Tag Archives: biotechnology

September 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

  • The Suzuki and Kodaly methods are two ways of teaching music to young children that may actually help them think later in life. Training in jazz improvisation may also be good for young brains in a slightly different way.
  • There are some bright ideas for trying to improve construction productivity, which has languished for decades. Most involve some form of offsite fabrication.
  • In energy news, there’s a big idea to produce half the world’s electricity from sunlight in the Sahara desert. Another idea for collecting solar energy in otherwise (ecologically) wasted space is solar roadways, and there are a few prototypes around the world but this doesn’t seem to be a magic bullet so far. Another big idea is long-term storage of energy to smooth out fluctuations in supply and demand over months or even years.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

artificial spider silk

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Artificial spider silk is an alternative to carbon fiber.

Amsilk is located in Martinsried, Germany, and owned by twins Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann. The Strüngmann brothers made their fortunes with Hexal, a generic drugmaker, and the company’s fibers came from research by Thomas Scheibel, a biomaterials professor at the University of Bayreuth.

The fibers are made by genetically modifying E.coli bacteria to produce spider silk proteins. These purified proteins are then dried into a silk powder, which can be put into textiles, cosmetics or used as the basis for lightweight composites.

Amsilk calls it “Biosteel” and says synthetic silk is resistant, flexible and soft, giving it an advantage over carbon fiber for use in implants and prosthetics, or even aviation. “The disadvantage of carbon is that aircraft are often grounded after a bump because parts have to be replaced,” said Amsilk boss Jens Klein. Minor damage to carbon fiber can be a big problem whereas Biosteel may be able to take the knock and remain in use.

 

the old sucking the blood of the young?

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There is grisly research where a young mouse is sown together with an old mouse and their blood vessels are connected. This seems to benefit the old mouse. And no, I haven’t watched “human centipede” and I have no desire to, although I did find the South Park parody of it moderately funny.

Beyond the stupidity of human centipede, you can imagine a mad dictator or Bond villain somewhere forcing people to be blood donors against their will. A more benign version would have biotech firms trying to synthesize whatever it is that makes young blood good, or possibly using stem cells to make a young version of a person’s blood. What if a version of me could be created that was just a bag of meat with no nervous system, and pumped out blood that kept me alive? That seems creepy but not necessarily unethical. Add a brain and keep that person sedated or otherwise detained against their will, and that would clearly be unethical (not to mention basically the plot of The Island.)

April 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

Impossible Foods

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Impossible Foods is a synthetic meat company.

The ingredient, made from soybean roots and genetically engineered yeast, goes into vegetarian Impossible Burgers, which are available in a growing number of restaurants — even fast-food stalwart White Castle…

It contains heme (pronounced HEEM), a key part of red meat and a source of iron, which humans can’t live without. Think of Brown’s discovery as plant-based blood. Brown, 63, says it makes the Impossible Burger sizzle, smell and taste like real red meat…

Fake meat will be one of the year’s hottest food trends. An increasing number of flexitarians — people not looking to eat meat at every meal — are helping to drive interest, according to Rabobank. Sales of alternative proteins are dwarfed by the $49 billion red meat and chicken market, but they’re expected to grow about 17 percent a year to $863 million in 2021, according to a CoBank estimate.

Apparently the company is having some trouble with the FDA, which it voluntarily sought approval from.

test tube dog food

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It makes sense that dog food would be the first serious commercial application of synthetic meat.

I can’t help thinking of the yeast vats in Isaac Asimov’s 1953 Caves of Steel. That idea has almost literally come true.

Bethencourt compares his company’s production of “clean” protein to that of sake—imagine giant fermentation tanks—right down to using the same ingredient to fuel its protein growth. Koji, a fungus, is the Japanese version of baker’s yeast. It grows rapidly inside tanks, along with sugar and nutrients, at the right balmy temperature. The result is a plant-based protein with a close match to eggs or animal-based meat. Because koji is widely consumed by humans, it already has a GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) designation. Wild Earth’s supply chain is simple—it uses only a handful of ingredients—and easily traceable.

February 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

  • A general rule across many types of wildlife is that their range after urbanization decreases to between one-half and one-third of what it was before urbanization.
  • The Cuban sonic attacks are real. At least, the people who experienced them have real brain damage, even if we still don’t know what technology did the damage.
  • Cape Town will probably not be the last major city to run out of water.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

Alzheimer’s reversed in mice

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An experimental genetic treatment has been able to completely remove the brain plaques that cause Alzheimers disease in mice.

BACE1 deletion in the adult mouse reverses preformed amyloid deposition and improves cognitive functions

BACE1 initiates the generation of the β-amyloid peptide, which likely causes Alzheimer’s disease (AD) when accumulated abnormally. BACE1 inhibitory drugs are currently being developed to treat AD patients. To mimic BACE1 inhibition in adults, we generated BACE1 conditional knockout (BACE1fl/fl) mice and bred BACE1fl/fl mice with ubiquitin-CreER mice to induce deletion of BACE1 after passing early developmental stages. Strikingly, sequential and increased deletion of BACE1 in an adult AD mouse model (5xFAD) was capable of completely reversing amyloid deposition. This reversal in amyloid deposition also resulted in significant improvement in gliosis and neuritic dystrophy. Moreover, synaptic functions, as determined by long-term potentiation and contextual fear conditioning experiments, were significantly improved, correlating with the reversal of amyloid plaques. Our results demonstrate that sustained and increasing BACE1 inhibition in adults can reverse amyloid deposition in an AD mouse model, and this observation will help to provide guidance for the proper use of BACE1 inhibitors in human patients.