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Skull Fusion Disorder Of Infants: UC Davis Bioengineer Receives Hartwell Grant
With support from a foundation that champions cutting-edge medical research, a biomedical engineer at UC Davis will start work this month on developing a new treatment for infants born with disorders that cause the sutures of their skulls to prematurely fuse together.
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New York State Compensation Policy For Egg Donors 'Seems Justifiable,' New York Times Editorial States
Although New York state"s decision to allow state-funded embryonic stem cell researchers to compensate women for donating their eggs "has provoked criticism from some ethicists and runs counter to guidelines issued by" NIH and the National Academy of Sciences, it still "seems justifiable" to pay the women "for undergoing an arduous procedure and to spur progress on potentially important research that has been slowed because of a lack of human eggs," a New York Times editorial states. The state"s Empire State Stem Cell Board last month made the decision to allow researchers to pay women up to $10,000 as compensation.According to the editorial, "[w]omen already get paid comparable sums to donate their eggs to help infertile women have a child through in vitro fertilization," so it "is hard to see why they should not be paid for contributing their eggs for research." The editorial notes that the "money is meant as reimbursement for travel, housing, child care or medical expenses," and it also would "compensate the women for the considerable time, burden and inconvenience of harvesting their eggs, a process that can take 56 hours spread out over many weeks.""The board set reasonable constraints, insisting that the research be rigorously reviewed and approved by oversight committees, that donors be fully informed of potential physical and psychological risks and that they give informed consent to the procedure," the editorial states. It adds, "One concern has been that payments could induce women, especially poor women, to provide eggs without fully considering potential risks." The editorial continues, "In an effort to mitigate that possibility, the stem cell board will follow the guidelines of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, which require justification for payments of $5,000 or more and deem sums above $10,000 inappropriate."The editorial adds, "Human eggs are highly prized for some of the most promising research, notably studies that require matching embryonic stem cells to a particular patient with a particular disease," concluding, "It has proved almost impossible to recruit women to go through the arduous process for free," so the "board was right to allow fair compensation" (New York Times, 7/11).
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Finance Committee Negotiators Near Accord On Bill
The Washington Post: "Three Democrats and three Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee are expected to wrap up their arduous multi-week talks in the coming days, and Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said he expects a panel vote before the Senate recess, which will begin Aug. 7. Assuming the fragile committee coalition holds, the legislation it produces would scramble the reform landscape by introducing policy ideas that have their origins in the political center. The bill is bound to disappoint liberals."
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Synchronized Swimming Of Algae May Have Significant Implications For Human Health And Disease

Using high-speed cinematography, scientists at Cambridge University have discovered that individual algal cells can regulate the beating of their flagella in and out of synchrony in a manner that controls their swimming trajectories. Their research was published on the 24th July in the journal Science. The researchers studied the unicellular organism Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, which has two hair-like appendages known as flagella. The beating of flagella propels Chlamydomonas through the fluid and simultaneously makes it spin about an axis. The researchers found that cells can beat their flagella in two fundamentally distinct modes: synchronised, with nearly identical frequencies and positions, and unsynchronised, with two rather different frequencies. Using a specialised apparatus to track the swimming trajectories of individual cells, the group showed that the periods of synchrony correspond to nearly straight-line motion, while sharp turns result from the asynchronous beating. Whereas previous studies had suggested that these modes were associated with different subpopulations of cells, the new work shows that the cells actually control the frequencies and thereby switch back and forth between the two modes. In essence, this suggests Chlamydomonas has two "gears". Moreover, the researchers have developed a mathematical analysis that describes the two beating flagella as "coupled oscillators," in a way similar to models of synchronised flashing of fireflies and the "Mexican wave" of people in a stadium. Analyzing terabytes of data on the patterns of synchronisation, they showed that the strength of the coupling was consistent with it arising from the fluid flows set up by the beating flagella. These observations constitute the first direct demonstration that hydrodynamic interactions are responsible for synchronisation, which has long been predicted to lead to such coordination. Professor Raymond E. Goldstein, the Schlumberger Professor of Complex Physical Systems in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) and lead author of the study, said: "These results indicate that flagellar synchronization is a much more complex problem than had been appreciated, and involves a delicate interplay of cellular regulation, hydrodynamics, and biochemical noise." Funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the work is part of a larger effort to improve our knowledge of evolutionary transitions from single-cell organisms (like Chlamydomonas) to multicellular ones. In addition, the flagella of Chlamydomonas cells are nearly identical to the cilia in the human body. In many of life"s processes, from reproduction to respiration, coordinated action of cilia plays a crucial role. For this reason, insight into synchronization and its control may have significant implications for human health and disease. The group was led by Professor Goldstein and included postdoctoral researchers Dr. Marco Polin and Dr. Idan Tuval, Ph.D. student Knut Drescher, and Professor Jerry P. Gollub, a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at DAMTP from Haverford College. Notes: The article "Chlamydomonas swims with two `gears" in a eukaryotic version of run-and-tumble locomotion" was published Friday 24th July in the journal Science. Farzana Miah University of Cambridge


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