Dean's World

A friend of mine pointed out to me a poem which explains everything you wanted to know about relativity but were afraid to ask. I've reposted it at my own site...

If the image is cut off for you, or you just want to read more by this artist, click here.

(Thanks, Martin.)

It seems gallingly cutesy, but "Mix-Up Chromosomes" is how Newsweek has dubbed the aneuploidy hypothesis of cancer causation. I suppose I shouldn't complain; for a popular science explanation that's as quick a summary of the idea as I can think of.

And, as Dean's World readers learned 2 years ago, the aneuploidy hypothesis has been making major waves in cancer research, with quite a few of the world's foremost cancer researchers and geneticists acknowledging that the hypothesis holds a great deal of promise. Indeed, that's why Harvey Bialy wrote this book which we've discussed more than once: because, as the former scientific editor at Nature Biotechnology, it was obvious to Harvey several years ago that the aneuploidy theory was going to be making major waves soon. And indeed it has.

You can read Newsweek's accounting here. It's really quite dumbed-down but close enough for Newsweek I guess. When reading it, bear in mind that by the time a story like this makes it into a publication like Newsweek, it's already been understood by researchers in the field for several years.

It's kind of amusing to see how they put Peter Duesberg's name as far near the end of the article as they possibly could, and had to quote anonymous researchers criticizing him. His name should have been at the top of the article. But Harvey said people would do everything they could to keep Peter's name out of it. For this appears to be a growing problem in the entire field of peer review and the grant application process: silence anyone who makes waves.

But they're not going to be able to do it here. If this theory bears out, Peter's going to be short-listed for a Nobel--again.

If you've got a strong background in biology (grad level, I would suggest), you might want to read this book.

Dr Keasling's project is to do biologically what no chemist has yet managed to accomplish—to synthesise an antimalarial drug called artemisinin cheaply. At the moment, artemisinin is a herbal remedy. It is extracted from Artemisia annua, a type of wormwood, and the best source is in China. Making artemisinin by standard chemistry requires so many steps that it is impractical. So Dr Keasling persuaded the Gates Foundation to back his idea for doing the job using synthetic biology.

For this, he has built a metabolic pathway in yeast cells that synthesises a chemical called artemisinic acid which chemists can easily convert into artemisinin. Some of the genes to do this have come from Artemisia, but others have been created from other sources.