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So what does this mean? This means, looking ahead, that it may be possible in the next few years to find drugs, not to cure motor neuron disease or that reverse the loss that’s already happened, but instead to simply slow the progress of the disease. Well you might say, that’s not such a high bar, you just want to slow the progress, but let me remind you that if you’re unfortunate enough to be diagnosed with a disease like ALS, generally speaking, people don’t survive more than three to six years. So if we found a drug which slowed down that degenerative process, we may be able to add significant amounts of time to their life. We could double that from three to six to maybe six to 12 more years, which would really be significant.
It is in the end, however, not fun to be thinking about all of these degenerative diseases that we or our loved ones are going to suffer from. And so I’d like to end by talking about another aspect of stem cell biology which has nothing to do with disease, but instead, has to do with the natural progress of aging and how we might use stem cells to mediate against that.
So harnessing stem cell biology for something I would call healthy aging. Aging is so obvious I hardly need to explain with it is. We all know that we age and we sense it and feel it in our own bodies. Here’s a nice picture of looking at a young woman who ages and you see that over time, here body changes. It’s the same person, cells have been replaced, but here body’s capacity for replenishment has declined over a period of some decades.
So what do we really know about aging? Well the characteristics are sort of obvious. One is, as a young person, you’re organs are quite robust, your wounds heal very rapidly, and there’s a high tissue turnover rate. As one ages, the ability to do all of those things declines. In an older person, the organs are more frail, wounds heal very slowly and there’s a low tissue turnover rate. So we believe by looking at the biology of stem cells, we can change the rate of that process. Not reverse it, nor can we make it stop, but we can slow it down so that one would enjoy a life with, let’s call it, a younger, healthier body.
I’m going to show you one experiment which has given us confidence that this can happen. This involves putting to mice together in what we call parabiotic mice. And it’s a kind of experiment I call, The Fountain of Youth Experiment. What we do in this experiment is remove the outer skin of two mice and sew them together; kind of like Siamese Twins. So we now have a young mouse and an old mouse sewn together. And the consequence of that is that they share their blood stream. They’re really quite happy. They continue to live a long life and run around in the cage and eat and play as they normally would.
The experiment I’m going to show you has to do with injuring the muscle in the mice and then asking whether there’s anything special about being young which allows your body to repair better. In fact, I’ll remind you that when you were a little boy or little girl, it was commonplace for you to say, fall of your bike or have an accident and then not even remember it a few days later. Your body was, as I’ve already said, very good at tissue repair and healing. As you age, that ability to repair muscle and heal, fix your bruises as it were, slows down. So when I fall of my bike now, I not only remember it the next day, I remember it for several weeks. It takes my body a much longer time to repair itself. So this experiment is designed to get at what is it about a young person that allows them to repair their muscle at a fast rate?
The experiment here shows a panel in blue in the middle, which I’d like to draw your attention to. And what we do is we take these two mice, which are parabiotic, and in the control experiment, the mice have their thigh muscle injured. It’s kind of a bruise as you would get, some might call it a Charlie Horse. What you can see that when we take parabiotic mice and injure the thigh muscle in one of them, and the “Y” stands for young, the muscle repair rate occurs normally, the same as if the mice were not paired together.
The second thing is control experiment shows is that pairing a young mouse with an old mouse does not diminish the young mouse’s ability to repair its muscle. So the amount of new red cells is the same.
And other control is to compare two old mice, put them together and injure the old mouse’s muscle. And here you see far fewer red cells. The repair rate is very slow. But the key result, the one you can guess is coming shown here at the end is to pair a young mouse with an old mouse and now injure the muscle in the old mouse, and sure enough, look at all those red cells. The old mouse has not been rejuvenated as it were. It’s repairing its muscle at the young rate.
So we dearly would like to know, what is it in young blood that stimulates muscle stem cells in an old mouse to make it repair better? This raises the question of what other aspects of aging might be affected by young factors. Might I have to do with our loss of memory, with our heart function? So we’re very keen to pursue these kinds of experiments, finding out what is it in a young animal that stimulates old stem cells, as it were, to make them young again.
So you can imagine a time when you might go to your doctor and she would say, well, your liver is looking a little tired or you’re muscles are not repairing well or your bone isn’t as strong as it could be, but don’t worry, we have some stem cells that we’ve taken from you when you were a bit younger. We’re going to put those in, top you up and you’re going to be good as new.
The main points I’ve tried to make today can really be summarized as follows. All of the cells in your body have an amazing potential. This is what got me interested in biology. It was discovered by cloning and it is to me still, such a mysterious and wondrous thing. I’d like to know how we can harness that potential in our cells to repair our bodies and understand disease.
I’ve shown some examples where stem cells can be used to replace body parts and find the root cause of disease. Finally, stem cells and the biology of regeneration… and the biology of regeneration hold out the prospect for really healthy aging. This will then lead in the longer term to designing our bodies and you might even say, designing babies. How do we use this information and should we use this information to affect our phenotype and those of subsequent generations. Thank you.
So to summarize what I’ve talked about today, it’s what I see as a new era of medicine based in regenerative biology. It starts from the fact, the amazing fact, that all of the cells in the body have this potential to make other kinds of cells. This has led to the discovery of human embryonic stem cells and other stem cells, which we’d now like to use to replace tissue and body parts and use to understand the root causes of disease.
This will inevitably lead to changing our bodies in a way that was previously unimaginable. It will have to do not only with designing our bodies, but thinking about how we might design or determine what is the phenotype of our babies. Thank you.
Professor Douglas Melton begins with a look at the basis for regenerative medicine, the human body’s ability to divide, grow, and specialize cells. With a solid foothold in developmental biology, we see how this knowledge led to the breakthrough cloning experiments we’re all familiar with: Hello, Dolly! Next, we’re introduced to the science of stem cells and their greatest hope: new "man-made" stem cells that could soon be used to reverse incurable degenerative diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s. Lastly, Professor Melton tells how these same stem cells may be the keys that unlock an end to aging as we know it.
SHOPS and supermarkets will not be fined for handing out single-use plastic bags until 2019, because WA is not ready for next month’s bag ban.
From July 1, all lightweight plastic bags will technically be banned in WA, while Queensland is also introducing a ban on the same date, bringing the two States into line with most of Australia.
But while Queensland retailers face fines from day one, businesses in WA can continue handing out the single-use plastic bags for another six months to exhaust their stockpiles.
Only from January 1, 2019, will they face fines of $5000 if they’re still circulating plastic bags of less than 35 microns, such as those currently handed out by the major supermarkets.
A Government spokesman yesterday confirmed the six-month extension was “in response to retailer feedback” to allow retailers time to make business changes and to run-down stocks.
The extension, negotiated by the National Retail Association (NRA), has been blamed on delays in communicating the bag ban to businesses and because the laws were not gazetted in WA until this week.
NRA national policy manager David Stout said Queensland was ready for the bag ban, but WA still had “a bit of work to do”.
Mr Stout said it would allow businesses to use stocks of plastic bags, a better outcome for the environment than dumping them in landfill.
But he said the major supermarkets such as Coles and Woolworths were ready to phase out free bags on or before July 1, and only some small and medium businesses would not meet the deadline.
A Department of Environmental Regulation spokesman confirmed only people who provided “false or misleading information” about the composition of a banned bag would be fined $5000 from July 1.
“In response to retailer feedback received during the consultation phase, the Government is implementing a six-month transition period to allow retailers time to make the necessary business changes and run-down existing stocks,” he said.
He said compliance officers would enforce the ban. Support and information had been provided to the retail sector since the ban was announced in September, with a website launched this week.
Damon Albarn is writing the music for a Chinese circus production.
The work is due to get its debut at the inaugural Manchester International Festival next June.
The Blur/Gorillaz singer recently returned from several weeks spent travelling across China, where he recorded with a variety of local musicians. He is now back in London working on the tapes and turning the raw material into a score.
The production, called ‘Monkey: Journey to the West’, is based on the traditional Chinese story ‘The Monkey King’ and the stage set is being designed by Albarn‘s Gorillaz colleague, Jamie Hewlett.
After the show’s Manchester debut, it will be staged in Paris and Berlin. The show, directed by Chinese theatre director Chen Shi-Zheng, will also feature Shaolin monks and singers from the Peking Opera.
Albarn is on a deadline to finish the score before the end of the year, but will interrupt work on the project to make his live debut with his new and untitled band at London‘s Roundhouse on October 26.
The band -as previously reported on NME.COM – includes ex-Clash bassist Paul Simonon, African drumming legend Tony Allen and former Verve keyboard player Simon Tong. The group’s debut album, ‘The Good, The Bad and The Queen’, will be released in the New Year.
Georgian govt accused of corrupting courts.
Recent controversial court decisions in Georgia have brought the country's legal system under the spotlight. With the acquittal rate at less than one per cent, many accuse the government of tightening its grip over judges.
A high-profile murder and a low-profile investigation: the case of Sandro Girgvliani became a byword for both. In 2006, the 28-year-old banker attended a birthday party for one of Georgia’s top police officials, where he fell into an argument with one of the guests. The next morning his body, with multiple injuries, was found on the outskirts of Tbilisi.
Four police officers were eventually sentenced to up to eight years for Girgvliani’s murder. However, they were released much sooner than expected.
"This term was not served by them to the end and after two or three years after the sentence of the court the president issued a decree and they were released from prison,” said Georgian opposition leader Kakha Kukava. “It shows more evidence that they were not just ordinary citizens, they were under protection of top officials of the Georgian government."
An investigation into the case was not even launched until hundreds of protesters went onto the streets of Tbilisi. The victim’s family looked for help from the European Court of Human Rights.
In April, European judges ruled the investigation was bungled, that high-ranking officials are escaping justice and that politically-sensitive convicts were getting unfair leniency from the country’s president. It also ruled that Georgia’s government should pay 50,000 euros to the murdered man’s relatives.
"The general public in Georgia had, long ago, given its verdict on the case, but it is a big victory that the European court acknowledges it now,” said political analyst Gia Khukhashvili.
“On a political level, it means the attitude to lawlessness in Georgia is changing and Europe is not ready to forgive such abuses by Saakashvili's regime," he added.
Still, lawyers who have been following the case since the start doubt any compensation will be paid under the current leadership.
According to figures published by Georgia’s Supreme Court, a staggering 99.6 per cent of cases resulted in guilty verdicts in 2010 – almost none saw defendants walk free.
The lawyer for the family of Sandro Girgvliani says no other country in Europe has a conviction rate like Georgia, and that it is a dangerous sign of the country becoming a police state. Europe’s courts have long been concerned about Georgia’s failure to make corrupt high-ranking officials face justice and police being used as pawns.
Millions are now spent in Georgia to create an image of the Georgian policeman living up to the social ideals of protecting and serving citizens. It is indeed likely you would struggle to bribe a policeman in Georgia and most certainly you could count on him to protect you from petty street crime. However, if the true criminals are actually in higher office than the police, who can the general public ever truly trust?
Daily commercials in Georgia show police work as among the most prestigious and transparent – police posts are made of glass so that everyone can see what officers do. Anti-corruption monitors say 80 per cent of the Georgian people trust their police. It is the government they believe works in the dark.
WILKES-BARRE, Pa. -- We found dogs, reptiles, even a pig that makes paintings at a pet expo at the Kingston Armory on Saturday.
The Luzerne County SPCA hosts the expo every year to bring pet owners and local vendors together.
The expo runs again Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the armory in Wilkes-Barre.
Thousands of miles away, Aaron Small went out yesterday afternoon, the day after Oakland pounded New York, 12-0, and delivered a bold and necessary five-hit shutout for the Yankees.
Matt Clement, surely aware of this, climbed the Fenway mound last night and worked eight innings, the eighth as impressive as any other -- strikeouts of Melvin Mora and Miguel Tejada, a Jay Gibbons single, then a Javy Lopez ground out on pitch No. 110 -- in the Red Sox' 7-6 win, maintaining a 3 1/2 game lead on the Yankees.
Your Game 1 matchup in the American League Championship Series? Small vs. Clement. That might never materialize, but, at this moment, each is his team's best starter. Small, nothing shy of the Yankees' savior, improved to 6-0. Clement is 13-3, and the Sox are 20-7 when he pitches (they're 59-48 when anybody else does).
This game was close only because of the defense -- three Boston errors helped Baltimore to four unearned runs, including two in the ninth against closer Mike Timlin.
All of that shifted the postgame focus, which should have been on employee No. 30. Clement, for a significant span this summer (July 1 to Aug. 5), was a run-an-inning pitcher (30 1/3 IP, 31 ER) and had difficulty keeping the ball in the yard (7 HR).
In five starts since, he's 2-0 with a 2.18 ERA and two home runs allowed.
''I have no answer for why I struggled," said Clement, who was hit in the head with a Carl Crawford liner at Tampa amid that difficult span. ''It's all about grinding."
Perhaps the best thing Clement has done of late is keep the ball in the park. That influenced Terry Francona to send Clement back out for the eighth.
''He's proven that because his stuff moves so much he's got a pretty good chance of keeping the ball in the ballpark," Francona said.
Timlin closed it for Clement, though it wasn't easy. B.J. Surhoff touched Timlin for a leadoff single, but Timlin came back to whiff Eric Byrnes. Luis Matos then grounded to shortstop Edgar Renteria, in a way that had Renteria moving toward second base for what looked like an easy double play. But Renteria rushed it and lost the ball, putting two on with one out.
''A little too quick," Francona said. ''Trying to get two before we got one."
Renteria's 24th error, most by any shortstop in the majors and 19 more than Orlando Cabrera, opened the door for Brian Roberts's RBI double and Mora's sacrifice fly. That required Timlin to face Tejada with the tying run on third. But Timlin -- who on this night became the first pitcher in the 105-year history of the Red Sox to make 70 appearances in three seasons -- went ahead, 0 and 2, and got the star shortstop to fly out to end it.
Timlin is on pace for 85 appearances, an incredibly tall order for someone age 39.
''We have to be careful," acknowledged pitching coach Dave Wallace.
But, Wallace pointed out, Timlin's four appearances before last night required a total of 24 pitches -- 2, 7, 8, and 7. What Wallace didn't say was that Timlin would have been done after 14 pitches, not 26, if Renteria had made the play on Matos.
David Ortiz provided what amounted to the winning run, though, at the time, it merely extended a 6-4 Sox lead to 7-4. Despite all of his 2004 exploits -- 41 home runs, 139 RBIs, a .301 batting average -- Ortiz did something last night with that seventh-inning swing on a 95-mile-per-hour Jorge Julio fastball that he couldn't a year ago. He scored his 100th run in a season.
He accomplished it in fitting fashion, because it wasn't a run as much as it was a jog, the culmination of his 37th homer and major league-leading 119th RBI. The locked-in DH has homered six times in eight games.
The Sox pinned the six other runs on Baltimore starter Erik Bedard. The 26-year-old lefthander struggled with his command early, going to three-ball counts on six of the first eight batters he faced on his way to an early exit (4 1/3 IP, 7 H, 6 ER).
Still, the Sox trailed, 1-0, in the middle of the third inning, 3-1 in the middle of the fourth. Two of Baltimore's runs to that point were unearned.
Consider Baltimore's two-run fourth inning: Tejada began the inning with a bloop double down the line in right. Jay Gibbons, up next, lined a ball to Manny Ramirez in left. Ramirez appeared to catch the ball, at least momentarily, but it fell to the ground when he attempted to transfer it too quickly. Gibbons was safe on the error.
''I looked at it on a couple replays," he said. ''I didn't feel as strong with my argument after I came in and looked at it."
Lopez then singled to center, which was guaranteed to score one run. But the ball veered off the grass and through Johnny Damon's legs, scoring a second run on the fielding error.
Baltimore led, 3-1, but that deficit would be erased in the bottom of the inning on Kevin Millar's third homer of the week, a two-run rope between the foul pole and the light tower in left. The homer, his eighth, followed a four-pitch walk by Jason Varitek. Millar has homered four times in 11 games after going homerless in 56.
Damon and Renteria began the fifth inning with singles. Ortiz flied out to deep center, but Ramirez followed with an RBI single to right, snapping the 3-3 tie. For Ramirez, the RBI was his 116th and first in seven games.
Varitek walked, ending Bedard's night with the bases loaded. Julio, on in relief, threw a wild pitch, scoring Renteria and advancing Ramirez to third. Ramirez then scored to make it 6-3 on a Millar ground out.
Baltimore got one back in the sixth, making it 6-4 when Gibbons crushed a Clement fastball deep into the seats in right.
Twitter Amplify’s newest partner is also its first with a global news broadcaster.
The social media video advertising platform and BBC Global News have teamed up to produce a new new in-Tweet broadcast, #BBCTrending, a new series of short form video broadcasts that will will launch later this fall. The broadcast will tackle the day’s trending phenomena on social media.
#BBCTrending will be distributed to the 4.8 million followers of the BBC international news Twitter handle. The service will leverage the BBC’s 24-hour video production, global news-gathering and monitoring operations.
Netflix Earnings Preview: Will Price Hikes Dent Subscriber Growth?
The Streaming Wars Heat Up: Just How Big a Threat Is Disney+ to Netflix?
All the arrested members of "Harkat-ul-Harb-e-Islam" are in NIA custody.
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) today conducted "follow up" searches in connection with the busting of a new Islamic State (ISIS) module -- Harkat-ul-Harb-e-Islam -- last month, an official said.
Ten people, including the group leader, who were allegedly planning to attack some political personalities, security establishments as well as crowded places in Delhi and National Capital Region were arrested by the NIA on December 26.
"Follow up searches are being carried out today at five locations in Amroha," an NIA spokesperson said.
Follow up searches are being carried out today at five locations in Amroha.
Earlier in December, the NIA had carried out searches at 17 places -- six in East Delhi's Jafarabad area, six in Amroha, two each in Lucknow and Hapur and one place in Meerut, leading it to seize a country-made rocket launcher, 12 pistols, 112 alarm clocks, 100 mobile phones, 135 SIM cards, several laptops and various electronic gadgets, besides 150 rounds of ammunition.
The NIA also seized 25 kg of explosive material, such as potassium nitrate, ammonium nitrate, sulphur, sugar material paste, mobile phone circuits, batteries, 51 pipes, remote control car triggering switch, wireless digital doorbell for remote switch, steel containers, electric wires, knife, sword, ISIS-related literature and Rs 7.5 lakh in cash.
The agency had registered a case on December 20 under several sections of the Indian Penal Code, the Explosive Substances Act and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
Private detectives, constant surveillance and a rather unfortunate misunderstanding - not what you'd expect after a decade of happily working from home.
But council employee Roger Mills faced exactly that after he was given permission to work from home in 1997.
One manager told Mr Mills to do some work from home as part of an efficiency drive. Another manager noticed that he wasn't around much, suspected skiving and last year hired private detectives to prove that Mr Mills was spending lots of working hours at home.
It all ended up in court - and this week Mr Mills won £66,000 for unfair and wrongful dismissal.
Councils do have genuine problems with absenteeism. The number who persistently phone in sick is suspiciously higher than in the private sector - especially on Mondays and Fridays. Managers sometimes ignore the problem rather than have the nuisance of endless disciplinary hearings with the trade unions.
But on the other hand the enthusiasm for Town Hall-directed snooping is becoming ubiquitous. Private detectives and the use of powers intended for fighting terrorism have been used to spy on everyone from paper boys under the age of 13, pushy parents using a false address to get their children into a good school, to residents who put their bins out on the wrong day.
Checking if Mills was authorised to work from home would have been sensible before the surveillance teams were dispatched.
Yet despite Mr Mills' Orwellian experience, home working increasingly makes sense for both staff and the companies they work for. For millions of office workers the advent of broadband internet has made the drudgery of the commute into work pretty irrational. They have a computer at home but spend perhaps a couple of hours a day getting to and from another computer, really much the same, which is at the office.
True, there are meetings in the office but those are often a bit of a waste of time anyway.

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