Researchers discover gene that blocks HIV

A team of researchers at the University of Alberta has discovered a gene that is able to block HIV, and in turn prevent the onset of AIDS.

Stephen Barr, a molecular virologist in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, says his team has identified a gene called TRIM22 that can block HIV infection in a cell culture by preventing the assembly of the virus.

"When we put this gene in cells, it prevents the assembly of the HIV virus," said Barr, a postdoctoral fellow. "This means the virus cannot get out of the cells to infect other cells, thereby blocking the spread of the virus."

Barr and his team also prevented cells from turning on the TRIM22 gene - provoking an interesting phenomenon: the normal response of interferon, a protein that co-ordinates attacks by genes like TRIM22 against viral infections, became useless at blocking HIV infection.

"This means that TRIM22 is an essential part of our body's ability to fight off HIV. The results are very exciting because they show that our bodies have a gene that is capable of stopping the spread of HIV."

One of the greatest challenges in battling HIV is the virus' ability to mutate and evade medications. Antiretroviral drugs introduced during the late 1990s interfere with HIV's ability to produce new copies of itself - and though beneficial, the drugs are unable to eradicate the virus. Barr and his team have discovered a gene that could potentially do the job naturally.

"There are always newly emerging drug-resistant strains of HIV so the push has been to develop more natural means of blocking the virus. The discovery of this gene, which is natural in our cells, might provide a different avenue," said Barr. "The gene prevents the assembly of the virus so in the future the idea would be to develop drugs or vaccines that can mimic the effects of this gene."

"We are currently trying to figure out why this gene does not work in people infected with HIV and if there is a way to turn this gene on in those individuals," he added. "We hope that our research will lead to the design of new drugs, or vaccines that can halt the person-to-person transmission of HIV and the spread of the virus in the body, thereby blocking the onset of AIDS."

The researchers are now investigating the gene's ability to battle other viruses.

Barr's research is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research. The findings are published in the Public Library of Science Pathogens.

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Patients who are frozen in time

Cryonics - freezing the dead with the hope of reviving them - has always been a long shot. But, says Wendy M Grossman, advances mean it could be coming a little closer

The conference room window overlooks a line of floor-to-ceiling, gleaming steel flasks. The steel feels chilly but not cold; the warehouse-like space they inhabit is unheated in the Arizona "winter". But don't lift the inner styrofoam lid and stick your hand in: they are filled with liquid nitrogen, which boils at 77 degrees Kelvin (-196C). From a nitrogen storage tank, a pipeline snakes along the ceiling sending a runner to each flask - more correctly, "dewar" - to top it up.

Most of the dewars are occupied. This is a little eerie. We are at Alcor, the cryonics organisation. The dewars' 79 occupants were - possibly will have been - people with a dream: that given enough time, medical science will advance enough to cure them of whatever killed them. To pay for their decades - centuries, possibly - at temperatures cold enough to prevent decomposition, they bought life insurance policies of between $75,000 (£38,500) and $100,000. Legally, they are dead. To Alcor's staff, they are "patients".

Cryonics is a small community. The two largest cryonics organisations, Alcor and Michigan-based Cryonics Institute, together poll about 1,600 members. Alcor has 79 patients and 33 pets in cryopreservation; CI has 85 patients and 50 pets.

Grand dream

Science was always going to be slow to fulfill a dream as grand as this. First, cryopreservation techniques need to improve so patients' bodies - and especially their brains, the repositories of memory and personality - suffer minimal damage. Second, the medical techniques for revival, such as cures for Aids, cancer and heart disease, must be developed. Many cryonicists opt to preserve only their heads, hoping for revival technology good enough to give them new, younger bodies. However, there are not even animal experiments to bolster the idea. Nobody has yet frozen and revived any mammal.

But the dream no longer seems quite as lunatic as it did in 1962, when Robert Ettinger's The Prospect of Immortality launched the modern cryonics movement. But because cryonics is so small, it has little funding for research.

The area of most immediate concern to cryonicists is improvements in preservation techniques: less damage at the beginning means an easier eventual repair job. The key technique, which came into use in 2001, is vitrification.

Ice cream that's melted and refrozen develops ice crystals. So do human bodies, where crystals can tear through delicate tissues. As one cryonicist puts it: "We didn't evolve to be frozen." Vitrification avoids this by replacing the blood with a mixture of antifreeze-like chemicals known as cryoprotectants via a machine like the cardio-pulmonary bypass devices used in hospitals. The right mixture at the right temperature, between -90C and -130C, becomes a smooth solid, like glass - hence vitrification.

This process and the cryoprotectants used vary between Alcor and CI; Alcor's cryoprotectants were developed and published by 21CM, a media-shy Florida-based company whose website stresses vitrification's usefulness to organ banks. Published research has shown that vitirication preserves the brain's structure remarkably well.

The downside is that cryoprotectants are toxic. In addition, vitrified human flesh tends to fracture. These are, respectively, the key areas for ongoing research to Ben Best, CI's president, and Alcor. Tanya Jones, director of operations at Alcor, says the cause of the fractures isn't clear, but that at least a few large fractures are easier to repair than many small ones.

The other problem is that it's illegal to vitrify someone while they're medically alive. So the teams have to wait for someone to be declared dead before they can go to work with vitrification.

Meantime, medical research throws up a new and promising headline almost every day. Last year, scientists at the J Craig Venter Institute successfully transferred an entire genome from one bacterium to another. In Maryland recently, scientists built an entire microbial chromosome.

Or take, for example, the work being done by Lance Becker, director of the Penn Center for Resuscitative Medicine. Becker is not directly concerned with cryonics, but it's easy to see connections. Becker wants to extend today's five-minute window for successful resuscitation after the heart stops.

"Fundamentally," he says, "what we are focused on is bringing people back to life from death or near-death, and reinventing or revolutionising the way we approach that." Becker's key discovery is that cells don't die during that five-minute window. The real damage comes when the heart restarts and oxygen floods the tissues, a process known as reperfusion.

"It's pretty well accepted that at the point at which the usual human being gets pronounced dead, all their cells are alive. It's a very eerie question: if all their cells are alive, what is death?" says Becker. Besides, if all the patient's cells are alive, why can't the patient recover and walk out of the hospital? "With our current therapies we can't do it."

One option, says Becker, is cooling the patient - by a few degrees, not to cryonic extremes - to buy time, an idea he says has been around for thousands of years. In studies, dogs and mice cooled before reperfusion have recovered better. "We believe it prevents reperfusion injury."

Cooling, he adds, is much quicker if you cool the blood directly, either by injecting a slurry of micro-ice particles or by using a bypass machine. Imagine, he says, a soldier in the Iraq war, bleeding to death while you watch. "If you could zap, perfuse him, put him on a plane, wing him to a major hospital and fix him all up - that's not at all crazy."

Mad or prescient?

That idea is in fact close to Jones's vision. "If we succeed in our mission," she says, "cryonics will become a process carried out in hospitals by medical staff for much shorter times."

That in itself is a change from the early days, when cryonicists more often aspired to immortality, not just more life. In addition, the demographics are changing. Formerly, most cryonicists were young, male and geeky. Now, Alcor gets whole families.

The important unknown is: Can a cryosuspended brain, warmed and revived, retain the memories and personality of its owner? Until this is proven - in a dog, if not a human - cryonicists don't know if they're mad or prescient. How long before we know?

Best says: "I think within 30 years we'll see a successful revival, but the people revived then would be cryopreserved 30 years from now." Last in, first out: the earliest patients to be cryopreserved suffered the worst damage. James Bedford, who in 1967 became the first person ever to be cryonically suspended and who is now at Alcor, was barely perfused at all. "For the people being cryopreserved now, under the best conditions, my guess is 50 to 100 years." Given the current rate of medical progress and research into nanotechnology, says Jones: "If we haven't done it in 100 years, it's not going to work."

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Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.

But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.

And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.

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Aromatherapy is no cure for what ails you

Here’s some unsettling news for anyone who ever sniffed a scented candle, essential oil or pricey pillow spray, hoping for healing or another kind of physical boost.

It doesn’t work.

At least that’s the verdict on two of the heavy hitters in the world of aromatherapy: lemon and lavender. Researchers at Ohio State University conducted what they say is the most scientifically rigorous test of physical changes caused by smelling the popular scents — and came up with nothing.

Oh, lemon oil certainly boosted mood, husband-and-wife scientists Ronald Glaser and Janice K. Kiecolt-Glaser report in the March issue of the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.

But a randomized controlled trial that tested heart rate, blood pressure, stress hormones and immune function showed no significant changes before and after the big sniff.

In fact, some of the 56 men and women in the two-year study showed a stronger reaction to distilled water than to either of the identified aromas.

“It’s nice that lemon oil affects mood, but it doesn’t do anything physiologically,” said Kiecolt-Glaser, director of the division of health psychology at OSU.

The scientists admitted they were surprised by the results of the study, which subjected volunteers to mild stress and then measured how quickly they recovered. They expected to find at least some significant response to lavender and lemon, which figure prominently in essential oils, lotions and sprays marketed as remedies for a range of ailments by the multi-million-dollar aromatherapy industry.

Even ‘true believers’ didn't change
Volunteers had scent-saturated cotton balls taped beneath their noses. Biological responses were measured before and after they dipped a foot for one minute in icy water, a known stressor. Scientists also stripped away skin cells with tape and then measured how fast the participants healed.

But the physiological markers didn’t budge, even when some volunteers were told what scents they were sniffing, and what pleasant side effects to expect.

Nearly a third of the subjects were so-called “true believers,” people who attested to the power of aromatherapy and regularly bought good-smelling products to soothe themselves. Their minds were saying one thing, but their bodies didn’t follow, said Ronald Glaser, a professor of molecular virology, immunology and medical genetics.

“Maybe lavender really does relax you, but guess what? We couldn’t find it,” he said.

The results of the study didn’t daunt Kathy Keville, a noted aromatherapist and author of a dozen books on the subject, including “Aromatherapy for Dummies.”

She didn’t dispute the science of the Glasers’ work, but she said that any of the more than 200 essential oils she uses regularly might have led to different results. Applying the essential oils topically instead of simply sniffing might also have produced different effects.

“If they had wanted blood pressure, they should have tried orange,” Keville said. “There are studies on chamomile being used for pain relief.”

Don't misjudge aromatherapy
It would be unfair to conclude that aromatherapy doesn’t work based on the results of even a rigorous single study, Keville said. Aromatherapy may not be a cure for specific illnesses or pain, but it’s a great adjunct therapy, she added.

That’s a view shared by Sue Repke, 44, one of the study participants, who believes the researchers’ findings — but doesn’t agree with them.

She’s an aromatherapy advocate who dabs lemon oil at her temples for alertness or eucalyptus oil to soothe a cold. She’ll turn to peppermint scents for a pick-me-up and her two girls, Alex, 13, and Andi, 10, are big fans of lavender-vanilla pillow spray.

“I think they need to keep looking, there’s something there,” said Repke, an occupational therapist in Columbus, Ohio. “It’s so frustrating when you know something works and they can’t find it.”

The Glasers say they would have been happy to report that a whiff of lavender or lemon cures what ails you — if it were true. Their work was funded by a two-year, nearly $374,000 grant from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. Officials there said the small exploratory study offers a good basis for future research.

Nice smell, but not a cure
The study may have been small, but it raises important points for people who turn to aromatherapy for help, the scientists say. Users are welcome to take a sniff of whatever scents they choose, but they should regard it as a fun diversion, not a physical cure.

“In any case, it’s an awfully pleasant way to have a placebo effect,” Keville said.

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