Word: biotech
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...Swedish biotech firm has signed an exclusive agreement with Harvard Medical School (HMS) that provides the firm broad access to nucleic acid technology developed...
...might be adding milk from a cloned cow to our coffee. Scientists, policymakers and others convene in Dallas this week to debate the possibility. That's because farmers and biotech firms are already cloning prize livestock. A National Academy of Sciences report says research vouches for the safety of by-products from cloned animals but calls for more study. If cloned animals end up in the food supply, will consumers know it? Probably not, says one of the report's authors, because "if companies can show that their milk or meat is substantially equivalent to those from noncloned animals...
These molecular structures are called fullerenes, or buckyballs, in honor of the American architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller. Smalley sits on the board of C-Sixty, a biotech company that builds fullerenes into molecules that researchers hope will attach to and deactivate HIV molecules and blow up cancer cells on cue. "Buckyballs are not quite like nanosubmarines that target deadly diseases"--as seen in the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage--"but because of their size and shape, they are well suited for drug discovery," says Stephen Wilson, co-founder of C-Sixty, based in Houston...
...from exhaustion and erosion. Old-fashioned cross-breeding can yield plant strains that are heartier and more pest-resistant. But in a world that needs action fast, genetic engineering must still have a role--provided it produces suitable crops. Increasingly, those crops are being created not just by giant biotech firms but also by home-grown groups that know best what local consumers need...
...such crops as sorghum and cassava--hardly staples in the West, but essentials elsewhere in the world. The key, explains economist Jeffrey Sachs, head of Columbia University's Earth Institute, is not to dictate food policy from the West but to help the developing world build its own biotech infrastructure so it can produce the things it needs the most. "We can't presume that our technologies will bail out poor people in Malawi," he says. "They need their own improved varieties of sorghum and millet, not our genetically improved varieties of wheat and soybeans...