Top scientists to Obama: Ban mutation experiments that will make avian flu more infectious

End Of Days News

 group of leading scientists – including a Nobel Prize winner - has proclaimed that it is “ethically and morally” wrong to alter the deadly H5N1 virus to make it more contagious for research purposes, and have asked President Obama to ban it.

“The accidental release of an artificial, laboratory-generated, human-transmissible H5N1 virus into the community has the potential to cause a global pandemic of epic proportions that would dwarf the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed over 50 million people,” read a letter to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

The petition was drafted by the Foundation for Vaccine Research (FVR), a scientific advocacy group, and numbered world-leading biologists among the 17 signatories, including Lord May, the former chief science advisor to the UK government, and Sir Richard Roberts, the recipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Medicine, for genetics research.

Late in 2011, two groups of scientists courted controversy, when they prepared to publish studies showing a modified version of the avian flu virus that could be passed through the air between mammals. In its current form, the virus, which has killed 60 percent of those it infects, is not easily caught by people from birds, and is even more difficult to transmit from one human to another.

Read More: http://rt.com/news/avian-flu-virus-obama-178/

‘Zombie cell’ mates biology and chemistry at nano-scale

End Of Days News

 

US researchers developed a process that coats a living cell with silica ‘armor’, creating a near-identical inorganic duplicate. This ‘zombie cell’ technique has the potential for building complex nano-scale machines using life as blueprint.
The process developed at the University of New Mexico is relatively simple. The team suspended living mammalian cells in a petri dish and added mild solution of silicic acid. One of the acid’s byproducts softens the protective lipid casing of the cell and makes it porous enough for the silica to flow in.

The acid then, in a process ‘still partially obscure’,embalms every organelle in the cell from the micro- and down to nanometer scale, covering them with a sort of silica armor. The resulting cell/silica composite can be then heated to either evaporate the protein ‘mold’ and created a near-perfect silica replica of the cellular structure.

Its most immediate use is long-lasting preservation of biological samples. But potentially the technique can be used to fabricate complex useful nanomachinery, says Bryan Kaehr a materials scientist at UNM’s Sandia National Laboratories.

“It’s very challenging for researchers to build structures at the nanometer scale,” he said. “We can make particles and wires, but 3-D arbitrary structures haven’t been achieved yet. With this technique, we don’t need to build those structures — nature does it for us. We only need to find cells that possess the machinery we want and copy it using our technique. And, using chemistry or surface patterning, we can program a group of cells to form whatever shape seems desirable.”

The alternative is to heat the composite without oxygen and turn the protein into porous conductive graphitic carbon supported by the silica coating. The silica can then be dissolved living a carbon structure that can find its use in fuel cells, decontamination and sensor technology.

If the composite isn’t heated, there are possible applications too. For instance, biological catalysts – the enzymes – must retain a certain shape to trigger chemical reactions. The silica coating preserves the structure at temperatures undreamed of by nature while still able to carry out reactions.

“Our zombie cells bridge chemistry and biology to create forms that not only near-perfectly resemble their past selves but can do future work,” Kaehr says.

The team reported their finds in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

http://rt.com/news/zombie-cell-new-mexico-258/