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10 years ago, walking near Bordeaux in France, we passed a prairie-like field full of mature sunflowers, ready for harvesting. Running through and above the centre of this field were the giant pylons and power-lines from the nuclear reactor about 10 miles away on the Gironde estuary. Under the 'shadow' of the the power lines, and stretching at least 500 metres(as far as we could see in the landscape)there was a basin like dip in the height and size of the plants. In the middle of this depression the plants were at best half the size of those outside the 'shadow', and the height increased evenly the further away from the centre of the dip. It appeared to us that the basin shaped 'valley' in the sunflower pattern was a direct result of the proximity of the power lines.

An interesting anecdote. Along with the originally cited report, that makes two anecdotes. And what is that famous aphorism about the plural of "anecdote", apocryphally attributed to Carl Sagan?

OK, that sounds a little dismissive. Here's some background, so you don't think I'm dismissing your anecdote out of hand (or the original report).

To be useful, your anecdote needs more detail (as does the original report) : firstly, the dimensions of the "dip" are quite unclear - at first glance it sounds like a dip that is a kilometre wide (500m on either side of the power line) stretching to the horizon. Which sounds quite gigantic, until you realise that it's a dip within a single field, and fields are not normally anything like that sort of size in the bits of France that I've seen. So, maybe your dip is X wide stretching as far as you could see into the field, some 500m?

Was the power line energised? You state that it was near a nuclear power plant (not that the power source is alleged to matter), but was the plant operational or down for maintenance - I know nothing about the power grid in that area of France.

How was the line of pylons constructed? possible by running a significant number of large loads of concrete, metal etc along a dirt road that you can't see under the sunflowers? You've dug a number of test pits to characterise the soil across the phenomenon you describe.

There are a lot of possible complicating effects in this sort of investigation. A significant chunk of modern theory and practice in the statistics of experimental design and analysis was invented to study very similar types of effect at the Rothampstead Research Centre around a century ago. (I had a statistics lecturer who had a hard-on for the topic. Which is a quite scary thought.) You'd need to control for vegetation type, and for soil types, as well as drainage and climatic effects across your field of interest and your electrical influences.
I'd approach the problem by producing modest-size (say, 0.5x1.0x1.0 m half-cube) soil containers, each containing one of two or three soil types (maybe mined from the field itself?) ; into different containers, I'd place several different crop types (say : sunflower, grass, wheat, clover ; four should be sufficient). I'd place my containers semi-randomly (using a Latin Square arrangement, for a first cut at a design) so as to incorporate a range of spacings from the pylons.
I'd also try to arrange negotiations with the electricity distribution people and get the pylons arranged into a loop, so that my field of investigation incorporated areas with no detectable variation in electric field, an area with a gradient to a current of "I", and an area with a gradient to a current of "2I" (you could do this with a pylon loop).
And to investigate thoroughly, I'd want to look at the effects of voltage and duration of current, as well as at presence/ absence of current.
Oh, and of course, you'd need to replicate the experiment over several growing seasons, moving the containers around in the field to sampl

Here is video and still image, of their example.

The original article (without ads)

http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/media/pressreleases/05_01_1 0_cell_morse_code.html

Media Releases
10 January 2005
A Morse code for human cells

Morse code is a simple, effective and clear method of communication and now scientists believe that cells in our body may also be using patterns of signals to switch genes on and off. The discovery may have major implications for the pharmaceutical industry as the signalling molecules that are targeted by drugs may have more than one purpose. The number of 'dots and dashes' being used by each signal could have different purposes, all of which could be modified by a drug.

The researchers, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and working at the Universities of Liverpool and Manchester and the Royal Liverpool Children's Hospital, in collaboration with scientists at AstraZeneca and Pfizer, have studied transcription factors, the signalling molecules inside cells that activate or deactivate genes. They found that the strength of the signal is less important than the dynamic frequency pattern that is used.

Professor Michael White of the Centre for Cell Imaging at Liverpool and leader of the research group said, "The timing of the repeating signal is essential for its interpretation. It seems that cells may read the oscillations in level of transcription factors in a similar way to Morse code."

The researchers focused on the response of a transcription factor involved in controlling the crucial processes of cell division and cell death. They found that the dynamics of the signalling molecule resemble the changes in calcium levels that encode other messages in cells. The results suggest how common signalling molecules could convey different messages through different frequencies.

Professor Douglas Kell, who sits on BBSRC Council and is a member of the research team, said, "This raises new challenges for drug designers. It appears that simply aiming to knock down signalling molecules with drugs, as many people are trying to do, may have weak or even undesirable effects as a range of signals could be cancelled out. It is going to be important in the future to decode the Morse-like messages from the molecules to make sure that only the desired effects are blocked."

Professor Julia Goodfellow, BBSRC Chief Executive, said, "This research is an example of a multi-disciplinary approach producing vitally important results. By combining expertise in cell biology, chemistry, mathematical modelling and bio-imaging the research team have discovered this coded signal that is going to inform the development of better, more effective drugs."

ENDS
Contacts

Matt Goode , BBSRC Media Office

Tel: 01793 413299, E-mail: matt.goode@bbsrc.ac.uk

Professor Michael White, University of Liverpool

E-mail: m.white@liv.ac.uk

Professor Douglas Kell, University of Manchester

E-mail: dbk@man.ac.uk

Notes to Editors

This research features in the January 2005 issue of Business, the quarterly magazine of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

The researchers used cultured cells, which had been modified to carry fluorescent proteins or a gene for bioluminescence which enabled them to visualise events in the cell.

The signalling molecule focused on was NF-kappa B which is a transcription factor involved in cell death and cell division.

The collaborative research was conducted by scientists at the Universities of Manchester, Liverpool , The Royal Liverpool Children's Hospital and the pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and Pfizer.

About BBSRC

The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) is the UK funding agency for research in the life sciences. Sponsored by Government, BBSRC annually invests around £300 million in a wide ran

The relevant paper came out ages ago.

But I see how the game works now:

Work really hard to discover something vaguely suggestive. Publish a colorful PDF with a description of the work that, really, makes no sense. But (don't forget this part!) explain that it's going to Change Everything. Then wait.

Sooner or later this Roland character will publish it on Slashdot and hordes of the most influential Lord of the Rings fanatics in the world will be all over it.

Sit back and let the money roll in!

Exactly..

Those fears of cloning is quite irrelevant at macro(UN) level.

What is dear to research, is the potential in medical advancement.

Clone will still be an individual, equally valued or... unvalued. Like you or me..

Cloning and diversity, 1999

Oh, yeah! There's a lot of redundancy in the genetic code.

If each nucleotide coded for an amino acid, then there would only be four possible amino acids used in proteins. If two nucleotides in sequence coded for one amino acid, then there would be 4^2=16 possible amino acids. In actuality there are 20 amino acids in common use in organisms, so a three-base code is used. These groups of three nucleotides are called codons.

3 nucleotides code for 1 amino acid, so there are 4^3=64 possible codons . There are only 20 amino acids in common usage, so obviously all 64 codons aren't needed. The extra codons are used for redundancy. Check out this page and notice how the amino acid serine (Ser [S]) is encoded by all codons beginning with TC. So any TC* codon will give you a serine in the translated protein. Some organisms prefer one codon over another, but in general you can the change the third codon without affecting the protein much.

So the answer to your question is yes - sort of. You can change a gene sequence without changing the protein sequence, but does that mean it's a completely different gene? Not really. It still does the same thing. It depends on how the patent is worded. If the patent gives control over the sequence, then you could be getting out on a loophole with some site-directed mutatagenesis. But if the patent gives control over the gene then it's a different story. Lots of greyspace there. I think the whole thing is just silly. Are they going to sue my pancreas for synthesizing insulin using their intellectual property?

Read this page for a good explanation of the whole process of translating nucleotide sequences into proteins.

From the articles that I have read on this very suspect claim it hints that they used the same method as was used with Dolly. I did my Senior Thesis on Geron, the company that purchased the rights to the methode that cloned Dolly; therefore, I have a fare understanding of what is involved with Nuclear Transfer. Although I am not an expert and have never attempted the process in a lab, I have read enough to know that it is a terrible idea to try this on humans at this point.

There is a easy to understand FAQ on the Roslin Institute web site written by the people that actually cloned Dolly. Here are some interesting highlights:

Are clone embryos like IVF and normal pregnancies?
Not so far. The scientists at the Roslin Institute, who pioneered this work, have repeatedly found that the clone foetuses grow much larger than normal ones, and there is a much higher chance of the pregnancy failing, of stillbirth, or of forced Caesarean sections. Dolly was the one successful pregnancy of more than 277 embryos.

What do the experts think? "I think you are always going to run the risk of having aging DNA," says Professor Lord Robert Winston, an IVF pioneer. "I would hate to think of a child of mine being cloned because I think it would be very likely he would have an accelerated aging process." Dr Jamie Grifo, director of the division of reproductive endocrinology at New York University, says: "Cloning is no better than any of the other treatments that are out there. A biological child is the husband's sperm, the wife's egg. A clone is not a biological child." Dr David Stevens, of the Christian Medical and Dental Society, asks: "Are we really willing to sacrifice hundreds of embryos - developing human beings - to make one baby who may suffer monstrous consequences?"

So, there are two very important points that must be stressed. The first is that there is a high percentage probability of genetic defect supported by further experiments. Think of the threat of genetic abnormalities in a fetus that managed to survive as much higher than if you had children with immediate family members.

The second is that each cell has an "age" that is determined by the number of times that a cell has divided. If you use DNA from adult cells that have divided many times, than all of the cells cloned from that DNA will be older. A cell can only dived around 50 times before it dies at which point you reach the Hayflick Limit. Although there are ways to prolong the life of cell lines similar to the way cancer spreads through a body, I doubt that this group of individuals thought of adding telomeres back to the end of the chromosomes that would be used to clone a human baby.

Here's a link to some old (159 years) agricultural experiments, probably what the OP was referring to: http://www.iacr.bbsrc.ac.uk/res/corporate/ltexperi ments/ltexpintro.htm

First of all: I do not believe this is actually true. Antinori really isn't better at cloning then the Roslin Institute, and they usually have a few hundred miscarriages for every successful pregnancy. Presuming Antinori did not have a few hundred women standing by to be impregnated, he really is very lucky to have a 100% success rate.

But anyway: Let's just assume this is an actual clone. Evidence is now coming through showing that dolly isn't quite as healty as we first expected.
Apparently she ages a lot faster, and has a number of diseases. Now imagine that, when the baby is born ('prototype clone'), (s)he starts getting all types of horrible diseases, limbs missing and what have you. That is when Joe Schmoe will understand you just can't copy people like you can copy a CD. Too bad someone has to suffer for it.

First, he was "sitting on the back of the giants" - there was huge research in this field going for years. He didn't start with nothing: he definitely was the first one to get to the point of having a clone of a mammal not derived from embryo cells, but there are still some important issues. I wonder whether this patent is going to stop the scientific community from doing further research.

This patent is much more disturbing then the one from Amazon (after all, one click, two clicks, who cares, how much time you spend on reading the book you've bought with this marvellous technology?). It will hamper some of the most important research fields in modern medicine, like getting finally xenotransplants work.

If everyone patented every scientific discovery the way Wilmut did you wouldn't be reading slashdot now. And Wilmut wouldn't have had even the chance of starting his research. On the other hand - yes, I agree, the team at Roslin Institute is responsible for the breakthrough - namely, choosing the right cell cycle stage for nuclear transfer. Remember, he did not invent the nuclear transfer, which has been conducted for the first time in 1952.

Regards,

January

P.S. Two links for you:

The Cloning of Dolly, a nice and easy explanation what is this nuclear transfer all about and how cloning works, and

A brief history of nuclear transfer, a nice essay at the Roslin Institute.