Navigenics and another genetic testing company, 23andMe, both just obtained their official licenses to operate in California.

Interestingly, Lisi himself pretty much seemed to feel the same way. He was ambitious in his aims but modest about his chances of succeeding. As he told me — and several extremely accomplished academic physicists agreed — his theory had at best maybe a 5% chance of being at least partly right. So I ended up trying to play around with this notion of “the next Einstein” (as you can see in the cover line) and use it to focus in on what I found most fascinating about Lisi: that despite his ambitions, he refuses to compromise his lifestyle.

It was also interesting to see the divide among physicists when Lisi started showing up in the media last fall. On the one hand, the surprisingly caustic world of physics blogs made quite a show over having to waste precious time debunking such a crank. On the other, I talked to quite a few physicists (including a Nobel Prize winner) who said some version of, “hey, he’s probably not right, but he’s got some good ideas and does proper math, so who cares if he gets a bit too much press? New ideas are always for the good.” Which struck me — at least as an outsider to the community — as a healthier approach. In any case, no physicist who had actually bothered to talk to Lisi actually thought he even remotely approached being a crank. In fact, they all seemed to kind of admire his outsider approach. He certainly wouldn’t be the first physicist to make contributions working outside of academia.

Back in June, I flew down to Boeing’s research office, in the hills outside of Canoga Park, near Los Angeles, to observe the dinosaur heading into the company’s giant CT scanner. It didn’t go exactly as planned. The researchers, led by Phil Manning from the University of Manchester, had trucked the body from South Dakota, only to discover that they’d built a frame around it too wide to spin on the CT bed. As a result, most of the day was spent hacking and sawing away at the corners of the dino’s plaster, trying to shrink it enough to fit.

Eventually they wedged the tail piece — the mummy was split into the body block and the tail block — into the scanner and sealed up the massive steel door. After a couple hours they came up with the first images of the tail, at a resolution of a 20,000th of an inch. The body was scanned later, the first images from which Manning told me he just got last week. So despite the fanfare surrounding the announcement this week, the biggest discoveries are no doubt left to come.

All of which I would have told in a magazine piece, at much greater length, but for the restrictions National Geographic put on the information. Now you can read it in just about every news outlet on the planet, but at least I can say I’ve seen the world’s most complete dinosaur mummy — albeit entirely encased in plaster — in person.

If you’re at all interested in dinosaurs, it’s worth catching the show this weekend if you have the National Geographic Channel.

First off, “Talk of the Nation Science Friday,” on October 5.

Followed by “Fair Game,” November 15.

The current method of producing ethanol (in the U.S.), from corn kernels, has been much castigated in the news lately. Although it seems a lot of the ethanol backlash is only tenuously based on actual research (especially when it comes to the energy balance of what goes into corn ethanol versus what you get out), there’s little doubt that corn ethanol has serious problems, enough to at least call its massive subsidies into question.

There is, however, another way of making ethanol, using a biological or chemical process to extract the cellulose, or “structural” part, from plants (rather than the starch, as in the case of corn ethanol, or the sugar, as in the case of the sugarcane ethanol in Brazil). Cellulosic ethanol usually makes the last couple paragraphs of ethanol stories; it’s declared to be some indeterminate number of years off, a biofuel holy grail awaiting a scientific breakthrough. There is general agreement that if we could make it, cellulosic fuel avoids most if not all of the problems of corn ethanol. Meanwhile, our federal energy targets (which are closer to hopes than targets, really) essentially assume that hundreds of millions of gallons cellulosic ethanol will soon be arriving. So, what gives?

My piece tries to lay out the history of the field (which actually dates to the 1970s), explain just what science needs to be done make it a reality, and profile some of the people doing that science. Some of the most fascinating work, to me at least, involves scientists scouting the world examining the excrement of rhinos and the stomachs of termites, looking for cellulose-digesting enzymes they can harness to make fuel.

The definitive-sounding take of the headline and cover undoubtedly give the piece a tint of undue optimism, but hopefully a closer read of the story itself reveals a careful effort to explain the state of affairs. In the end it’s tough to come to a conclusion beyond….cellulosic ethanol is some years off; but we try to make the case that the funding and research is now in place, for the first time, to determine whether cellulosic ethanol can become a commercial reality. Dozens of bio-refineries in the works, and hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in research, are about to answer that question.

Personally, as is mentioned in the story, I don’t believe alternative fuels of any kind can make much of a climate change dent alone, without higher fuel economy standards, conservation, and maybe (I’m still undecided on this) a carbon tax. Cellulosic ethanol, however, could be a huge factor on the fuel replacement side of things.

In experiments with mice genetically engineered to lack a certain gene in the dentate gyrus, Tonegawa and colleagues pinpointed the signaling pathway underlying the recall of specific places.

Different sets of mice were placed in two similar chambers, one of which gave them a mild foot shock. After three days, the mice began to freeze in fear in both chambers, even the one in which they had never been harmed.

Within two weeks, the normal mice learned to associate only one chamber with the foot shocks while recognizing the second as safe. The genetically engineered mice “had a significant but transient deficit in their ability to distinguish similar contexts,” McHugh said.

The theory fits well with the Chris Moulin’s research at the University of Leeds, which I wrote about in the New York Times Magazine last year. The neurons Tonegawa identified in the hippocampus mirror the “recollective experience circuit” that Moulin and his colleagues hypothesized as the source of déjà vécu, a condition of persistent déjà vu:

Their hypothesis rested on the understanding, established in the wake of Tulving’s research, that episodic memories consist of two aspects: the information content, or “memory trace,” and an accompanying experience of recollection. It’s that experience, a little bit of consciousness attached to a memory, that lets us know that we are calling up something from the past. If someone experienced that feeling constantly, without any memory trace attached, they would feel — as Conway describes it — as if they were “remembering the present.” In other words, déjà vécu. …

…Moulin and Conway concluded that their patients’ déjà vécu was similarly located in the temporal lobes, in a “recollective experience circuit” that regulates the process of remembering. If the circuit was “continuously active,” it would keep feeding the brain that feeling of recollection, without any real memory attached.

Could ordinary déjà vu be a minor version of the same thing, a brief misfire in a temporal-lobe circuit that sets off the feeling of remembering? “Somebody like A.K.P. shows that there is this sensation that is separate from memory,” Moulin told me. “If his can go chronically wrong, ours can go momentarily wrong.”

Although it’s likely an overstatement to say, as the MIT researchers do (in the Reuters account) that “one big question about the memory is now taken care of,” the work is undoubtedly a significant piece of the déjà vu puzzle.

Wolfe and Diamond, along with Claire Dunavan at UCLA, lay out a five-step process by which viruses jump from animals to humans and then become established in human populations. They also comb the scientific literature for 25 significant viruses, from hepatitis B to influenza A, to AIDS, to smallpox, and parse out some interesting conclusions about how some deadly viruses become endemic in humans, and others don’t.

Their main conclusion, however, is that we know very little about the origins of diseases that have shaped human history. They propose an “origins initiative” to study the beginnings of a dozen of the deadliest agents. They also describe Wolfe’s effort, described in depth in the Wired piece, to expland his bushmeat hunter-monitoring project in Cameroon into a global early monitoring system for new viruses jumping from wild animals to humans:

Most major human infectious diseases have animal origins, and we continue to be bombarded by novel animal pathogens. Yet there is no ongoing systematic global effort to monitor for pathogens emerging from animals to humans. Such an effort could help us to describe the diversity of microbial agents to which our species is exposed; to characterize animal pathogens that might threaten us in the future; and perhaps to detect and control a local human emergence before it has a chance to spread globally.

]]> http://www.atavist.net/2007/05/18/more-on-the-mystery-of-emerging-viruses/feed/ 0 http://www.atavist.net/2007/04/24/bushmeat-and-the-next-pandemic/ http://www.atavist.net/2007/04/24/bushmeat-and-the-next-pandemic/#comments Tue, 24 Apr 2007 17:02:12 +0000 evanratliff http://www.atavistic.org/2007/04/24/bushmeat-and-the-next-pandemic/ My latest piece for Wired, about UCLA biologist Nathan Wolfe’s efforts to detect and study viruses as they cross over from wild animals to humans in remote corners of the world, is out in the May issue. It’s on newsstands now, and also available online here.

Some additional photos from my reporting trip to Cameroon are currently online at Wired, and I’ll be posting more here later today.

Also coming: Some additional material that didn’t make the story cut. In the meantime, comments welcome or drop me an email at eratliff[at]atavistic.org.

UPDATE: I’ve put some more photos up. Captions up coming shortly.