GEN-ERIC News

When Jamie Howard knocked on Paul Sucher’s door six months ago, he was trying to sell him a new vacuum cleaner. He ended up giving him one of his kidneys. The chance encounter with Howard, a travelling salesman for the Kirby Co., led to transplant surgery in August. Now, the colour is returning to Sucher’s cheeks and he is recovering. Sucher, 35, suffered kidney failure three years ago because of high blood pressure, forcing him to undergo dialysis. When Howard came by on a sales call, he learned that Sucher couldn’t afford a new vacuum cleaner because of the illness. He also learned Sucher had O-positive blood - the same as his.

Scientists have come up with a new currency to be used by inter-planetary travellers. The Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination, or Quid, is made from a polymer used in non-stick pans and is designed to withstand the stresses of space travel. Bearing a striking resemblance to the Drogna - the currency used in The Adventure Game - the Quid has no chemicals or sharp edges that could pose a potential problem to space goers should the “coins” accidentally float free in zero gravity. It was designed for foreign exchange company Travelex by scientists from the National Space Centre and the University of Leicester. They predict that regular trips into space will be considerably more commonplace within the next five years and that holiday facilities on the Moon are a possibility within the next 50 years. The issue of currency has long featured in science fiction, from the all-encompassing “credit” to the Altarian Dollar, the Triganic Pu, or even where money doesn’t exist at all as is the case in Star Trek. Professor George Fraser from the University of Leicester told BBC News: “With an inflatable space hotel from Bigelow Aerospace under development in the US, and Virgin Galactic developing SpaceShipTwo, there will be better access to space than there has been. “In the fullness of time we will have to adopt a universal currency if we are going to carry out serious commerce in space. It’s an interesting initiative.”

Among biology’s more riveting inquiries is the investigation of gene-environment interactions – the demonstration that a person’s genes constantly react to experience in a way that changes behavior, which in turn shapes environment, which in turn alters gene expression and so on. As David Olds described a few weeks ago, this new subdiscipline is yielding startling insights about how nature and nurture mix to help determine one’s health and character. This week reviewer Charles Glatt reviews a study that takes this investigation a level deeper, examining how two different gene variants show their power – or not – depending on whether a child is abused, nurtured, or both. As Glatt describes, this study, despite its grim subject, suggests promising things about the power of nurture to magnify nature’s gifts or lift its burdens.

Researchers have found a surprising diversity of hardy bacteria in a seemingly unlikely place — the so-called sterile clean rooms where NASA assembles its spacecraft and prepares them for launching. Samples of air and surfaces in the clean rooms at three National Aeronautics and Space Administration centers revealed surprising numbers and types of robust bacteria that appear to resist normal sterilization procedures, according to a newly published study. The findings are significant, the researchers report, because they can help reduce the chances of stowaway microbes contaminating planets and other bodies visited by the spacecraft and confounding efforts to discover new life elsewhere. “These findings will advance the search for life on Mars and other worlds both by sparking improved cleaning and sterilization methods and by preventing false-positive results in future experiments to detect extraterrestrial life,” said the leader of the study, Dr. Kasthuri Venkateswaran, a microbiologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

A group of scientists, led by mathematicians, has taken on the challenge of building a common model of immune responses. Their work will radically improve our understanding of the human immune system by allowing all the scientific disciplines working on it to have a common reference point and language. The mathematicians, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), will investigate how the different cellular components of the immune system work together and devise a theoretical and computational model that can be used by immunologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists and engineers. The model promises to help a multi-disciplinary research community work together to bring about medical advances for patients. The project, the Immunology Imaging and Modelling (I2M) Network, is highlighted in the quarterly research highlights magazine of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) this week. The immune system is one of the most fascinating and complex systems in the human body and scientists still do not fully understand how it works. Immunology has traditionally been a qualitative science, describing the cellular and molecular components of the immune system and their functions. However, to advance our understanding of how the body fights disease there is a pressing need to better understand how the components work together as a whole and provide this information in a quantitative format which can be accessed by the entire scientific community.