Science, Technology & Health: October 2009 Archives

An awesome new cancer treatment kills dividing cells with electricity.

The particularly lethal brain cancer known as glioblastoma multiforme is fast-growing, difficult to treat, and nearly always fatal; even with aggressive therapy, patients have a median survival time of less than two years. But scientists are pursuing new ways to attack this type of brain tumor, and one company may just be succeeding. NovoCure, a small startup founded in Israel in 2000, has developed a device that uses an electric field to disrupt the growth of cancer cells, and early results are promising. Out of ten patients who started using the device in combination with chemotherapy shortly after their initial diagnosis, seven are still alive more than four years later, and five of them show no signs of cancer progression.

NovoCure's device consists of insulated electrode pairs placed on a patient's body near the tumors, attached by leads to a three-kilogram battery that the patient carries everywhere. The electrodes emit low-intensity electric fields that rapidly alternate to create a current that has no effect on any tissue in the body except dividing cells. Just before a dividing cell splits in two, it briefly forms an hourglass shape before the two daughter cells pinch off, and this shape is particularly vulnerable to electricity. The current gets concentrated at the cell's narrow waist, and at the very moment of division, the cell membrane is destroyed, and the cells disintegrate.

Absolutely brilliant. Please keep up the good work.

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, has written a terrific health care reform proposal that includes not only eight important steps we can take to make health care better and cheaper, but also an excellent explanation of why viewing health care as a "right" is nonsensical.

Many promoters of health care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care-to universal and equal access to doctors, medicines, and hospitals. While all of us can empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have any more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have an intrinsic right to food, clothing, owning their own homes, a car or a personal computer? Health care is a service which we all need at some point in our lives, but just like food, clothing, and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually-beneficial market exchanges rather than through government mandates. A careful reading of both The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter, because there isn’t any. This “right” has never existed in America.

Even in countries such as Canada and the U.K., there is no intrinsic right to health care. Rather, citizens in these countries are told by governmental bureaucrats what health care treatments and medicines they are eligible to receive and when they can receive them. All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce and expensive treatments. Although Canada has a population smaller than California, 830,000 Canadians are waiting to be admitted to a hospital or to get treatment. In England, the waiting list is 1.8 million citizens. At Whole Foods we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund on their behalf. Our Canadian and British team members express their benefit preferences very clearly-they want supplemental health care more than additional paid time off, larger donations to their retirement plans, or greater food discounts; they want health care dollars that they can control and spend themselves without permission from their governments. Why would they want such additional health care benefit dollars to spend if they already have an “intrinsic right to health care”? The answer is clear-no such right truly exists in either Canada or the U.K.-or in any other country.

So how can America entice Mr. Mackey and others like him into public service? I expect that if you asked him to run for office he's laugh in your face.

Sound Mind Investing nearly summarizes how health care "reform" will screw the middle class from both ends.

Indeed, there are compelling reasons to be concerned that your taxes and/or personal insurance costs will rise significantly if health care legislation passes in something similar to its currently proposed form. Why? Consider the big picture: insurers will have to accept all applicants, even those with serious or terminal illnesses. Their costs' will skyrocket as a result of having to cover claims by a surge of already-sick new customers.

In theory, a significant portion of these new costs would be offset by the insurers gaining new income from the insurance premiums paid by millions of healthy, currently-uninsured new customers. This is the so-called "mandate" which would require everyone to have health insurance. Anyone failing to do this would pay a fine to the U.S. Treasury.

Originally, the fines were set at relatively high levels, but fine levels were subsequently watered down.

Now, with the potential fines dropped so low, few of the healthy uninsured are likely to buy insurance. They'll just pay the much less-expensive fine. If the majority of new customers the insurance companies get are the ones who are already sick, insurers' costs are going to explode with very little offsetting additional income. That's where you — the currently insured, reasonably healthy person or family — come in. You're the key to all these pieces fitting together.

The insurers need more money to pay the claims of new sick customers? Check — they can get it by raising your premiums. Lower-income families can't afford the premiums of their new coverage? Check — they will be subsidized by raising your taxes to pay for them.

Middle class citizens will pay both higher premiums and higher taxes to fund the "reform". For an added poke in the eye, health care quality will also plummet.

The Democrats are eager to sell you on the idea that health care "reform" will help "other people" and won't cost anyone anything. Don't believe it.

Here's a decent explanation of "net neutrality", along with who wins and loses under the various scenarios.

What is net neutrality anyway?

It is the common name for creating and preserving what the FCC calls the "open Internet".

The FCC is trying to write rules that enforce six principles it says ISPs must uphold to preserve what the commission calls the "open Internet." These rules would tell ISPs to:

* allow sending and receiving all lawful content.
* allow all lawful applications and services.
* allow all lawful devices that don't harm the network.
* allow access to all network, application, service and content providers.
* ensure there is no discrimination against particular lawful content, applications, services and devices.
* reveal practices necessary network management that might limit the other five principles.

Doctors have grown facial bones for a boy born without them, and the entire process required only a single surgery.

Stem cells so far have been used to mend tissues ranging from damaged hearts to collapsed tracheas. Now the multifaceted cells have proved successful at regrowing bone in humans. In the first procedure of its kind, doctors at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center replaced a 14-year-old boy's missing cheekbones—in part by repurposing stem cells from his own body. ...

"This is sort of the holy grail for a number of different surgeons," says Jesse Taylor, a surgeon and researcher in the hospital's Division of Plastic Surgery and one of the procedure's lead physicians. The procedure could be used in plastic, orthopedic and neural surgeries, he notes. Some bone tissue had previously been generated from stem cells in the lab, but this marks hope for a surgical solution for those who need additional bone.

"We often find ourselves in the operating room saying, 'Man, I wish we had a little more bone,'" Taylor says. In adult patients plastic and metal have often subbed in, in the absence of bone, but as Taylor notes: "What happens if someone gets a fracture? It's another surgery." In contrast, a natural bone regrown from stem cells should heal on its own. Another alternative, bone transplants—either repurposed from the patient's body or from cadavers—have high rejection and absorption rates, leading to many unsuccessful attempts.

To create the new bones, which have become part of the patient's own skull structure and have remained securely in place for four and a half months, the medical team used a combination of fat-derived stem cells, donated bone scaffolds, growth protein, and bone-coating tissue.

Amazing. And as usual with these breakthroughs, no embryonic stem cells were used which means that no one had to die to create these bones.

Joseph Antos explains that health care "reform" will ad hundreds of billions of dollars to our national debt because none of the promised cost savings will be realized.

A careful reading of the evidence suggests that the Baucus bill will add as much as $376 billion to the federal deficit through 2019. And that figure understates the full impact of the bill on the budget. If the big-spending parts of the proposal started next year rather than in 2014, the fiscal damage would be much greater.

Can anyone guess why the most expensive parts of the plan won't kick in until 2014? Maybe so that Obama and Congress won't have to face reality until after as many re-elections as possible.

At face value, the Baucus bill seems to be close to what the president ordered. According to the CBO, the bill gives coverage to 29 million uninsured Americans for less than $900 billion while simultaneously reducing the deficit. The problem is that the bill counts as savings large cuts to Medicare providers that will almost certainly never happen.

The Congressional Budget Office has to pretend that they believe that future Congresses will decide to keep these cost savings in place, even though they certainly won't.

The most blatant example is the annual cut in fees paid by Medicare to physicians. The cuts started out small, about 5% a year, but even that was unsustainable. To "solve" the political problem without having to admit to a big increase in the deficit, Congress has given doctors a series of one-year fixes. The foregone payment reductions add up, and next year Medicare is supposed to slash doctor's fees 21%.

Clearly, that will not happen. At the urging of the American Medical Association, Democrats in the House decided to end the charade by permanently granting fee increases to physicians at a 10-year cost of nearly $230 billion. Sen. Baucus accepted responsibility only for the usual one-year fix, at a cost of almost $11 billion. That means he is being credited with $218 billion in savings at which future Congresses will chip away, a year at a time.

There is another $240 billion in cuts to hospitals, home care providers, nursing facilities and hospices that are destined to go the way of those physician fee savings. If none of those reductions are implemented, Medicare spending will increase $458 billion over the next decade, and the deficit will grow by $376 billion.

The "savings" are due to counting promises to save money as actual saved money. The promises will be broken by a future Congress, but the current Congress still wants to get credit now.

These budget games are so obvious that the CBO blew the whistle--but scored the savings anyway. The CBO scores bills as they are written, without trying to second-guess Congress even when there is plenty of reason to do so. The agency explained that their estimates assume that the proposals are enacted and remain unchanged over the next two decades. In a masterpiece of understatement, the CBO pointed out that such provisions are often over-ridden by future Congresses.

That's the trick: when it comes time to actually stop spending the money, Congress will attempt to tug at our heartstrings and show us all the poor people who will be hurt if we don't spend more money. People will buy these "arguments" and the cost savings will never be actualized.

We citizens don't need to be bound by the same foolish assumptions that constrain the Congressional Budget Office. They have to believe Congress because they work for Congress. We don't need to be that gullible.

Scientists have long known that people on calorie-restricted diets can live longer than people who eat a normal number of calories, but the actual mechanism behind such increased longevity may have just been discovered.

Our cells build two kinds of recycling factories. One kind, known as the proteasome, is a tiny cluster of proteins. It slurps up individual proteins like a child sucking a piece of spaghetti. Once inside the proteasome, the protein is chopped up into its building blocks.

For bigger demolition jobs, our cells rely on a bigger factory: a giant bubble packed with toxic enzymes, known as a lysosome. Lysosomes can destroy big structures, like mitochondria, the sausage-shaped sacs in cells that generate fuel. To devour a mitochondrion, a cell first swaddles it in a shroudlike membrane, which is then transported to a lysosome. The shroud merges seamlessly into the lysosome, which then rips the mitochondrion apart. Its remains are spit back out through channels on the lysosome’s surface. ...

Unfortunately, as we get older, our cells lose their cannibalistic prowess. The decline of autophagy may be an important factor in the rise of cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders that become common in old age. Unable to clear away the cellular garbage, our bodies start to fail.

If this hypothesis turns out to be right, then it may be possible to slow the aging process by raising autophagy. It has long been known, for example, that animals that are put on a strict low-calorie diet can live much longer than animals that eat all they can. Recent research has shown that caloric restriction raises autophagy in animals and keeps it high. The animals seem to be responding to their low-calorie diet by feeding on their own cells, as they do during famines. In the process, their cells may also be clearing away more defective molecules, so that the animals age more slowly.

Legal Insurrection dismantles Consumer Reports' partisan advocacy of "health care reform" and concludes thusly:

CR has stepped out of being a provider of unbiased information (both good and bad) to empower consumers to make their own informed decisions, and has become a political advocacy group which seeks to minimize the legitimate arguments against the current Democratic proposals. If that is what one was expecting from CR, that's fine, but that is not how CR presents itself to the public.

There is nothing wrong with CR taking a position on consumer issues, and I agree that the insurance industry deserves much criticism and reform. But CR has gone far beyond such consumer protection issues and has jumped headlong into disputes as to the role of government in our lives. When it comes to this fundamental issue of individual liberties versus government control, CR has no special expertise or legitimacy.

It may be hard for CR to understand, but the health care debate is not just about coverage or costs. As President Obama himself has commented, the heart of the dispute is over the role of government in our lives, which is why people are so passionate. It now is clear where CR stands on this fundamental issue, and it is not on the side of those of us who value self-reliance as the first choice, with a safety net being only for those who, through no choice of their own, cannot provide for themselves. CR has taken the side of those for whom the safety net is an excuse to expand government control and social engineering.

I'll admit that I'm surprised by the thinly veiled politicization of Consumer Reports. Very disappointing.

(HT: theblogprof.)

Private astronaut Brian Binnie discusses his first trip to space aboard SpaceShipOne.

When the day of my flight finally came, I was working with very little sleep. Prior to the release point, I had an excruciating hour in which I had little to do but sit, think, and come face to face with the demons that lurked into my thoughts as I waited. Would things go according to plan? Had SpaceShipOne revealed to us all its secrets? The flight test was under such a microscope that I couldn’t even sneeze – without multiple cameras in the cockpit beaming the images back to the many people watching including the whole Scaled team, the X PRIZE Foundation, Paul Allen, Sir Richard Branson, NASA, and tons of media outlets. Considering that I hadn’t flown the vehicle in some 10 months, I felt I was under a huge amount of pressure. Then, after the hour long wait, things shifted into fast forward and everything happened incredibly quickly. After release, I was under the impressive acceleration of the hybrid rocket and thundering toward space. The shuddering and shaking vibrations combined with the demonic screeching of that motor were most memorable. But, by far, the best part was the contrast provided when I shut off the rocket; Blessed peace and quiet and the instant karma of weightlessness. And then, my God, that view! Separating the black void that is space from the peaceful panorama below is a thin blue electric ribbon of light that is the atmosphere. For 4 minutes I got to soak it all in. I tell you, one cannot be unmoved by the experience! From Mojave, I could see the San Francisco Bay to the North, Baja Mexico to the south, the Sierra-Nevada Mountains and the Pacific. I captured some of the sights with a camera but it’s definitively something you need to see for yourself.

Someday I'm sure I will! These stories give me far more hope than the Space Shuttle ever did that I might get to go into space myself one day.

An international team of paleoanthropologists claims to have discovered a 4.4-million-year-old ancestor of modern humans, which they have named Ardipithecus ramidus. I'm extremely skeptical of their conclusions.

Researchers in the U.S. and Ethiopia on Thursday made public fossils from a 4.4-million-year-old human forebear they say reveals that the earliest human ancestors were more modern than scholars assumed and deepens the evolutionary gulf separating humankind from today's apes and chimpanzees.

The highlight of the extensive fossil trove is a female skeleton a million years older than the iconic bones of Lucy, the primitive female figure that has long symbolized humankind's beginnings.

An international research team led by paleoanthropologist Tim White at the University of California, Berkeley, unveiled remains from 36 males, females and young of an ancient prehuman species called Ardipithecus ramidus, unearthed in the Awash region of Ethiopia since 1994. The creatures take their scientific name from the word for root in the local Afar language. They are not the oldest known homind fossils but they comprise the most complete set discovered so far.

Emphasis mine. Were these bones discovered in a skeleton-shaped pile buried in the dirt? Of course not.

“Then the whole crew converged on the area and we crawled on the surface like a baby on hands and knees” searching for additional bones, he said. In the coming months, they found dozens of bones scattered over an area of 10 to 15 meters (33 to 49 feet).

Lovejoy did an analysis on 145 teeth they found, including canines from as many as 21 individuals.

A mere dozens of bones scattered over an area fifty feet across. But all related to each other, right?

Ardi was found in alongside crumbling fossils of 29 species of birds and 20 species of small mammals - including owls, parrots, shrews, bats and mice.

And those dozens of bones were in whole pieces?

Researchers have pieced together 125 fragments of bone - including much of her skull, hands, feet, arms, legs and pelvis - which were dated using the volcanic layers of soil above and below the find.

So the claim is that:

1. Dozens of Ardi bones were found. How many dozens? Let's say many dozens. Even 200 bones.

2. These 200 bones were correctly assembled from many hundreds of fragments.

3. These 200 bones belong to between 21 and 36 individual Ardis. Let's take the low figure.

4. They can differentiate the Ardi bones from all the other bones from unknown species that are mixed in with them.

5. Once they identify the Ardi bones, they can tell which ones are from which individual.

6. After all that they get an average of ten bones per individual, max.

The claims made by the researchers are just plain incredible. Look below at the pictures of the bones they assembled from fragments and the artist rendering of Ardi.

The accompanying caption is "Ardi's skeleton (left) revealed she was 4ft tall and weighed 7st 12oz". Think about that verb for a second: revealed. Not "possibly", "probably", "claims", but a concrete word: revealed. No shoulders and hardly any torso bones, but Ardi's weight is "revealed"?

I don't believe it. There are computer images of bone fragments and all sorts of claims of complex analysis, but I simply don't think there's enough information in the bone fragments to make the claims they're making.