Word: egg
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...fight them without fighting your brothers." Some Gazans love Hamas, others fear it. But potentially all contribute to a kind of "popular army" ready to take up stones or rifles to protect Hamas should the Palestinian Authority go gunning for them. Ajez for one thinks Sharon is trying to egg on such a battle: "Israel wants us to kill each other. Then who will they need to negotiate with?" He, for one, says he will not get involved. "I will go sit with my wife and tell the Prime Minister, 'You take a weapon and fight them...
Rewriting basic biology was the last thing on Tilly's mind when he and his colleagues began their research. They were interested in prolonging fertility, but as experts in cell death, or apoptosis, they were looking for ways to keep the limited supply of eggs limping along longer. "We assumed the dogma was correct," he says. Indeed, they found that the egg cells in adult-mouse ovaries are constantly dying off--but at a remarkable rate of up to 1,200 a day, or about a third of the total. "By the existing dogma," says Tilly, "they shouldn't last...
...simple arithmetic isn't a strong enough argument for such an astonishing proposition, so the biologists conducted several experiments to test it. In one, they looked for and found cells that appeared to be undergoing meiosis, the type of cell division peculiar to sperm and egg cells. They also detected the activity of a gene involved in that process. Then they dosed the mice with busulfan, a cancer drug known to kill the stem cells that produce sperm. Three weeks later, there were virtually no eggs left, suggesting that the drug had found a similar stem-cell target...
Finally, in an especially ingenious experiment, they used mice genetically engineered to carry a jellyfish gene that glows a faint fluorescent green and transplanted normal ovarian tissue into them. If the mice really did have egg-producing stem cells, some should migrate into the new tissue to generate new, green eggs--while the follicles that enveloped them, coming from normal tissue, would be white. "That's exactly what we saw," says Tilly...
Even if they do, it will be a while before anyone benefits from this research. Scientists will have to figure out how to purify ovarian stem cells, then transfer them into depleted ovaries to see if they can restart egg production--first in mice, then, if possible, in humans. But if they can, Tilly envisions all sorts of benefits. You might extract the cells and freeze them, and if a woman got cancer, you could reintroduce them after chemotherapy shut down her ovaries. Or you might freeze some of the vigorous stem cells in a young woman so she would...