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Upfront– WSPA
IN PRAISE OF BEAR FARMS Can there be anything good to say about farming bears for their bile? Last week a Chinese official speaking at the 4th International Symposium on Trade in Bear Parts in Nagano, Japan, managed it. Huang Haikui, a government official responsible for enforcing the rules of the CITES conservation treaty, says farming is helping to increase the number of Asiatic black bears in the wild. The bears’ bile has been a staple in traditional Chinese medicine for more than 3000 years. Tightening the control of how it is harvested from the animals has had a beneficial effect on wild populations, Huang says. According to Huang, getting bile from farms reduces the pressure on wild populations and has led to an increase in the number of wild Asiatic black bears to
27,500. Critics argue, however, that this claim is unsubstantiated. Bear census reports have not been made available and farming serves only to increase demand for bear bile, says Dave Eastham of the London-based World Society for the Protection of Animals. “The consumption of bear bile has gone through the roof since bear farming started in the early 1980s.” The bear bile industry is finding new ways to market the product, he says, and has even started to include it in some shampoos. According to Huang, the introduction of new pain-free techniques for extracting bile from the bears, along with the forced closure of hundreds of poorly equipped bear farms, means that fewer bears are now suffering.
Stem-cell rethink
for permission to use Wisconsin’s ESCs or the methods Thomson used to grow them. Even academics once had to pay up to $5000 to use the cells, though the charge has dropped to $500. Jeanne Loring, a biologist at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, California, claims that when Thomson grew the cells he used methods known to work for other mammals. She has filed a statement backing a challenge to the patents brought by the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, based in Santa Monica, California, and the Public Patent Foundation in New York.
–Kept for its bile–
MONEY talks, and the drug industry’s dollar talks loud and clear through the pages of leading medical journals. That’s the conclusion of Peter Gøtzsche and his team at the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen, Denmark, who compared reviews of drug studies funded by pharmaceutical companies with similar reviews done without industry support. The Danish team was looking for bias in meta-analyses, which combine results from multiple drug studies to establish the effectiveness of an experimental drug compared with an established treatment. To ensure a fair comparison, they matched studies that were published within two years of one another and that addressed the same
Cochrane online database, recognised as the gold standard for such analyses. Studies backed by drug companies, however, tended to recommend the experimental drug without reservation, even though the estimated effect of the treatment was similar, on average, to that reported in the Cochrane reviews (BMJ, DOI: 10.1136/ bmj.38973.444699.0B). Gøtzsche says that some industry-funded reviews were also biased in their methods, as they considered only studies held in the company’s own database. He says he would now ignore any meta-analyses funded by drug companies. STUART FRANKLIN/MAGNUM
Calling the tune
“Company-backed studies tended to recommend the experimental drug” drugs and diseases. “That has not been done before,” Gøtzsche says. Studies conducted without drug industry funding reached similar conclusions to the systematic reviews held in the –Now Mexico City knows what to aim for– 6 | NewScientist | 14 October 2006
FREE stem cells for all? Possibly, now that the US Patent and Trademark Office is re-examining key patents on human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) that some say have been stifling stem cell research. The first lines of human ESCs were grown by James Thomson at the University of WisconsinMadison in 1998. Since then, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which manages the university’s intellectual property, has charged biotechnology firms licence fees running to hundreds of thousands of dollars
Breathe easier IT IS a breath of fresh air for people living in pollution-choked cities. For the first time, the World Health Organization has issued global targets for cutting air pollution, and it says at least 2 million people could be saved from early death each year if countries meet them. The WHO targets, issued on 5 October, demand that levels of fine particulates from traffic, industry and burning of fossil fuels be cut to a third of what they www.newscientist.com
60 SECONDS are today, especially in highly polluted cities such as Beijing, China, and New Delhi, India. “We think we can reduce premature deaths in more polluted cities by 15 to 20 per cent,” says Michael Krzyzanowski of the WHO in Bonn, Germany, who has coordinated the targets. The WHO wants big cuts in most other air pollutants too, including ozone and sulphur dioxide. The drive to cut particulates has pleased Benoit Nemery, chair of the scientific committee of the European Respiratory Society. He says there is unequivocal and consistent evidence that such particles are harmful, not only to the lungs but also to the heart.
THE US has issued a new national space policy that reflects a more aggressive and unilateral stance than the previous version set out a decade ago by former president Bill Clinton. The earlier statement said US operations should be “consistent with treaty obligations”. In contrast, the most recent one, issued on 6 October, rejects international agreements that would limit US testing or use of military equipment in space. The new version also uses stronger language to assert that the US can defend its spacecraft, echoing an air force push for
In the eco-red
SHUTTLE DAMAGE MISSED
WE ARE consuming the Earth’s resources faster than they can be What goes ding in the night? replenished, at least according Apparently the space shuttle Atlantis, to US think tank Global Footprint which last month sustained one of the Network. It declared 9 October largest debris hits in the history of “overshoot day” – the point in NASA's shuttle programme. each year when our ecological Following the craft's safe landing allowance for that year is spent. on 21 September, ground inspectors GFN’s eco-audits began in 1961, discovered a hole 12 millimetres deep and overshoot day has fallen ever and 2.7 millimetres wide in a radiator earlier since its first occurrence, on the inside surface of the shuttle’s on 19 December 1987. Now it will right payload bay door. take 15 months for the world to The location means the hit must regenerate what we use in 2006. have occurred while the doors were “Humanity is living off its open. It also accounts for why the ecological credit card and can only hole was not spotted despite three do this by liquidating the planet’s rounds of on-board inspections natural resources,” says Mathis conducted just before Atlantis landed. Wackernagel, GFN’s executive Such inspections are restricted to the director. “While this can be done shuttle’s protective heat shield, where for a short while, overshoot a puncture can potentially expose the ultimately leads to the depletion of resources such as the forests, oceans and agricultural land upon which our economy depends.” But not everyone is pessimistic. The European Centre for International Political Economy thinks that the GFN analyses dwell on the global picture but ignore the potential for solutions. For example, says CIPE director Julian Morris, forests in richer countries tend to be managed sustainably. “By being totally negative, [GFN] detracts from solutions that are out there.” –Made by a meteoroid?– www.newscientist.com
“The new US space policy reflects a more aggressive and unilateral stance”
Giant wind farm to come Work has begun on what will be the world’s largest onshore wind farm, south of Glasgow in the UK. When up and running in three years' time, the 140 turbines on Eaglesham Moor will power 200,000 homes and save 250,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year.
“space superiority” made in 2004. It states the US has the right to “protect its space capabilities, respond to interference and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to US national interests”. The document also details how the US government plans to administer the use of nuclear-powered space craft, which will be used if they “safely enable or significantly enhance space exploration or operational capabilities”.
Chikungunya strikes A new, more virulent African strain of the chikungunya virus, which struck Réunion and other Indian Ocean islands earlier this year, has been declared an epidemic in India. The disease has so far caused 81 deaths in the state of Kerala alone and a further 1.2 million cases have been reported nationwide.
Base bolsters bones
shuttle’s internal structure to the extreme heat of atmospheric re-entry. Although specialists on the ground and astronauts in the shuttle reported seeing objects floating near Atlantis during the flight, these objects were moving on nearly identical paths to the spacecraft and so could not have caused the damage. The object that bored into Atlantis – possibly a meteoroid or a fragment of space junk – must have hit the orbiter at a relatively high speed. The windows in the crew cabin have to be replaced regularly due to damage from small impacts, or "dings" as they are known in NASA vernacular. The previous largest ding occurred during a mission in 1995, when a small object penetrated the outer thermal blanket on the payload bay door of Columbia.
A simple alkali food supplement can increase bone density in post-menopausal women at risk of osteoporosis. Women who took potassium citrate daily for up to a year had a 1 per cent boost in bone density in the lumbar spine, reports a team led by Reto Krapf of the University of Basel, Switzerland. The compound is thought to neutralise bone-dissolving acids from foods such as dairy products.
Gene reader earns Nobel A chemist who worked out how cells convert the genetic information in DNA into RNA templates for making proteins received this year's Nobel prize in chemistry. Roger Kornberg of Stanford University in California revealed in great detail how this process, called transcription, relies on an enzyme called RNA polymerase II.
Beam us up, Yahoo! Online search engine Yahoo is to beam a message to space consisting of stories and images gathered from individuals around the globe. The message will be sent using a laser atop the Pyramid of the Sun in the ancient Mexican capital of Teotihuacàn. Material will also be archived for what is being billed as the first digital time capsule. The closing date for submissions is 8 November. NASA
Going it alone
14 October 2006 | NewScientist | 7
Upfront– WSPA
IN PRAISE OF BEAR FARMS Can there be anything good to say about farming bears for their bile? Last week a Chinese official speaking at the 4th International Symposium on Trade in Bear Parts in Nagano, Japan, managed it. Huang Haikui, a government official responsible for enforcing the rules of the CITES conservation treaty, says farming is helping to increase the number of Asiatic black bears in the wild. The bears’ bile has been a staple in traditional Chinese medicine for more than 3000 years. Tightening the control of how it is harvested from the animals has had a beneficial effect on wild populations, Huang says. According to Huang, getting bile from farms reduces the pressure on wild populations and has led to an increase in the number of wild Asiatic black bears to
27,500. Critics argue, however, that this claim is unsubstantiated. Bear census reports have not been made available and farming serves only to increase demand for bear bile, says Dave Eastham of the London-based World Society for the Protection of Animals. “The consumption of bear bile has gone through the roof since bear farming started in the early 1980s.” The bear bile industry is finding new ways to market the product, he says, and has even started to include it in some shampoos. According to Huang, the introduction of new pain-free techniques for extracting bile from the bears, along with the forced closure of hundreds of poorly equipped bear farms, means that fewer bears are now suffering.
Stem-cell rethink
for permission to use Wisconsin’s ESCs or the methods Thomson used to grow them. Even academics once had to pay up to $5000 to use the cells, though the charge has dropped to $500. Jeanne Loring, a biologist at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, California, claims that when Thomson grew the cells he used methods known to work for other mammals. She has filed a statement backing a challenge to the patents brought by the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, based in Santa Monica, California, and the Public Patent Foundation in New York.
–Kept for its bile–
MONEY talks, and the drug industry’s dollar talks loud and clear through the pages of leading medical journals. That’s the conclusion of Peter Gøtzsche and his team at the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen, Denmark, who compared reviews of drug studies funded by pharmaceutical companies with similar reviews done without industry support. The Danish team was looking for bias in meta-analyses, which combine results from multiple drug studies to establish the effectiveness of an experimental drug compared with an established treatment. To ensure a fair comparison, they matched studies that were published within two years of one another and that addressed the same
Cochrane online database, recognised as the gold standard for such analyses. Studies backed by drug companies, however, tended to recommend the experimental drug without reservation, even though the estimated effect of the treatment was similar, on average, to that reported in the Cochrane reviews (BMJ, DOI: 10.1136/ bmj.38973.444699.0B). Gøtzsche says that some industry-funded reviews were also biased in their methods, as they considered only studies held in the company’s own database. He says he would now ignore any meta-analyses funded by drug companies. STUART FRANKLIN/MAGNUM
Calling the tune
“Company-backed studies tended to recommend the experimental drug” drugs and diseases. “That has not been done before,” Gøtzsche says. Studies conducted without drug industry funding reached similar conclusions to the systematic reviews held in the –Now Mexico City knows what to aim for– 6 | NewScientist | 14 October 2006
FREE stem cells for all? Possibly, now that the US Patent and Trademark Office is re-examining key patents on human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) that some say have been stifling stem cell research. The first lines of human ESCs were grown by James Thomson at the University of WisconsinMadison in 1998. Since then, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which manages the university’s intellectual property, has charged biotechnology firms licence fees running to hundreds of thousands of dollars
Breathe easier IT IS a breath of fresh air for people living in pollution-choked cities. For the first time, the World Health Organization has issued global targets for cutting air pollution, and it says at least 2 million people could be saved from early death each year if countries meet them. The WHO targets, issued on 5 October, demand that levels of fine particulates from traffic, industry and burning of fossil fuels be cut to a third of what they www.newscientist.com
60 SECONDS are today, especially in highly polluted cities such as Beijing, China, and New Delhi, India. “We think we can reduce premature deaths in more polluted cities by 15 to 20 per cent,” says Michael Krzyzanowski of the WHO in Bonn, Germany, who has coordinated the targets. The WHO wants big cuts in most other air pollutants too, including ozone and sulphur dioxide. The drive to cut particulates has pleased Benoit Nemery, chair of the scientific committee of the European Respiratory Society. He says there is unequivocal and consistent evidence that such particles are harmful, not only to the lungs but also to the heart.
THE US has issued a new national space policy that reflects a more aggressive and unilateral stance than the previous version set out a decade ago by former president Bill Clinton. The earlier statement said US operations should be “consistent with treaty obligations”. In contrast, the most recent one, issued on 6 October, rejects international agreements that would limit US testing or use of military equipment in space. The new version also uses stronger language to assert that the US can defend its spacecraft, echoing an air force push for
In the eco-red
SHUTTLE DAMAGE MISSED
WE ARE consuming the Earth’s resources faster than they can be What goes ding in the night? replenished, at least according Apparently the space shuttle Atlantis, to US think tank Global Footprint which last month sustained one of the Network. It declared 9 October largest debris hits in the history of “overshoot day” – the point in NASA's shuttle programme. each year when our ecological Following the craft's safe landing allowance for that year is spent. on 21 September, ground inspectors GFN’s eco-audits began in 1961, discovered a hole 12 millimetres deep and overshoot day has fallen ever and 2.7 millimetres wide in a radiator earlier since its first occurrence, on the inside surface of the shuttle’s on 19 December 1987. Now it will right payload bay door. take 15 months for the world to The location means the hit must regenerate what we use in 2006. have occurred while the doors were “Humanity is living off its open. It also accounts for why the ecological credit card and can only hole was not spotted despite three do this by liquidating the planet’s rounds of on-board inspections natural resources,” says Mathis conducted just before Atlantis landed. Wackernagel, GFN’s executive Such inspections are restricted to the director. “While this can be done shuttle’s protective heat shield, where for a short while, overshoot a puncture can potentially expose the ultimately leads to the depletion of resources such as the forests, oceans and agricultural land upon which our economy depends.” But not everyone is pessimistic. The European Centre for International Political Economy thinks that the GFN analyses dwell on the global picture but ignore the potential for solutions. For example, says CIPE director Julian Morris, forests in richer countries tend to be managed sustainably. “By being totally negative, [GFN] detracts from solutions that are out there.” –Made by a meteoroid?– www.newscientist.com
“The new US space policy reflects a more aggressive and unilateral stance”
Giant wind farm to come Work has begun on what will be the world’s largest onshore wind farm, south of Glasgow in the UK. When up and running in three years' time, the 140 turbines on Eaglesham Moor will power 200,000 homes and save 250,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year.
“space superiority” made in 2004. It states the US has the right to “protect its space capabilities, respond to interference and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to US national interests”. The document also details how the US government plans to administer the use of nuclear-powered space craft, which will be used if they “safely enable or significantly enhance space exploration or operational capabilities”.
Chikungunya strikes A new, more virulent African strain of the chikungunya virus, which struck Réunion and other Indian Ocean islands earlier this year, has been declared an epidemic in India. The disease has so far caused 81 deaths in the state of Kerala alone and a further 1.2 million cases have been reported nationwide.
Base bolsters bones
shuttle’s internal structure to the extreme heat of atmospheric re-entry. Although specialists on the ground and astronauts in the shuttle reported seeing objects floating near Atlantis during the flight, these objects were moving on nearly identical paths to the spacecraft and so could not have caused the damage. The object that bored into Atlantis – possibly a meteoroid or a fragment of space junk – must have hit the orbiter at a relatively high speed. The windows in the crew cabin have to be replaced regularly due to damage from small impacts, or "dings" as they are known in NASA vernacular. The previous largest ding occurred during a mission in 1995, when a small object penetrated the outer thermal blanket on the payload bay door of Columbia.
A simple alkali food supplement can increase bone density in post-menopausal women at risk of osteoporosis. Women who took potassium citrate daily for up to a year had a 1 per cent boost in bone density in the lumbar spine, reports a team led by Reto Krapf of the University of Basel, Switzerland. The compound is thought to neutralise bone-dissolving acids from foods such as dairy products.
Gene reader earns Nobel A chemist who worked out how cells convert the genetic information in DNA into RNA templates for making proteins received this year's Nobel prize in chemistry. Roger Kornberg of Stanford University in California revealed in great detail how this process, called transcription, relies on an enzyme called RNA polymerase II.
Beam us up, Yahoo! Online search engine Yahoo is to beam a message to space consisting of stories and images gathered from individuals around the globe. The message will be sent using a laser atop the Pyramid of the Sun in the ancient Mexican capital of Teotihuacàn. Material will also be archived for what is being billed as the first digital time capsule. The closing date for submissions is 8 November. NASA
Going it alone
14 October 2006 | NewScientist | 7