Word: fibroblast
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Perhaps the ultimate protection against species extinction is what the San Diego scientists call their Frozen Zoo. More than just a sperm bank, it is a repository of fibroblast cells taken from the connective tissue of hundreds of exotic wild animals, ranging from Sumatran tigers to Uganda's pygmy chimps. These cells, which are easier to store and grow than most, are kept in liquid nitrogen at a temperature of -196° C ( - 320° F) against the day when technology will be ready to reawaken them. Says San Diego's Benirschke: "We could probably get along...
...that it would produce largely complete molecules of human leukocyte IF. At Harvard, Biochemist Tadatsugu Taniguchi, who first isolated an interferon gene while at the Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research, and Molecular Biologist Mark Ptashne seem on the verge of getting their restructured E. coli to spew out human fibroblast...
Indeed, the interferon bandwagon seems to be gathering momentum. According to last week's Boston Globe story, the new M.I.T. production technique could bring the cost of fibroblast IF down from about $50 to only $2.50 per million units. Says the A.C.S.'s Rauscher: "Right now it's costing something like $150 a day to treat patients, and a full course of treatment can go as high as $30,000 or more. This is very good news indeed." So it is. For even if interferon should only partly live up to its initial, most tentative promise, it would augment...
...interferon's secrets. They found that it is a protein produced by cells in response to some stimulation, usually by a virus. To date, at least three varieties of IF have been identified. One kind is produced by leukocytes, or white blood cells. A second type is generated by fibroblasts, cells that form connective tissue in skin and other organs. (A prime source of fibroblast IF is the foreskin of circumcised infants.) The third, called immune interferon, is apparently made by T lymphocytes, soldier cells that attack invaders and are part of the body's immune system.* Each seems...
...Pathologist Robert Friedman of the National Institutes of Health says, it is more of an "insider," a substance tailor-made by the immune system cells themselves. According to Samuel Baron, the Texas virologist, immune IF is 20 times more potent an antitumor agent than the interferon produced by fibroblast or leukocyte cells...