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After the beloved family dog passes away, after the crying and the pet cemetery in the garden, after looking and sobbing at playtimes pictures hanging on the fridge, new puppy or kitten sooner or later follows its predecessor.

New pet, new smiles, new experiences.

But some people really cant cope with the loss. And here is where technology comes in: dog cloning. Yup: if you believe that Spot, Fifi or Runner were so special no other pet will ever be able to top them, you can actually take a sample of their DNA to a specialized clinic and take them back from dog heaven. Well, not really back, but a animal with the exact same DNA coding will be the exact copy of the mourned one. Also personality-wise? Apparently, but that’s still all to be figured out.

The story of Laneclot Encore is one good example of how far you can go for love.

Edgar and Nina Otto, a Florida couple, had their yellow Labrador retriever, Lancelot, cloned after he died of cancer.

The procedure costed the Otto family US$155,000 and raised lots of eyebrows among not only the general public but also the pet-caring community. “We have gotten some negative feedback from people on the price.” Yet, as Lancelot Encore squirmed in his arms, he added, “But we feel it is worth it.” Said Mr. Otto. Most of the negative comments regard the county’s critical economical situation opposed to getting a new pet for such an amount of money.

Dr. Sara Pizano’s opinion, of Miami-Dade County’s animal services department, focused also on the financial aspect but from another point of view. She said that for the price the Ottos paid for having Lancelot cloned, “we could do spays and neuters for six months.”

The company in charge of the procedure was the Northern California biotech firm BioArts International. BioArts partnered with Dr. Hwang S Woo-Suk, of the South Korea biotech research firm Sooam. An egg containing the late Lancelot’s DNA was placed in a Korean dog to create Lancelot Encore. Once the pup was able to leave his birth mother and go out on his own, he was flown from South Korea to San Francisco before finally making his way to Miami.

South Korea appears to be one of the world’s cloning center. Last August a Seoul-based biotechnology firm said it will open a dog cloning centre capable of cloning eventually up to 1,000 dogs annually early next year.

“We need this new facility to turn dog cloning services into a full-fledged business,” Cho Seong-Ryul, director of RNL Bio, told AFP.

On September 11th, 1984 Alec Jeffreys, now Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, discovered something called “genetic fingerprinting” in a laboratory in the Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester. His discovery was to become the turning point for forensic DNA analysis, paternity tests and DNA cloning.

Professor Jeffreys and his team were working on DNA patters, overwhelmed by the number of variables present even between mother and son or identical twins. “This is too complicated”, thought Jeffreys, but then came came what he calls his “eureka” moment and realized that every DNA strain contains not only the information the organism has inherited from parents, but also its unique “fingerprint” trace which repeats itself in its every single cell. What initially appeared to be a random and confusing bulk of unlinked information information, was actually the individual’s distinctive feature.

This accidental discovery opened up a new area for science, making DNA analysis crucial for criminal investigation, paternity tests and diversity analysis also among non-human species. The first real legal case involving DNA fingerprints analysis came in March 1985. A family of UK citizens originally from Ghana was accused of child swapping because the youngest one flew back to Great Britain after a trip to their hometown on a damaged passport. Blood typing analysis concluded that the boy was part of the family but couldn’t be determined if he was the son or a nephew with no residence rights. This is where Professor Alec Jeffreys got involved and scientifically proved he was a full member of the family.

Another headline-making investigation, successfully concluded thanks to Professor’s Jeffreys work, was the identification of the remains of the Nazi criminal Josef Mengele. After the Second World War he fled from the Allies and escaped to South America, where he lived for the rest of his life without ever being caught. In 1996 the German government, keen to close the case, asked professor Jeffreys together with professor Erika Hagelberg, an expert in extracting DNA from bones, to analyze the remains of Wolfgang Gerhard, a man of German origins buried in the cemetery of a small Brazilian town. The man, who drowned some years earlier in a swimming accident, was proven with a 99.94% certainty to be Mengele.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the discovery, the University of Leicester has organized various events and conferences to stretch once more the importance of Professor’s Jeffreys work. To read more about this, visit http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/genetics/jeffreys/

Sixteen years after the discovery of  the APOE4 gene, who’s mutation is the focus of Alzheimer’s research and treatment, two more genes have been pinpointed as implicated in the disease’s development.

Alzheimer’s disease - a degenerative disease, which slowly and progressively destroys brain cells. It is named after Aloïs Alzheimer, a German neurologist, who in 1907 first described the symptoms as well as the neuropathological features of Alzheimer’s disease such as plaques and tangles in the brain .

A UK team discovered that mutations in the CLU and PICALM genes, both known to have protective roles in the brain, increase by 20% the chance of developing Alzheimer’s. They basically turn from protectors into enemies of the brain’s health, even though the studies are still at an initial stage and the links between the genes and the disease are not quite clear yet.

Philippe Amouyel, an epidemiologist at the University of Lille in France and an author of one of the studies, says “that they may be involved in the elimination of the major component of amyloid plaques.” Buildup of these plaques is a major cause of Alzheimer’s.

The results of the study have been associated with the research on another genetic marker of the brain, responsible for the clearance of amyloid plaques. According to Julie Williams, professor of neuropsychological genetics at Cardiff University in Wales, this combination of discoveries forms an important breakthrough in the current impetus to discover the causes of Alzheimer’s disease”.

Today Alzheimer’s figures are increasing world-wide. According to the American 2009 Alzheimer’s report, in the US alone 5.5 million people suffer from this disease, growing at the speed of one new diagnosis every 70 seconds. Alzheimer recently became the 6th cause of death, surpassing diabetes.

In Europe, the estimated number of affected people, according to the Alzheimer Europe web site, is 7.3 million. These figures sets important challenges for all European health care systems, since the oldest old is one of the fastest growing sectors of European societies.

As for any other disease, an early diagnosis is the best way to treat and learn how to live with Alzheimer’s.

Ten years from now every new-born will know wether he’ll suffer from diabetes in his teens or a heart condition in his fifties. Not from a pediatric psychic, that is not in sight yet, but from the analysis of the genetic code of the baby. The costs of DNA mapping have already sensibly diminished, but they will drop to less than $1000 in the near future, making this a standard after-birth procedure. The human Genome Project, the first human genome sequencing ever published was completed in 2001 at a cost of $4 billion. Two years ago scientists James Watson and Craig Venter had their genomes mapped with about $1m, and Dr. Stephen Quake, a Stanford engineer, recently decoded is own with less than $50,000 and just a three-member staff. Dr Jay Flately from Illumina, an American company specialized in personalized medicine development by applying innovative genetic technologies, stated in an interview with The Times that most kids will have this simple procedure done within 2019. It will be enough to collect a drop of blood with a heel-prick blood test, similar to the one that is already used to screen for inherited diseases such as cystic fibrosis. “The limitations are sociological; when and where people think it can be applied, the concerns people have about misinformation and the background ethics questions. I think those are actually going to be the limits that push it out to a ten-year timeframe” he said. This procedure will in fact raise eyebrows on privacy concerns: what if an insurance company manages to get its hands on your own sequenced genome and prices your health insurance accordingly? But, as Dr. Flatley added “people have to recognize that this horse is out of the barn, and that your genome probably can’t be protected, because everywhere you go you leave your genome behind.” A used coffee mug or a fallen out hair are enough to track a person’s DNA anyway. This is why it will be very important for proper legislation to be passed. The benefits will be so great that will most likely wipe out the initial concerns. Knowing which kind of cancer or cariovascular problems could affect us, is crucial to early prevention and drugs and dietary advice.

September 1st 2009 is a very important day in Swiss DNA Bank’s history. It’s the day the staff finally pulled the strings on a very intensive two-years project development. Everything came together and the “put-the-web-application-on-line-button” was pushed.

The dream of creating the first data and DNA forever banking service came to life.

The idea was always to create a bank, a Swiss bank, which followed each and every security and privacy policy of our country. But what was going to be sheltered in this bank was not money or bonds. Was something much more precious and unique: it was people’s memories and DNA.

As Swiss DNA Bank’s website often states, one’s life experience, knowledge and memories are the most important asset we have. It takes a lifetime to build them.

On the other hand, our DNA trace is something that belongs only to ourselves. The health information contained are crucial not only for the carrier, but also for it’s family. Knowing your biological ancestry can help you prevent or cure many disease. But at the end of one’s life these assets are most likely going to be lost. Our children, our grandchildren and the ones that will come after them are deprived of the chance of getting to know who we where, what we’ve done and what we’ve learned.

This is where the idea of the Perpetual Financial Engine comes from.

The Perpetual Financial Engine feature is the reason why Swiss DNA Bank’s service is Forever. As of today, there is no technological support that you are sure it will be readable in even just 10 or 15 years time. Think about a floppy disc or an audio cassette.

So we figured that the solution to perpetual data storage is not technological, but financial.

The Perpetual Financial Engine, together with a long-lasting and safe structure of a Swiss bank, is the key to being able of founding tomorrow’s technological support renewal.

The user’s subscription fee is partially invested in safe assets, such as Swiss government bonds, in order to guarantee a small revenue, year after year, which allows to keep our storing facilities up to date.

When this whole picture came together, it was time to think of a safe way to store it all. The solution fort the physical storage of the servers which contain the data came from the heart of the Swiss Alps, from a former military nuclear shelter which was converted into server hosting facility.

Once Swiss DNA Bank’s servers were safe behind closed steel doors, the attention turned to on-line security.

The web-development team figured that username and password were not enough to protect such sensible data. So each Swiss DNA Bank user is provided with a Swiss DNA Card, a credit card sized one-time access code generator. The one-time access code is the third field one has to fill to enter the Swiss DNA Bank web application, an amazing tool to organize memories, pictures, documents, and any other file you can think of.

Take a look at your desk. Open some drawers randomly. Check your computer’s desktop. And what about the office’s shelves? Unless you are one of those people naturally gifted with full organizational skills, at least one of those places is a real mess.

And if you are organized, this will be your ultimate tool!

Now you can store it all, safely and Forever.

http://www.swissdnabank.com/

Maybe we are one step closer to break the ultimate tabu. Maybe some researchers actually feel the mystery of life is about to be unveiled.

At least according to Dr. Craig Venter, an independent and controversial scientist who announced some sort of artificial life will be ready to be presented to the world in four months time.

By artificial life he means a man-made organism. Verner has been working on the project for about ten years now and feels he is about to reach the finish line. The project is very complex and consists in transplanting DNA into bacteria.

Last January Dr. Verner’s team built a whole bacterium’s genome form scratch. This man-made DNA was than transferred in a host cell. These experiments have been proven ineffective, at least until now. The reason for failure was that these synthetic genome was not able to develop the natural barriers against viruses. This process is called methylation.

This time the Verner team actually managed to remethylate the genome before placing it in the host cell.  And the experiment was a success.

This experiment raised many eyebrows, of course. The main objection was that calling this process “artificial life” was taking it too far: researchers are rebooting a new DNA code into a host cell, not creating a living organism from scratch.

Any interpretation you want to give to Dr. Verner’s research, it is sure the latest proof that science and medical science are reaching new turning points faster and faster.

Are we looking into a scientific boundaries-less future?

It took Christopher Columbus 36 days to reach America. Now you fly to New York in about 8 hours. The first commercial computer, the UNIVAC I costed about $1,550,000 and weighed 13 tons. How much did you spend for your laptop?

Tech devices have been getting smaller, faster and cheaper. We all noticed that. This development is becoming reality in the DNA research field as well, as Dr. Stephen Quake, a Stanford engineer, has recently proven the world.

He recently decoded is own genome sequence with less than $50,000 and just a three-member staff thanks to his Heliscope Single Molecule Sequencer. This innovative machine can sequence a human genome in four weeks with a small technical staff. Companies and labs who have been providing this service relied on hundreds of machines and large staff to get the job done. The most recently sequenced human genome before Dr. Quake’s costed about $250,000 to be decoded, and his machine brings the cost to less than a fifth of that. Not to mention that it is much faster. He said the much-discussed goal of the $1,000 genome could be attained in two or three years. That is the cost at which genome sequencing could start to become a standard part of medical practice. Once again, we are watching modern technology became obsolete live.

We are driving fast down the road of routine full genome sequencing. This will lead to a better understanding of our personal disease risk-factors and prevention.

“You have to have a strong stomach when you look at your own genome,” Dr. Quake said. Looking at his own, he discovered a variant associated with heard disease. Luckily he inherited only from one parent, which leaves him with another healthy gene copy.

The cost of the device is “about $1 million, depending on how hard you bargain,” Dr. Quake said. Funny enough it is about the same as the UNIVAC I. Will genome sequencing devices become part of household first-aid kits in a decade time?

The genome of the HIV virus, responsible for AIDS and AIDS-related infections, has been entirely decoded by a team of researchers at the University of North Carolina lead by professor Kevin Weeks. This is a huge step forward towards understanding how this deadly virus attacks the human body and, consequently, how it can be cured.

Prior to this scientific achievement retroviral drugs, the only known cure to HIV’s symptoms, not to the disease itself, where shaped to attack only few decoded parts of the virus’ genome. HIV, like many other viruses, is composed of a single stranded RNA, some sort of single-stranded DNA molecule. While DNA contains fixed and sequenced genetic information, the RNA is able to fold into complicated patterns. This makes the molecule much more difficult to analyze.

The next step in HIV RNA research will be to change its sequence in order to understand how this affects the virus and discover its weak sides.
“We are also beginning to understand tricks the genome uses to help the virus escape detection by the human host”, said Weeks.

This will help in starting antiretroviral treatment (ART) as early as possible in HIV positive people. A recent study conducted by professor Matthias Egger of the University of Berne in sub-Saharan Africa has shown that mortality rates of people starting HIV treatment are not much different than those of the general population if treatment is started before the immune system has been severely damaged.

According to the latest UNAIDS report on the global AIDS epidemic, released in July 2008, there have been significant gains in preventing new HIV infections worldwide, especially in heavily-plagued countries. But if HIV infections have globally dropped from 3 to 2.7 million, the rates of infections are rising in countries such as China, Indonesia, Kenya, Mozambique, Papua New Guinea, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and Vietnam.
Some so-called first-world countries are experiencing a rise in infection as well, such as Germany, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Japanese cloning experts were successful in cloning a mouse that has been dead for 15 years, and that the new animal turned out fine. It was even able to reproduce with another female rat, which gave researchers a field day, seeing how this step in science could bring forth a cloning “revolution.” The cell that the team used was stored for all these years in an environment with a constant temperature of about -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit).

Because this temperature is almost identical to the one frozen ground has, cloning experts are confident that they can find a mammoth cell that was preserved since the last Ice Age. Such a huge breakthrough in the field of genetics has the international scientific community buzzing with excitement, as the new experiment proved that not only living animals can be cloned, but dead ones as well.

Current estimates place the potential number of dead mammoths under Siberian soil at about 10,000, so the odds of scientists finding a good cell are pretty good. The main problem for cloning the large beast is not a good cell though, but rather a host to plant the cell in. The mouse was “resurrected” when his cell was inserted into a female mouse and developed there.