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Hi. I am Art Caplan, from the NYU Langone Medical Center, Division of Medical Ethics. What is going on in the field of regenerative medicine with respect to stem cell research? We have recently had yet another in a long series of scandals involving claims about the ability to manipulate stem cells in ways that turned out to be utterly untrue and fraudulent. In this case, a scientist in Japan said that she was able to make adult stem cells revert to embryo-like stem cells with some pretty simple chemical exposures. It was announced in leading journals and covered extensively by the media. Then she had to admit that no one could duplicate what she had done and confessed that she had made it up. This is not the first time that this has happened in the stem cell field. Going back all the way to right after Dolly the sheep was cloned, people were trying to clone human embryos to see if they could get cloned human embryos from stem cells. A group in Korea announced that they had made the first cloned human embryos. Nobody could replicate what they did, and they ultimately had to retract their claims published in leading scientific journals that they had cloned human embryos. Stem cell research seems again and again to go off the rails when it comes to the ethics of research. What is going on and why is that so? I think there are a couple of reasons why this particular area has gotten itself in so much hot water. One is that there is a relative shortage of funding. Because of the controversial nature of cloning -- getting stem cells from human embryos -- some avenues of funding have dried up, and it puts pressure on people to come up with other ways to try to make human stem cells. With less funding, there is more pressure. Sometimes people cut corners. I think that can l

Scientists reported Wednesday that they had taken a significant step toward altering the fundamental alphabet of life - creating an organism with an expanded artificial genetic code in its DNA. The accomplishment might eventually lead to organisms that can make medicines or industrial products that cells with only the natural genetic code cannot. The scientists behind the work at the Scripps Research Institute have already formed a company to try to use the technique to develop new antibiotics, vaccines and other products, though a lot more work needs to be done before this is practical. The work also gives some support to the concept that life can exist elsewhere in the universe using genetics different from those on Earth. "This is the first time that you have had a living cell manage an alien genetic alphabet," said Steven A. Benner, a researcher in the field at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Fla., who was not involved in the new work. But the research, published online by the journal Nature, is bound to raise safety concerns and questions about whether humans are playing God. The new paper could intensify calls for greater regulation of the budding field known as synthetic biology, which involves the creation of biological systems intended for specific purposes.

PUNE: From reporting important findings on parental care among Arthropods to establishing the antiquity of metazoans (multi cell organisms), the Department of Geology and Palaeontology at the city-based Agharkar Research Institute (ARI) has come a long way in emerging as a leader in the study of trace fossils in the country. The department, whose golden jubilee celebrations begin on Friday, has made landmark contributions in the study of fossils in the past 50 years. For future research, the department aims to focus on studying the secondary porosity of rocks for exploring hydrocarbon resources as well as in establishing modern analogues to their fossil counterparts. Rajani Panchang-Dhumal, a project scientist at the department, said, "The Geology and Palaeontology department at ARI hosts a large fossil repository with over 7,000 type specimens in its collection. This repository is consulted regularly, both by research scholars as well as scientists from India and abroad. This national facility is now undergoing modernization and will soon be available on the web." [Visit Koyal Info Group Mag - Blog] Why study fossils? After a living organism died, it became buried under the ground in the layers of sediment. Once these layers become rock, the remains are said to be fossilized. They tell us about the organisms that lived on Earth from the time of the oldest fossils, about 3.8 billion years ago, to the present. By studying fossils we can learn not only about the creatures and plants of the distant past, but how they grew, what they ate, how they interacted, and many aspects of their behavior. Read Full Article Here…