When I had worked on my MSc thesis in biology on the relation of human mitochondrial mutations and aging the paper I used most frequently was Sequence and organization of the human mitochondrial genome by Anderson et al. published in Nature, 1981. The reason was simple: it is more of a database than a hypothesis driven article with the published 16.569 base pair sequence of the circular human mitochondrial genome (L-strand) containing 37 genes and a bigger non-coding, regulatory region. Throughout my work I had to use it as a basic reference. The sequence is a reconstruction of a single European individual’s mtDNA and contains several rare alleles. Nice figure isn’t it?
I’ve just realized with the help of genomics pioneer and warrior Craig Venter’s recent molecular autobiography Life decoded, that the brilliant two time Nobel laureate, sequencing urfather Frederick Sanger is also a coauthor of the paper. Here comes Venter: Read the rest of this entry »
This slide comes from the presentation of Google Fellow Jeff Dean on Seattle Conference on Scalability, entitled Abstractions for Handling Large Datasets. (The title Google Fellow seems to me as something similar in rank to a full professorship at Stanford.)
If there is any? Stem cell biology and regenerative medicine as an institutionally specified discipline is quite young, about a decade old. Bone marrow transplantation traces its roots back to the 1970-s, but many people don’t realize that it is the most useful although restricted form of stem cell therapy till this day. In my opinion the birth date of present day stem cell biology is Thomson et al.’s 1998 November paper in Science on EmbryonicStemCellLinesDerivedfromHumanBlastocysts.
Not because it was so original. It is known that much of the embryonic stem cell isolation protocol and the in vivo teratoma forming as pluripotency test came from two papers by Cambridge biologists, appeared in 1981 that reported the derivation of pluripotent stem cell lines from cultured mouse embryos. But the Thomson results were based on human cells and this is a crucial difference concerning potential regenerative therapies as it was discussed in the paper: “The standardized production of large,purified populations of euploid humancells such as cardiomyocytesand neurons will provide a potentially limitless source of cellsfor drug discovery and transplantation therapies. Many diseases,such as Parkinson’s disease and juvenile-onset diabetes mellitus,result from the death or dysfunction of just one or a few celltypes. The replacement of those cells could offer lifelong treatment.” Also the timing of the paper was good. The 2 Cambridge papers, which were also mentioned as references in the Thomson et al. paper.:
Evans, M. J. & Kaufman, M. H. Establishment in culture of pluripotential cells from mouse embryos. Nature 292, 154-6. (1981).
Martin, G. R. Isolation of a pluripotent cell line from early mouse embryos cultured in medium conditioned by teratocarcinoma stem cells. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 78, 7634-7638 (1981).
In your opinion: What is the birth date of present day stem cell biology? Is there any discrete point? How would you locate the beginnings of stem cell science in time and space?
Today I visited a presentation of Vint Cerf, whose work in the 70s on the nascent Internet Protocols, like TCP/IP became historical. Mr. Cerf serves as “Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist” of Google, and he has mainly a brand maintaining and popularizer role. Unfortunately he wasn’t asked about his activity on InterPlaNetary Internet Project but I really liked his slide on the first ever 4 processors interconnected as the initial ARPANET between UCLA, Stanford University of California, Santa Barbara and University of Utah’s Graphics Department. My question to Mr. Cerf was: What is the biggest scalability problem at Google and at the Internet just right now, out of which he answered the latter, although I haven’t processed it fully yet. Picture: My MacBook shot, when Cerf explains Google Earth’s user-generated level.
Wow, I bought the flight tickets yesterday, so next week I’m visiting the Center for Gene Therapy in downtown New Orleans for a few days. I was invited to give a seminar there. Of course I’d like to be more than just a stem cell tourist in America’s Most Interesting City. New Orleans has a very unique history and present. Such a unique figure is Alejandro “Bloody” O’Reilly, who was the Spanish governor of Louisiana. The New Yorker Magazine has a special and terrific online daily column, the New Orleans Journal written by freelance journalist Dan Baum, from which we can gain deep insights about the ins and outs of the city. During the trip preparations I rewatched David Lynch’s Wild at Heart because of the New Orleans scenes and there is one catchy old soundtrack song performed by these guys:
Also a more authentic version of this song with John Lee Hooker and the same Van Morrison Read the rest of this entry »
When I had worked on my MSc thesis in biology on the relation of human mitochondrial mutations and aging the paper I used most frequently was Sequence and organization of the human mitochondrial genome by Anderson et al. published in Nature, 1981. The reason was simple: it is more of a database than a hypothesis driven article with the published 16.569 base pair sequence of the circular human mitochondrial genome (L-strand) containing 37 genes and a bigger non-coding, regulatory region. Throughout my work I had to use it as a basic reference. The sequence is a reconstruction of a single European individual’s mtDNA and contains several rare alleles. Nice figure isn’t it?
New Orleans has a very unique history and present. Such a unique figure is 