. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14021 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Studying chilli peppers is helping scientists create a new type of painkiller which could stop pain at its source. A team at the University of Texas says a substance similar to capsaicin, which makes chilli peppers hot, is found in the human body at sites of pain. And blocking the production of this substance can stop chronic pain, the team found. They report their findings in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Capsaicin is the primary ingredient in hot chilli peppers which causes a burning sensation. It does this by binding to receptors present on the cells inside the body. Similarly, when the body is injured, it releases capsaicin-like substances - fatty acids called oxidized linoleic acid metabolites or OLAMs - and these, via receptors, cause pain, the researchers have found. Dr Kenneth Hargreaves, senior researcher at the Dental School at the University of Texas, and his team next set out to see if they could block these newly discovered pain pathways. Lab work on mice showed that by knocking out a gene for the receptors, there was no sensitivity to capsaicin. Armed with this knowledge they set about making drugs to do the same. (C)BBC

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 14020 - Posted: 04.27.2010

Janelle Weaver Mammals may possess the biochemical machinery to produce morphine — a painkiller found in the opium poppy, according to a new study. Meinhart Zenk of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St Louis, Missouri, and colleagues detected traces of morphine in the urine of mice after injecting chemical precursors of the drug. They report their findings today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Like other opioids, morphine is a potent, potentially addictive pain reliever. Scientists have speculated for decades that animals naturally synthesize morphine because specialized receptors in the brain respond to the drug. Trace amounts of morphine had been found in human urine and cells2. But studies using living animals yielded inconclusive results because of possible contamination from external sources of morphine in their food or in the environment. "This paper seems to be one of the most definitive I've seen," says Chris Evans, a neurobiologist and expert on opioid drugs at the University of California, Los Angeles. "They've convincingly shown that there's a pathway there which could possibly produce morphine." Alkaloids are ring-shaped chemical compounds that contain nitrogen. The presence of an alkaloid called tetrahydropapaveroline (THP) in brain tissue and urine has led to speculation that it may be a precursor to morphine made naturally inside the body. Opium poppyThe mouse pathway for making morphine is likely to have evolved independently from that of the opium poppy.A. Kohlberg, Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 14019 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By S.I. Rosenbaum BELMONT — The tiny red eye of the Quotient diagnostic device can’t see a child’s face. It can’t see him fidget in class. It doesn’t know what his grades are. But it can see even the subtle moves a child makes, down to the millimeter. According to the company that manufactures the device and the McLean Hospital psychiatrist who invented it, the Quotient’s motion tracker can help a doctor determine whether a child has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. The makers call it the first objective test for ADHD. But BioBehavioral Diagnostics must overcome skepticism among many doctors, who have seen other diagnostic tests for ADHD flop. The absence of a reliable test, combined with the wide use of behavior-modifying drugs, has made ADHD a controversial disorder. Often, parents are left unsure about what to do when their child is one of the 5 to 10 percent of children diagnosed with ADHD, which is characterized by hyperactivity, inattention, and impulsivity. “These diagnoses are based on behavioral descriptors, or subjective states of being,’’ said Judith Warner, author of “We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication.’’ “That makes it suspect in the eyes of people who don’t understand it.’’ BioBehavioral Diagnostics, of Westford and Philadelphia, says its device can change that, by distinguishing between the restlessness and jitters of a child with ADHD and the movements of one who does not have the disorder. © 2010 NY Times Co.

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 14018 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Virginia Morell East Africa’s elephants face few threats in their savanna home, aside from humans and lions. But the behemoths are terrified of African bees, and with good reason. An angry swarm can sting elephants around their eyes and inside their trunks and pierce the skin of young calves. Now, a new study shows that the pachyderms utter a distinctive rumble in response to the sound of bees, the first time an alarm call has been identified in elephants. “It’s an important finding,” says Karen McComb a behavioral ecologist at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. “It not only provides the first demonstration that elephants use alarm calls but also shows that these may have very specific meanings.” Indeed, the study suggests that this alarm call isn’t just a generalized vocalization but means specifically, “Bees!” says Lucy King, a postgraduate zoologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and the study’s lead author. Several other species, including primates and birds, make calls that warn others of danger. Because elephants also have an extensive repertoire of vocalizations, researchers have long suspected that certain calls have specific meanings. But it’s not easy for researchers to link the pachyderms’ calls—many of which are beyond the range of human hearing—to particular events. A few years ago, however, King and colleagues documented the fear elephants have of bees via a series of playback experiments: When they hear buzzing bees, the pachyderms turn and run away, shaking their heads while making a call that King terms the “bee rumble." © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Evolution
Link ID: 14017 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By TARA PARKER-POPE Parents and teachers often tell children to pay attention — to be a “good listener.” But what if your child’s brain doesn’t know how to listen? That’s the challenge for children with auditory processing disorder, a poorly understood syndrome that interferes with the brain’s ability to recognize and interpret sounds. It’s been estimated that 2 to 5 percent of children have the disorder, said Gail D. Chermak, an expert on speech and hearing sciences at Washington State University, and it’s likely that many cases have gone undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. The symptoms of A.P.D. — trouble paying attention and following directions, low academic performance, behavior problems and poor reading and vocabulary — are often mistaken for attention problems or even autism. But now the disorder is getting some overdue attention, thanks in part to the talk-show host Rosie O’Donnell and her 10-year-old son, Blake, who has A.P.D. In the foreword to a new book, “The Sound of Hope” (Ballantine) — by Lois Kam Heymann, the speech pathologist and auditory therapist who helped Blake — Ms. O’Donnell recounts how she learned something was amiss. It began with a haircut before her son started first grade. Blake had already been working with a speech therapist on his vague responses and other difficulties, so when he asked for a “little haircut” and she pressed him on his meaning, she told the barber he wanted short hair like his brother’s. But in the car later, Blake erupted in tears, and Ms. O’Donnell realized her mistake. By “little haircut,” Blake meant little hair should be cut. He wanted a trim. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Hearing
Link ID: 14016 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Wendy Zukerman Rats with damaged spines can walk again thanks to acupuncture. But it's not due to improvements in their energy flow or "chi". Instead, the ancient treatment seems to stop nerve cell death by reducing inflammation. Acupuncture's scientific credentials are growing. Trials show that it improves sensory and motor functions in people with spinal cord injuries. To find out why, Doo Choi and his colleagues at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, South Korea, damaged the spines of 75 rats. One-third were given acupuncture in two locations: Shuigou – between their snout and mouth, and Yanglingquan – in the upper hind leg. Others received no treatment or "simulated acupuncture". After 35 days, the acupuncture group were able to stand at a steeper incline than the others and walk better. Staining their paws with ink revealed that their forelimb-hindlimb coordination was fairly consistent and that there was very little toe dragging, whereas the control groups still dragged their feet. The rats in the acupuncture group also had less nerve cell death and lower levels of proteins known to induce inflammation after spinal cord injury and make neural damage worse. One explanation is that sharp needles prompt a stress response that dampens down inflammation. In humans, the inflammation that follows spinal cord injury is known to be responsible for nerve cell death. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 14015 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower Pansy the chimpanzee died surrounded by friends and family who cared for her as best they could and reacted to her demise with silent somberness. Pansy’s story, as well as those of two mothers unable to let go of their deceased infants, raises the possibility that chimpanzees know when a companion has died and realize that he or she will never return, two new studies report in the April 27 Current Biology. “Chimpanzees may have greater awareness of the finality of death than has previously been believed,” says psychologist James Anderson of the University of Stirling in Scotland, who directed the study of Pansy’s death. Pansy’s case provides the first glimpse of chimps’ responses to a companion’s natural death, Anderson says. Two video cameras in an indoor enclosure at a safari park recorded what happened before and after Pansy’s death on December 7, 2008. In the days before Pansy’s demise three adult chimps, including her daughter, groomed her regularly. Grooming increased as Pansy’s breathing became labored in the 10 minutes preceding death. A male chimp stood over Pansy’s lifeless body and pulled at her left arm and then tried to open her mouth. He jumped onto the platform where Pansy lay and charged in an aggressive display. After pounding on Pansy’s body, he ran off. The next day, the three chimps watched silently as keepers removed Pansy’s body. None of them slept on Pansy’s deathbed for five days. For several weeks, survivors did little and ate less than usual. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 14014 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists have identified new genes and pathways that influence an individual's typical pattern of brain electrical activity, a trait that may serve as a useful surrogate marker for more genetically complex traits and diseases. One of the genes, for example, was found to be associated with alcoholism. A report of the findings by researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes of Health, appears online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "This important advance sustains our hope for the potential of genome-wide association techniques to further the study of complex genetic disorders such as alcoholism," notes NIAAA Acting Director Kenneth R. Warren, Ph.D. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) allow researchers to rapidly scan the complete set of DNA of many individuals to find genetic variations associated with a particular disease or condition. "One of the challenges in identifying the genes that underlie alcoholism is the large degree of genetic and environmental variability associated with the disease," explains first author Colin A. Hodgkinson, Ph.D., a geneticist in the NIAAA Laboratory of Neurogenetics. "Such variability has impeded even GWAS efforts to identify alcoholism genes. To overcome those difficulties, we used GWAS techniques to search for genetic variants related to EEG, or brain wave, patterns in a comparatively small sample of several hundred Native American individuals." As unique as an individual's fingerprints, EEG (electroencephalogram) patterns are highly heritable, and have been associated with alcoholism and other psychiatric disorders.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14013 - Posted: 04.27.2010

By Terry Sejnowski When physicists puzzle out the workings of some new part of nature, that knowledge can be used to build devices that do amazing things -- airplanes that fly, radios that reach millions of listeners. When we come to understand how brains function, we should become able to build amazing devices with cognitive abilities -- such as cognitive cars that are better at driving than we are because they communicate with other cars and share knowledge on road conditions. In 2008, the National Academy of Engineering chose as one of its grand challenges to reverse-engineer the human brain. When will this happen? Some are predicting that the first wave of results will arrive within the decade, propelled by rapid advances in both brain science and computer science. This sounds astonishing, but it’s becoming increasingly plausible. So plausible, in fact, that the great race to reverse-engineer the brain is already triggering a dispute over historic “firsts.” The backdrop for the debate is one of dramatic progress. Neuroscientists are disassembling brains into their component parts, down to the last molecule, and trying to understand how they work from the bottom up. Researchers are racing to work out the wiring diagrams of big brains, starting with mice, cats and eventually humans, a new field called connectomics. New techniques are making it possible to record from many neurons simultaneously, and to selectively stimulate or silence specific neurons. There is an excitement in the air and a sense that we are beginning to understand how the brain works at the circuit level. Brain modelers have so far been limited to modeling small networks with only a few thousand neurons, but this is rapidly changing. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 14012 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers have shed new light on the mechanism behind epilepsy attacks in the brain, revealing a potential new target for drug treatment. Around half a million people in the UK have some form of epilepsy. Until recently the focus of research has been on cells called neurons, but a US study points to a completely different cell. Nature Neuroscience journal reports its behaviour may be key to uncontrolled brain activity behind the condition. Epilepsy attacks, which can manifest as fits in some people, or "absences" in others, are caused by too much electrical signalling from the brain's neurons. However, in many cases, the reason for this over-activity is poorly understood. Scientists now believe that, in some cases, although the problem happens at the neuron the underlying reason may be the failure of surrounding cells to help control this activity. The latest study, from the Tuft University School of Medicine and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, provides the strongest evidence yet that a cell called an astrocyte is the culprit. The astrocyte is known to have a wide range of functions, including supplying nutrients to other brain cells, and even helping the brain cope with damaged nerve cells. In some brain diseases, the astrocytes swell up and behave differently, and it is this condition which the researchers believe is linked to epilepsy. They induced this swelling in brain samples from mice, then tested whether this made a difference to the ability of the brain cells to "turn down", or inhibit, the brain signals from specific neurons. They found that the enlarged astrocytes led to reduced levels of a brain chemical known to inhibit electrical signalling from the neurons. (C)BBC

Keyword: Epilepsy; Glia
Link ID: 14011 - Posted: 04.26.2010

By DANIEL CARLAT One day several years ago, I was reaching the end of my first visit with a patient, J.J., who had come to see me for anxiety and insomnia. He was a salesman for a struggling telecommunications company, and he was having trouble managing the strain on his finances and his family. He was sleeping poorly, and as soon as he opened his eyes in the early morning, the worries began. “I wake up with a list of things to worry about,” he said. “I just go through the list, and it seems to get longer every day.” A psychiatric interview has a certain rhythm to it. You start by listening to what your patient says for a few minutes, without interrupting, all the while sorting through possible diagnoses. This vast landscape of distress has been mapped into a series of categories in psychiatry’s diagnostic manual, DSM-IV. The book breaks down mental suffering into 16 groups of disorders, like mood disorders, anxiety disorders, psychotic disorders, eating disorders and several others. As I listened to J.J. (a nickname that he agreed I could use to protect his privacy), it was clear to me that he had one of the anxiety disorders, but which one? In order to systematically rule in or rule out the disorders, I asked J.J. dozens of questions. “Do you have panic attacks?” “Do you get fearful in crowded situations?” “Have you ever experienced a traumatic event that later caused flashbacks or nightmares?” Each of J.J.’s answers provided me with a clue, closing off one possibility while opening up others. At its best, when you are working with an intelligent, insightful patient, the process is fun, involving a series of logical calculations, much like working a Sudoku puzzle. Finally, toward the end of the hour, I felt confident that I had arrived at J.J.’s diagnosis. “I think you have what we call ‘generalized anxiety disorder,’ ” I told him. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Stress
Link ID: 14010 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Richard Cytowic, contributor CAN you really see what I'm saying? In this entertaining book, perceptual psychologist Lawrence Rosenblum goes beyond this metaphorical catchphrase to show that everyone can and does. This is not a book about synaesthesia, nor one about super-senses that make individuals see the world in curious ways. Rather, it shows how the scope of everyone's perception is greater than we realise, thanks to the ways that senses reinforce one another, giving us a unified picture of everyday reality taken from multiple perspectives. While it makes for a fascinating read, the research Rosenblum draws on is not always new. For example, we have long known that hearing is strongly influenced by sight, and that hearing-impaired people are not alone in having lip-reading skills. We all lip-read to some extent when we strain to understand what others are saying at noisy cocktail parties, and even in private one-on-one conversations. Sight and sound are so tightly joined that even bad ventriloquists convince us that the dummy moving its lips is doing the talking. At the cinema, we likewise believe that dialogue comes from actors' mouths and ambient sounds from objects on the screen rather than the surrounding loudspeakers. Smell can also affect the gist of what we hear, biasing attitudes toward the speaker. Even scents we cannot consciously detect shade attitudes, judgements and overt behaviours. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Vision; Hearing
Link ID: 14009 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Judith Horstman What ethical concerns will arise from new technology and medicine that can reveal our thoughts and enhance our brains? To comment on this issue, please use our forum. Back in the 1980s – in a place long ago and far away called the U.S. House of Representatives – I was a Washington correspondent covering health policy issues, and a young Congressman from Tennessee named Al Gore was chairman of a subcommittee on science and technology. That oversight and investigations subcommittee was wrestling with troublesome questions surrounding organ transplantation. A new anti-rejection drug, cyclosporine, had raised survival rates for recipients to 80 percent, a tremendous advance in life-saving medical technology that resulted in a massive demand for donor organs – already in short supply – and set off a flood of legal, moral and ethical issues. Kidneys were being sold and bought from living donors, the wealthy were getting to the head of waiting lists after making huge donations to hospitals, and desperate parents were launching media campaigns for hearts, livers and lungs for their dying children. In the most notorious and bizarre case, a baboon heart was transplanted into a 7-month-old infant, Baby Fae, who did not survive. Gore's subcommittee waded into this morass and produced landmark legislation: The National Organ Transplant Act prohibited the sale of human organs and set up a policy and structure for allocation of donor organs. More legislation followed and so did more bioethical issues, such as those involving embryonic stem cells, gene therapy, and the ownership of your own body tissue and genes – and foreshadowed the increasingly complex ethical issues to come. © Copyright The Sacramento Bee.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 14008 - Posted: 06.24.2010