I feel like I see articles like this all the time, and the underlying current is one of thinking that there are all these engineering breakthroughs that will make things that operate better than the native biological system. Engineers often tend to think this way, not unlike the carpenter who thinks the moon is made of wood. As a biologist, I may be somewhat guilty of the opposite bias, but the truth of the matter is that engineers have seldom been able to make materials and machines that operate as well as their biological counterparts. For example, artificial joints and teeth are all vastly inferior to their biological counterparts, and they will be for a while yet.
My point is that human enhancement will occur, but this article grossly underestimates the role molecular biology will have in the near future. For example, to make soldiers with more endurance, you could try replacing their blood with an artificial substitute, or you could give them recombinant erythropoeitin to increase their red blood cell count. The EPO injections are trivial (ask professional bicyclists), but after years and years of research, we still don't have an acceptable artificial blood substitute.
As far as artificial muscles go...that is just ridiculous. To think that in 30 years we will be implanting stuff like that into peoples' bodies. We will be growing muscle tissue in vats and implanting long before we deal with artifical stuff. However, first we will be using relatively simple methods to locally control muscle growth (like small molecule inhibitors of receptors for hormones that inhibit muscle growth, etc.) That alone will be huge.
I think the real lack of conceptual understanding has to do with the evolutionary perspective. Basically, humans are incredibly good at doing things that humans have to do in the wild, and the only easy enhancements that we can make are "enhancements" that actually decrease our fitness from the hunter-gatherer perspective. For example, stronger muscles require a huge food intake, so they're selected against. In this day and age, that's easy to get around, with steroids or other technologies. It's easy to increase endurance with EPO injections, but there are obvious problems (e.g. death) associated with that as well. People seem to think that it will be as easy to improve cognitive abilities or immune system function, but that's just wrong. Our brains and immune systems already operate pretty much at their optimum, and claims that we could simply inject "nanobots" that improve the function of either are ridiculously ignorant.
I don't know anything about the engineering aspects of it, why they would need to use the resonance frequency instead of another one. My guess is that it's a quantitative issue of getting the thing to fit into a small unit or something, but I agree, it sounded weird to me too.
As far as Braille being a DC phenomenon, I think the idea is that there were supposed to be a small number of braille units, like one for each fingertip, and the person would keep their finger stationary while the letters scrolled across. In the normal situation, the person is actively moving their fingers over the dots, which causes displacement of the fingertip that can be decomposed into sinusoids. Inside the skin of the fingertip, there are different types of nerve endings, which have different frequency response functions. These different types of nerve endings send their signals up to the brain separately, where they're combined into a unified percept, so you can't introspectively tell that that's how it works. I think that Braille perception occurs mainly through the channel mediated by the Merkel disk-type nerve ending, IIRC. In any case, a person can't read Braille if there's no movement to cause vibration. If you try feeling something without moving your finger, you can see how that would be the case.
This has been tried, and my understanding is that it's generally regarded as a failure. The device was called the opticon, and it's featured in the movie "Sneakers." I had it explained to me once by a somatosensory neurophysiologist, and he said that the piezoelectric-based ones essentially vibrated across the fingertips at the resonance frequency of the piezo crystals themselves, and they (like typical engineers) never bothered to consult the neurophysiology literature to find out what part of the frequency spectrum is responsible for Braille perception. He told me that shape memory alloys were being used for this purpose, since they could be driven at the right frequency. This was about six years ago that he told me this.
It's not that I don't agree with you on that, and I would argue that the widespread existence of pseudogenes is an even stronger argument (though it argues for a different kind of "junk" DNA). For example, there are about 1000 olfactory receptor genes in both mice and humans, and something like 99% of them are 1-to-1 orthologs. However, in humans ~750 of them are pseudogenized, which is pretty crazy if you think about it.
However, getting back to the transcriptional regulation thing, I think the argument is more complicated. Let me clarify the argument from ignorance thing I'm saying. An example: I remember someone making a transgenic mouse, and they saw that the promoter region for their gene was something like 8kb long (as in it was 8kb until the next identified gene). So they took 4kb of it, and they simply couldn't get it to work. Then they went back and took the whole 8kb, and it worked. Now it would be absolutely ridiculous to claim that every base in that 8kb were necessary for cell-type specific expression. Most people would probably think there are a few transcription factor binding sites hidden in there. Yet even if one could map out all those sites, it would be a ridiculous logical leap to go on to say that the rest of the DNA there is "junk DNA." No responsible scientist would ever make that claim, despite the fact that we know that some of that 8kb probably has no function. However, that is the claim that is implicitly made whenever a pop scientific article claims "new function found for junk DNA."
To summarize: Your point is, "junk DNA" exists. I agree--there has to be DNA with no function. My point is, with the exception of pseudogenes, no one has been eager to say this is "junk DNA" or that is "junk DNA." And to argue that they have been, as the pop science press does, fundamentally mischaracterizes the attitude of most biologists, who acknowledge that the role of noncoding regions in transcriptional regulation is far from understood, particularly with respect to epigenetics.
The point is that "junk DNA" is a legitimate term that is being used currently in the technical literature.
I'll grant you that it is a semi-legitimate term, in that it has been used before. However, many of those 55 references refute the concept of "junk DNA," and most of them place it in quotes, which is not usually done with technical terms like intron or transcription factor. More importantly, there is a huge disparity between the tiny number of pubmed references and the repeated claims by science writers that the belief that most DNA is "junk DNA" is some sort of predominant paradigm in modern molecular biology. The majority of biologists I've talked to about this topic argue that certain aspects of transcriptional control are complicated and poorly understood, and it's known that noncoding regions are important, so they would be uncomfortable calling something "junk DNA" simply because they did not know its function. When someone figures out that some noncoding region plays a role in transcriptional regulation through whatever mechanism, the pop science press implies that this was some sort of big surprise in the field. The whole RNAi thing was a surprise, but that's because of the mechanism, not because it implies that noncoding regions are important for regulation.
The debate turns around the quantitative issue of what proportion of the genome it is, as well as questions about the selective pressures for preservation/elimination of junk DNA and its potential role in evolution.
The scientific debate, yes. I agree 100%. The debate you and I are having right here revolves around the definition of the term "junk DNA," and whether popular science journalists accurately convey the common opinions in the field or perpetuate strawman arguments to make scientific results seem more profound and novel than they really are. We'll probably never agree, but this is one of the more interesting discussions I've had on/. -- thanks!
Sort of. I think the main point is that there are regions of DNA that code for actual proteins, but the majority of DNA does not. However, a lot of the noncoding regions are involved in the regulation of the coding regions, and that's important. The only difference between a muscle cell in your heart and a neuron in your brain is in the regulation of those coding regions, so it makes sense that there would be complicated mechanisms involved. This isn't a new insight, by any means. The whole thing with transposons etc. is basically saying that we evolved, and in some sense we're continuing to evolve. A system in which every piece of DNA had an important function is one that can't be modified very easily. Transposons are a mechanism by which evolution can occur more rapidly than by random mutation alone, so it makes sense that there are lots of transposons lying around in supposedly unimportant parts of the genome. Unfortunately, there's no obvious computer metaphor I'm aware of that can clarify how these things work, but you're absolutely right in thinking that the main role of noncoding DNA is in regulating the activity of the coding regions of DNA that make proteins. All the mechanisms involved in that are far from understood, so no molecular biologist I've met has been willing to claim that regions of DNA of unknown function are "junk DNA," since we know that those regions are involved in turning genes on and off, and we don't know exactly how that's done, so it would be ridiculously premature to call something "junk DNA" just because you haven't figured out how it works yet.
It's not exactly nontechnical--it's in Science, after all. As far as the whole "junk" DNA term, 55 pubmed hits is an incredibly small number for something of that generality, and I think the fact that there are so few supports my point that it is not a widely used concept or term in molecular biology. For example, a pubmed search for "intron" brings up 27964 hits. A search for "noncoding" brings up 4577. A search for "microsoft" brings up 746 hits. A search for "Wotan," the germanic name for Thor's father in Norse mythology, brings up 68 hits, which is more than the 55 hits you get for "junk DNA."
I don't think we fundamentally disagree on any scientific issues. I agree with everything you've said scientifically. I think where we disagree is on the pop scientific characterization of the biological community's position on the whole "junk DNA" debate. I'm arguing that it's been fundamentally mischaracterized. As you've said, it's been known from the beginning that noncoding regions play an important role in transcriptional regulation. It's been hypothesized for a long time that there is complicated stuff going on with epigenetic modifications involved in cell differentiation. There are telomeres. We've known about things like pseudogenes for a long time, so everyone has known that there is DNA that does not serve a useful purpose (plus on theoretical grounds, one could argue that a biological system couldn't effectively undergo evolution if its genome were so tightly controlled that every single base pair was important). What I'm saying is that the whole "junk DNA" debate in the pop science literature mischaracterizes the actual debate going on in biology. When you read the Science article, you get the impression that it's some big insight that noncoding regions are important in transcriptional regulation, when we both know that's obviously not a recent development. The idea that there are small noncoding RNAs that are somehow involved in transcriptional or translational regulation is new, but I think it's a fundamental mischaracterization of the position of molecular biologists to claim that they all thought that all that DNA was useless junk DNA. Basically, I'm saying that people think it's sexy when dogma is overturned, so science writers play up the whole "junk DNA" thing and pretend that it's some sort of dogma in molecular biology when it simply isn't. I would also argue that your definition of "junk DNA," which I would call the correct one, is not the definition used in the pop science literature, including the Science article.
I disagree with your definition of "wasteland," but I've never heard either "junk" or "wasteland" in serious scientific conversation, so I'm not sure that matters. The point is, looking at the rest of the article, you're assuming the person who wrote that article has your level of sophistication, when clearly they don't. It keeps saying "Junk DNA does X" and "Junk DNA does Y." The only way that makes sense is if their definition of "junk DNA" is an incredibly naive one that encompasses, if not all noncoding regions, all noncoding regions not involved in direct physical interaction with transcription factors (something closer to your strawman definition). And that is a definition that would be untenable to any biologist on logical principles alone, since the label of "real" junk DNA should really only be applied to things if there's a reason to believe that they really have no function (like pseudogenes with frameshift mutations).
If you haven't gotten this impression, it's because you've been tainted by having too much knowledge of real molecular biology. Read this quote taken directly from
Science's writeup
5 Hidden DNA Treasures. Biologists digging through the DNA between the genes and between a gene's protein-coding regions are unearthing new insights into how genomes work. Protein-coding sequences take up less than 10% of the human genome. The rest, previously considered a genetic wasteland, are proving quite influential for gene function.
As you say, the existence of noncoding regulatory elements has been known since the days of the lac operon, which I think is the mid-1960s. So who considered non-coding regions a "genetic wasteland?" Science writers, not scientists.
That is an interesting result, but the paper was from last year, not this year. Also, it's not one of the ones cited by Science in their writeup of "junk" DNA:
(quoted from sciencemag.org):
5 Hidden DNA Treasures. Biologists digging through the DNA between the genes and between a gene's protein-coding regions are unearthing new insights into how genomes work. Protein-coding sequences take up less than 10% of the human genome. The rest, previously considered a genetic wasteland, are proving quite influential for gene function. The wasteland is rich in genetic gems: short stretches of regulatory DNA, transposable elements (sequences that hop from one place to another), coding sequences that yield tiny RNA molecules, and so on.
Figure 4
CREDIT: TIM SMITH
By dissecting regulatory DNA, molecular biologists are learning about the exquisite controls that cause genes to turn on at the right time and in the right place. Short DNA sequences about 500 bases long, called activators, rev up gene expression by binding to regulatory proteins called transcription factors. Subtle differences in the arrangement of transcription factor binding sites cause gene activity to vary in different ways. Several reports this year have implicated activators as the source of genetic changes leading to the emergence of new species.
Junk DNA is chock-full of transposable elements. New work shows that these elements, when present between the coding regions of genes, can slow or halt transcription. They also help make new genes by hopping into existing ones, thereby altering the protein code. One such event involved a key gene for nerve function.
Junk DNA also encodes RNA, already shown to affect gene expression through RNAi (RNA interference). In yeast genes, for example, geneticists discovered that RNAi can block the binding of proteins needed to activate a gene involved in making the amino acid serine.
The quest to uncover more gems is revving up. The National Human Genome Research Institute has a new program, Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, that aims to capture and catalog all functional DNA within this "wasteland," starting first with 30 million bases of protein-coding and noncoding sequences.
E. Pennisi, "Searching for the Genome's Second Code," Science 306, 632 (2004)
A News article on the hunt for noncoding DNAs that control gene expression.
E. Pennisi, "A Fast and Furious Hunt for Gene Regulators," Science 306, 635 (2004)
The ENCODE Project Consortium, "The ENCODE (ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements) Project," Science 306, 636 (2004)
E. Pennisi, "Disposable DNA Puzzles Researchers," Science 304, 1590 (2004)
J. A. Martens et al., "Intergenic Transcription is Required to Repress the Saccharomyces cerevisiae SER3 Gene," Nature 429, 571 (2004)
G. Bejerano, "Ultraconserved Elements in the Human Genome," Science 304, 1321 (2004)
H. H. Kazazian Jr. , "Mobile Elements: Drivers of Genome Evolution," Science 303, 1626 (2004)
A review of how retrotransposons have accumulated within the genome and how this process has been important during evolution.
C. C. Mello and D. Conte Jr., "Revealing the World of RNA Interference," Nature 431, 338 (2004)
N. G. Smith et al., "Evidence for Turnover of Functional Noncoding DNA in Mammalian Genome Evolution," Genomics 84, 806 (2004) [PubMed]
You haven't spoken to many molecular biologists, then. The idea that a substantial fraction of the noncoding DNA has no function is widely accepted, although not proved. And I don't know anybody in the field who would dismiss the idea as "absurd."
You're misunderstanding my point. What I'm calling absurd is the idea that DNA is unimportant BECAUSE it's non-coding. Not the idea that unimportant non-coding DNA exists (which I explicitly stated at the end of my post). All of the supposed excitement about any discovery involving so-called "junk" DNA is traceable back to the first interpretation, which as far as I know, no biologist anywhere has ever believed. The only reason this interpretation continues to exist, as far as I can tell, is because it is perpetuated by ignorant science writers who claim that there are biologists somewhere who believe this.
As a biologist, I have to say that I'm incredibly disappointed by the inclusion of "junk" DNA in the list. I don't know what specific research results they're referring to when they say there's a breakthrough there, but the entire concept of "junk" DNA is absurd. I've never met a single molecular biologist who believed that non-coding regions were unimportant, and in fact it's been known for at least forty years that non-coding regions are important in regulation of gene expression. Maybe what bothers me most is the term "junk" DNA, which I've never actually heard another scientist use. It's a fictitious concept perpetuated by science writers so that they can feign surprise every time someone can attribute a function to a non-coding piece of DNA (and claim that the scientific community was surprised as well).
All that aside, I'm sure there are big breakthroughs in our understanding of the role of non-coding regions, and it probably deserves to be mentioned. However, one important point to make is that in spite of all this, there ARE parts of the genome that are unquestionably useless evolutionary vestiges. This is not necessarily mysterious, but it is interesting (for example, providing what is in my mind the most convincing evidence of evolution).
I think so, because they found the remains of something like six Homo floresiensis-es.
Re:this is from brazil & france, NOT USA pharm
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 1
Well, I guess that's another way to put it. I agree with you that legal risk is a big part of it, especially for pharmaceutical companies doing clinical trials. But no matter how you look at it, ethics ARE a huge scientific setback. I heard about a neuroscientist once who wanted to get wires implanted in his brain and left there for a year. It's something they do to epileptics before surgery all the time, but they only leave them there for 12 hours or a couple of days. He wanted them in for a whole year, and he wanted to get access to the data afterwards. He found surgeons who were willing to implant them, lined everything else up, and in the end was unwilling to get ethical approval from the IRB (institutional review board). It might be ill-advised, but unethical? We can risk human life for manned space flight when robots would do, or send soldiers to their death for oil, but we can't risk human life to understand the brain? That's the kind of ethics I'm talking about.
Re:this is from brazil & france, NOT USA pharm
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 1
Actually, no, it was discovered in France. While the complete research was done between a French (Montaigner) and an American scientist (Gallo), the actual discovery of the virus (not disease, virus) was done at l'Institut Pasteur by Montaigner and his team.
Ack, sorry about that one. You're right. I thought that HIV had been one of the HTLV retroviruses that Gallo's group had previously discovered, and Montagnier connected it to the disease. I used to work on HIV, a long time ago, and my memory of the historical details has faded since then.
And don't be lured, for pure science US doesn't lead the world in biomedical. The US leads the world in APPLIED biomedical. For fondamental research, many countries (such as France with Institut Pasteur) have roughly the same level and cooperate enough that none is leading.
Well, I agree with you that the US lead in applied biomedical science is more obvious, but I don't know how you can say that the US is not the world leader in basic biological science. I don't mean to imply that the best science comes from the US, only that the largest quantity of good science does. Nations like France and Germany have elite institutes like Institut Pasteur or the Max Planck that are as good as any institute in the US, but the US has more of them. Because there's a lot more funding here. And half the people in science in the US are from other countries anyway. This is a pretty commonly-held viewpoint among professional scientists. I can't find the citation now, but there was a thing in Nature or Science a while ago about how americans are afraid the US is starting to lose its dominant position (which is another way of saying that the US is in the dominant position). The article said that it isn't that the US is falling, but that other nations are starting to catch up. Which I think is great. Science is an international pursuit, and although I'm from the US, my allegiance is to science, not American science.
Also, it's important to note that HIV doesn't pick off the old, weak, and sick. It takes the young and healthy people, in the prime of their lives. Having that segment of the population removed in large numbers totally destroys a society, especially "developing nations" in places like Africa.
Re:this is from brazil & france, NOT USA pharm
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The reason this work is coming out of Brazil is the same reason the spinal cord story earlier this week came out of Korea. Namely, ethics. The single greatest hindrance to scientific advancement in the US. In the US, it would be unethical to conduct this study, because you couldn't let a group of people go without HIV meds for a year. That would be unethical. It's the same way it's unethical to test experimental therapies on patients with terminal cancer. Since their disease is terminal, it can be argued that they are consenting out of desperation, and the researcher is therefore taking advantage of them.
In any case, dendritic cells were discovered in the US, HIV was discovered in the US, etc., so it can't be argued that the giant money machine of US science didn't contribute. It also can't be argued that the US does not lead the world in biomedical science. This is because we spend so much money on it that the best scientists from all over the world are concentrated here. However, I agree with you that this is not the same as the idiotic statement that we are subsidizing other nations' healthcare.
IAAB, and I find this post extremely interesting because it demonstrates the lack of information/understanding/. readers have on the issue.
(1) stem cells can be cultured from adult hosts through hormonal treatments
Some stem cells can be taken from adult hosts, such as the ones they use to do a bone marrow transplant. However, these cells are already partially differentiated, and they can't be redifferentiated into any arbitrary tissue (studies showing that they could were later found to be incorrect).
(2) they have none of the rejection issues that embryonic stem cells do
This is not true. The issues are the same. If you take adult stem cells (e.g. bone marrow) from someone else, there will be rejection issues.
The whole point of all this research is that ES cells are the least differentiated, while stem cells taken from an adult are partially differentiated. There is a lot of work going on that attempts to de-differentiate adult stem cells (or other cells) into ES cells, which could be re-differentiated into any arbitrary tissue. For example, to take blood and differentiate it into liver cells. If one could perform this de-differentiation, one could take cells from a person and make them into 100% compatible organ tissue for reimplantation.
This process of cellular de-differentiation has been falsely labeled "cloning" by GOP spinmeisters, despite scientists' best efforts to get people to understand that it is not cloning, merely a process which enables many things, including cloning.
Anyway, to get back to the point, the goal is to de-differentiate cells from a patient into ES cells, then use those ES cells to treat the patient. Because the de-differentiation process is very inefficient at this point, it's easier to get started doing research with ES cells that are lying around waiting to be thrown away. This is why we need to get unused ES cells from fertility clinics, because the in vitro de-differentiation procedures are currently very low efficiency.
As a second point, the two opinions that
1. destroying ES cells is destroying human life, and 2. adult stem cells are as good as ES cells without the drawbacks
are mutually exclusive. If ES cells were human life (which they simply are not, but I can understand the confusion), then you're defining human life as a population of cells with the capacity to differentiate into any tissue. If I don't have any of those in my body, then I guess I'm not alive. Alternatively, if a population of adult stem cells were found to possess this capacity, then using those would be murder. When the original paper came out incorrectly showing that there were blood cells that could differentiate into any cell type, that would have implied that every blood transfusion every performed would have been a mass murder of thousands and thousands of innocent people! I could go on and on, but basically, the opinion that ES cells represent human life simply doesn't make sense.
Impeding and not funding are different things. An imposition is banning or blocking or imposing harsh regulations.
If they just declined to fund research proposals involving ES cells, you would be right. However, the ban on federal funding of ES cell research is more restrictive than that. Most labs have several sources of funding and multiple projects going on simultaneously, and almost all basic science biology labs get funding from the government. If I were in a lab doing ES cell research, even work that was privately funded, I would essentially have to work in a separate facility from everyone else. I couldn't use the lab centrifuge, geiger counter, refrigerator, incubator, etc., because those were bought with federal dollars. On a practical level, it's extremely difficult, if not possible, to work under those conditions. So in practical terms, it is a ban.
The bottom line is that the issue here is the future development of "factories" of human bits and pieces. It frightens people. Embryonic stem cells are thrown away, but we both know that in short order they would be harvested efficently and clinically with absolutely no regard to their nature: much like antibodies or animal specimens are harvested today.
That's a silly, alarmist view. Or maybe it's true. Maybe ES cells will lead to both matrix-style baby factories AND the cures to terrible diseases. Couldn't we just ban baby factories?
It is hardly disturbing that the government would elect not to fund a practice which is very fairly consider contraversial for a pay-off that is available through other means or highly hypotethical. Bush has said repeatedly that if other avenues are exhausted or the circumstances warrant it a revisitation of the issue can be made.
What you're saying here is partially misguided and partially factually incorrect. I would argue that the only reason it is controversial at all is because politicians decided to make an issue out of it. We've been throwing the cells in the trash for years, and nobody cared! Bush wants to appear somewhat flexible on the ES cell issue because he KNOWS that the ban will be lifted in the future, because it will very quickly become politically unpopular once the Swiss (or whoever) cure diabetes (or whatever). This, really, is what bothers me most. Bush is not an idiot, and he understands the promise of ES cell research. He even knows that his opposition to funding the work is bad for the US (but maybe only a little), but he's willing to do it because he knows it will win him votes among people who don't understand the issue. Unfortunately, only about 2% of the general public understands the issue.
As far as the promise being "available through other means or highly hypothetical," the evidence right now is against that. We can cure some diseases in mice using ES cells, and there are things we can only do with ES cells, etc. I would say that if you can cure a disease in a mouse, it's not "highly hypothetical" to think that you could use the same strategy to treat a human.
I agree, I'm waiting for the paper to come out, but you're making the problem sound harder than it actually is. In a spinal cord injury, the neurons themselves are intact, they just get their axons clipped. If you can re-stimulate neuron growth, you should be able to get the circuit to wire up again. Even though the wiring wouldn't even necessarily be exactly correct, with lots of training, the person would probably regain some function. There have been papers in big journals demonstrating that these kinds of injuries can be cured in mice, and I'm pretty sure the claim was never made that new neurons were created.
In certain ways, it's analogous to reattaching an amputated arm. If the surgeons line up and resew the nerve sheath, the axons will grow back out from the spinal cord and reinnervate the muscle. Of course, the spinal cord is more complicated, but if external intervention can make the right conditions, I bet the same process can occur.
As a scientist, I'm very disturbed to see so many intelligent, educated people on/. coming out in defense of the current government's anti-science stance. The claim that bothers me the most, however, is that this result somehow proves that we don't need embryonic stem cells. So some researchers in Korea finally cured a spinal cord injury in a human. Big deal! Try growing a new kidney in a vat for me without using ES cells. Or try growing someone a new hand to replace the one they lost in a car accident. Don't get me wrong, this is a breakthrough, but spinal cord injuries are just the very, very tip of the iceberg. And the current government impedes working on embryonic stem cells for "ethical" reasons, when the cells get thrown in the trash can anyway?
The only fact anyone needs to know is that Bush made a decision to seriously cripple American science because it would win him votes. As a scientist, this pisses me off. Hell, as a taxpaying citizen, this pisses me off--it is the wrong decision for the economic future of the USA. If I were in a wheelchair, I can't imagine how pissed off I'd be.
ask who should be in charge of developing medicine - the government or industry?
That's way too complex of a question to be asked in such a trivial form. Industry is in charge of "developing medicine," and I think it should be, though there are changes that should be made. However, industry should NOT be in charge of scientific research funding, the government should be. And it is, through the NIH, NSF, etc. If industry were in charge of everything, scientific research would only be performed if there was a chance that it would lead to something profitable. Imagine what a disaster that would be; yet Bush is pushing it in that direction.
The thing is, it's like recording from 10 random wires on your computer's motherboard. You might see something interesting, but it won't give you the ability to do complex things with your computer. It's very useful if you are trying to map areas of the brain, but it doesn't let you read someone's thoughts. You have to read my reply in the context of the original post to see my point.
Sorry if I was overly harsh; I understand your point. However, it is not true that microelectrode arrays can not be used to control complex tasks. Nicolelis's work with the monkey robot arm, etc. is the best demonstration of this. However, it is true that this can not be done without training, both on the organism's side, and on the computer's side. I agree the technology will be essentially useless for normal people, but it might be very useful for quadruplegics one day. Interestingly, it serves to point out that probably the main stumbling block to understanding of the human brain is the technology for noninvasive recording of activity (and no, fMRI doesn't count).
I'm sorry, but you obviously have not had any substantial experience with neurobiology, and if you had, you would know that you are dead wrong. EEG is still a very powerful tool, and in my opinion it is highly underutilized. An example is the box anesthesiologists call the "bis," a bispectral analyzer. I've never used one in person, but the basic idea is that you put three electrodes on the scalp, and it gives you a number between 0 and 100. When the person is fully conscious, the box says 100. When you inject a drug, the number starts to fall. When it drops below 50, the person is unconscious, and when it hits 0 the person is dead. "Hats" with 96-electrodes in them are capable of collecting data that can do crazy things, like predict the occurrence of seizures up to ten minutes in advance.
As far as implanted multielectrode arrays providing interesting data, I guess "interesting" is subjective, but they can record individual action potentials from hundreds of neurons with sub-millisecond time resolution, and I'm not sure what more you could ask for than that, aside from increasing the number of neurons recorded. It's certainly enough for a monkey to control a robot arm.
Your statement "At best, you might see a different firing pattern based on external stimulus, and even that is rare" is simply false, however. So false I don't even know where to begin. What do you think every systems neurophysiologist in the world has been doing since the 1920s? To see a different firing pattern based on an external stimulus, you don't even need to stick electrodes into the brain. You can do that by shining a light through the skull and recording reflected light with a digital camera. Do you honestly believe that microelectrode arrays implanted directly into the brain can't do any better than that?
Actually, I think it's pretty well-accepted that bipedalism evolved because it is a more efficient way to travel long distances. Animals that sprint to evade predators, etc., have four legs, while animals that are capable of efficient long-distance travel (e.g. the human and kangaroo) are bipedal. I think (conditioned) humans and kangaroos can beat horses and dogs in long distance foot races. In any case, if you imagine an ape-like human ancestor, with its semi-bipedal gait adapted for tree-climbing, the most efficient way to make a good runner is to transition to a full bipedal gait. Even a couch potato human could easily beat any other primate species in a marathon.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel like I see articles like this all the time, and the underlying current is one of thinking that there are all these engineering breakthroughs that will make things that operate better than the native biological system. Engineers often tend to think this way, not unlike the carpenter who thinks the moon is made of wood. As a biologist, I may be somewhat guilty of the opposite bias, but the truth of the matter is that engineers have seldom been able to make materials and machines that operate as well as their biological counterparts. For example, artificial joints and teeth are all vastly inferior to their biological counterparts, and they will be for a while yet.
My point is that human enhancement will occur, but this article grossly underestimates the role molecular biology will have in the near future. For example, to make soldiers with more endurance, you could try replacing their blood with an artificial substitute, or you could give them recombinant erythropoeitin to increase their red blood cell count. The EPO injections are trivial (ask professional bicyclists), but after years and years of research, we still don't have an acceptable artificial blood substitute.
As far as artificial muscles go...that is just ridiculous. To think that in 30 years we will be implanting stuff like that into peoples' bodies. We will be growing muscle tissue in vats and implanting long before we deal with artifical stuff. However, first we will be using relatively simple methods to locally control muscle growth (like small molecule inhibitors of receptors for hormones that inhibit muscle growth, etc.) That alone will be huge.
I think the real lack of conceptual understanding has to do with the evolutionary perspective. Basically, humans are incredibly good at doing things that humans have to do in the wild, and the only easy enhancements that we can make are "enhancements" that actually decrease our fitness from the hunter-gatherer perspective. For example, stronger muscles require a huge food intake, so they're selected against. In this day and age, that's easy to get around, with steroids or other technologies. It's easy to increase endurance with EPO injections, but there are obvious problems (e.g. death) associated with that as well. People seem to think that it will be as easy to improve cognitive abilities or immune system function, but that's just wrong. Our brains and immune systems already operate pretty much at their optimum, and claims that we could simply inject "nanobots" that improve the function of either are ridiculously ignorant.
I don't know anything about the engineering aspects of it, why they would need to use the resonance frequency instead of another one. My guess is that it's a quantitative issue of getting the thing to fit into a small unit or something, but I agree, it sounded weird to me too.
As far as Braille being a DC phenomenon, I think the idea is that there were supposed to be a small number of braille units, like one for each fingertip, and the person would keep their finger stationary while the letters scrolled across. In the normal situation, the person is actively moving their fingers over the dots, which causes displacement of the fingertip that can be decomposed into sinusoids. Inside the skin of the fingertip, there are different types of nerve endings, which have different frequency response functions. These different types of nerve endings send their signals up to the brain separately, where they're combined into a unified percept, so you can't introspectively tell that that's how it works. I think that Braille perception occurs mainly through the channel mediated by the Merkel disk-type nerve ending, IIRC. In any case, a person can't read Braille if there's no movement to cause vibration. If you try feeling something without moving your finger, you can see how that would be the case.
This has been tried, and my understanding is that it's generally regarded as a failure. The device was called the opticon, and it's featured in the movie "Sneakers." I had it explained to me once by a somatosensory neurophysiologist, and he said that the piezoelectric-based ones essentially vibrated across the fingertips at the resonance frequency of the piezo crystals themselves, and they (like typical engineers) never bothered to consult the neurophysiology literature to find out what part of the frequency spectrum is responsible for Braille perception. He told me that shape memory alloys were being used for this purpose, since they could be driven at the right frequency. This was about six years ago that he told me this.
It's not that I don't agree with you on that, and I would argue that the widespread existence of pseudogenes is an even stronger argument (though it argues for a different kind of "junk" DNA). For example, there are about 1000 olfactory receptor genes in both mice and humans, and something like 99% of them are 1-to-1 orthologs. However, in humans ~750 of them are pseudogenized, which is pretty crazy if you think about it.
However, getting back to the transcriptional regulation thing, I think the argument is more complicated. Let me clarify the argument from ignorance thing I'm saying. An example: I remember someone making a transgenic mouse, and they saw that the promoter region for their gene was something like 8kb long (as in it was 8kb until the next identified gene). So they took 4kb of it, and they simply couldn't get it to work. Then they went back and took the whole 8kb, and it worked. Now it would be absolutely ridiculous to claim that every base in that 8kb were necessary for cell-type specific expression. Most people would probably think there are a few transcription factor binding sites hidden in there. Yet even if one could map out all those sites, it would be a ridiculous logical leap to go on to say that the rest of the DNA there is "junk DNA." No responsible scientist would ever make that claim, despite the fact that we know that some of that 8kb probably has no function. However, that is the claim that is implicitly made whenever a pop scientific article claims "new function found for junk DNA."
To summarize: Your point is, "junk DNA" exists. I agree--there has to be DNA with no function. My point is, with the exception of pseudogenes, no one has been eager to say this is "junk DNA" or that is "junk DNA." And to argue that they have been, as the pop science press does, fundamentally mischaracterizes the attitude of most biologists, who acknowledge that the role of noncoding regions in transcriptional regulation is far from understood, particularly with respect to epigenetics.
The point is that "junk DNA" is a legitimate term that is being used currently in the technical literature.
/. -- thanks!
I'll grant you that it is a semi-legitimate term, in that it has been used before. However, many of those 55 references refute the concept of "junk DNA," and most of them place it in quotes, which is not usually done with technical terms like intron or transcription factor. More importantly, there is a huge disparity between the tiny number of pubmed references and the repeated claims by science writers that the belief that most DNA is "junk DNA" is some sort of predominant paradigm in modern molecular biology. The majority of biologists I've talked to about this topic argue that certain aspects of transcriptional control are complicated and poorly understood, and it's known that noncoding regions are important, so they would be uncomfortable calling something "junk DNA" simply because they did not know its function. When someone figures out that some noncoding region plays a role in transcriptional regulation through whatever mechanism, the pop science press implies that this was some sort of big surprise in the field. The whole RNAi thing was a surprise, but that's because of the mechanism, not because it implies that noncoding regions are important for regulation.
The debate turns around the quantitative issue of what proportion of the genome it is, as well as questions about the selective pressures for preservation/elimination of junk DNA and its potential role in evolution.
The scientific debate, yes. I agree 100%. The debate you and I are having right here revolves around the definition of the term "junk DNA," and whether popular science journalists accurately convey the common opinions in the field or perpetuate strawman arguments to make scientific results seem more profound and novel than they really are. We'll probably never agree, but this is one of the more interesting discussions I've had on
Sort of. I think the main point is that there are regions of DNA that code for actual proteins, but the majority of DNA does not. However, a lot of the noncoding regions are involved in the regulation of the coding regions, and that's important. The only difference between a muscle cell in your heart and a neuron in your brain is in the regulation of those coding regions, so it makes sense that there would be complicated mechanisms involved. This isn't a new insight, by any means. The whole thing with transposons etc. is basically saying that we evolved, and in some sense we're continuing to evolve. A system in which every piece of DNA had an important function is one that can't be modified very easily. Transposons are a mechanism by which evolution can occur more rapidly than by random mutation alone, so it makes sense that there are lots of transposons lying around in supposedly unimportant parts of the genome. Unfortunately, there's no obvious computer metaphor I'm aware of that can clarify how these things work, but you're absolutely right in thinking that the main role of noncoding DNA is in regulating the activity of the coding regions of DNA that make proteins. All the mechanisms involved in that are far from understood, so no molecular biologist I've met has been willing to claim that regions of DNA of unknown function are "junk DNA," since we know that those regions are involved in turning genes on and off, and we don't know exactly how that's done, so it would be ridiculously premature to call something "junk DNA" just because you haven't figured out how it works yet.
It's not exactly nontechnical--it's in Science, after all. As far as the whole "junk" DNA term, 55 pubmed hits is an incredibly small number for something of that generality, and I think the fact that there are so few supports my point that it is not a widely used concept or term in molecular biology. For example, a pubmed search for "intron" brings up 27964 hits. A search for "noncoding" brings up 4577. A search for "microsoft" brings up 746 hits. A search for "Wotan," the germanic name for Thor's father in Norse mythology, brings up 68 hits, which is more than the 55 hits you get for "junk DNA."
I don't think we fundamentally disagree on any scientific issues. I agree with everything you've said scientifically. I think where we disagree is on the pop scientific characterization of the biological community's position on the whole "junk DNA" debate. I'm arguing that it's been fundamentally mischaracterized. As you've said, it's been known from the beginning that noncoding regions play an important role in transcriptional regulation. It's been hypothesized for a long time that there is complicated stuff going on with epigenetic modifications involved in cell differentiation. There are telomeres. We've known about things like pseudogenes for a long time, so everyone has known that there is DNA that does not serve a useful purpose (plus on theoretical grounds, one could argue that a biological system couldn't effectively undergo evolution if its genome were so tightly controlled that every single base pair was important). What I'm saying is that the whole "junk DNA" debate in the pop science literature mischaracterizes the actual debate going on in biology. When you read the Science article, you get the impression that it's some big insight that noncoding regions are important in transcriptional regulation, when we both know that's obviously not a recent development. The idea that there are small noncoding RNAs that are somehow involved in transcriptional or translational regulation is new, but I think it's a fundamental mischaracterization of the position of molecular biologists to claim that they all thought that all that DNA was useless junk DNA. Basically, I'm saying that people think it's sexy when dogma is overturned, so science writers play up the whole "junk DNA" thing and pretend that it's some sort of dogma in molecular biology when it simply isn't. I would also argue that your definition of "junk DNA," which I would call the correct one, is not the definition used in the pop science literature, including the Science article.
I disagree with your definition of "wasteland," but I've never heard either "junk" or "wasteland" in serious scientific conversation, so I'm not sure that matters. The point is, looking at the rest of the article, you're assuming the person who wrote that article has your level of sophistication, when clearly they don't. It keeps saying "Junk DNA does X" and "Junk DNA does Y." The only way that makes sense is if their definition of "junk DNA" is an incredibly naive one that encompasses, if not all noncoding regions, all noncoding regions not involved in direct physical interaction with transcription factors (something closer to your strawman definition). And that is a definition that would be untenable to any biologist on logical principles alone, since the label of "real" junk DNA should really only be applied to things if there's a reason to believe that they really have no function (like pseudogenes with frameshift mutations).
If you haven't gotten this impression, it's because you've been tainted by having too much knowledge of real molecular biology. Read this quote taken directly from Science's writeup
5 Hidden DNA Treasures. Biologists digging through the DNA between the genes and between a gene's protein-coding regions are unearthing new insights into how genomes work. Protein-coding sequences take up less than 10% of the human genome. The rest, previously considered a genetic wasteland, are proving quite influential for gene function.
As you say, the existence of noncoding regulatory elements has been known since the days of the lac operon, which I think is the mid-1960s. So who considered non-coding regions a "genetic wasteland?" Science writers, not scientists.
That is an interesting result, but the paper was from last year, not this year. Also, it's not one of the ones cited by Science in their writeup of "junk" DNA:
(quoted from sciencemag.org):
5 Hidden DNA Treasures. Biologists digging through the DNA between the genes and between a gene's protein-coding regions are unearthing new insights into how genomes work. Protein-coding sequences take up less than 10% of the human genome. The rest, previously considered a genetic wasteland, are proving quite influential for gene function. The wasteland is rich in genetic gems: short stretches of regulatory DNA, transposable elements (sequences that hop from one place to another), coding sequences that yield tiny RNA molecules, and so on.
Figure 4
CREDIT: TIM SMITH
By dissecting regulatory DNA, molecular biologists are learning about the exquisite controls that cause genes to turn on at the right time and in the right place. Short DNA sequences about 500 bases long, called activators, rev up gene expression by binding to regulatory proteins called transcription factors. Subtle differences in the arrangement of transcription factor binding sites cause gene activity to vary in different ways. Several reports this year have implicated activators as the source of genetic changes leading to the emergence of new species.
Junk DNA is chock-full of transposable elements. New work shows that these elements, when present between the coding regions of genes, can slow or halt transcription. They also help make new genes by hopping into existing ones, thereby altering the protein code. One such event involved a key gene for nerve function.
Junk DNA also encodes RNA, already shown to affect gene expression through RNAi (RNA interference). In yeast genes, for example, geneticists discovered that RNAi can block the binding of proteins needed to activate a gene involved in making the amino acid serine.
The quest to uncover more gems is revving up. The National Human Genome Research Institute has a new program, Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, that aims to capture and catalog all functional DNA within this "wasteland," starting first with 30 million bases of protein-coding and noncoding sequences.
E. Pennisi, "Searching for the Genome's Second Code," Science 306, 632 (2004)
A News article on the hunt for noncoding DNAs that control gene expression.
E. Pennisi, "A Fast and Furious Hunt for Gene Regulators," Science 306, 635 (2004)
The ENCODE Project Consortium, "The ENCODE (ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements) Project," Science 306, 636 (2004)
E. Pennisi, "Disposable DNA Puzzles Researchers," Science 304, 1590 (2004)
J. A. Martens et al., "Intergenic Transcription is Required to Repress the Saccharomyces cerevisiae SER3 Gene," Nature 429, 571 (2004)
G. Bejerano, "Ultraconserved Elements in the Human Genome," Science 304, 1321 (2004)
H. H. Kazazian Jr. , "Mobile Elements: Drivers of Genome Evolution," Science 303, 1626 (2004)
A review of how retrotransposons have accumulated within the genome and how this process has been important during evolution.
C. C. Mello and D. Conte Jr., "Revealing the World of RNA Interference," Nature 431, 338 (2004)
N. G. Smith et al., "Evidence for Turnover of Functional Noncoding DNA in Mammalian Genome Evolution," Genomics 84, 806 (2004) [PubMed]
You haven't spoken to many molecular biologists, then. The idea that a substantial fraction of the noncoding DNA has no function is widely accepted, although not proved. And I don't know anybody in the field who would dismiss the idea as "absurd."
You're misunderstanding my point. What I'm calling absurd is the idea that DNA is unimportant BECAUSE it's non-coding. Not the idea that unimportant non-coding DNA exists (which I explicitly stated at the end of my post). All of the supposed excitement about any discovery involving so-called "junk" DNA is traceable back to the first interpretation, which as far as I know, no biologist anywhere has ever believed. The only reason this interpretation continues to exist, as far as I can tell, is because it is perpetuated by ignorant science writers who claim that there are biologists somewhere who believe this.
As a biologist, I have to say that I'm incredibly disappointed by the inclusion of "junk" DNA in the list. I don't know what specific research results they're referring to when they say there's a breakthrough there, but the entire concept of "junk" DNA is absurd. I've never met a single molecular biologist who believed that non-coding regions were unimportant, and in fact it's been known for at least forty years that non-coding regions are important in regulation of gene expression. Maybe what bothers me most is the term "junk" DNA, which I've never actually heard another scientist use. It's a fictitious concept perpetuated by science writers so that they can feign surprise every time someone can attribute a function to a non-coding piece of DNA (and claim that the scientific community was surprised as well).
All that aside, I'm sure there are big breakthroughs in our understanding of the role of non-coding regions, and it probably deserves to be mentioned. However, one important point to make is that in spite of all this, there ARE parts of the genome that are unquestionably useless evolutionary vestiges. This is not necessarily mysterious, but it is interesting (for example, providing what is in my mind the most convincing evidence of evolution).
I think so, because they found the remains of something like six Homo floresiensis-es.
Well, I guess that's another way to put it. I agree with you that legal risk is a big part of it, especially for pharmaceutical companies doing clinical trials. But no matter how you look at it, ethics ARE a huge scientific setback. I heard about a neuroscientist once who wanted to get wires implanted in his brain and left there for a year. It's something they do to epileptics before surgery all the time, but they only leave them there for 12 hours or a couple of days. He wanted them in for a whole year, and he wanted to get access to the data afterwards. He found surgeons who were willing to implant them, lined everything else up, and in the end was unwilling to get ethical approval from the IRB (institutional review board). It might be ill-advised, but unethical? We can risk human life for manned space flight when robots would do, or send soldiers to their death for oil, but we can't risk human life to understand the brain? That's the kind of ethics I'm talking about.
Actually, no, it was discovered in France. While the complete research was done between a French (Montaigner) and an American scientist (Gallo), the actual discovery of the virus (not disease, virus) was done at l'Institut Pasteur by Montaigner and his team.
Ack, sorry about that one. You're right. I thought that HIV had been one of the HTLV retroviruses that Gallo's group had previously discovered, and Montagnier connected it to the disease. I used to work on HIV, a long time ago, and my memory of the historical details has faded since then.
And don't be lured, for pure science US doesn't lead the world in biomedical. The US leads the world in APPLIED biomedical. For fondamental research, many countries (such as France with Institut Pasteur) have roughly the same level and cooperate enough that none is leading.
Well, I agree with you that the US lead in applied biomedical science is more obvious, but I don't know how you can say that the US is not the world leader in basic biological science. I don't mean to imply that the best science comes from the US, only that the largest quantity of good science does. Nations like France and Germany have elite institutes like Institut Pasteur or the Max Planck that are as good as any institute in the US, but the US has more of them. Because there's a lot more funding here. And half the people in science in the US are from other countries anyway. This is a pretty commonly-held viewpoint among professional scientists. I can't find the citation now, but there was a thing in Nature or Science a while ago about how americans are afraid the US is starting to lose its dominant position (which is another way of saying that the US is in the dominant position). The article said that it isn't that the US is falling, but that other nations are starting to catch up. Which I think is great. Science is an international pursuit, and although I'm from the US, my allegiance is to science, not American science.
Also, it's important to note that HIV doesn't pick off the old, weak, and sick. It takes the young and healthy people, in the prime of their lives. Having that segment of the population removed in large numbers totally destroys a society, especially "developing nations" in places like Africa.
The reason this work is coming out of Brazil is the same reason the spinal cord story earlier this week came out of Korea. Namely, ethics. The single greatest hindrance to scientific advancement in the US. In the US, it would be unethical to conduct this study, because you couldn't let a group of people go without HIV meds for a year. That would be unethical. It's the same way it's unethical to test experimental therapies on patients with terminal cancer. Since their disease is terminal, it can be argued that they are consenting out of desperation, and the researcher is therefore taking advantage of them.
In any case, dendritic cells were discovered in the US, HIV was discovered in the US, etc., so it can't be argued that the giant money machine of US science didn't contribute. It also can't be argued that the US does not lead the world in biomedical science. This is because we spend so much money on it that the best scientists from all over the world are concentrated here. However, I agree with you that this is not the same as the idiotic statement that we are subsidizing other nations' healthcare.
IAAB, and I find this post extremely interesting because it demonstrates the lack of information/understanding /. readers have on the issue.
(1) stem cells can be cultured from adult hosts through hormonal treatments
Some stem cells can be taken from adult hosts, such as the ones they use to do a bone marrow transplant. However, these cells are already partially differentiated, and they can't be redifferentiated into any arbitrary tissue (studies showing that they could were later found to be incorrect).
(2) they have none of the rejection issues that embryonic stem cells do
This is not true. The issues are the same. If you take adult stem cells (e.g. bone marrow) from someone else, there will be rejection issues.
The whole point of all this research is that ES cells are the least differentiated, while stem cells taken from an adult are partially differentiated. There is a lot of work going on that attempts to de-differentiate adult stem cells (or other cells) into ES cells, which could be re-differentiated into any arbitrary tissue. For example, to take blood and differentiate it into liver cells. If one could perform this de-differentiation, one could take cells from a person and make them into 100% compatible organ tissue for reimplantation.
This process of cellular de-differentiation has been falsely labeled "cloning" by GOP spinmeisters, despite scientists' best efforts to get people to understand that it is not cloning, merely a process which enables many things, including cloning.
Anyway, to get back to the point, the goal is to de-differentiate cells from a patient into ES cells, then use those ES cells to treat the patient. Because the de-differentiation process is very inefficient at this point, it's easier to get started doing research with ES cells that are lying around waiting to be thrown away. This is why we need to get unused ES cells from fertility clinics, because the in vitro de-differentiation procedures are currently very low efficiency.
As a second point, the two opinions that
1. destroying ES cells is destroying human life, and
2. adult stem cells are as good as ES cells without the drawbacks
are mutually exclusive. If ES cells were human life (which they simply are not, but I can understand the confusion), then you're defining human life as a population of cells with the capacity to differentiate into any tissue. If I don't have any of those in my body, then I guess I'm not alive. Alternatively, if a population of adult stem cells were found to possess this capacity, then using those would be murder. When the original paper came out incorrectly showing that there were blood cells that could differentiate into any cell type, that would have implied that every blood transfusion every performed would have been a mass murder of thousands and thousands of innocent people! I could go on and on, but basically, the opinion that ES cells represent human life simply doesn't make sense.
Impeding and not funding are different things. An imposition is banning or blocking or imposing harsh regulations.
If they just declined to fund research proposals involving ES cells, you would be right. However, the ban on federal funding of ES cell research is more restrictive than that. Most labs have several sources of funding and multiple projects going on simultaneously, and almost all basic science biology labs get funding from the government. If I were in a lab doing ES cell research, even work that was privately funded, I would essentially have to work in a separate facility from everyone else. I couldn't use the lab centrifuge, geiger counter, refrigerator, incubator, etc., because those were bought with federal dollars. On a practical level, it's extremely difficult, if not possible, to work under those conditions. So in practical terms, it is a ban.
The bottom line is that the issue here is the future development of "factories" of human bits and pieces. It frightens people. Embryonic stem cells are thrown away, but we both know that in short order they would be harvested efficently and clinically with absolutely no regard to their nature: much like antibodies or animal specimens are harvested today.
That's a silly, alarmist view. Or maybe it's true. Maybe ES cells will lead to both matrix-style baby factories AND the cures to terrible diseases. Couldn't we just ban baby factories?
It is hardly disturbing that the government would elect not to fund a practice which is very fairly consider contraversial for a pay-off that is available through other means or highly hypotethical. Bush has said repeatedly that if other avenues are exhausted or the circumstances warrant it a revisitation of the issue can be made.
What you're saying here is partially misguided and partially factually incorrect. I would argue that the only reason it is controversial at all is because politicians decided to make an issue out of it. We've been throwing the cells in the trash for years, and nobody cared! Bush wants to appear somewhat flexible on the ES cell issue because he KNOWS that the ban will be lifted in the future, because it will very quickly become politically unpopular once the Swiss (or whoever) cure diabetes (or whatever). This, really, is what bothers me most. Bush is not an idiot, and he understands the promise of ES cell research. He even knows that his opposition to funding the work is bad for the US (but maybe only a little), but he's willing to do it because he knows it will win him votes among people who don't understand the issue. Unfortunately, only about 2% of the general public understands the issue.
As far as the promise being "available through other means or highly hypothetical," the evidence right now is against that. We can cure some diseases in mice using ES cells, and there are things we can only do with ES cells, etc. I would say that if you can cure a disease in a mouse, it's not "highly hypothetical" to think that you could use the same strategy to treat a human.
I agree, I'm waiting for the paper to come out, but you're making the problem sound harder than it actually is. In a spinal cord injury, the neurons themselves are intact, they just get their axons clipped. If you can re-stimulate neuron growth, you should be able to get the circuit to wire up again. Even though the wiring wouldn't even necessarily be exactly correct, with lots of training, the person would probably regain some function. There have been papers in big journals demonstrating that these kinds of injuries can be cured in mice, and I'm pretty sure the claim was never made that new neurons were created.
In certain ways, it's analogous to reattaching an amputated arm. If the surgeons line up and resew the nerve sheath, the axons will grow back out from the spinal cord and reinnervate the muscle. Of course, the spinal cord is more complicated, but if external intervention can make the right conditions, I bet the same process can occur.
As a scientist, I'm very disturbed to see so many intelligent, educated people on /. coming out in defense of the current government's anti-science stance. The claim that bothers me the most, however, is that this result somehow proves that we don't need embryonic stem cells. So some researchers in Korea finally cured a spinal cord injury in a human. Big deal! Try growing a new kidney in a vat for me without using ES cells. Or try growing someone a new hand to replace the one they lost in a car accident. Don't get me wrong, this is a breakthrough, but spinal cord injuries are just the very, very tip of the iceberg. And the current government impedes working on embryonic stem cells for "ethical" reasons, when the cells get thrown in the trash can anyway?
The only fact anyone needs to know is that Bush made a decision to seriously cripple American science because it would win him votes. As a scientist, this pisses me off. Hell, as a taxpaying citizen, this pisses me off--it is the wrong decision for the economic future of the USA. If I were in a wheelchair, I can't imagine how pissed off I'd be.
ask who should be in charge of developing medicine - the government or industry?
That's way too complex of a question to be asked in such a trivial form. Industry is in charge of "developing medicine," and I think it should be, though there are changes that should be made. However, industry should NOT be in charge of scientific research funding, the government should be. And it is, through the NIH, NSF, etc. If industry were in charge of everything, scientific research would only be performed if there was a chance that it would lead to something profitable. Imagine what a disaster that would be; yet Bush is pushing it in that direction.
The thing is, it's like recording from 10 random wires on your computer's motherboard. You might see something interesting, but it won't give you the ability to do complex things with your computer. It's very useful if you are trying to map areas of the brain, but it doesn't let you read someone's thoughts. You have to read my reply in the context of the original post to see my point.
Sorry if I was overly harsh; I understand your point. However, it is not true that microelectrode arrays can not be used to control complex tasks. Nicolelis's work with the monkey robot arm, etc. is the best demonstration of this. However, it is true that this can not be done without training, both on the organism's side, and on the computer's side. I agree the technology will be essentially useless for normal people, but it might be very useful for quadruplegics one day. Interestingly, it serves to point out that probably the main stumbling block to understanding of the human brain is the technology for noninvasive recording of activity (and no, fMRI doesn't count).
I'm sorry, but you obviously have not had any substantial experience with neurobiology, and if you had, you would know that you are dead wrong. EEG is still a very powerful tool, and in my opinion it is highly underutilized. An example is the box anesthesiologists call the "bis," a bispectral analyzer. I've never used one in person, but the basic idea is that you put three electrodes on the scalp, and it gives you a number between 0 and 100. When the person is fully conscious, the box says 100. When you inject a drug, the number starts to fall. When it drops below 50, the person is unconscious, and when it hits 0 the person is dead. "Hats" with 96-electrodes in them are capable of collecting data that can do crazy things, like predict the occurrence of seizures up to ten minutes in advance.
As far as implanted multielectrode arrays providing interesting data, I guess "interesting" is subjective, but they can record individual action potentials from hundreds of neurons with sub-millisecond time resolution, and I'm not sure what more you could ask for than that, aside from increasing the number of neurons recorded. It's certainly enough for a monkey to control a robot arm.
Your statement "At best, you might see a different firing pattern based on external stimulus, and even that is rare" is simply false, however. So false I don't even know where to begin. What do you think every systems neurophysiologist in the world has been doing since the 1920s? To see a different firing pattern based on an external stimulus, you don't even need to stick electrodes into the brain. You can do that by shining a light through the skull and recording reflected light with a digital camera. Do you honestly believe that microelectrode arrays implanted directly into the brain can't do any better than that?
Actually, I think it's pretty well-accepted that bipedalism evolved because it is a more efficient way to travel long distances. Animals that sprint to evade predators, etc., have four legs, while animals that are capable of efficient long-distance travel (e.g. the human and kangaroo) are bipedal. I think (conditioned) humans and kangaroos can beat horses and dogs in long distance foot races. In any case, if you imagine an ape-like human ancestor, with its semi-bipedal gait adapted for tree-climbing, the most efficient way to make a good runner is to transition to a full bipedal gait. Even a couch potato human could easily beat any other primate species in a marathon.