Scientists
believe cyanide[1] was abundant
on primordial Earth more than 2.5 billion years ago. Importantly, cyanide tends to self-assemble into larger
molecules and does so efficiently under freezing conditions. Tellingly, cyanide
evaporates more quickly than does water so it could only become concentrated in
cold temperatures.[2] Cold temperatures also preserve fragile
molecules – such as nucleobases – dramatically extending the time they exist
thus increasing the opportunity(ies) for further development. Frozen cyanide in the presence of
ammonia can form adenine (a nucleotide base).[3]
To state the obvious,
the above reasoning[4] has expanded
the range of worlds on which to search for extraterrestrial life.
Reference List
Fox,
D. (2008, February). Did life begin in ice? Discover.
52-60.
National
Public Radio. (2000, March). Analysis:
Scientists share results of 25-year experiment of freezing vials of liquid. Retrieved January 11, 2008 from the
National Public Radio Home Page: http://www.npr.org/ .
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On the night of April 24, 1944,
British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the
Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno.
Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at
the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.
The 450 rolls of film had been
assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the
Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God's word. The
wartime destruction made the project "outright impossible," Mr. Spitaler
wrote in the 1970s.
Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of
photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now
dribbling out to scholars -- and a Quran research project buried for more than
60 years has risen from the grave.
"He pretended it disappeared. He
wanted to be rid of it," says Angelika Neuwirth, a former pupil and
protégée of the late Mr. Spitaler. Academics who worked with Mr. Spitaler, a
powerful figure in postwar German scholarship who died in 2003, have been left
guessing why he squirreled away the unusual trove for so long.
Ms. Neuwirth, a professor of Arabic
studies at Berlin's Free University, now is overseeing a revival of the
research. The project renews a grand tradition of German Quranic scholarship
that was interrupted by the Third Reich. The Nazis purged Jewish experts on
ancient Arabic texts and compelled Aryan colleagues to serve the war effort.
Middle East scholars worked as intelligence officers, interrogators and
linguists. Mr. Spitaler himself served, apparently as a translator, in the
German-Arab Infantry Battalion 845, a unit of Arab volunteers to the Nazi
cause, according to wartime records.
During the 19th century, Germans
pioneered modern scholarship of ancient texts. Their work revolutionized
understanding of Christian and Jewish scripture. It also infuriated some of the
devout, who resented secular scrutiny of texts believed to contain sacred
truths.
The revived Quran venture plays into a
very modern debate: how to reconcile Islam with the modern world? Academic
quarrying of the Quran has produced bold theories, bitter feuds and even claims
of an Islamic Reformation in the making. Applying Western critical methods to
Islam's holiest text is a sensitive test of the Muslim community's readiness to
both accommodate and absorb thinking outside its own traditions.
"It is very exciting," says
Patricia Crone, a scholar at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and a
pioneer of unorthodox theories about Islam's early years. She says she first
heard that the Munich archive had survived when attending a conference in
Germany last fall. "Everyone thought it was destroyed."
The Quran is viewed by most Muslims as
the unchanging word of God as transmitted to the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th
century. The text, they believe, didn't evolve or get edited. The Quran says it
is "flawless" and fixed by an "imperishable tablet" in
heaven. It starts with a warning: "This book is not to be doubted."
Quranic scholarship often focuses on
arcane questions of philology and textual analysis. Experts nonetheless tend to
tread warily, mindful of fury directed in recent years at people deemed to have
blasphemed Islam's founding document and the Prophet Muhammad.
A scholar in northern Germany writes
under the pseudonym of Christoph Luxenberg because, he says, his controversial
views on the Quran risk provoking Muslims. He claims that chunks of it were
written not in Arabic but in another ancient language, Syriac. The
"virgins" promised by the Quran to Islamic martyrs, he asserts, are
in fact only "grapes."
Ms. Neuwirth, the Berlin professor now
in charge of the Munich archive, rejects the theories of her more radical
colleagues, who ride roughshod, she says, over Islamic scholarship. Her aim,
she says, isn't to challenge Islam but to "give the Quran the same
attention as the Bible." All the same, she adds: "This is a taboo
zone."
Ms. Neuwirth says it's too early to
have any idea what her team's close study of the cache of early texts and other
manuscripts will reveal. Their project, launched last year at the
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science and Humanities, has state funding for 18
years but could take much longer. The earliest manuscripts of the Quran date from
around 700 and use a skeletal version of the Arabic script that is difficult to
decipher and can be open to divergent readings.
Mystery and misfortune bedeviled the
Munich archive from the start. The scholar who launched it perished in an odd
climbing accident in 1933. His successor died in a 1941 plane crash. Mr.
Spitaler, who inherited the Quran collection and then hid it, fared better. He
lived to age 93.
The rolls of film, kept in cigar
boxes, plastic trays and an old cookie tin, are now in a safe in Berlin. The
photos of the old manuscripts will form the foundation of a computer data base
that Ms. Neuwirth's team believes will help tease out the history of Islam's
founding text. The result, says Michael Marx, the project's research director,
could be the first "critical edition" of the Quran -- an attempt to
divine what the original text looked like and to explore overlaps with the
Bible and other Christian and Jewish literature.
A group of Tunisians has embarked on a
parallel mission, but they want to keep it quiet to avoid angering fellow
Muslims, says Moncef Ben Abdeljelil, a scholar involved in the venture.
"Silence is sometimes best," he says. Afghan authorities last year
arrested an official involved in a vernacular translation of the Quran that was
condemned as blasphemous. Its editor went into hiding.
Many Christians, too, dislike secular
scholars boring into sacred texts, and dismiss challenges to certain Biblical
passages. But most accept that the Bible was written by different people at different
times, and that it took centuries of winnowing before the Christian canon was
fixed in its current form.
Muslims, by contrast, view the Quran
as the literal word of God. Questioning the Quran "is like telling a
Christian that Jesus was gay," says Abdou Filali-Ansary, a Moroccan
scholar.
Modern approaches to textual analysis
developed in the West are viewed in much of the Muslim world as irrelevant, at
best. "Only the writings of a practicing Muslim are worthy of our
attention," a university professor in Saudi Arabia wrote in a 2003 book.
"Muslim views on the Holy Book must remain firm: It is the Word of Allah,
constant, immaculate, unalterable and inimitable."
Ms. Neuwirth, the Berlin Quran expert,
and Mr. Marx, her research director, have tried to explain the project to the
Muslim world in trips to Iran, Turkey, Syria and Morocco. When a German
newspaper trumpeted their work last fall on its front page and predicted that
it would "overthrow rulers and topple kingdoms," Mr. Marx called Arab
television network al-Jazeera and other media to deny any assault on the tenets
of Islam.
Europeans started to study the Quran
in the Middle Ages, largely in an effort to debunk it. In the 19th century,
faith-driven polemical research gave way to more serious scientific study of
old texts. Germans led the way.
Their original focus was the Bible.
Priests and rabbis pushed back, but scholars pressed on, challenging
traditional views of the Old and New Testaments. Their work undermined faith in
the literal truth of scripture and helped birth today's largely secular Europe.
Over time, some turned their attention to the Quran, too.
In 1857, a Paris academy offered a
prize for the best "critical history" of the Quran. A German, Theodor
Nöldeke, won. His entry became the cornerstone of future Western research. Mr.
Nöldeke, says Ms. Neuwirth, is "the rock of our church."
The Munich archive began with one of
Mr. Nöldeke's protégés, Gotthelf Bergsträsser. As Germany slid towards fascism
early last century, he hunted down old copies of the Quran in the Middle East,
North Africa and Europe. He took photographs of them with a Leica camera.
In 1933, a few months after Hitler
became chancellor, Mr. Bergsträsser, an experienced climber, died in the
Bavarian Alps. His body was never given an autopsy; rumors spread of suicide or
foul play.
His work was taken up by Otto Pretzl,
another German Arabist. He too set off with a Leica. In a 1934 journey to Morocco,
he wangled his way into a royal library containing an old copy of the Quran and
won over initially suspicious clerics, he said in a handwritten report about
his trip.
The Nazis began to use Arabists early
in the war when German forces began pushing into regions with large Muslim
populations, first North Africa and then the Soviet Union. Scholars were used
to broadcast propaganda and to help set up mullah schools for Muslims recruited
into the German armed forces.
Mr. Pretzl, the manuscript collector,
appears to have worked largely in military intelligence. He interrogated
Arabic-speaking soldiers captured in the invasion of France, then, according to
some accounts, set off on a mission to stir up an Arab uprising against British
troops in Iraq. His plane crashed.
Responsibility for the Quran archive
fell to Mr. Spitaler, who had helped collect some of the photos. During the
war, Mr. Spitaler served in the command offices in Germany and later as an
Arabic linguist in Austria, gaining only a modest military rank, records
indicate.
After the war, he returned to
academia. Instead of reviving the Quran project, he embarked on a laborious but
less-sensitive endeavor, a dictionary of classical Arabic. After nearly half a
century of work, definitions were published only for words beginning with two
letters of the 28-letter Arabic alphabet.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=a1206a74-5f7f-443f-97f5-9b389a4d4f9e&m=0
Mr. Spitaler rarely published papers,
but was widely admired for his mastery of Arabic texts. A few scholars,
however, judged him overly cautious, unproductive and hostile to unconventional
views.
"The whole period after 1945 was
poisoned by the Nazis," says Günter Lüling, a scholar who was drummed out
of his university in the 1970s after he put forward heterodox theories about
the Quran's origins. His doctoral thesis argued that the Quran was lifted in
part from Christian hymns. Blackballed by Mr. Spitaler, Mr. Lüling lost his
teaching job and launched a fruitless six-year court battle to be reinstated.
Feuding over the Quran, he says, "ruined my life."
He wrote books and articles at home,
funded by his wife, who took a job in a pharmacy. Asked by a French journal to
write a paper on German Arabists, Mr. Lüling went to Berlin to examine wartime
records. Germany's prominent postwar Arabic scholars, he says, "were all
connected to the Nazis."
Berthold Spuler, for example,
translated Yiddish and Hebrew for the Gestapo, says Mr. Lüling. (Mr. Spuler's
subsequent teaching career ran into trouble in the 1960s when, during a Hamburg
student protest, he shouted that the demonstrators "belong in a
concentration camp.") Rudi Paret, who in 1962 produced what became the
standard German translation of the Quran, was listed as a member of "The
Institute for Research on and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church
Life." Despite their wartime activities, the subsequent work of such
scholars is still highly regarded.
By the mid-1970s, Mr. Spitaler in
Munich was nearing retirement at the university there. He began moving boxes
into a room set aside for the dictionary project at Bavaria's Academy of
Sciences. His last doctoral student in Munich, Kathrin Müller, who was working
on the dictionary, says she looked inside one of the boxes and saw old film.
She asked Mr. Spitaler what it was but didn't get an answer. The boxes, she now
realizes, contained the old Quran archive. "He didn't want to explain
anything," she says.
In the early 1980s, when the archive
was still thought to be lost, two German scholars traveled to Yemen to examine
and help restore a cache of ancient Quran manuscripts. They, too, took
pictures. When they tried to get them out of Yemen, authorities seized them,
says Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, one of the scholars. German diplomats finally persuaded
Yemen to release most of the photos, he says.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=a1206a74-5f7f-443f-97f5-9b389a4d4f9e&m=0
Mr. Puin says the manuscripts
suggested to him that the Quran "didn't just fall from heaven" but
"has a history." When he said so publicly a decade ago, it stirred
rage. "Please ensure that these scholars are not given further access to
the documents," read one letter to the Yemen Times. "Allah, help us
against our enemies."
Berlin Quran expert Ms. Neuwirth,
though widely regarded as respectful of Islamic tradition, got sideswiped by
Arab suspicion of Western scholars. She was fired from a teaching post in
Jordan, she says, for mentioning a radical revisionist scholar during a lecture
in Germany.
Around 1990, Ms. Neuwirth met Mr.
Spitaler, her old professor, in Berlin. He was in his 80s and growing frail,
but remained sharp mentally. He "got sentimental about the old
times," recalls Ms. Neuwirth. As they talked, he casually mentioned that
he still had the photo archive. He offered to give it to her. "I had heard
it didn't exist," she says. She later sent two of her students to Munich
to collect the photo cache and bring it to Berlin.
The news didn't spread beyond a small
circle of scholars. When Mr. Spitaler died in 2003, Paul Kunitizsch, a fellow
Munich Arabist, wrote an obituary recounting how the archive had been lost,
torpedoing the Quran project. Such a venture, he wrote, "now appears
totally out of the question" because of "the attitude of the Islamic
world to such a project."
Information about the archive's
survival has just begun trickling out to the wider scholarly community. Why Mr.
Spitaler hid it remains a mystery. His only published mention of the archive's
fate was a footnote to an article in a 1975 book on the Quran. Claiming the
bulk of the cache had been lost during the war, he wrote cryptically that
"drastically changed conditions after 1945" ruled out any rebuilding
of the collection.
Ms. Neuwirth, the current guardian of
the archive, believes that perhaps Mr. Spitaler was simply "sick of"
the time-consuming project and wanted to move on to other work. Mr. Lüling has
a less charitable theory: that Mr. Spitaler didn't have the talents needed to
make use of the archive himself and wanted to make sure colleagues couldn't
outshine him by working on the material.
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Mr. Kunitzsch, the obituary author,
says he's mystified by Mr. Spitaler's motives. He speculates that his former
colleague decided that the Quran manuscript project was simply too ambitious.
The task, says Mr. Kunitzsch, grew steadily more sensitive as Muslim hostility
towards Western scholars escalated, particularly after the founding of Israel
in 1948. "He knew that for Arabs, [the Quran] was a closed matter."
Ms. Müller, Mr. Spitaler's last
doctoral student, says the war "was a deep cut for everything" and
buried the prewar dreams of many Germans. Another possible factor, she adds,
was Mr. Spitaler's own deep religious faith. She opens up a copy of a Quran
used by the late professor, a practicing Catholic, until his death. Unlike his
other Arabic texts, which are scrawled with notes and underlinings, it has no
markings at all.
"Perhaps he had too much respect
for holy books," says Ms. Müller.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=a1206a74-5f7f-443f-97f5-9b389a4d4f9e&m=0
A new kind of dating agency relies on
matching people by their body odour
ONE of life's little mysteries is why
particular people fancy each other—or, rather, why they do not when on paper
they ought to. One answer is that human consciousness, and thus human thought,
is dominated by vision. Beauty is said to be in the eye of the beholder,
regardless of the other senses. However, as the multi-billion-dollar perfume
industry attests, beauty is in the nose of the beholder, too.
ScientificMatch.com, a Boston-based
internet-dating site launched in December, was created to turn this insight
into money. Its founder, an engineer (and self-confessed serial dater) called
Eric Holzle is drawing on an observation made over a decade ago by Claus
Wedekind, a researcher at the University of Bern, in Switzerland.
In his original study Dr Wedekind
recruited female volunteers to sniff men's three-day-old T-shirts and rate them
for attractiveness. He then analysed the men's and women's DNA, looking in
particular at the genes that build a part of the immune system known as the
major histocompatability complex (MHC). Dr Wedekind knew, from studies on mice,
that besides fending off infection, the MHC has a role in sexual attractiveness.
It changes odours in ways the mice can detect (with mice, the odours are in the
urine), and that detection is translated into preferences for particular mates.
What is true for mice is often true for men, so he had a punt on the idea that
the MHC might affect the smell of human sweat, as well.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=a1206a74-5f7f-443f-97f5-9b389a4d4f9e&m=0
It did. Women preferred T-shirts from
men whose MHC was most different from their own. What was more, women with
similar MHCs favoured the use of similar commercial perfumes. This suggests
that the role of such perfumes may be to flag up the underlying body scent
rather than mask it, as a more traditional view of the aesthetics of body odour
might suggest.
That makes evolutionary sense. The
children of couples with a wide range of MHC genes, and thus of immune
responses, will be better protected from disease. As the previous article
suggests, that could be particularly important in a collaborative, group-living
species such as humanity. Moreover, comparing MHCs could be a proxy for
comparing kinship, and thus help to prevent inbreeding.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=a1206a74-5f7f-443f-97f5-9b389a4d4f9e&m=0
http://louis1j1sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=36f0e6c9-8b8a-4f0a-8630-e5d3b879fad4&m=0
http://louis2j2sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=14218f60-0cb6-4fa5-beba-5ee65da4b5e1&m=0
The promise of an MHC-based match is not
only that your partner's old laundry will smell better but all sorts of other
benefits too. The biological compatibility created by complementary immune
systems apparently promises better orgasms, a lower likelihood of cuckoldry,
more happiness and so on. Nor are heterosexuals the only ones who can benefit.
Gay men and women respond as strongly to MHC-derived smells as straight people
do—though, as might be expected, their response is to the smell of people of
the same sex, rather than the opposite one.
Indeed, the only people for whom MHC
matching might not be expected to work are women on the Pill. Chemical
contraception, which mimics pregnancy, messes up the system because of an
intriguing twist. When women are pregnant, they prefer the smell of MHCs that
are similar to their own. This means they are happier in the company of their
relatives, which may, as the previous article also suggests, bring evolutionary
benefits of its own.
ScientificMatch.com does not rely
entirely on the MHC. Besides sending off a swab taken from the inside of their
cheek and a cheque for $1,995, hopeful singles have to answer the usual
questionnaire about income, background and details such as whether they would
prefer a skiing holiday to one spent sketching. They are not, however, asked
whether they wear their T-shirts for three days on the trot.
January 4, 2008, 8:09 am
Breast Cancer Test Errors Cause Faulty
Treatment
Posted by Jacob Goldstein
The era of personalized medicine won’t
work unless we can also find our way into the era of reliable diagnostic
testing. And in the case of breast cancer — one of the diseases with good
personalized drugs for certain types of tumors — the diagnostic tests aren’t
working very well, the WSJ reports.
As a result, many women who would benefit
from drugs such as Genetech’s Herceptin or GlaxoSmithKline’s Tykerb are going
without because faulty tests say their tumors wouldn’t respond to the drugs. At
the same time, errant tests also cause other women are to take drugs that
aren’t right for their type of tumor.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=a1206a74-5f7f-443f-97f5-9b389a4d4f9e&m=0
“If we tried to market pregnancy tests
with this rate of inaccuracy, they would be taken off the market,” says Allen
Gown, chief pathologist of PhenoPath Laboratories in Seattle, told the WSJ. “It
means there are a lot of women being treated inappropriately.”
A study published last year and led by
Genentech researchers reviewed how well labs performed Her-2 tests, which are
used to determine whether a woman should take Herceptin. It found that 14% to
16% of those judged positive for Her-2 were actually negative. Of those judged
negative, 18% to 23% were in fact positive.
That sort of high error rate could
lead to tighter oversight of labs. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services, the federal agency that regulates the testing sites, is examining
tougher quality-control requirements. At the moment, labs have to pass outside
proficiency checks on 83 types of tests — a list that was devised 15 years ago
and doesn’t include the breast-cancer tests.
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healthblog@wsj.com
What is the clinical relevance of gene
profiling? What is going to happen to the healthcare economic system with the
introduction of increasingly expensive new drugs that benefit only a small
percentage of patients who receive them? Hence the headlong rush to develop
tests to identify molecular predisposing mechansims whose presence still does
not guarantee that a drug will be effective for an individual patient. Nor can
they, for any patient or even large group of patients, discriminate the
potential for clinical activity among different agents of the same class. In
the new paradigm of requiring a companion diagnostic as a condition for
approval of new targeted therapies, the pressure is so great that the companion
diagnostics they’ve approved often have been mostly or totally ineffective at
identifying clinical responders (durable and otherwise) to the various
therapies. Cancer cells often have many mutations in many different pathways,
so even if one route is shut down by a targeted treatment, the cancer cell may
be able to use other routes. Targeting one pathway may not be as effective as
targeting multiple pathways in a cancer cell. Another challenge is to identify
for which patients the targeted treatment will be effective. And tumors can
become resistant to a targeted treatment. The drug no longer works, even if it
has previously been effective in shrinking a tumor. Drugs are combined with
existing ones to target the tumor more effectively. Most cancers cannot be
effectively treated with targeted drugs alone. Understanding “targeted”
treatments begins with understanding the cancer cell. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=a1206a74-5f7f-443f-97f5-9b389a4d4f9e&m=0
Comment by gpawelski - January 4, 2008
at 11:38 am
I am a little confused re my treatment
plans. I havw been diagnosed with invasive breast cancer with HER 2 positive
along with ER (90%) and PR(40%) positive.
Some one suggested that it is rare to
find all three factors positive and suggested to have a retest. Your site is
kind of supporting that there could be false positives or negatives in certain
case and a second test is advised.
[1] The source(s) of cyanide
is/are variously conjectured to be comets, and/or ultraviolet light and/or lightening. This process would have ended when the
atmosphere became oxygen rich, i.e., more than 2.5 billion years ago.
[2] It is estimated that 4
billion years ago our Sun was approximately 30% dimmer than today and at one
point the Earth’s average surface temperature was about -40 degrees F and an
ice sheet 1,000 feet thick covered the majority of the Earth.
[3] While as of yet there is no
accepted theory regarding the development of enzymes in frozen conditions,
scientists have discovered that with most of the water frozen, relevant enzymes
can only join RNA chains (i.e., and not cut the RNA chains); this applies even
to enzymes modified in the laboratory causing them to not work at room
temperature (i.e., they continue to work
and to only join RNA chains in ice).
[4] In theatrical irony,
Professor Stanley Miller of the University of California at San Diego -- the
professor who stashed away ammonium cyanide in 1972 in very cold conditions and
opened the thermos 25 years later and which opening established the creation of
glycine and adenine and sparked this line of inquiry – had a stroke shortly
thereafter and his numerous other frozen experiments were incinerated by a
hazmat team fearful of the release
of toxic cyanide as his lab was being renovated. The information regarding the other thermoses was stored
only in Professor Miller’s mind.
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