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Florida, which has a well-funded, sustained program, recently reported that its high school smoking rate fell to just 8.6 percent in 2013, far below national rates. Alaska, with another well-funded program, reported reducing high school smoking to 10.6 percent in 2013. From 2001–2010, the New York State Tobacco Control...
In California, which has the nation's longest-running tobacco control program, lung cancer rates have declined four times faster than in the rest of the United States.
Studies have also found that tobacco prevention programs deliver a strong return on investment. A 2011 study in the American Journal of Public Health found that Washington state saved more than $5 in tobacco-related hospitalization costs for every $1 spent during the first 10 years of its program. A February 2013 study...
Comprehensive state tobacco prevention and cessation programs include the following key components: (1) coordinated state and community interventions aimed at preventing youth and young adults from starting to use tobacco, promoting quitting among current tobacco users and eliminating exposure to secondhand smoke; (2) ...
While the nation has made enormous progress in reducing smoking, tobacco use remains the number one cause of preventable death in the United States. Every one of these deaths is entirely preventable if we do what we know works. What's needed is the political will to fully implement proven strategies, including funding ...
Pakistan did not adequately address the key US concerns, including the threat posed by the Haqqani Network and other terrorist groups including Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Tayyiba that enjoyed safe haven with Pakistan.
Though Pakistan continued military operations to eradicate terrorist safe havens in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, their impact on all terrorist groups was uneven, said the State Department report.
The US on Wednesday said the Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba militant groups continue to pose a regional threat and that Pakistan did not adequately address America’s concerns on terrorism in 2017.
Although al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been seriously degraded, remnants of its global leadership, as well as its regional affiliate al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), continued to operate from remote locations in the region that historically have been exploited as safe havens, the US State Departme...
The report notes that from August to December 2017, the Trump administration placed a pause on spending new Foreign Military Financing for Pakistan, holding these funds until Pakistan addressed key US concerns, including the threat posed by the Haqqani Network and other terrorist groups that enjoyed safe haven with Pak...
Although Pakistan’s National Action Plan calls to “ensure that no armed militias are allowed to function in the country,” several terrorist groups focused on attacks outside of the country continued to operate from Pakistani soil in 2017, it said. These groups included the Haqqani Network, besides the LeT and JeM which...
According to the report, the Pakistani military and security forces undertook operations against groups that conducted attacks within Pakistan, such as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.
Even as the Pakistani government pledged support to political reconciliation between the Afghan government and the Afghan Taliban it did not restrict the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani Network from operating in Pakistan-based safe havens and threatening US and Afghan forces in Afghanistan. “Pakistan did not take sufficient...
Pakistan detained Hafiz Saeed, leader of LeT and its front organisation Jamaat ud-Dawa (JuD), in January 2017, but a Pakistani court ordered his release from house arrest in November 2017, it said. In its report the State Department rued that progress remained slow on the Pakistan government’s efforts to implement UN s...
The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), it said, continued to note with concern that Pakistan’s outstanding gaps in the implementation of the UN Security Council ISIS and al-Qaeda sanctions regime have not been resolved, and that UN-listed entities – including LeT and its affiliates – were not effectively prohibited fr...
“Although Pakistan’s laws technically comply with international anti-money laundering/countering the financing of terrorism standards, authorities failed to uniformly implement UN sanctions related to designated entities and individuals such as LeT and its affiliates, which continued to make use of economic resources a...
Sybron Dental Specialties Inc. said it acquired Swiss company Hawe Neos Holding SA for $45 million to expand the Orange company's dental-products business in Europe.
Sybron, which was spun off from Apogent Technologies Inc. last year, said it expects the purchase to add one cent a share to its profit in fiscal 2002 and as much as 5 cents the following year.
The purchase will give Sybron a business that has about $17 million in revenue a year.
Sybron shares, which have risen 23% this year, fell 79 cents to $20.80 on the New York Stock Exchange.
Professor Douglas Melton introduces the astounding advances being made today to unlock the powerful potential hidden within our own cells.
I’m Doug Melton; I’m the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Natural Sciences at Harvard University, and the Co-Director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.
Well, I’m glad to talk to you today about an exciting new biology in medicine. It’s what I call the biology of regenerative medicine and it’s going to change your life. It’s going to lead to longer and healthier lives for humans in a way that was really unimaginable just a few decades ago.
Let me put this in perspective. In the last century, infectious disease caused enormous suffering and harm to many millions of people. A simple infection like whooping cough or diphtheria or any kind of bacterial infection, led to millions of lost lives and suffering until the discovery of antibiotics. Once antibiotics...
I’m going to talk to you about a biology that will similarly change our lives. It’s a biology based in stem cells and genetics and it has to do with understanding with how our bodies are made, maintained and replenished, and it will also teach us something deeply important about disease. Most interestingly perhaps, it ...
To put this in a little more perspective, let me remind you that in the last century, beginning with Mendel’s discovery of genes and genetic inheritance, we learned about the genes we inherit from our mother and father affect who we are. That was reduced to understand that genes are made of DNA, the chemical stuff of g...
So what has been lost in this discussion up until now, is the idea that the real unit of biology is not DNA, but is instead a cell. Cells are alive, cells make more cells and cells are the units that allow us to harness the future of our bodies and regenerative medicine.
So let me move to this point by saying that I think in the 21st century, biology will usher in advances in regenerative medicine and stem cells will be at the center of discovery and application in that new field. In order to make sense of this, we have to dig into a little bit of a kind of biology called Developmental...
In the last century there were two important advances in biomedicine. One was the discovery of antibiotics, which made it possible to then cure people of these what we consider to be common bacterial infections and led to so much disease and suffering.
The second major finding of the last century was an understanding of genes. This began with Mendel’s working on peas and understanding that our parents each give us some units of genetic inheritance which came to be known as genes. That led then to the finding that genes are made of DNA and that was concluded at the en...
But this, we should remember, is sort of like learning the letters of the alphabet or the words involved in a language. And language and books are much more than the letters of the alphabet or the words, it’s the way they’re combined. And that combination, to make the analogy with biology, occurs in cells. Therefore ce...
Let me explain that a bit more. I’m going to make the case that in this century, the 21st century, biology will usher in advances in regenerative medicine. Stem cells will be at the center of this discovery and application. To make sense of this, let’s remind ourselves what happens during normal human development. It i...
In this picture here, you see the first spark that starts human development, that is fertilization. You see a large yellow egg there, a human egg, with many sperm trying to fertilize it. Only one sperm wins, one of those blue-headed sperm and that then leads to the first step, which will be cell division.
Cell division occurs rapidly over the first few days of development and as you see in this picture, there are two cells that are formed from the fertilized egg. Development proceeds a pace and forms an early stage of development called the blastocyst. This is quite an important stage and I’ll come back to it later, but...
Within a few hours, development proceeds quite quickly and we can see here by one month later, the basic body form is already apparent. One can see the beginning of arms and legs, the heart, the eye and the facial cavities are starting to form. It’s just a short time after that, at 46 days, when it’s obvious then that ...
To conclude then, by 70 days, you see something that’s clearly human. So within just 70 days, one has gone from a fertilized egg to something that’s clearly human, not yet fully developed, but clearly human. For me, this is one of the most mysterious and wondrous things about biology. How does that fertilized egg make ...
Now, it’s not a human being yet, but it’s clearly on its way to being a human. And I like to sort of contrast this with things that we’re commonly amazed by in our life. Things like an iPod or a computer are not nearly as wondrous to me as how this fertilized egg made all of these body parts in just 70 days.
Well to look at that in a little bit more detail, let’s consider this picture where there are two aspects to human development. The first is obvious, is growth. Cells not only divide, but they have to increase in size and then growth occurs inside the womb of the mother. But the second and the one we’ll focus on today ...
Here you see in the bottom of this picture, arrows pointing to the fact that different cells of the early embryo will give rise to different kinds of cells in the adult. The blue cells are representing nerve, the red cells there in the middle are blood cells and at the bottom is an organ, the pancreas, which makes insu...
This picture shows, on the right, a fully formed cartoon of a human. It’s estimated that there are about 350 different kinds of cells in the human body. And as you see then, the puzzle is, how do these cells arise from a single fertilized egg?
In the last century, we’ve learned quite a bit about that. The first thing we know is that there are approximately 25,000 human genes, bits of DNA that code for proteins, that make up all of the proteins found in our cells. Now the puzzle then for a developmental biologist is to figure out how do those 25,000 genes get...
We don’t understand that in detail yet, but that’s an exciting and important problem for the next generation of biologists. How do you take 25,000 genes and make all the different cells in the body? I sometimes think an interesting analogy for that is, when you go to a Chinese restaurant you can often see hundreds of d...
Now, an important point discovered just in the last few decades is that while cells become different, they are differentiated as shown in this picture. They retain the capacity to do everything else. This is quite an amazing potential and it was demonstrated or identified by an important experiment called cloning. Many...
This next picture then shows the result of the first cloned animal. On the right, you see 30 cloned adult frogs. These are genetically identical; it’s as if they are twins many times over. They were prepared from a mating of the two albino or white frogs shown in the middle part of the picture. And in that part of the ...
Let’s have a look in a little more detail with a cartoon of how that’s actually done because it’s an important experiment showing how one can reveal the potential of all of the genes in our cells. In this little cartoon movie, you’ll see a pipette and remove the nucleus that contains all of the genes from this… from th...
I thought it would be nice to see what does this look like in real life. So now I have a real life movie of a cloning experiment we’ve done with mice. It’s the same procedure, but in real life.
Here you see on the left, a holding pipette, which just provides a little suction to hold onto the egg. The egg is inside and the injection pipette on the right has to penetrate a membrane. That membrane looks sort of like the rings around Saturn. That egg has got this protective membrane and the pipette is drilling a ...
So now we have the cytoplasm, which is the recipient for the cloning experiment. We’ll get that one out of the way. And now I’ll show in the next part of this picture a new egg coming in which has been nucleated, and now we’re going to inject a nucleus from a skin cell into that egg. Here again, it’s held with the hold...
We’ll do that again. We can line these up like a factor and do them one at a time and you can to tens of these at once and then reimplant the injected egg into a mouse to give rise to the cloned animal.
Now it looks relatively easy here. It’s not something you could do at home, but with practice, you can become quite an expert at this cloning procedure. As a result of that, at least one famous clone has been made, that’s the famous sheep, Dolly. You see here in the next picture, a picture of Dolly and her surrogate mo...
After that finding, it’s been possible to clone a number of kinds of animals. Here you see Dolly up on the top left in the picture, a horse cloned on the right, a dog on the bottom left, on the bottom right is a whole set of clones obtained from one cow. You might ask yourself, why would you close cows? Well, the answe...
So in this point of our understanding, scientists have been able now to clone quite a large number of animals. Shown in this picture is a list of those cloned recently: sheep, cow, goats, pigs, rabbits, horses, ferrets. I know of also common pets, cats and dogs.
What’s missing from this list is humans. I believe it’s possible to clone humans. It hasn’t been done, but that’s something we should think about and discuss is what would be the value on cloning humans and whether or not our society should allow that to occur.
For a biologist, however, cloning humans is not the interesting challenge. We’ve already learned what we want from the cloning experiment and that’s summarized here. What we can conclude from cloning is the following: the nucleus of the cells of your body, many, if not all, of the differentiated cells in your body can ...
So what I’d like you to remember from this is that many cells in your body have this astounding potential. They have locked in their nucleus the capacity to make any other part of your body. Regenerative medicine is all about harnessing that potential to make new cells and to treat and cure diseases.
Let’s go now to this problem of cell differentiation. We’re obviously not going to begin cloning people to make more cell types. What we have to do is make use of the conclusion from cloning to understand how we can harness and manipulate our own cells. That has to do with this issue of cell differentiation. So as I’ve...
How might we get at that? Well the reason we want to get at it, of course, is if we could do that, we could replace damaged or diseased body parts. If one’s in an accident and loses some tissue or an organ or as is more common, suffering from a disease, a liver disease or a heart disease or a disease of the skin, one s...
Now our bodies, as you may know, have the capacity to do some replenishment on their own. Not all parts of our body, but some of them are constantly replenished. You probably know, as shown here in this picture, that your skins turns over and is constantly renewed. When you got up in the mirror… or when you got up this...
That’s also true for our intestine, that is, our gut. Our gut cells are sloughed off at a very rapid rate and are constantly being repaired and replaced. So our body has the capacity to renew and replenish some of our tissues, but clearly, we don’t have an obvious capacity for major organ replacement. If you were to lo...
So let me now talk a bit about regeneration. What is regeneration and what do we mean by it? This picture here is a painting from Rubens of a Greek myth. Zeus punished Prometheus for giving fire to humans. And as you see in this picture, they’ve chained Prometheus to a rock and then sent an Eagle to peck away at Promet...
We want to therefore understand really this process of regeneration, as I’ve said. Why is it that the liver can regenerate and other tissues don’t? So regeneration then is the reactivation of the normal process of development and we would like to use it to restore missing or damaged tissues.
Now as I’ve indicated and as you know, we as humans aren’t very good at regeneration. But there is one vertebrate, one animal with a backbone, which is extremely good at regeneration. It’s what I would call, the kind of regeneration, an expert. And here’s a picture of this species. These are salamanders. Common salaman...
So in this picture here, you’re going to see a cartoon of the normal process of regeneration sped up by time lapse photography. So here, a limb had been amputated and you see taking pictures every few days, a new limb growing back. Now a cartoon of what this looks like is shown here, and if you are a little queasy, you...
You can see here, the bone in white and the muscle in red is starting to be changed to dedifferentiate, to become unspecialized, and create a mound of cells that will then go on to grow and recapitulate or reproduce a normal process of development. That takes a couple of months’ time. New cartilage and bone forms, ther...
In real life, the time lapse pictures shown here in still form, shows that if one cuts through the upper arm, through the radius and ulna, or cuts here through the humerus, one can see that in both cases, by 70 days, the animal has regenerated its entire limbs.
The point I’d like to make here is that vertebrate animals have in their cells, the capacity to make any new part of their body and Salamanders have figured out how to do this on a large scale. A great challenge for us now is to figure out how we could learn to harness those processes to use them in human biology.
If we look forward to how that’s going to be done, it is, as I’ve indicated already, going to begin with learning about cell turnover. And that leads us to a very special kind of cell called a stem cell. I’ve already mentioned that cells in your body are not static, that they turn over. This picture here shows that our...
Well, what’s responsible for this turn over? How are these cells replenished? There are two ways our body does that. This slide shows that it’s done either with a stem cell or let’s look at the bottom of this picture at the division of fully differentiated cells.
In the bottom picture, let’s imagine a pancreas or a kidney cell which just divides to give rise to two more kidney cells. The top is really what I want to focus on today, which is a stem cell. These cells are very unusual because they have the capacity to make more of themselves, to self-renew, and to give rise to dau...
So how our cells in out body are replenished. There are two ways this is done. One way is for a fully specialized differentiated cell to just divide and make two. That happens for cells in our pancreas and in the kidney, for example. But for many tissues in our body, there’s a special cell called a “stem cell.” That ce...
I want to focus a bit on this first one of self-renewal. I’ve been talking about how we renew our bodies, well, this stem cell does that on its own, that is one cell can make more of itself.
If we can understand how a stem cell makes more of itself that should deeply inform our thinking about how we can renew, not only a cell, but tissues and organs. So we’re very keen to understand this process of self-renewal.
A second thing a stem cell can do is make specialized or differentiated cells. Probably the best known of these is a bone marrow stem cell, a blood stem cell, which is given to cancer victims. And this cell makes all of the tissues of the blood, all of the… the picture here showing all the different kinds of blood cell...
Now among stem cells, there’s my favorite one, the one that has truly special abilities and that’s called an embryonic stem cell. An embryonic stem cell can not only self-renew like all other stem cells, but its special capacity is to make all different kinds of cells. Indeed, it can make blood, it can make nerve, it c...
Now one thing I’ve skipped over here is, where do these especially interesting and important embryonic stem cells come from? Where do we get human embryonic stem cells? Let me show you that those are derived from a sort of complicated procedure making use of material from in vitro fertilization clinics. So as you proba...
It’s estimated that there are about 400,000 such eggs in freezers in the United States. My colleagues and I use those to derive human embryonic stem cells. We derive them from fully informed consent, where the sperm and egg donor have said that rather than throw that material away; why not use it to try to find more ab...
So what you see is that we can take a human fertilized egg, allow it to develop to the blastocyst stage, which I’d mentioned before, in a petri dish, and then from the inside of that, culture out and derive human embryonic stem cells. The inner cell mass of this culture blastocyst is removed and put in a petri dish and...
It is worth noting that this has raised ethical questions which have important political implications and something for further discussion. Nonetheless, I believe that it’s perfectly justified, in fact, it’s something we should certainly do to try to alleviate human suffering by making use of this material which would ...
I’m glad to say that in recent years there’s been another possibility of creating a human stem cell, what we call a pluripotent stem cell, which has many, but not exactly all of the properties of the human embryonic stem cell. And this one doesn’t have the ethical complications of beginning with a human fertilized egg....
In the next few years, we may be able to find ways of turning these into a fully potent cell, just like a human embryonic stem cell. And that would be wonderful because it would then remove the need for dealing with these human fertilized eggs.
Well, what do we do with these stem cells? As I said, there are two kinds of things we want to think about using them for. One is to make tissues and organs, as I’ve already described with the human heart. But let’s talk about how we can use them to replace tissues in the diseased state and/or use them as tools to disc...
This requires that I remind you where we are in biomedicine in this era. We’ve largely conquered the problem for many, but not all infectious diseases. What our society suffers from now, to a large extent is what I would call degenerative diseases. These are diseases where parts of our brain and our nervous system dege...
What all of these degenerative diseases have in common is that they have a genetic makeup that inclines the patient to get the disease, but doesn’t guarantee that they will get it. There’s another factor, an environmental factor, which you could say, pushes a person over the edge and causes them to get the disease. A g...
We know this is true furthermore because there are many cases of identical twins, two people with the same genes, where one has one of these degenerative diseases and the other one doesn’t showing therefore that there is an as yet unknown environmental factor that therefore causes one to get juvenile diabetes.
So I’d now like to address the potential of stem cells to replace tissues and to use them as tools to discover drugs for degenerative diseases.
I haven’t talked much about degenerative diseases, so let me explain what I mean by them.
Degenerative diseases are diseases where a particular cell type in the body becomes dysfunctional or destroyed. In the case of neuro degeneration, that would be in the fore brain, basil neurons in the fore brain are lost in the disease known as Alzheimer’s. In Parkinson’s disease, it’s a different neuron. A neuron in t...
Another disease of the degeneration would be cardiovascular disease. A disease of the heart tissue or the blood vessels which degenerate over time leading to heart attacks and possibly death. The disease I work on, diabetes is one where our body’s metabolism can’t function anymore often because a cell in the pancreas t...
I’d like to talk then about how we can treat these diseases with stem cells by focusing on the fact that in each of these cases, a single kind of cell is lost. In the case of diabetes, the cell which is lost is a cell in the pancreas called the beta cell, which makes insulin. There are two types of diabetes. There’s ad...
It might be worth pointing out that all of these degenerative diseases like diabetes have an enormous social and health consequence on the individual, but also a really enormous economic consequence on our society. It’s estimated, for example by the U.S. government, that the cost of treating diabetes in America runs on...
So back to diabetes. ese islets, which contain the insulin producing cells within them.
In a Type I diabetic, as I’ve said, the body attacks those blue cells and eliminates them. In this picture here, you see that the blue cells are gone, there is no insulin producing cells and the patient is now entirely dependent on daily blood glucose checks and the insulin injections.
The way this can be treated now, which doesnLet’s talk about how we might use stem cells to treat diabetes. Well, if the cells in the pancreas are lost, they would look something like this. The blue cells here are cells that have been stained with an antibody for insulin. So they are the cells in your body that make th...
What we’d like to do then is to make islet cells. That is the pancreatic insulin-producing beta cells from human embryonic stem cells. The way we go about doing that is to first understand how beta cells are normally made and then we try to recapitulate or reproduce that using human embryonic stem cells. So our startin...
We’re not there yet, but I’m confident that we’re going to be able to make bucket loads of these beta cells in the next few years. And as I’ve indicated before, this is just one application for human embryonic stem cells. If we go back to look at the list of these degenerative diseases, many investigators are working o...
So one big grand goal of the use of human embryonic stem cells is to make cells which are deficient in disease and use those for transplantation. In the next few years, I predict we will be able to see major advances in that for treatment of diabetes and some neurodegenerative diseases.
There is, however, another completely independent or parallel path where stem cells are used, not as products to put into people, but are used a tools for drug discovery. So drugs, of course, are small molecules of chemicals that you take to change your body’s Phenotype, your body’s activity. I’d like to describe an ex...
The idea for this experiment is to take embryonic stem cells from a patient who suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS, or a similar disease called spinal muscular atrophy. In both cases where motor neurons are lost. Turn those cells into motor neurons and then have a control or similar cell from a patient that doesn’t...
In the example I’ll give in this experiment is to use motor neurons that have been derived from stem cells. In one case from cells that have genes that cause a person to get the disease and in the other case not. The important point to see here is that if we use the control cells, the rate at which they die in a petri ...
The red bars show that these motor neurons die very quickly in a petri dish. This allows us to set up an assay to look for a drug that will slow the progress of the disease. And tantalizingly, we’ve already found some examples where this could work. The green shows the amount of a protein that is important for motor ne...

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