Adrian Morrison, DVM, PhD. Throughout history, humanity has associated with animals in ways that have benefited human beings. Animals have been hunted for food and clothing, accepted at our hearths for companionship, and brought into our fields to produce and provide food. Only during the latter two-thirds of the last century could most people – in the developed, wealthy West — begin to imagine living without animals as part of our daily lives. We were completely dependent on them. As the twentieth century progressed, though, technological advances rendered animals’ visible presence in our lives unnecessary. We can eat a steak without coming close to a living cow, or wear a wool sweater without having to shear any sheep. But now, according to some, we have no need, indeed no right, to interfere in animals’ lives, even to the extent of abandoning their use in life-saving medical research. This belief motivates the animal rights/liberation movement, which follows the thinking of a small group of vocal philosophers. But what does the term “animal rights” mean in a practical way to most in our society? All of us do use the word “rights” quite commonly: the right to decent, humane treatment when animals are in our charge. This is our obligation as humane human beings. Indeed, this duty is embodied in law, and we can be prosecuted and punished if we ignore it as lawyer/ethicist Jerry Tannenbaum from the University of California-Davis pointed out to me years ago when I was focused on the depredations of the “animal rights movement” against biomedical researchers and blinded to the obvious. Thus, the ongoing debate – and recent violence in some California universities for example – is about a more radical (and unworkable view) of rights. To clarify things in my own mind, I have come up with a ranking of views/behavior from the extreme to the reasonable as I see it. © Copyright Oxford University Press USA 2006-2008

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 12928 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Boys who have a so-called "warrior gene" are more likely to join gangs and also more likely to be among the most violent members and to use weapons, a new study finds. "While gangs typically have been regarded as a sociological phenomenon, our investigation shows that variants of a specific MAOA gene, known as a 'low-activity 3-repeat allele,' play a significant role," said biosocial criminologist Kevin M. Beaver of Florida State University. In 2006, the controversial warrior gene was implicated in the violence of the indigenous Maori people in New Zealand, a claim that Maori leaders dismissed. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here But it's no surprise that genes would be involved in aggression. Aggression is a primal emotion like many others, experts say, and like cooperation, it is part of human nature, something that's passed down genetically. And almost all mammals are aggressive in some way or another, said Craig Kennedy, professor of special education and pediatrics at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, whose research last year suggested that humans crave violence just like they do sex, food or drugs. "Previous research has linked low-activity MAOA variants to a wide range of antisocial, even violent, behavior, but our study confirms that these variants can predict gang membership," says Beaver, the Florida State researcher. "Moreover, we found that variants of this gene could distinguish gang members who were markedly more likely to behave violently and use weapons from members who were less likely to do either." © 2009 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Aggression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 12927 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Andy Coghlan The transmission of abnormal proteins that form tangles in cells may explain how Alzheimer's spreads throughout a patient's brain, research shows. "We've shown how it probably progresses within an individual person," says co-leader of the research team, Michel Goedert of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. Goedert and his colleagues demonstrated the key role played by the "tau" protein tangles by injecting the brains of healthy mice with brain material from mice which make the abnormal form of the protein. By the end of the experiment, the tangles had spread beyond the sites where they had originally been injected to many distant parts of the brain. Drug hope Because the healthy mice were incapable of making the tau tangles themselves, the only explanation is that the tangles somehow spread or dispersed to neighbouring tissue from the site where they were injected. "They never usually develop these tangles," says Goedert. The researchers hope to use the same system to identify which forms of the tau protein spread the symptoms, and how to block them with drugs. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 12926 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Mike Stobbe ATLANTA - Tourette's syndrome occurs in 3 out of every 1,000 school-age children, and is more than twice as common in white children as in blacks or Hispanics, according to the largest US study to estimate how many have the disorder. Tourette's - known for its physical tics and, in some cases, shouted obscenities - has long been considered a rare condition. The new number means it's more common than some past estimates, but confirms that it's far less common than other neurological conditions such as autism or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The racial gaps are probably the most surprising finding, the study's authors said. "Prior to this, we really had very little information about minorities," said Lawrence Scahill, a Yale University researcher. The study was released yesterday. It's not clear why whites have a higher rate or whether future studies will find the same disparity, specialists said. Some suspect it has less to do with genetics than with a difference in access to medical care or in attitudes about whether repetitive blinking or other tics require medical care. The study, led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimates there are about 150,000 US children with Tourette's. The researchers also found that: Most cases were mild, but 1 in 4 were - in the parent's opinion - moderate or severe. Boys had a rate three times higher than girls. © 2009 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Tourettes
Link ID: 12925 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Victoria Gill As if flying around in the dark swooping and diving to catch insects was not tricky enough, bats also listen for their fellow hunters. A study has revealed how these winged mammals recognise other bats' voices. They are able to differentiate the ultrasonic "echolocation" calls that other bats make as they navigate. In the journal PLoS Computational Biology, the scientists report that the bats have an internal "reference" call to which they compare others. Yossi Yovel from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, and his colleagues in Germany recorded the echolocation calls of five greater mouse-eared bats The bats use these brief bursts of sound in sonar navigation - bouncing sound waves off their surroundings to find their way and locate prey. Dr Yovel's team tested the bats' ability to identify the others by playing the recorded sounds to them. "Each bat was assigned two others it had to distinguish between," Dr Yovel explained. "So we trained bat A on a platform, playing a sound from bat B on one side and from bat C on the other. He had crawl to where the 'correct' sound was coming from." Each of the subjects was taught that a call from just one of the other bats was correct. So during this training exercise, if the bat A made the right choice, and crawled towards the sound from bat B, it was rewarded with its favourite food - a mealworm. "Then, in the next stage - the test - we rewarded them no matter what choice they made, and they still chose correctly more than 80% of the time," said Dr Yovel. (C)BBC

Keyword: Hearing; Animal Communication
Link ID: 12924 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LISA SANDERS, M.D. “Mommy, I’m afraid. Tell me what to do.” The child’s mother looked up at her 8-year-old daughter. “It’s going to be O.K.,” she said. “Just go get some help.” The woman watched as her daughter left the public bathroom, where she now lay. She and her daughter had come to this store to pick up some new towels. But once inside the mother began to feel hot and dizzy. Her heart fluttered in her chest, and she felt as if she was going to be sick. She grabbed her daughter’s hand and hurried to the bathroom. Once there she suddenly felt as if she was going to pass out and laid down on the bathroom floor. That’s when she sent her daughter to get help. Finally a store clerk came into the bathroom holding the little girl’s hand. The last thing the woman remembered was the look of horror on the clerk’s face as she saw the middle-aged woman lying on the floor in a pool of her bloody stool. When the E.M.T.’s arrived at the store, the woman was unconscious. Her heart was racing, and her blood pressure was terrifyingly low. She was rushed to the emergency department of Yale-New Haven Hospital. By the time she arrived at the emergency room, her blood pressure had come up and heart rate gone down, and she was no longer bleeding from her rectum. A physical exam uncovered nothing unusual, and all of the testing she had was normal, with one important exception: her blood seemed to have lost its ability to clot. If that problem persisted, she would be in danger of bleeding to death after even the smallest cut or abrasion. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 12923 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Steve Connor, Science Editor One of the defining characteristics of being human is the supreme act of personal sacrifice needed to lay down one's life for the good of the group – but could such altruism be hard-wired in our genes as a result of Darwinian evolution? Biologists have argued for decades about the evolution of altruism and long ago came to the conclusion that Darwinian natural selection cannot explain acts of supreme personal sacrifice except those directly connected with helping the survival of close blood relatives who share similar genes. But now a study has suggested that altruism in prehistoric human societies may after all have resulted from a form of natural selection caused by a state of near-continual warfare between competing tribes of hunter gatherers, an idea that Charles Darwin himself first suggested in his 1873 book The Descent of Man. A scientist has suggested that because so many of the 200,000 years of human history were spent during our hunter-gatherer phase, before the invention of agriculture, less than 10,000 years ago, this long period in our evolutionary history shaped our social behaviour. Moreover, he believes that altruism may have evolved directly as a result of tribal warfare because personal sacrifice was the key that enabled one group to be victorious over another. Samuel Bowles, of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, said: "Warfare was sufficiently common and lethal among our ancestors to favour the evolution of what I call parochial altruism, a predisposition to be co-operative towards group members and hostile towards outsiders. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 12922 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LESLEY ALDERMAN If the sleep peddlers have their way, quite a bit. Sleep is a $23.9 billion industry — if you count things as diverse as mattresses, white noise machines and prescription pills — and it has more than doubled in the last decade, according to Marketdata Enterprises, a research firm in Tampa, Fla. The market for insomnia drugs alone is expected to grow 78 percent, to nearly $3.9 billion, by 2012, as drug makers scramble to bring more pills to market to compete with name brands like Lunesta, Sonata and Ambien CR. There is even a new event, the National Sleep Foundation’s Big Sleep Show, to promote sleep-inducing products and services to the tired masses. It occurs several times a year, and the next one is set for August in Dallas. Sleeping is a serious problem for millions of people. The National Sleep Foundation (which receives financial support from pharmaceutical companies) estimates that 20 percent of Americans, up from 13 percent eight years ago, sleep fewer than six hours a night. The lucky few who sleep a full eight hours or more dropped to 28 percent, from 38 percent, the foundation said. Being chronically sleep-deprived is more than just tiring. It can lead to depression, high blood pressure and lower productivity, both on and off the job. If the problem is pure insomnia — rather than sleep apnea or another medical issue — there are smart and affordable options. Here are some of the most cost-effective ways to get the sleep you need, and a few things you should avoid altogether. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 12921 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower PARK CITY, Utah — Mothers with teenagers or young adults living at home face plenty of stress. If the young home-dwellers have been diagnosed with autism, the emotional intensity of caregiving surges dramatically in the mothers and may undermine the functioning of a critical stress hormone, a long-term study suggests. Over a five-year span, women who had children with autism living at home reported many more challenges in their daily lives than women caring for typically developing teens and young adults, reported psychologist Marsha Seltzer of the University of Wisconsin–Madison on June 4 at the annual meeting of the Jean Piaget Society. Moms of children with autism spent nearly all of their time on caregiving activities, experienced an inordinate amount of daily fatigue, often got into arguments at home and at work, and reported having negative feelings far more often than positive ones. Analyses of saliva samples collected from women near the end of the study period showed that those caring for offspring with autism produced unusually low levels of the stress hormone cortisol throughout the day. In mothers caring for teenage or young adult children free of developmental problems, cortisol levels rose sharply throughout the morning and then declined to a level that still remained well above that of mothers tending to kids with autism. “We’re seeing remarkably low levels of cortisol activation in mothers caring for their children with autism, which may reflect the toll taken by chronic stress and fatigue in their lives,” Seltzer said. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 12920 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Brendan Borrell Seated in the bed of a pickup truck, Joshua Tewksbury cringes with every curve and pothole as we bounce along the edge of Amboró National Park in central Bolivia. After 2,000 miles on some of the worst roads in South America, the truck's suspension is failing. In the past hour, two leaf springs—metal bands that prevent the axle from crashing into the wheel well—jangled onto the road behind us. At any moment, Tewksbury's extraordinary hunting expedition could come to an abrupt end. A wiry 40-year-old ecologist at the University of Washington, Tewksbury is risking his sacroiliac in this fly-infested forest looking for a wild chili with a juicy red berry and a tiny flower: Capsicum minutiflorum. He hopes it'll help answer the hottest question in botany: Why are chilies spicy? Bolivia is believed to be the chili's motherland, home to dozens of wild species that may be the ancestors of all the world's chili varieties—from the mild bell pepper to the medium jalapeño to the rough-skinned naga jolokia, the hottest pepper ever tested. The heat-generating compound in chilies, capsaicin, has long been known to affect taste buds, nerve cells and nasal membranes (it puts the sting in pepper spray). But its function in wild chili plants has been mysterious. Which is why Tewksbury and his colleagues have made multiple trips to Bolivia over the past four years. They're most interested in mild chilies, especially those growing near hot ones of the same species—the idea being that a wild chili lacking capsaicin might serve as a kind of exception that proves the rule, betraying the secret purpose of this curiously beloved spice.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 12919 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey Researchers may have discovered how a neuron-killing protein selects its victims — it has an accomplice. Scientists identified a mutant form of the protein huntingtin as the culprit in Huntington’s disease in 1993. The protein is found in every cell in the body, but it only turns deadly in brain cells — particularly cells in the striatum, a part of the brain that helps control movement. Why mutant huntingtin preferentially kills those cells has been a mystery. Now, researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore report in the June 5 Science that a protein called Rhes may goad huntingtin into killing brain cells in the striatum, leading to Huntington’s disease. If confirmed, the finding could provide new avenues for developing therapies to treat the fatal neurodegenerative disease, says Nancy Wexler, president of the Hereditary Disease Foundation and a Huntington’s disease researcher at Columbia University. “This study really gave me a peek into what the future of the field might look like,” says William Seeley, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center. Many researchers study the role of individual proteins in causing or preventing disease, but few studies before this one go beyond the molecular level and explain why neurodegenerative diseases attack only certain parts of the brain. “What makes it so special for me is that it builds a bridge back to the anatomy of the disease,” Seeley says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 12918 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY As if splitting a pair of pants, telling a transparent lie or mispronouncing the word “epitome” weren’t humiliation enough, nature has provided humans, especially the fair-skinned kind, with a built-in scarlet letter. Jane Austen heroines may pink endearingly at a subtle breach in manners; millions more glow like a lava lamp in what feels like a public disrobing: the face, suddenly buck-naked. People who become severely anxious in social situations often swear that the blush itself is the source of their problems, not a symptom. Doctors may even perform surgery — severing a portion of the sympathetic nerve chain, which runs down the back — to take the red out. Yet even this operation usually doesn’t short-circuit the system entirely, because a blush is far more than a stigmata of embarrassment. It is a crucial signal in social interactions — one that functions more often to smooth over betrayals and blunders than to amplify them. In a series of recent studies, psychologists have found that reddening cheeks soften others’ judgments of bad or clumsy behavior, and help to strengthen social bonds rather that strain them. If nothing else, the new findings should take some of the personal sting out of the facial fire shower when it inevitably hits. “We are this hypersocial species that settles conflicts and misunderstandings face to face, and we need a way to repair daily betrayals and transgressions quickly,” said Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life” (Norton, 2009). “A blush comes online in two or three seconds and says, ‘I care; I know I violated the social contract.’ ” Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 12917 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Jeff Hecht Laughter is not uniquely human. Researchers who tickled 25 juvenile apes – including three human infants – and recorded the sounds they made say that laughter seems to be shared by all great apes. That would mean laughter dates back some 10 to 16 million years, to our common ancestor. Some have argued that human laughter must have different origins to that of other apes because it sounds so different. But the new experiments – the first to study all great apes – reveals sound patterns that all share, says Marina Davila Ross, a primatologist at the University of Portsmouth, UK. "It is likely that great apes use laughter sounds to interact in similar ways to humans." Davila Ross and her colleagues compared 11 features of the sound of laughter from young humans and other great apes with each other and with the laughter of a siamang, the largest living gibbon. They found humans made more "voiced" cries, in which vibration of the larynx's vocal folds at regular frequencies yielded rich harmonics. The vocal folds of all the other apes except for one bonobo vibrated irregularly, making more "noisy" sounds. They also found that humans laughed only while exhaling, but the other apes laughed while inhaling too. But there was no such clear differentiation in other measures, like peak frequency and sound duration. When the researchers drew up an evolutionary tree based on acoustic traits, they found the siamang came out at the base, followed by the orang-utan, with the bonobo closest to humans – the same lineage shown by genetic analysis. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 12916 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JoNel Aleccia At age 55, he stands 5-foot-11 and weighs 308 pounds, which doctors say helps to explain why he’s been diagnosed with severe obstructive sleep apnea, a dangerous disorder that puts him at high risk for health problems — and falling asleep at the wheel. “It was mild, but has worsened as I have gotten older,” says Armstrong, a Michigan man who weighed 190 two decades ago, but gradually has put on pounds. Fortunately for Armstrong — and the people on the road around him — his employer Swift Transportation Corp. of Phoenix is one of a small but growing number of trucking firms that voluntarily screen drivers at risk for sleep apnea and then pay to treat and monitor them for the potentially life-threatening condition. Armstrong, for instance, wears a mask hooked to a machine that inflates his airways and restores his oxygen levels every night as he sleeps in his rig. “I feel that I’m a much better and safer driver because of this CPAP,” he said, referring to the continuous positive airway pressure machine. But that’s the exception, not the rule, according to sleep scientists at Harvard University, who have renewed a call for federal rules requiring mandatory testing of obese drivers. They say research shows there’s a strong link between fat drivers and sleep apnea and that screening could help prevent truck crashes that kill more than 5,200 people and injure more than 100,000 each year in the U.S. © 2009 Microsoft

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 12915 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By RONI RABIN Teenagers whose parents have a history of depression are at particularly high risk of becoming depressed themselves. Now, a large clinical trial has found that a group cognitive behavioral program that teaches coping and problem-solving skills to such high-risk teenagers can reduce the risk. But, the study also found, the success rate of the prevention program varied greatly depending on the mental health status of the teenagers’ parents at the time they began intervention. The program was much more effective than standard care if the parents were also not depressed when the intervention began. The study was published in this week’s Journal of the American Medical Association. “Were we surprised?” said Judy Garber, a professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University. “No. There is evidence in the literature that kids don’t respond as well to treatment if the parent is depressed.” John Weisz, a professor of psychology at Harvard University who was not involved in the trial, said the results might help identify the best candidates for the prevention program. He said there were several reasons why the treatment may be less effective when a parent is depressed. “It may be the biological risk for depression is greater in these adolescents — that if the parents were once depressed but aren’t depressed any longer, the biological risk isn’t as great," he said. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 12914 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Celeste Biever CLAD in a dark suit and sunglasses, Derek Paravicini makes a beeline for the sound of my voice and links his arm into mine. "Hello, Celeste. Where have you come from today?" I reply and his response is immediate: "From Holborn?" He repeats the word several times, savouring each syllable. "Hol-born, Hol-born, Hooool-bbooorn. Where's Hoollll-booorn?" As our conversation continues, the substance of much of what I say doesn't seem to sink in, but the sounds themselves certainly do, with Paravicini lingering over and repeating particularly delightful syllables. "Meewww-zick. The pi-aan-o." Such touching and immediate friendliness is not quite what I expected from my first meeting with the 29-year-old, blind musical savant, but his obsession with reproducing sounds certainly makes sense, given his talent. Paravicini can play just about any piece of music you request, entirely from memory, with formidable technical ability, despite having severe learning difficulties that mean he needs constant support in everyday life. And as I find out an hour later, he constantly improvises the pieces he has learned by ear, rather than simply copying as you might expect. Paravicini is a prodigious savant - someone with a dazzling talent in one or two fields, normally music, maths, art or memory, but who also has some kind of a disability, such as autism. Psychologists have puzzled long and hard over savant skills, which confound their traditional understanding of intelligence. "What makes savants so interesting is this jarring juxtaposition of ability and disability in the same person," says Darold Treffert, a psychiatrist based in Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin who was also a consultant for the film Rain Man. "We are used to seeing skills that are consistent with each other." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Intelligence; Autism
Link ID: 12913 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway A rare and mysterious syndrome that causes people to sound foreign has become even more baffling. Until now, the condition has been linked with damage in certain brain areas, but researchers have found two people with no trace of brain damage who have nevertheless sounded foreign since childhood. This could prompt neurologists and linguists to rethink the origins of foreign accent syndrome (FAS) and may even point toward a genetic cause, says Peter Mariën, a neurologist at Middelheim General Hospital and the University of Antwerp, Belgium, who led the study. "There is no such thing as one simple recipe that explains what happens to a person who has foreign accent syndrome," he says. Brain damage or developmental problems could occur in brain circuits responsible for the timing, tone and pronunciation of speech, causing accents to sound foreign. "They know perfectly what to say," Mariën says. "They have the idea, they have the concept, but the organisation of the articulation patterns is disrupted." People with FAS aren't reverting to a childhood accent or one they picked up from others, says Sheila Blumstein, a cognitive linguist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who was not involved in the study. They just sound foreign. "A lot of us have concluded that foreign accent syndrome is in the ears of the beholder," she says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 12912 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Anna Ehrlund Do you covet your neighbor's candy? Create a diversion, and that chocolate bar could be yours. Capuchin monkeys may know this trick as well: New observations reveal that they falsely make predator alarm calls and, in so doing, grab food abandoned by those they've scared off. If this deceptive behavior is deliberate, the monkeys have evolved a highly complex mode of thinking. Tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella nigritus) are relatively small primates living in South America. They feed mainly on fruits and insects, and live in groups of about seven to 40 animals. When feeling threatened by a snake or a predator cat such as an ocelot, the monkeys give off warning calls that sound like hiccups to alert other members of the group, who then respond by fleeing or becoming more alert. But these calls may not always serve as a real warning. Brandon Wheeler, a biological anthropologist at Stony Brook University in New York state was studying a group of capuchins eating food left on platforms constructed in trees, when he noticed some of the monkeys made the calls when predators weren't around. "They were giving the same calls that they give for cats extremely frequently," he says. "When they do, other individuals often run out off the platform, which potentially leaves [the platform] available for whoever called to jump in to get some food." Researchers have noted deceptive behavior in primates and other species, but Wheeler pursued his anecdotal observations more systematically. In a series of experiments, he used the treetop platforms to offer food such as bananas to the monkeys in their natural habitat in Iguazú National Park in Argentina. © 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 12911 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Every visual illusion - from the way that simple lines drawn on paper seem to form a cube, to the logic-defying labyrinths of M. C. Escher - works exactly the same way: they expose discrepancies between physical reality and our perception of that reality. That makes visual illusions appealing objects of study for neuroscientists: they offer clues to how our brains handle the information we receive about the outside world, in particular how we process visual images. "In most cases, we don't know how they work or why they work in neural terms," says Susana Martinez-Conde, a perceptual neuroscientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. That's why a panel of scientists - of whom Martinez-Conde is one - organise the Visual Illusion of the Year Contest. Now in its fifth year, it features dozens of illusions created by scientists, artists, computer programmers and even the occasional magician. New illusions offer potentially new insights on the workings of the human mind: but they're fun, too. You can try out some of the winning entries for yourself below. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 12910 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Brooke Adams The mice at the top of a column of stacked plastic bins at Q Therapeutics are shivering so hard they seem to be jumping. Their nonstop shivering and seizures are caused by a genetic defect that robs the mice of the crucial myelin sheath that surrounds nerve cells and helps them send signals. Because of the defect, the mice are soon paralyzed and die prematurely. It is a related problem -- loss of this myelin sheath -- that in humans causes the progressive loss of function in multiple sclerosis and several other diseases that can cause paralysis in humans. And that's why what has happened to the mice is so promising: After being treated with an adult stem cell therapy developed at Q Therapeutics, they are no longer shivering. The product, called Q-Cells, also may be applicable to such neurodegenerative diseases as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS -- better known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Now, the National Institutes of Health have awarded a $5 million grant to Q Therapeutics, the University of Utah's Cell Therapy Facility and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, which as a team has had success in animal models of ALS.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease ; Stem Cells
Link ID: 12909 - Posted: 06.04.2009