x - 39 Louis Sheehan

The analysis side of things is where more work is needed, says Hunt. “That’s the downside,” he says. “Many of the assays are difficult to do. It’s easy for the patient, but tough for the lab.”

An expanding area of research involves looking for proteins made by distressed cells, says Madden. Lung cells that have been attacked by a pollutant often make interleukin 8, a protein that recruits immune system cells from the blood. If hundreds of school children were exposed to diesel exhaust, for example, breath analysis could reveal interleukins or cytokines, giving a quick take on how the kids’ lungs are dealing with the assault.

Eventually, says Madden, suites of proteins might be identified that indicate specific exposures. “If you look at 100 proteins, do 10 stick out as unique to smokestack emissions or 10 for ozone exposure?” Better collaboration between physicians on the clinical side and scientists on the environmental side would help move that prospect along, he says.

“It’s a fun and expanding field—an up-and-coming research tool that people are really trying hard to translate into the clinical world,” says Hunt. “I think a lot will happen in the next few years. Eventually, we’ll be able to smell how people are doing.”

Big, unmanned spy planes, like the Predators flying over Iraq, have plenty of problems. For starters, they are expensive to build and operate. More important, some can be relatively easy to spot. Shrinking such planes so that they weigh less than two ounces would result in the perfect vehicle to get a bird’s-eye view of the terrain.

Of course, flying a craft as small as 41/2 inches wide comes with its own difficulties—the smaller the flyer, the more unstable and less energy efficient it becomes. To smooth the flight of such small planes, Peter Ifju, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Florida, created a flexible wing (built onto the prototype plane at right) that can keep a steady course in the face of gusty winds. Inspired by the wings of bats, Ifju built a carbon fiber skeleton covered with a latex membrane that pacifies gusts by acting as a shock absorber.

The craft remains steady even on a windy day. The downside is a flight time of just 15 minutes before the battery must be recharged.

With a recent government study projecting that at least 36 states will face water shortages within the next five years, some states are looking to tap our oceans for more than a trickle of our freshwater needs. The only significant seawater desalination, or desal, facility in operation in the United States is the Tampa Bay Seawater Desalination Plant, which after a problem-plagued start is finally producing 25 million gallons of water a day, or about 10 percent of the region's water supply. California, Texas, Massachusetts, and Georgia are all cautiously considering similar saltwater desal plants. But critics say (pdf) these plants are energy hogs that have a hugely detrimental impact on coastal marine life.

One potential alternative that’s getting a lot of attention these days, not just in the United States but around the world, is the idea of offshore desalination platforms or vessels. “There are so many obstacles and hurdles to overcome in building and running a desal plant onshore,” says Charles “Skip” Griffin, a senior vice president with PBS&J Engineers who has been designing water-treatment plants for 40 years, “that going off-land is kind of a no-brainer.”

Offshore, the water can be extracted from an optimal depth where sea life density is low and where the water is cleaner, reducing the extensive pretreatment that onshore plants must perform. Furthermore, the concentrated saltwater left over after processing can be more thoroughly diluted in the deep ocean rather than being dumped near shore, where marine life is plentiful. And the cost of powering an offshore plant is expected to be less than for land-based plants; while land-based plants end up having to buy third-party power, an offshore plant could produce its own without the markup.

The notion of offshore desal platforms is not entirely new—India has built a test plant, and a Spanish company wants to construct a wind-powered one—but most such approaches are geared toward small productions of 5 million gallons or less per day. Far more ambitious is a plan from Water Standard Company, a Houston-based water-treatment outfit that intends to build a Seawater Desalination Vessel (SDV) that could output up to 15 times that much—up to three times the production of the Tampa Bay desal plant. The SDV, moored a mile or more offshore, would generate its own power with efficient gas turbines, which could use biofuels if sufficient supplies are available. The SDV would use the same desal method the Tampa plant uses, reverse osmosis, in which seawater is pumped at high pressure through dense membranes to remove the salt. It’s basically the same process that cruise ships (80,000 gallons per day) and military ships (aircraft carrier: 300,000 gallons per day) have used to convert seawater to freshwater for decades.

"It looks like it's feasible," says Mark S. Williamson, an engineer who evaluated the Water Standard Company's SDV proposal on behalf the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District in California. "But it has never been done before on this scale and so, in our assessment, we think the proponents have probably underestimated the cost and the regulatory difficulty. And the harm or lack of harm to the marine life has not been established in my judgment."

Water Standard says it's well aware of the costs and regulatory hurdles; to lessen the regulatory burden, the company expects the first ship will probably be built for Israel, Australia, China, or the Middle East—areas where there is a great demand for water and an easier path to government approval. The company hopes to have the first SDV up and running within two years. "There are no untried processes here," says spokesperson Gayle Collins. "This is proven technology."

— Call it the battle of the planet creationists.

On one side of the ring stands Doug “Rocky Core” Lin. On the other side stands Alan “Jupiter in a Hurry” Boss. For more than a decade, Lin, a theorist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has argued with Boss, a theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington (D.C.), over the correct theory of planet formation.

Lin champions what is generally viewed as the standard model, known as core accretion. In this model, grains of dust lying within the disk of gas and dust that surrounds a young star gather together to form solid chunks of rock. Then some of these bodies are destined to become rocky planets like Earth; others cloak themselves in a massive envelope of gas and form gas giants like Jupiter. But one problem with this gradual, two-step recipe for making a Jupiter is that the gaseous disk may evaporate before the process finishes.

In the early 1990s, Boss proposed an alternate model, called gravitational instability, in which gas giants form wholesale from a sudden fragmentation of the disk. No gradual buildup is required.

Lin says he stuck his neck out in a public debate with Boss in San Diego a few years ago and made a prediction about the arrangement of extrasolar planets not yet found, a prediction only the core accretion model could support.

On June 16, during a workshop in Nantes, France, on superEarths — rocky extrasolar planets five to 10 times the mass of Earth — Lin said that a newfound association between these planets and extrasolar Jupiters matches his prediction and provides “an acid test for proving the core accretion scenario.” In his talk, Lin cited the new findings announced earlier that day by researchers based at Geneva Observatory in Switzerland. That team has found several extrasolar planetary systems in which a superEarth closely circles a star, while a Jupiter or Saturn orbits at a greater distance.

Those systems show that superEarths — rocky cores — must have formed first, before the Jupiters, just as the core-accretion model predicts, Lin says.

In Boss’ gravitational instability picture, the gas giants could form much faster than the rocky planets. In that theory, “It would be highly unlikely to form a generation of superEarths before the Jupiters get settled,” Lin notes.

At the conference in France, Jonathan Lunine of the University of Arizona in Tucson said he agrees that the findings support the core-accretion model, at least for making Jupiters in the inner part of the gas and dust disk. Reached by e-mail back in the United States, Boss contends that “these results are also consistent with the predictions of gravitational disk instability, which only operates in the outer disk, outside of the region where the terrestrial planets form.”

Says Lin: “I do not expect Alan to admit defeat and am sure that he will come up with an even more contrived scenario. Just ask him if there will ever be a reason that would make him give up.”

By mixing soapy water, oil and the theory of information, a physicist has found a possible clue to the origin of the genetic code, as well as to the structure of other biochemical languages.

Life’s workhorse molecules are made from only 20 different types of amino acids, encoded in the chemical makeup of DNA. In principle, DNA could code for about three times that many, 64 possible combinations. Comparing the genetic code with the physics of soapy water suggests an explanation for why nature chose 20 as an optimal number, Tsvi Tlusty of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, reports in an upcoming Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Genes are segments of DNA that encode instructions for constructing the molecules, primarily proteins, needed to build and operate cells. Each gene is a long sequence of “letters” — A, C, T and G — symbols for the chemical bases adenine, cytosine, thymine, and guanine. Each three-letter combination specifies an amino acid. But the code is redundant, meaning that sometimes different triplets represent the same amino acid — for example, CAA and CAG both represent glutamine.

The genetic code presumably evolved from the diverse and chaotic chemistry of the Earth’s primordial broth. Before settling on the 20 standard amino acids, the developing code faced opposing pressures. Organisms with a more complex molecular language — using more than 20 types of amino acids — could have deployed a wider range of chemical combinations to adapt to environmental changes. But organisms with simpler chemistry required less molecular machinery and energy, Tlusty explains. And using fewer amino acids reduces the rate of random errors in copying genetic information: If several triplets have the same meaning, there’s a good chance that changing one letter will have no consequences.

Eventually the code reached an optimal level of richness, which provided flexibility without being too high-maintenance. Such a balancing act, Tlusty says, is similar to how certain physical systems tend to make arrangements that minimize energy while maximizing entropy (a measure of disorder).

To put the analogy on more solid footing, Tlusty made a physics-inspired mathematical model of the genetic code. He first represented the code as a network in which each node stands for a three-letter word. Two nodes are connected if they differ by just one letter. Tlusty then “colored” the nodes, assigning the same color to triplets that encode the same amino acid. The coloring partitioned the network into regions.

In the early days of evolution, the boundaries of these regions would have shifted around before finding an optimal configuration. The competitive advantage of a richer code would favor breakup into smaller regions (encoding more amino acids), while the cost of copying errors and energy expense would push toward fewer, larger regions (and thus fewer amino acids). Based on this model, Tlusty says he found that 20 is an optimal number of regions, so nature’s choice of 20 amino acids wasn’t completely random.

Tlusty’s model is mathematically equivalent to the physics of oil and soapy water mixtures. In certain conditions, soapy membranes engulf the oil into tubes, and the tubes plug into each other, forming networks. These networks take on shapes that minimize energy and maximize entropy.

Tlusty says his theory also could apply to other biochemical codes that cells use to process information. For example, he says, it could offer some insight into the language of antigens, the molecules that prompt the immune system to produce particular antibodies.

However, comments Glenn Tesler, a mathematician at the University of California, San Diego, Tlusty’s paper is rather abstract and offers no concrete example of further applications. Still, Tesler adds, the results are interesting in that they tie together ideas from information theory, physics and biology.

Covered in antibodies and bathed in laser light, carbon nanotubes kill malignant cells with heat. The new technique may one day enable physicians to target and kill cancerous growth without surgery, radiation or chemotherapy.

After the team shone near-infrared light over a cell culture with antibody-coated carbon nanotubes attached to cancer cells, the diseased cells died, while non-cancerous cells went unharmed, researchers report online June 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

If this technique works in living tissue, “it might be possible to cook tumors rather than to surgically remove them,” says Ellen Vitetta, an immunologist at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas and coauthor of the new study.

Should future tests show this method is safe to use in humans, doctors could inject antibody-coated carbon nanotubes into a breast lump and then pass near-infrared light laser light over the skin. That would, in theory, kill the tumor without invasive surgery.

“This research is at a very early stage,” Vitetta says, “so moving it from a tissue culture setting to an animal and then a human is going to take time. It might or might not work. It is too early to say.”

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DEATH TO CANCER CELLSThe image on the left shows cancer cells not treated with antibody-coated nanotubes that survived the near-infrared light treatment. The image on the right shows cancer cells treated with antibody-coated nanotubes and light. The blue color indicates that the laser light killed the cell. Balaji Panchapakesan/Univ. of Louisville in Kentucky

Vitetta and her colleagues coated carbon nanotubes with leukemia-specific antibodies that seek out and bind to particular molecules on human leukemia cells. They then created lymphoma-specific antibodies and did the same in human lymphoma cells. Each antibody type fits to only one kind of cancer cell, like a key fitting only one lock, Vitetta explains.

Once the antibodies clicked into their targets, scientists passed laser light over the cell culture. Like radio antennae, the carbon nanotubes picked up the laser light’s frequency and converted the light to heat, which heated, and ultimately killed, the cancer cells.

To make sure only diseased cells felt the heat, the team conducted two control tests on healthy cells — one with a cell culture treated only with laser light and one that also included the antibody-covered nanotubes. In these trials, no cells were damaged.

“The controls are good. They serve as a rigorous test,” says Eric Wickstrom, a biochemist at Thomas Jefferson University, in Philadelphia, who studies how to use nanotubes and near-infrared light to destroy breast cancer tissue but was not involved in the current study. “They answer whether a specific antibody goes to a specific cancer cell, or whether any antibody will do.”

The new study confirms Wickstrom’s team’s 2007 results, which showed breast cancer cells could be killed with a similar method that didn’t rely on specific antibodies. This team’s study shows that, using cancer-specific antibodies, researchers could one day target and kill particular types of cancer cells, Wickstrom adds.

That “proof of specificity” is the most significant aspect of this work, Vitetta says.

Current cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy and radiation, kill both diseased and healthy cells, Vitetta explains. This method could cook only diseased cells, both dividing and dormant ones. According to Vitetta, standard treatments do not kill dormant cancer cells.

These cells are not dividing at the time of treatment but can do so at a later time and cause a relapse, Vitetta says. “Antibody-carbon nanotubes would not care if a cell is dividing,” she says.

Go ahead, have that extra cup of coffee.

One of the largest studies ever conducted shows that coffee drinkers die at almost the same rates as their non-drinking peers. But, after controlling for the fact that coffee drinkers tend to exercise less and smoke more, coffee is linked to a slightly lower death rate in both men and women.

The findings, reported in the June 17 Annals of Internal Medicine, are based on data from the Nurses Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. The two studies tracked 86,214 female nurses for 24 years and 41,736 male veterinarians, pharmacists and other health workers for 18 years. Every two years, the volunteers answered detailed questionnaires about coffee consumption, exercise habits, weight, smoking history and other health information.

Overall, participants who downed a few cups of coffee a day had about the same death rate as those who didn’t drink coffee, despite the fact that coffee drinkers tended to smoke more, drink more alcohol, not take vitamins and exercise less. All of those factors are linked to higher death rates.

After accounting for the caffeinated coffee drinkers’ less healthy lifestyles, the researchers found that women drinking two to three cups a day had a 25 percent lower death rate from heart disease and an 18 percent lower risk of death from all causes compared with their equally unhealthy peers. The study did not find such differences for men, perhaps because the study tracked fewer men for a shorter period of time, says Esther Lopez-Garcia of the University Autónoma of Madrid in Spain, who led the study. Volunteers who drank caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee had similar death rates, suggesting that caffeine was not responsible for the beneficial effect.

The death rates of those who drank even higher amounts of coffee did not differ significantly from the death rates of volunteers who drank 2 to 3 cups of coffee a day.

The findings suggest that coffee may reduce the risks of death in general, and may be especially good at combating heart disease.

David Jacobs, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis who was not involved in the study, says the results are convincing. “People like to sit down with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. That really confounds the data, but they have really nice analyses of smoking status and coffee.”

Ken Mukamal, an internist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, agrees. “They have very careful and detailed information on lifestyle features,” he says. “It’s important . . . to take these results at face value.”

The idea that coffee can promote health isn’t far-fetched, Mukamal says. Coffee beans are chock-full of antioxidants, chemicals that can protect DNA from damage and promote cell survival. What’s more, coffee may also reduce inflammation inside the blood vessels, thereby lowering the risk of heart disease, Lopez-Garcia says.

Still, it’s premature to start guzzling coffee as a health tonic, she says.

Studies on coffee consumption and health have had mixed results over the years. Early studies linked coffee consumption to pancreatic cancer, and others have found elevated risks of heart disease. However, those studies did not account for the fact that coffee drinkers, in general, tend to have less healthy lifestyles, Lopez-Garcia says.

“There’s very little evidence that coffee itself is a bad thing. It’s gotten a bit of a bum rap,” says Mukamal, who has been involved in other epidemiological studies on coffee and mortality. “There’s a little bit of a legacy of thinking there’s something sort of hedonistic about drinking coffee, and I don’t think it’s all that warranted.”

Just any old coffee drink may not do. The volunteers in the study, who were tracked mostly in the late 1980s and early ’90s, likely drank primarily filtered drip coffee. But past studies have shown that the health effects of coffee may depend on how it’s made, Mukamal says.

Boiled drinks like Turkish coffee and French press have high levels of a cholesterol-boosting compound called cafestol. And “coffee drinks” like mocha triple venti lattes are full of calories, which may offset any benefit of the coffee itself, he says. By contrast, filtered drip coffee, which most of the survey respondents consumed, has few calories and almost no cafestol.

The study is probably “saying something about filtered, good old-fashioned 1980s and 1990s coffee and not saying very much about the fancy kinds of coffee that you might be drinking in 2008,” Mukamal says.

Lou Genise, a compact man with a shorn head and Fu Manchu mustache, sat propped up on a mattress in a hospital room tucked away on the fifth floor of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. Wearing an eyeshade and listening to music through a headset, he was oblivious to the two psychiatrists sitting nearby, quietly monitoring his every move.

Worry and nausea had been the 37-year-old performance artist’s constant companions during his treatment for metastatic colon cancer that was diagnosed a year earlier. Yet the shroud of negativity lifted under the influence of psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in the hallucinogenic mushrooms used in sacred Native American rituals.

Early one morning last July, Genise had taken a little white capsule containing the psychedelic as part of a medically supervised study to test whether it could ease the mental anguish of people with terminal cancer. He had checked into the hospital the afternoon before, and Charles Grob, the UCLA psychiatrist who is conducting the study, reviewed with him the issues he wanted to confront. Genise said he had developed a Pavlovian aversion to hospitals after all he had been through and would get nauseated in anticipation of getting treatment. He was also having trouble accepting his separation from a former girlfriend, who had come to Los Angeles to care for him when he fell ill.

“I had dealt with the big, earth-shattering problems, but the day-to-day anxieties were the hard part,” Genise recalled five months later, sipping tea in his home in the L.A. neighborhood of Echo Park. “But following the session, I had two startling epiphanies. First, here I was in a hospital having a pleasurable experience, which immediately cured my anxieties. And it suddenly clicked in my head that I didn’t need to cling to my ex. It was a spectacular experience, because in a short time I was able to work through some serious issues on a very deep level.”

At a handful of sites across the country, after a four-decade hiatus, psychedelic research is undergoing a quiet renaissance, thanks to scientists like Charles Grob who are revisiting the powerful mind-altering drugs of the 1960s in hopes of making them part of our therapeutic arsenal. Hallucinogens such as psilocybin, MDMA (better known as Ecstasy), and the most controversial of them all, LSD, are being tested as treatments for maladies that modern medicine has done little to assuage, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, drug dependency, obsessive-compulsive disorder, cluster headaches, and the emotional suffering of people with a terminal illness.

While Grob’s study is not complete—he has tested 11 out of a projected 12 volunteers—patients seemed to have positive experiences. “No one had a bad trip, and most derived some benefit,” he says. “It lowered their anxiety, improved their mood and disposition, and imbued them with a greater acceptance of their situation and capacity to live in the moment and appreciate each day.”

Other early test results are equally encouraging. University of Arizona scientists recently fed psilocybin to nine volunteers whose obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) was so disabling that many could not hold down a job or leave the house; they would observe elaborate cleaning rituals or shower for hours until they felt comfortable. Conventional treatments such as psychotherapy and medication had failed. In each of the nine patients in the study, psilocybin drastically diminished or melted away their compulsions for up to 24 hours, and several remained symptom-free for days.

In another ongoing study, psychiatrist Michael Mithoefer of Charleston, South Carolina, is testing MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine) on people suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), including rape victims and Iraq War veterans who have not gotten any relief from conventional treatments such as antidepressants and therapy.

PTSD is normally triggered by a terrifying incident—combat, childhood sexual abuse, physical abuse, a serious accident, rape, or a natural disaster—in which people feel their lives are in danger but are powerless to defend themselves. Sometimes PTSD can be triggered by growing up in a harrowing environment where a child is at the mercy of a cruel parent or parental figure. To survive such horrific circumstances, sufferers often numb themselves to their pain. The cornerstone of PTSD treatment involves reliving the trauma in a way that enables patients to process their fears in a rational way. But by definition, revisiting the experience can be frightening, and people often become locked in the grip of intense anxiety.

The drug MDMA, a chemical cousin of mescaline and methamphetamine, can kindle intense euphoria or sublime seren–ity, creating a calming therapeutic environment in which to revisit trauma. Eighteen out of a projected 21 patients in Mithoefer’s study have already been treated, and in many cases just two sessions dramatically diminished symptoms, which is remarkable because PTSD in this group of subjects has been resistant to other types of treatment.

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Psilocybe zapotecorum

Image courtesy of Alan Rockefeller

One of the study participants spent more than two decades in therapy in a futile attempt to heal the deep wounds inflicted by a violent and emotionally abusive stepfather. She ran away from home, was raped twice by men who picked her up hitchhiking, and ricocheted from one abusive relationship to another.

The patient, a 51-year-old woman from South Carolina, coped by deadening herself emotionally. “I knew I was messed up, but I sealed up all those feelings because they were so overwhelming,” she recalls. “They were like the monster that is locked behind a three-foot-thick steel door.”

Under the influence of MDMA, she was able to let go of the blockage that had stunted her emotionally. “The drug opened the door and removed that fear of feeling,” she says. “I never cried about those experiences before, but now I can and I welcome it. I no longer feel like I’m holding back the Red Sea.”

Success stories like these explain why psychedelics never lost their appeal for Grob and a handful of other academic scientists. Despite their promise, however, it is still difficult to get such studies off the ground. Psychedelics are classified as Schedule 1 drugs by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which outlaws their use outside a research setting. Exceptions are made for Native American church–goers, who are allowed by law to use peyote in prayer meetings, and members of a branch of a Brazilian-based church in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who have won court battles for the right to use the hallucinogenic tea ayahuasca in their religious rituals.

In the current climate, the main source of funding for studies of hallucinogens are two private philanthropies: the Heffter Research Institute in Santa Fe, which was founded in 1993 by academics and mental health professionals to finance scholarly research, and MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), which has dispensed more than $10 million since it was launched in 1986 by Rick Doblin, a drug reform activist in Boston with a Harvard University Ph.D. in public policy.

But it is not just social taboos that have scared off government funders and pharmaceutical companies. Critics worry that this research will legitimize reckless recreational use, especially among impressionable young adults. “That danger needs to be considered before we open a Pandora’s box,” says Glen Hanson, a pharmacologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and former acting director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “So much emotion is tied up with this research that it often gets in the way of critically analyzing the risks.”

Still, mainstream psychiatrists like Herbert Kleber, director of the Division on Substance Abuse at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, hope these experiments will chip away at institutional resistance. “They have therapeutic potential for crippling mental maladies, especially for OCD, PTSD, and drug and alcohol addictions, which have such a high relapse rate,” says Kleber, a former deputy director for the Office of National Drug Control Policy at the White House. “These are not easy drugs to work with, and some of the side effects are unpredictable. But they are all absolutely worthy of research.”

With his salty beard, wire-frame glasses, khaki pants, tie, and sport jacket, Charles Grob, a 57-year-old professor of psychiatry, doesn’t look anything like a wild-eyed rebel of the ’60s. He squeezes in psychedelic research on weekends because his workdays are filled overseeing a large clinical program that handles 400 to 500 patients a year and supervising the child psychiatry fellows, residents, interns, psychology postdocs, and social workers in training who rotate through his department at UCLA.

Grob’s fascination with the medicinal powers of hallucinogens began in 1972, when he was babysitting dream-research experiments at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, where his father, David Grob, was chief of medicine. Having dropped out of college and with little to do but read, he dug into the library of his psychologist boss, Stanley Krippner, and was astonished to learn that after World War II scientists were achieving what seemed like miracle cures by treating once-intractable mental ills with psychedelics such as LSD. “They were at the cutting edge of psychiatric research,” Grob says.