Word: sugar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What causes porcine organs to be rejected so quickly is a sugar molecule on the surface of pig cells that identifies the tissue as unmistakably nonhuman. When the immune system spots this marker, it musters its defenses. PPL scientists recently succeeded in finding the gene responsible for the sugar and knocking it out of the nucleus of a pig cell. Their next step would be to extract that nucleus, insert it into a hollowed-out pig ovum and insert the ovum into the womb of a host sow. The sugar-free piglet that was eventually born could then be cloned...
...cloned piglets PPL introduced to the world last week were created in just this way, though for this first experiment in pig replication, the scientists left the sugar genes intact. "We wanted to work with pristine cells to make sure our cloning technique would indeed work," says Ayares. Now that they've proved it does, the scientists plan to raise the bar and try the same procedure with modified genes...
Despite this recent success, PPL is not likely to be setting up its organ shop anytime soon. Knocking out the key sugar gene solves only the problem of short-term rejection. Long-term rejection, caused by blood coagulating around the new organ, requires that researchers re-engineer an entirely different set of genes that code for anticoagulants. But even this would not be a perfect solution, and recipients of pig organs would probably still have to take the same rainbow of antirejection drugs recipients of human organs must now endure...
...SUGAR ALERT Type 2 diabetes was almost unheard of in children only a decade ago. But now, with a quarter of U.S. kids overweight, a panel named by the American Diabetes Association warns of "an emerging epidemic." The panel says that overweight children with high cholesterol, high blood pressure or a family history of diabetes should lose weight, exercise and get screened for diabetes...
Interstate 10, bound east to west, is a nonstop train of dreamers. Barreling through the desert, they come in search of the cheap thrill, the easy score, the fast women, the sugar daddies. On their final approach, they can already begin to make out the pale halo of the city's lights--lights that can be seen from outer orbit, against the dark face of a planet couched in the shadow of night. They make their way down to the strip and all around the city. They're greeted by a madman's dreamscape: castles made of sand, built with...