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The H5N1 bird flu, whose known human death toll has now reached 32, has made its first foray outside Asia. It turned up at Brussels airport last week in a pair of eagles smuggled from Thailand, and caused one human infection.
Belgian authorities say they have contained the threat, and are now analysing the virus. “We were very, very lucky,” says Rene Snacken, head of flu at Belgium’s Scientific Institute of Public Health in Brussels. “It could have been a bomb for Europe.”
But illegal wildlife smuggling is thought to be so widespread that only luck, and the difficulty the virus still has at spreading in humans, may have prevented a public health disaster so far.
The virus has spread across east Asia in poultry in the past year, and caused 44 reported human cases in Vietnam and Thailand. The most recent death, a 14-year-old girl in Thailand’s Sukothai province, was on 19 October.
On 18 October, a Thai man was stopped for a random drug check at Zaventem Airport in Brussels. Customs officers found two small, crested hawk eagles in plastic tubes in his hand luggage.
He had flown from Bangkok to Vienna, then connected to Brussels. It was pure chance he was inspected, as under Europe’s Schengen agreement people arriving in Belgium from Austria are not subject even to passport checks.
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BY PAUL ELIAS
The biotechnology revolution is shaking up the pet world.
First came a cloned cat. Then came the fish genetically engineered to glow.
Now, a Los Angeles company is exploiting the latest in biotechnology to create cats genetically engineered to be nearly free from the allergy-causing proteins that plague millions of people.
Allerca Inc. president Simon Brodie said by 2007 the company will use RNA interference to ''silence'' a gene in cats that produces the irritant, which is excreted through saliva and the skin.
The company is now accepting $350 deposits for the British short hair breed of cats it plans to charge $3,500 a piece for in the United States. Brodie said he hoped to sell about 200,000 of the genetically engineered cats a year. The four-person company has yet to engineer any cats, which will be spayed and neutered to prevent breeding with naturally born felines.
Brodie doesn't see a regulatory problem. Neither the Department of Agriculture nor the Food and Drug Administration stepped in to regulate the GloFish because it wasn't meant for human consumption.
"As long as people don't start eating cats and they don't enter the food chain, then we should be handled like the GloFish," he said.
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Government is likely to announce a new policy promoting faster approval of GMO crops to enhance yields and feed its growing population, Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Science and Technology said on Wednesday.
Likely to be in place within eight to nine months, the policy would also promote foreign and private sector investment in the biotechnology sector.
"We intend to have a biotech policy as quickly as possible to supply to the farmers pest-resistant and drought-resistant seeds with high nutritional values," the minister said.
The debate on biotech grains has intensified worldwide, with advocates saying they could lead to a more secure future for food, while opponents say they could produce new toxins and allergens, affecting the health of consumers.
India opened the door to genetically modified organism (GMO) technology in 2002 after years of trials and allowed Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Co. (MAHYCO), in which US biotech giant Monsanto Co. owns a 26 per cent stake, to sell transgenic cotton.
It may take many years for the approval of a second GMO crop. Sibal said at least seven GMO crops, including rice, potatoes and mustard, were being field-tested in India.
Sibal said the Government planned to restructure the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee, which has representatives from the ministries of science and technology, environment and health.
The Government was equally keen to have bio-safety standards in place, and would only welcome private companies if such standards were complied with, the minister said.
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HA NOI — Viet Nam must take large strides to catch up with the level of hi-tech industrial development achieved by other countries in the region and around the world, according to a report delivered by the National Assembly’s Committee for Science, Technology and Environment to the 11th legislature early this week.
[some text omitted]
In term of biotechnology, Viet Nam ranks after the RoK, Singapore, China, Thailand and Indonesia in the region.
According to the committee’s report on Monday, a lack of money is the main obstacle preventing Viet Nam from developing its biotechnology industry. Almost all of Viet Nam continues to practice and study older medical and agricultural techniques, with more modern biotechnology studies still only being conducted in laboratories.
Experts have long insisted that a development strategy for the hi-tech industry with specific goals is a necessary element in Viet Nam’s quest for industrialisation and modernisation.
As hi-tech development requires a great amount of high-risk investment, it is important to choose the appropriate areas to develop first, the committee said.
The areas they suggested for investment were in the food and agriculture processing industry, the agricultural chemical industry, the medical biology industry, in the development of animal breeding and tree seedlings, and the industrial software industry.
The committee also suggested setting up a national steering committee to co-ordinate the different ministries and localities to develop the hi-tech industry.
The committee said it is also critical to bring technology to the countryside, remote areas and islands.
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Three years ago Elisabeth Bryant believed she would be blind for the rest of her life. “I couldn’t see anything,” she says. Now, although her vision is not perfect, she can see well enough to read, play computer games and check emails.
Bryant has retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease that has blinded four generations of her family. What has saved the sight in one of her eyes is a transplant of a sheet of retinal cells. The vision in this eye has improved from 20:800 to 20:84 in the two-and-a-half years since the transplant – a remarkable transformation.
So far, six patients with either advanced retinitis pigmentosa or macular degeneration have had similar transplants. Together, these degenerative diseases are the biggest cause of blindness in rich countries, affecting tens of millions of people. While Bryant’s improvement is the most dramatic, four other patients have also had good results.
When New Scientist print edition (1 February, 2003) reported the initial results of these retinal transplants, experts cautioned that the results could be due to the rescue effect: a short-term improvement triggered by the release of growth factors after eye surgery. That appears increasingly unlikely, because the rescue effect usually lasts only months.
“We have shown the way,” says Robert Aramant at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, who developed the transplant technique with his colleague Magdalene Seiler. “It is possible to reverse these incurable diseases.”
No other technique has come close to achieving this. The team has received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration to carry out further transplants on people with less advanced disease, and Aramant believes the results will be even better.
There is a catch, of course. The sheets of retinal cells used by the team are harvested from aborted fetuses, which some people find objectionable.
There is also a practical problem. Although millions of terminations are performed each year in the US alone, the fetal tissue is rarely donated. If further trials are successful and the technique starts to be widely used, there will not be enough tissue to meet demand.
One accusation of those opposed to using fetal tissue is that women might be tempted to have abortions to provide tissue to restore their own sight or that of relatives. “People are going to claim that we are promoting abortion,” says Norman Radtke, the surgeon who carried out the transplants at the Norton Audubon Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky.
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New Delhi —After developing genetically modified, pest-resistant cotton, Indian scientists are hoping for a similar breakthrough in brinjal [Indian word for eggplant] to make its varieties resistant to pest attacks without high doses of insecticide.
Several institutions in India are conducting research on genetically modified brinjal, or eggplant, and among them efforts of state-run Indian Agricultural Research Institute and a US seed major have reached field trials.
The Department of Biotechnology hopes in two-three years the government will give permission for commercial cultivation of genetically modified varieties of brinjal after establishing the bio-safety of the crop.
This, they feel, will provide farmers with a solution to protect their brinjal crop against shoot and fruit borer pests, which account for 50 percent of the total insecticide sprays for the crop, costing Rs.1,750-Rs.4,375 per hectare.
"A lot depends on the performance of the Bt brinjal developed by Maharashtra Hybrid Seed Company," said a senior official of the Department of Biotechnology, referring to the field trials by the Indian arm of US seeds major Monsanto.
The multi-location field trials by the company is evaluating the efficacy of a protein called Cry1Ac in resisting infestation of shoot and fruit borer at different agro-climatic conditions.
"We would know about the success of the transgenic variety of Mahyco's brinjal varieties after the crop is harvested in December or January at a dozen trial sites," officials said.
The Biosafety data would evaluate the effects of the Bt gene on the targeted and non-target pests, beneficial organisms, environment and food safety, as also the agronomic performance of its hybrids, cost savings and yield.
"Unless the trials establish over 90-95 percent protection against shoot and fruit borer, the transgenic variety of brinjal would not be considered viable," a senior scientist at a state-run research institution said.
"A moderate success runs the risk of the insect larvae gradually developing resistance to the Bt gene introduced in the plant," the scientist added.
Mahyco, as the Indian joint venture of Monsanto is known, was the first to get permission to release Bt cotton commercially. It is now assessing its Bt brinjal under the government's All India Crop Research Project on Vegetable Crops Trial Programme.
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The stem cell lines available for federally-funded research in the US have characteristics which mean they may never be used for medical treatments in humans, a new study suggests.
Fred Gage at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California and Ajit Varki at the University of California, San Diego, US, have shown that human embryonic stem cells (hESC) cultivated on a scaffolding of mouse “feeder” cells take on the properties of the rodent cells. Consequently, if implanted in a human they would provoke an immune response that would kill the hESCs, they say.
The finding reinforces calls by US stem cell researchers for their government to free up federal money to research fresh lines of human ESCs, grown on non-biological scaffolds.
Stem cell research in the US is currently limited to 22 lines, following a policy introduced by President George W Bush in 2001. These lines were derived before August 2001 and all of the cells were grown on a scaffolding of mouse cells.
“It’s a new twist on why it can’t be done,” says Richard Hynes, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ committee on guidelines for human embryonic stem cell research.
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Helen Pearson
Fly results might benefit methods for cloning mammals.
As if there weren't enough of them in the world already, scientists have succeeded in cloning flies. The identical fruitflies are the first insects ever cloned, says the Canadian team that created them.
The question everyone asks, says group leader Vett Lloyd of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is why anyone would want to clone flies in the first place.
She hopes that the insects, which are very easy to experiment with, will help to fine-tune the cloning process in other animals and even in humans, where the technique is being researched to aid production of therapeutic stem cells.
In cloning, the DNA-containing nucleus of an adult cell is injected into an egg whose own nucleus has been removed. At the moment, the majority of cloned mice, sheep and other animals die before birth. It is thought this is because the adult DNA is not properly 'reprogrammed' and cannot orchestrate the growth of an embryo.
Using flies, researchers might reveal genes that are important for this reprogramming, and that have counterparts in other animals. That is because it is relatively easy in flies to knock out the function of a single gene and then attempt cloning with these cells, which will test whether that gene is crucial.
If such genes are identified, then in theory cloned mammalian embryos might be grown in tailored solutions that alter the activity of those genes to improve the technique's success rate.
Transferable skills?
Although some groups have attempted to clone insects before, Lloyd says this is the first time it has been successful. The team used a slight variation on the standard cloning process: they transferred nuclei taken from embryos rather than fully-fledged adult cells.
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Mendel in the Kitchen A Scientist's View of Genetically Modified Foods by Nina Fedoroff and Nancy Marie Brown Joseph Henry Press, Washington, DC, 2004. 366 pp. $24.95, C$32.95. ISBN 0-309-09205-1.
In Mendel in the Kitchen, Nina Fedoroff (an expert in plant molecular biology and genetics at Pennsylvania State University) and Nancy Brown (a science writer) present a clearly written history of plant breeding that focuses on the new field of the genetic engineering of crops. They emphasize the many contributions that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) now make toward increasing food supplies while at the same time raising the nutritional levels of some foods.
In the initial chapters, the authors review early plant breeding research, such as the development of hybrid corn, that featured the transfer of genes within crop species. This approach made enormous contributions to fostering the growth of crop yields during the Green Revolution. Crop improvements developed through plant breeding were responsible for approximately 40 percent of the increase in yields; the remaining 60 percent stemmed from greater inputs in fossil-fuels energy, fertilizers, and pesticides. Between 1950 and 1983, yields of crops (especially cereal grains) doubled to quadrupled. On a global scale, grains provide approximately 80 percent of the calories consumed by humans. Thus, the Green Revolution was vital for feeding billions of people around the world.
Though highly successful, these efforts at improving the qualities and yields of crop plants through breeding were relatively slow compared with the advances propelled by subsequent developments in the fields of molecular biology and genetic engineering. Formerly, plant breeders had to depend on manipulating (through the establishment and crossing of selected lineages) the genetic material within a particular crop to increase yields. Now, genetic engineering technology provides a means by which beneficial genes can be relatively rapidly transferred between different plant species or even taken from essentially any other organism and introduced into crops. For example, as the authors point out, this technology has been used to improve the resistance of winter rye, carrots, and other crops to freezing conditions.
However, to date plant breeding, genetic engineering, and other agricultural technologies have not been able to keep pace with the continuing growth in the global human population. (The current population numbers nearly 6.5 billion, and each day there are more than a quarter million additional people to be fed.) The World Health Organization recently reported that around the world more than 3.7 billion people are now malnourished--the largest number in history. Contributing to this nutritional problem are declines in per capita cereal grain production that, according to data collected by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, began in 1984 and continue to the present.
Several places in the book, Fedoroff and Brown emphasize the value of developing herbicide-tolerant crops to help increase yields by controlling weeds. Although raising such genetically engineered crops can reduce weed infestations, there is little evidence the new technology is significantly more effective for weed control than current approaches that combine the use of herbicides and tillage. Nevertheless, companies working on GMOs (which include many firms with substantial interests in agricultural chemicals) have placed a heavy emphasis on developing herbicide-tolerant crops. This focus has contributed to the increased use of herbicides to control weeds and the resulting increase in environmental pollution.
Although they discuss freezing tolerance in crops, the authors do not mention a related issue: the tremendous opportunities that genetic engineering offers for developing perennial grains. At present, most agricultural grains are annual crops, which means the soil has to be tilled and the fields replanted every year. These tasks require the annual investment of an enormous amount of energy, both fossil and human energy. The annual tillage also contributes to the serious soil erosion afflicting croplands in the United States and elsewhere around the world. If perennial grains were developed, farmers might have to replant only once every five or six years. This use of biotechnology would be especially beneficial for many farmers in developing countries, who currently may have to spend more than 400 hours per hectare hand-tilling their fields before planting their crops.
I found the authors' criticisms of organic agriculture surprising. They report that yields from organic farming are significantly lower than those for most conventionally grown crops and therefore conclude that a shift toward organic foods would require significantly more cropland. This is not the case. Long-term experiments (lasting 22 years) conducted at the Rodale Institute that compared conventional corn and soybean production with two different organic technologies found that the yields were approximately the same. In fact, during drought years corn yields from the organic treatments were significantly higher than those from the recommended conventional approach. The organic farming technologies also offered the advantage of avoiding applications of insecticides and herbicides, whereas conventional corn production uses more insecticides and herbicides than any other crop grown in the United States. Overall, organic approaches would reduce the use of fossil energy in corn production by about 30 percent and substantially increase the organic matter in the soil. The authors' discussion of organic farming emphasizes its potential drawbacks while neglecting the opportunities it offers to conserve fossil energy resources, reduce soil erosion, and reduce global warming.
The criticisms expressed here reflect my disagreement with the authors' positions on several topics covered in the book. But they should not overshadow the fact that Fedoroff and Brown present a strong case that plant breeding and genetic engineering have made and will continue to make substantial contributions to our food supply. Certainly, increased awareness and appreciation of the potential benefits of GMO research will enlarge the scope to cover additional dimensions, such as the development of perennial grain crops. Researchers from many disciplines, social scientists, and any readers desiring a broad perspective of the rewarding applications of genetics in agriculture will find Mendel in the Kitchen most helpful.
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