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US researchers have engineered a line of "mighty mice" whose human equivalent would have similar abilities to the bicycling champion Lance Armstrong, according to research published Thursday. The breed of mice can run six kilometers (four miles) at a speed of 20 meters (yards) per minute for up to six hours without stopping, according to Richard Hanson, a biochemistry professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. "They are metabolically similar to Lance Armstrong biking up the Pyrenees; they utilize mainly fatty acids for energy and produce very little lactic acid," said Hanson, the senior author of the article...

Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth. The announcement, which is expected within weeks and could come as early as Monday at the annual meeting of his scientific institute in San Diego, California, will herald a giant leap forward in the development of designer genomes. It is certain to provoke heated debate about the ethics of creating new species and could unlock the door to new...

LONDON: Controversial US scientist Craig Venter claimed to have constructed a synthetic chromosome using chemicals made from the laboratory, a step towards the creation of first new artificial life form on Earth. "This landmark will be a very important philosophical step in the history of our species. We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before," sources reported on Saturday, quoting Venter as saying. He is expected to announce the discovery -- a feat of bio-engineering never previously achieved -- within weeks. According...

Jellyfish with up to a dozen heads have been created in the laboratory by carefully monkeying with a few genes. The genetic experiments could shed light on how natural colonies of other multi-headed organisms first originated, including some that build coral reefs. Researchers targeted so-called Cnox genes, which help control how the bodies of jellyfish are laid out as their embryos develop. These genes are closely related to Hox genes, which play a similar role in humans. How they did it They experimented on the European hydromedusa (Eleutheria dichotoma), collected from the south of France. (In Greek mythology, the Hydra...

FORGET genetic engineering. The new idea is synthetic biology, an effort by engineers to rewire the genetic circuitry of living organisms. The ambitious undertaking includes genetic engineering, the now routine insertion of one or two genes into a bacterium or crop plant. But synthetic biologists aim to rearrange genes on a much wider scale, that of a genome, or an organism’s entire genetic code. Their plans include microbes modified to generate cheap petroleum out of plant waste, and, further down the line, designing whole organisms from scratch. Synthetic biologists can identify a network of useful genes on their computer screens...

Scientists at the institute directed by J. Craig Venter, a pioneer in sequencing the human genome, are reporting that they have successfully transplanted the genome of one species of bacteria into another, an achievement they see as a major step toward creating synthetic forms of life. Other scientists who did not participate in the research praised the achievement, published yesterday on the Web site of the journal Science. But some expressed skepticism that it was as significant as Dr. Venter said. His goal is to make cells that might take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and produce methane, used...

April 26, 2007     First designer babies to beat breast cancer   Mark Henderson, Science Editor   Two couples whose families have been ravaged by breast cancer are to become the first to screen embryos to prevent them having children at risk of the disease, The Times has learnt. Tests will allow the couples to take the unprecedented step of selecting embryos free from a gene that carries a heightened risk of the cancer but does not always cause it. The move will reignite controversy over the ethics of embryo screening. An application to test for the BRCA1...

FRONT ROYAL, Virginia, April 2, 2007 (POP.org/LifeSiteNews.com) - For a number of years now, a great deal of discussion has taken place among scientists and in the popular media about the genetic engineering of children. Will it soon be possible, for prices widely affordable at least to the upper-middle class, to guarantee that children have a high IQ, or excellent athletic ability, or be over 6 feet tall, or have blond hair and blue eyes? Is it right to commodify children in this way, and have parents choosing options as they do with cars? And wouldn’t it be boring to...

LONDON, February 27, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The British government’s plans to ban the creation of human/animal hybrid embryos are over after a group of 45 scientists, ethicists and politicians published an open letter in January saying that a ban would hold back the advancement of British science.   The Times reports that the government is now dropping plans to ban the experiments and will instead offer funding for a public debate before new legislation is drafted.   The open letter, published in the Times in response to the government’s December 2006 announcement that it planned to draft legislation to ban...

Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They’ll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They’ll stop worrying about “frankenfoods” and embrace genetic engineering. He predicts that all this will happen in the next decade, which sounds rather improbable — or at least it would if anyone else had made the prediction. But when it comes to anticipating the zeitgeist, never underestimate Stewart Brand. He divides environmentalists into romantics...

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- The power to create "perfect" designer babies looms over the world of prenatal testing. But what if doctors started doing the opposite? Creating made-to-order babies with genetic defects would seem to be an ethical minefield, but to some parents with disabilities -- say, deafness or dwarfism -- it just means making babies like them. And a recent survey of U.S. clinics that offer embryo screening suggests it's already happening. Three percent, or four clinics surveyed, said they have provided the costly, complicated procedure to help families create children with a disability. Some doctors have denounced the...

The refrigerator is used to lengthen the life of your food, and a new study suggests a similar principle could prolong your life, too. Researchers have found that lowering the body temperature of mice by just 0.5?C extends their lifespan by around 15%. In the future, people might be able to take a drug to achieve a similar effect on body temperature and enjoy a longer life, they say. ... Bruno Conti at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, US, and colleagues designed genetically engineered mice with a specific brain-cell defect in a region called the lateral hypothalamus. The...

Boy or girl? Almost half of U.S. fertility clinics that offer embryo screening say they allow couples to choose the sex of their child, the most extensive survey of the practice suggests. Sex selection without any medical reason to warrant it was performed in about 9 percent of all embryo screenings last year, the survey found. Another controversial procedure - helping parents conceive a child who could supply compatible cord blood to treat an older sibling with a grave illness - was offered by 23 percent of clinics, although only 1 percent of screenings were for that purpose in 2005....

Is the cloning of human babies' tissue an insult to god? Posted at: 22:01 A proposal to create babies that are both cloned and genetically altered to prevent serious hereditary disease has been outlined by the leader of the team that created Dolly the sheep, re-igniting the debate on the moral implications of cloning human beings. Ever since news that Dolly had been cloned from an adult cell made headlines around the world, Prof Ian Wilmut has repeatedly said he is "implacably opposed" to cloning a human being. But in his forthcoming book After Dolly, serialised in The Daily Telegraph,...

SAN FRANCISCO -- Lots of people think bacon is good -- but good for you? Scientists said the key to accomplishing that may be a microscopic worm. Geneticists have mixed DNA from a type of roundworm and pigs to produce swine with significant amounts of omega-three fatty acids -- the kind believed to stave off heart disease. Earlier experiments have succeeded in manipulating animals' fat content, but most never made it out of the lab because of taste problems. While boosting omega-threes doesn't decrease the fat content in pigs, the fatty acids are also important to brain development and may...

CHICAGO - Buying organic milk these days - or organic apples, eggs, or beef - no longer has to mean an extra trip to a Whole Foods supermarket or the local co-op. Organic products now line the shelves at Safeway and Costco. And Wal-Mart - already the nation's largest organic-milk seller - says it wants to sell more organic food. Large companies including Kraft, General Mills, and Kellogg own sizable organic- and natural-food brands. Now, they are developing organic versions of their own products, too. Still, while some organic-food fans welcome its broadening appeal and availability, others worry that the...

SAN FRANCISCO - A tiny biosciences company is developing a promising drug to fight diarrhea, a scourge among babies in the developing world, but it has made an astonishing number of powerful enemies because it grows the experimental drug in rice genetically engineered with a human gene. Environmental groups, corporate food interests and thousands of farmers across the country have succeeded in chasing Ventria Bioscience's rice farms out of two states. And critics continue to complain that Ventria is recklessly plowing ahead with a mostly untested technology that threatens the safety of conventional crops grown for food. "We just want...

A conference in Waikiki sparked a protest today over an industry that's beginning to thrive in Hawaii - biotechnology. Police monitored a small group of Native Hawaiians and environmentalists who gathered to protest practices in genetic engineering. Across the street, more than 300 people gathered from around the Pacific Rim to share ideas and compare progress in the larger field of biotech. "The biotech industry isn't paying any attention to the serious risk to human health and the environment of their experiments," said Isaac Moriwake of Earthjustice. "The result is they're turning the people of Hawaii and the lands of...

A recently discovered genetic mechanism appears to play an important role in the development of cancer, scientists are reporting today, in findings that may eventually lead to new ways to diagnose and treat the disease. The discoveries "change the landscape in cancer genetics," Dr. Paul S. Meltzer of the National Human Genome Research Institute wrote in a commentary in the journal Nature, which is publishing three papers on the findings today. Other scientists cautioned that the new findings merely added detail to the already complex picture of how tumors arise and grow. The findings concern micro-RNA's, which are tiny snippets...

SÃO PAULO, Brazil, March 3 - In a significant victory for large biotechnology companies like Monsanto, Brazil's lower house of Congress has overwhelmingly approved legislation paving the way for the legalization of genetically modified crops. After months of delays and heated debate, legislators passed a biotechnology law late Wednesday night by a vote of 352 to 60. The bill had pitted farmers and scientists against environmental and religious groups. Besides lifting a longstanding ban on the sale and planting of gene-altered seeds, the legislation also clears the way for research involving human embryonic stem cells that have been frozen for...