Regular science news
- Botrytis under control
- Heart-assist patient dies
- Journals to take control back from drug companies
- Plans to clone a human
- Staph wins the battle
- US patent issued for cocaine vaccine
- Tomatoes that grow in salt water
Botrytis under control
28 July 2001 – Botrytis cinerea, more commonly known as bunch rot or grey mould, costs the wine industry billions of dollars each year from lost crops, control measures and reduced wine quality. However, the Dominion newspaper in New Zealand reported that scientists from the New Zealand Government-owned HortResearch have discovered a biological control agent which controls Botrytis without damaging the grape. A manufacturing plant is being set up by biotech company Zenith Technology Corporation.
[Source: The Australian Financial Review]
Heart-assist patient dies
28 July 2001 – The first man in the US to be given an experimental heart-assist pump died on Tuesday from complications related to gastrointestinal bleeding, The Age has reported. The pump was implanted on 1 March. Hospital officials said that he lived nearly five months longer than he was expected to live without the device.
[Source: The Age]
Journals to take control back from drug companies
6 August 2001 – Drug company-sponsored research may not be published in prominent medical journals unless the scientists involved are guaranteed scientific independence following a stand by medical journal editors taken at last May's international meeting of journal editors in Philadelphia, The Washington Post has reported. Under an agreement between the editors, the journals would adopt unified policies towards the use of research results. The fear is that drug companies currently have too much control over results of biomedical research, especially studies of medicines' safety and effectiveness. Doctors are highly influenced by medical journals when deciding which drugs to prescribe.
[Source: The Washington Post – Susan Okie]
Plans to clone a human
6 August 2001 – Three scientists are planning the world-first cloning of a human being, The Age has reported. Italian embryologist Severino Antinori, Kentucky specialist Panos Zavos and biochemist Brigitte Boisselier claim to be two months away from the first stage of cloning. If the proposal goes ahead, the first cloned human could be born next year. The matter was hotly debated at a US Academy of Sciences conference on scientific and medical aspects of human cloning on Tuesday. Scientific experts have condemned the proposal, saying it is dangerous and unethical. It is unclear where the three plan to conduct the human cloning, which is illegal in much of Europe and would require FDA approval in the US.
[Source: The Age – Gay Alcorn]
Staph wins the battle
28 July 2001 – Researchers from Harvard Medical School have reported that Zyvox, the first entirely new antibiotic in 35 years, has lost its battle against staph, the biggest cause of infections in hospitals worldwide. Zyvox is a synthetic chemical that prevents the bacteria from making protein, which in turn prevents it from growing. A little more than a year after the drug was released in the US, an 85 year old man has developed a strain of staph infection resistant to Zyvox. Scientists are unsure whether the new strain of staph will become prevalent, but say that the drug should still be able to help many people.
[Source: The Australian]
US patent issued for cocaine vaccine
26 July 2001 – The US Patent and Trademark Office has granted a patent for the method used to produce cocaine vaccines. The vaccination method, created by Dr Robert Bohannon, would render cocaine useless as a recreational drug. Cocaine molecules are too small for the body to develop anti-bodies to. However, the new method binds cocaine molecules onto larger molecules, at which point the body recognises it as a foreign substance and produces anti-bodies. Companies Cantab, Xenova and Scripps Research Labs also filed patents after Bohannon's initial filing. At least one of these cocaine vaccines are already in FDA Phase II clinical trials.
[Source: uventures.com]
Tomatoes that grow in salt water
1 August 2001 – Scientists from the US and Canada have created a genetically modified tomato plant that can grow in water one third as salty as sea water, The Age has reported. Results of tests conducted on the crop, published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, have shown that while the leaves of the tomato plants were high in sodium, the fruit itself was unaffected. Once completely developed, the new plant could make use of thousands of hectares of farmland ravaged by salinity. Researchers expect it to be commercially available in three years.
More locally, researchers at CSIRO and NSW Department of Agriculture have been cross-breeding durum wheat plants to increase salt tolerance.
[Source: The Age – Brett Foley]
