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Along with research done by Mark Roth with H2S, this could save lots of people.

What's with the mods today? What exactly is redundant about this? Mark Roth is working about suspended animation using controlled oxygen depletion with H2S and CO, work which has shown quite some promise in various animal models. Interesting stuff that is completely on topic. The main problem with suspended animation, be it of whole organisms or of tissues, is oxygen damage. Mark Roth depletes the oxygen in a controlled manner, the work cited in TFA is based on adding dichloroacetate, which has been shown to prevent ischemic damage in tissue. Not sure how the two would complement each other, as I am not much of a metabolism guy. Anyway, someone mod up the parent, that downmod is undeserved.

I say "Horseshit" to you. The reason that no cure for "cancer" has been found is because "cancer" is not one thing, it is many things. Some cancer has been cured. Here is a list of curable cancers:
* Childhood Acute lymphoid leukemia (ALL)
* Hodgkin's disease
* Large cell lymphoma
* APL
* Testicular cancer
* Choriocarcinoma
http://www.fhcrc.org/science/education/courses/cancer_course/clinical/treatment/curable.html
So your whole premise is crap. Modern medicine is making major strides at improving the health of humans.

Who's the chairman of Charter? Paul G. Allen, of Microsoft fame. here's his picture. If any of your out there work in food service and Paul Allen happens to come into your establishment, remember to spit in his food. Strictly for "enhanced user experience", of course.

According to this page the scientific benchmark offers a mixed result. Although ScienceMark seems to be well-designed it's Windows-only and closed source. I'd be interested to see some open, Linux-oriented benchmarks. I wrote a very simple one called obench.m which uses Octave running off a live Quantian 0.7.9.1 CD, it might be interesting to get some numbers from it (I have timed some Pentiums, Athlons and Opterons).

I do not understand what the fuss is about here. I am not talking about the ID-Evo debate. What the good Dr.Thornton seems to have discovered, is only a case of moonlighting, which is well known in biology. Moonlighting is the phenomenon when a single protein fulfills several, often unrelated and even more often unexpected functions in a cell. Biologists are aware of this fact, and hence understand this to be one of the basic ways in which molecular evolution occurs. The fact that an aldosterone receptor can exist before aldosterone is not really surprising. Drug designers are designing molecules all the time for which receptors already exist. Basically, I do not think that it is a novel as the NYtimes would have us beleive. Here is an interesting paper describing several such moonlighting occurences.[Warning: PDF]. Further a presentation for non-biologists on moonlighting is here One of the leading researchers in the field of moonlighting proteins is Dr.Joel Sussman. He works on how the AChE enzyme may be affecting a variety of other aspects in neural cell biology.

The SA article mentions this as background for the work with H2S. The Sulfur can replace Oxygen due to its similar valences, etc, so they're able to reach the anoxic state instead of the hypoxic state without damaging tissue in the process. For more info you probably want to visit:

The Safar Center for Resuscitation Research

Mark Roth's (principal researcher on this article) website

Wikipedia page on Hydrogen Sulfide

On a side note, that was a great SA issue in general, they also had a really cool article on creating antimatter.

Derek

By pre-treating patients who are about to undergo an organ transplant, it's possible to 'redirect' the immune system so that it does not launch an attack on the donor organ.

A couple of quick points:
1. The experiments were done in mice, not humans.
2. All the mice undergoing the treatment underwent graft rejection.

During the early 80s scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center experimented with T-cell depleted stem cell transplants in an effort to prevent graft-versus-host disease (GvHD), a principal cause of death following bone marrow transplantation. The principle behind GvHD is similar to that of an organ rejection, except that the immune system recognizes the whole body as foreign and attacks it. When mice were given T-cell depleted transplants from MHC mismatched donors (something that promotes GvHD and is why you have to find a bone marrow donor match), their survival rates were identical to that of mice who receaved autologous transplants (they donated bone marrow to themselves - no GvHD). To say that the transplant community was excited would be an understatement. One prominent scientist even wrote that "we've (the transplant community) solved the problem of GvHD".

However, when clinical trials involving humans begain, it was quick discovered that while GvHD was reduced (not eliminated), there was a huge increase in graft failure (in otherwords, the patients didn't develop an immune system - very bad).

The immune system is a tricky thing. While mice are the experimental model, the experimental results don't always match those from humans. We can do a whole lot of things in vitro to mice cells that we can't even begin to duplicate in human lymphocytes. Additionally, mice and humans don't always share the same functional receptors (mice Ly-108 vs the human KIRs).

I applaud the BBC news report - at least they identified that the study was simply a step, used animals, and didn't cure the mice. The Slashdot summary is simply flat out incorrect.

Does anybody know if they are using factor VIII protein as their clotting agent? Also, how many dalmations were used in testing this agent before it was released, hmmm?

Check out this article for more info on blood clotting protein research in Seattle.

Both the medecine and the chemistry prizes were awarded for proprietary research done in the interests of multinational pharmaceutical corporations.