Martian DNA

Genomics maverick Craig Venter, life synthesiser and human genome cracker has conquered all Earthly summits and has set his sights on the next frontier: Mars.

Last week Venter revealed that he plans to send a DNA sequencer to Mars in his “biological teleporter” which will sequence any DNA it can find in the Martian soil and beam the data back to Earth. This eliminates the risky and potentially costly procedure of returning any physical samples to us in a useful form.

We’ve been searching for life on Mars for the past thirty odd years though, why haven’t we found it? And what makes Venter so sure he can succeed?

Venter is looking for something we’ve not looked for before, specifically DNA, what we know as the basis of all life on Earth. One thing we’ve learned recently about the building blocks of DNA is that the sugar that forms its backbone has been found floating around in space. Maybe they were thrown out from the fallout of asteroid collision that created our moon from primordial microbes on the Earth that was. Maybe they weren’t, but however they got there, there’s reason that they couldn’t settle on Mars and start making machines – life!

In the past, searches for organic chemistry on Mars have turned up nothing but ambiguity, most famously the Viking landers. These crafts found evidence of metabolic chemical reactions like those we see on Earth however the unusual content of the Martian soil may have corrupted the results of the experiments and any conclusions in favour of life have been more or less thrown out of the window. What Venter is looking for now is not simply reactions indicative of life but the chemical makeup of it itself.

Venter is not alone however in his search for DNA on Mars. A group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology called Search of Extraterrestrial Genomes (SETG) is working on building their own genome sequencer aimed at use on the red planet. SETG has divulged significantly more information than Venter has however. They are looking at identifying and sequencing both DNA and RNA (DNA’s older brother) using a next generation sequencing machine on a computer chip called Ion Torrent. SETG is seven years in the making and will search for genomic material made by something still living to anything synthesised up to a million years ago.

All of these plans are well meaning and incredibly exciting, but there’s every chance that if there is life on Mars, it’s still going to elude us because it’s not DNA based. Nevertheless if we do find DNA on Mars yet more weight is added to the hypothesis that life was seeded here and on Mars by passing asteroids. This would suggest that there might also be life in innumerable other locations throughout space, and how awesome would that be?

Living up to his reputation for arrogance and audacity, Venter has put forward that he has no doubt that there is life to be found on Mars. He says “there will be DNA life forms there”, this author for one hopes he is correct.

Bird Flu Redux?

In the past couple of months the story of the creation of a hyper-virulent strain of bird flu by Dutch virologists has caught the attention of many in the scientific establishment as well as those in government. Yes, these results and conclusions has sparked a row over the scientist’s right to publish and has forced us even to question the purpose of the scientific endeavour itself. The US authorities, quite rightly so, raised the issue that publication and possession of this knowledge is a potential target for nefarious exploitation and could usher in a new era of bioterrorism.

In September of 2011, it was reported that Ron Fouchier at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam had successfully made a H5N1 virus - which causes bird flu - able to spread between mammals in his lab. This was a feat that had not before been achieved and many virologists had postulated that it was not even possible.

Fouchier’s H5N1 is also miles more infectious than traditional bird flu and was seen to be at least so infectious as seasonal flu. This is the factor that has previously prevented a bird flu pandemic, it's deadly enough but simply too poorly infectious for a deadly killer virus outbreak like in the movies as hyped by the media, and likely never would be.

However, Fouchier and his team have proved this to be wrong. They showed that only five specific mutations were sufficient to transform the virus in to a potential Hollywood style killer.

Initially the virus was given three mutations which before had shown that the virus could be transferred to a mammal. This allowed the virus to infect Fouchier’s mammal of choice - the ferret chosen for its similar response to viral infection to humans - and kill them but not infect fresh healthy subjects. So far business as usual.

The three mutation virus which killed these ferrets then was isolated from dead ferrets and reinfected in to healthy ones in a contained and stringent procedure. This is a common method for making a virus adapt to a new host and was iterated ten times, with virus shed from the tenth test group becoming infectious enough to infect a healthy ferret and kill them.

Fast forward to November and the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (USNSABB) decides to delay the publication of the work of Fouchier et al on H5N1 on grounds that it could in the wrong hands become a weapon or further work on the so-called “armageddon virus” could allow it to escape the lab and enter the population.

As the story stands at this point, things appear to be being hideously sensationalised and misrepresented. Some articles on the subject appeared to imply that Fouchier et al “DELIBERATELY [sic] creat[ed] armageddon bird flu virus” as though their work had been funded by the Lex Luthor Institute for Evil. All Fouchier et al were trying to do was find out if it was possible for H5N1 strains like this to evolve and how it could be prevented, better monitored, treated and cured.

Eventually, Fouchier was allowed to publish by the USNSABB, initially with certain data redacted from the finished paper and made available only to accredited researchers, although this decision was soon overturned and the USNSABB came out in favour of publication.

It was the Dutch authorities who next threatened Fouchier’s right to publish. Since Fouchier’s base at the Erasmus Medical Centre is in the Netherlands he is subject to Dutch law which prohibits the export of weaponisable technology, and they say that potentially this is what Fouchier is hawking. Apparently fed up with the red tape, Fouchier now plans to submit his article to the American journal Science who are protected under to US law to publish any article which has been formally submitted to them, however as of seventh of March 2012, Science are yet to receive correspondence from Fouchier.

This story highlights important issues in science and its relationship with world governments and the apparently rising issue of censorship in science. As I see it, science should never be censored, as the second we begin to put limitations on our knowledge we bolt these limits also to our capabilities as individuals and societies.

Censorship is antithetical to the nature of the scientific endeavour. When we observe phenomena we experiment with them to find out what’s really going on and once we have conclusions we tell everyone about it and welcome their criticism. Censorship could put the clamps on that altogether, then where would be?

In saying this though, science is dangerous, that’s part of what makes it so exciting, so correct measures should be made in order to ensure that dangerous science is used safely and appropriately - by which I mean no weaponisation at all - a task which some might say can be entrusted to no individual government or inter-governmental organisation...

Sources New Scientist Science Nature Discover Magazine

Synthesising Sight

Corneal blindness is the fourth most common cause of blindness worldwide, causing 5.1% of all blindness. It is caused by damage and scarring to the cornea, the transparent covering of the eye which protects the pupil and iris and so the only real treatment for this kind of blindness has been a transplant of the cornea. This sounds simple enough, but donors are sparse and the procedure is risky and expensive, making treatment implausible in many developing countries.

For years, this has been the general prognosis for corneal blindness: either to live with it or patiently await a donor and even a transplant is only a temporary fix. However this week Sylvia Paton in Edinburgh became the first person to receive a stem cell transplant in the cornea to reverse the damage causing the disease.

Stem cells are the poster child of the tomorrow’s medicine and are at the core of the dynamic field of regenerative medicine. A stem cell is one which can generate a complete tissue of any kind in the body, herein lies their usefulness. A very small sample of stem cells could in the future be used to generate an entirely new lung or kidney or any other organ imaginable.

This procedure involved formation of new corneal tissue formed from stem cells which was replaced the damaged scarred tissue which caused the blindness.

It will be months before a the effect (if any) of this treatment may be seen but Professor Baljean Dhillon, a consultant ophthalmic surgeon at Murrayfield Hosptial in Edinburgh and the study’s principle investigator, is hopeful and says that such treatment “could bring sight to many people around the world who currently live in darkness”.

As pioneering as this treatment is, it is not the first of its kind. In July of last year, the first ever synthetic organ transplant was performed in Sweden, where a synthetic trachea coated in the patient’s own stem cells was transplanted in to a woman who had lost hers to cancer, while a surgeon in the USA has been performing transplants of synthetic bladders made from stem cells since the late ‘90s.

Professor Dhillon’s procedure potentially gives thousands of people around the world their sight back, however for patients with a genetic predisposition to corneal blindness – as this patient was – the stem cells must be obtained from the eyes of another adult donor. This does not really solve much for patients in this predicament since donations of eye tissue appears to be a source of distaste among the public and donors are of eye tissue are rare.