Word: miceli
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...just the rich and powerful who have advocates in Congress. So do the small and wiggly, including mice, frogs, lizards, fish and hamsters. And they need them, with products like "crush" videos showing up on the Internet. The videos, which sell for up to $100, show small animals being stomped to death, usually by women wearing high-heeled shoes and boots. Although there are laws against animal cruelty, prosecutors have had trouble winning cases because most of the films don't show the stompers' faces. They also have to prove that the films were made within a three-year statute...
...Alzheimer's is the formation of sticky clumps of protein, called amyloid plaques, in the brains of affected patients. Scientists from Elan Pharmaceuticals, a biotech company headquartered in Ireland, reported they had produced a vaccine that could prevent plaques from forming and dissolve existing ones in the brains of mice. They speculated that a similar approach might be used to treat people...
What got lost in the enthusiasm was a sense of how difficult it is to make the leap from mice to men--especially in this case. For starters, mice don't get Alzheimer's disease. The rodents in these experiments were genetically engineered to produce amyloid plaques, but they don't exhibit any of the other telltale signs of Alzheimer's. Indeed, scientists aren't sure whether plaques are a cause or an effect of the disease. A vaccine that removes plaques in mice could still fail to treat the underlying disease in people...
...problem, researchers injected the mice's brains with neuronal stem cells, a kind of parent cell that can generate any cell type in the central nervous system. These same cells have shown promise in the localized treatment of Parkinson's disease. In this case, though, the stem cells had to migrate throughout the mice's brains, then figure out what kinds of cells to turn into--a much more complicated process. Yet that's just what they did, fanning out and transforming themselves into oligodendrocytes, which started churning out myelin insulation. In 60% of cases, the tremors stopped almost completely...
...precisely the right way is unclear, but the fact that they did respond suggests that a different brain disorder might have produced a different, equally therapeutic result. If that's so--and, more important, if it turns out to work in humans the same way it does in mice--then neuroscientists may someday have a brain-repair tool kit of astonishing versatility and power...