New Scientist: Fatal brain cancer tamed by gene therapy

Fatal brain cancer tamed by gene therapy - 25 February 2008 :

Previous attempts to treat glioblastomas with gene therapy failed because some tumour cells survived and regrew. The new treatment overcomes this problem by permanently priming the immune system to pick off any straggler tumour cells.

A harmless virus that only infects fast-dividing cancer cells is injected directly into the brain... One gene, HSV1-TK, kills the cancer cells by activating ganciclovir...

And here's the cool bit:

...a second gene, Flt3L... summons immune "dendritic" cells from the bloodstream into the brain.

(How does it do that?)

[The dendritic] cells engulf the debris and transport it back to lymph nodes, where they re-prime the immune system to attack any remaining tumour cells during and after treatment.

Lymph nodes seem like a gunnery school for white blood cells: you go there to learn how to distinguish friend from foe. (BTW fevers seem to help lymph nodes do their jobs.)

Doc Searls: The FCC and the Giant Zero

The FCC and the Giant Zero:

"Message to Verizon and the rest: the Internet is not about ‘consumer choice’. We produce as well as consume. We need to be able to run our own servers. [emph. added] We need to be able to exercize supply as well as demand. We need symmetricality, not just neutrality."

Amen to that.

I live in Santa Fe. As far as I can tell, my choices are Earthlink (via Qwest DSL @ 1.5Mbps) and Comcast. If I want a static IP address, a useful step to server-hood, then my rates would go up by 30%. Bah.

Netgear WAN MTU Size

(Not sure why I haven't written this up yet. It sure was a problem for a long time...)

I used to work "offsite" -- outside the home -- several days a week. When offsite my laptop could perform subversion operations against a repository on my home network, with good performance. But when the notebook was "inside" the home network, those same operations would take forever.

Eventually I stumbled on the fix, clearly explained in the help sidebar of the WAN Setup page of my Netgear WGR614 router: change the MTU to 1492. (Shades of Christopher Columbus!)

Nobody reads documentation :\

The normal MTU (Maximum Transmit Unit) value for most Ethernet networks is 1500 Bytes, 1492 Bytes for PPPoE connections, or 1436 for PPTP connections.

Site-specific browsers and web-app testing

 ?

Site-specific browsers should simplify testing of some types of web applications, e.g. those which support multiple registered users. On platforms such as Mac OS X, which typically run only one instance of each application, SSBs should allow you to launch multiple, distinct applications which point to the same website.

Is anyone doing this? Is it better (and does it always suffice) to simply run multiple copies of a twill script, and to dispense with browser-based tests?

I haven't tried Fluid yet, since my main work machine is still running Tiger.

Alas, I guess basic Prism apps won't do the job:

Technorati Tags:
software development, prism, fluid, web development

DNA Articles du Jour

Next-generation pathogen sequencing

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20191/

454 Life Sciences have figured out how to isolate pathogen RNA from human tissue samples, and have used the process to identify previously-unknown pathogens as the likely cause of death for three transplant recipients.

In the 1980s, my brother's neighbor almost died from an illness whose cause was never determined. More recently, local doctors have been unable to figure out why a friend's daughter had a fever for three weeks. This process may make it possible to diagnose the causes of many more illnesses.

"...the sequence of the new virus was different enough that existing methods could not have detected [it]..."

"As many as 40 percent of cases of central nervous system disease cannot be traced back to a specific culprit. For respiratory illness, the figure is 30 to 60 percent."

"Usually, PCR requires some advance knowledge of the sequence in question because it relies on molecular primers that match the string of code to be amplified. But 454 sequencing avoids that problem by using a large number of random primers."

Combining DNA from >2 "parents"

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=9835

I didn't know people could have problems with their mitochondrial DNA.

"...[the] research involved implanting the DNA from a [woman] with a mitochondrial disorder into the egg of a [woman] with healthy mitochondria. Thus the woman with the genetic disorder passed on the rest of her genetic legacy, while the other woman contributed only [healthy mitochondrial] DNA."

Ethical firestorm to follow...

Installing PVM under MacPorts on Leopard

I've been having trouble getting PVM 3.4.5 to install under MacPorts on Leopard. The conf/DARWIN.def configuration file defines the FAKEXDRFLOAT preprocessor symbol; it may be needed for OS X 10.4, but it causes a compiler error w. GCC 4.0.1 under 10.5:

../../src/pmsg.c:785: error: static declaration of 'xdr_float' follows non-static declaration.

The workaround is simple: install the Darwin8 variant.

$ sudo port install pvm +darwin_8

DailyTech - Solar Activity Diminishes; Researchers Predict Another Ice Age

DailyTech - Solar Activity Diminishes; Researchers Predict Another Ice Age:

Researcher Dr. Timothy Patterson, director of the Geoscience Center at Carleton University, shares the concern. Patterson is finding "excellent correlations" between solar fluctuations, a relationship that historically, he says doesn't exist between CO2 and past climate changes. [emphasis added] According to Patterson. we shouldn't be surprised by a solar link. "The sun [is] the ultimate source of energy on this planet," he says.

Oh no! Is it too late to start increasing our greenhouse gas emissions, to keep the planet from freezing over? ;)

Whatever is the truth about how we affect our environment, it's good to be reminded of our insignificance — and our uncertainty.