Cloning Conundrum
A researcher from the group of shamed South Korean cloning scientist Hwang Woo-suk told a South Korean television station that Hwang coerced her to donate her own eggs for his cloning efforts. She revealed that after undergoing the painful procedure to have the eggs removed, she had to experiment on her eggs later the same day. The junior said she regrets that she didn't stand up to the lead scientist; she feared she wouldn't get academic recognition for her involvement in the research.
A collaboration between the University of Wisconsin and a company called WiCell has created the first human stem cell cultures without using animal cells. Typically the process involves mouse embryos, which can supply the nutrients and growth factors needed to harvest the cells. However, the animal embryo method carries the risk of protein contamination, which is eliminated with this technique.
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For the first time, scientists have grown a whole organ, artificially, from nothing. The organ in question? Replacement breasts. Not one, but two teams have successfully outfitted mice with a new pair of boobs after identifying the type of stem cell responsible for breast tissue. While this may seem like a joke, the technique may allow women who have undergone a mastectomy to regenerate their breasts.
On the last day of 2005, there was a big first for biotechnology. On the morning of December 31st, Avery Lee Kennedy, the first baby fertilized from a frozen donor egg taken from a commercial egg bank, was born at the University of Kentucky Medical Center.
A research group in Spain warns that children conceived via a common in vitro fertilization method called ICSI (or intracytoplasmic sperm injection) may end up with chromosomes containing bacterial DNA. By contaminating mouse sperm with the bacteria E. coli, injecting the sperm into eggs, and then testing the resulting embryos, the scientists found that the bacteria had not been weeded out of the genome. A UK scientist commenting on the study said that this was unlikely to cause negative health effects.
Going Green
A wave buoy, a solar-paneled skyscraper, a wind farm and a biomass plant have made the UK's list of best green energy schemes. All the projects, which began operation in 2005, are part of Britain's goal of switching 10% of its energy to renewable sources by 2010.
Researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California are looking to the past to predict the future of climate change. The scientists point to a large change in ocean currents that occurred 55 million years ago, that took nearly 150,000 years to correct. By studying itsy bitsy fossils from the ocean floor at 14 different locations, the team believes that north Atlantic currents that warm northern Europe may be getting weaker, a disruption similar to the ancient current shift.
Spacing Out
On Tuesday, NASA celebrated the two-year anniversary of its first Mars rover, Spirit, touching down on the Red Planet. The second Mars rover, Opportunity, reached the fourth planet's surface three weeks later. Both have completed the mission's main objective: determining, using geological evidence, whether water ever flowed on Mars. Apparently, it once did.