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Reproductive Biology; News

Reproductive Biology; News

Sorting Out Chromosome Errors

Jon Cohen

By studying embryos, eggs, and sperm in humans and other species, researchers have made solid progress in determining how, where, and when the process of distributing chromosomes to progeny goes awry, a condition called aneuploidy, which is the most common cause of miscarriage. The advent of in vitro fertilization, which has high failure rates that appear strongly tied to aneuploidy, has also pushed the field forward. So, too, has the discovery that some chromosomes are more prone to aneuploidy than others.

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Quirks of Fetal Environment Felt Decades Later

Jennifer Couzin

Even successful pregnancies can leave babies at risk of certain diseases; normal babies who might have encountered adversity in the womb have a higher incidence of certain chronic diseases later on in life. A growing number of researchers are examining variables such as maternal stress, placental development, and embryo implantation that might underlie the perplexing find. But for the most part, the mechanisms by which the fetal experience contributes to adult disease remain enigmatic.

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Cells Exchanged During Pregnancy Live On

Marcia Barinaga

Cells exchanged during pregnancy can live on indefinitely in the mother and child. This so-called microchimerism, viewed at first as an oddity, has been linked to autoimmune diseases and complications of pregnancy. Indeed, microchimerism might help explain one of the puzzles about autoimmune diseases: why many of them strike more women than men.

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Research on Contraception Still in the Doldrums

Constance Holden

By 2020, about 1.2 billion people, or 16% of the world's population, will be entering their childbearing years. But contraception research hasn't produced a major breakthrough since the introduction of the birth control pill, and there are still only two choices for men: condoms and vasectomy. Most companies have been driven away by liability issues, tough government regulations in the United States and other countries, and concerns about profitability, a big problem for products for which the greatest demand is in poor countries.

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News of the Week

BIOWARFARE:
Did Bioweapons Test Cause a Deadly Smallpox Outbreak?

Martin Enserink

WASHINGTON, D.C.--A preliminary report that a 1971 smallpox outbreak in the former Soviet Union was triggered by a secret bioweapon field test has sparked a heated debate--and some nasty backbiting--among the small circle of bioterrorism experts. The outbreak shows that an aerosol attack with smallpox could actually kill, and it suggests that the Soviets turned an extremely deadly smallpox strain into a weapon, a smallpox expert said at a meeting here last weekend.

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CLONING:
Moratorium Replaces Ban as U.S. Target

David Malakoff

Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) last week announced that he was abandoning his efforts to persuade the Senate to pass a bill outlawing all human cloning--including some types of research aimed at developing new medical treatments. Instead, Brownback says he will work to win congressional approval for a 2-year moratorium on such work. But critics say even that step would cause unacceptable delays for studies that could result in important medical benefits.

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RADIOLOGICAL TERRORISM:
New Effort Aims to Thwart Dirty Bombers

Richard Stone

CAMBRIDGE, U.K.--Under an agreement expected to be announced next week, Russia will provide information on stray radioactive materials across the former Soviet Union that could be used in dirty bombs, and the U.S. Department of Energy will provide initial funding of roughly $40 million over the next 2 years to track them down. Lending extra urgency to the initiative are revelations about the legacy of a secret Soviet research program to spray radioactive cesium on agricultural fields.

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GERMANY:
Gruss Takes Max Planck Helm

Philipp Weis and Gretchen Vogel

HALLE AN DER SAALE, GERMANY--In his first full day on the job as president of Germany's premier research organization, the Max Planck Society (MPG), Peter Gruss was spared a possible cut in the organization's government funding. But the threat of future belt-tightening could still jeopardize his efforts to forge stronger links with German universities and keep MPG at the forefront of world science.

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IMMUNOLOGY:
Plant a Few Cells, Sprout a Thymus

Jennifer Couzin

Two teams have found that a tiny subset of cells from a mouse embryo can be grown into a full-blown thymus and beget a healthy immune system in the recipient mice. The finding suggests that it might be relatively easy, as far as regenerating organs goes, to give a failing thymus a boost.

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DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY:
Nerves Tell Arteries to Make Like a Tree

Greg Miller

How arteries shape themselves into the fine patterns that ensure that no bit of tissue goes wanting for oxygen and nutrients has been an open question. Now a study in the 14 June issue of Cell shows that arteries follow the lead of another of the body's branching specialists: nerves. The report also identifies a molecule released by the nerves that apparently signals the arteries to fall in step.

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CANADA:
Act Seen as First Step in Protecting Species

Wayne Kondro

OTTAWA, CANADA--Canada's House of Commons last week approved the country's first law to protect endangered species. But although federal officials say the legislation, which relies on incentives rather than punishments, sets a new standard for cooperation between public and private sectors, environmental groups grumble that the approach leaves much to be desired.

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CANADA:
Amgen Splits With Lab, But Its Money Lingers

Wayne Kondro

OTTAWA, CANADA--Amgen has decided to sever its ties to the University of Toronto-based research institute it has funded for nearly a decade. But in an unusual twist, it's going to continue paying millions of dollars a year for work to which the university will hold all intellectual property rights.

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EXOPLANETS:
Jupiter's Brother Joins the Family

Richard A. Kerr

Last week, just as American astronomers were about to announce the discovery of "a first cousin of the solar system," European astronomers spread the word that they had uncovered a nearer relation: an exoplanet that more closely resembles Jupiter in a planetary system far more like our own, "a younger brother" of Jupiter, as one of the discoverers put it. The find marks the true beginning of an expected string of discoveries of planetary systems in which Earth-like planets might be hiding.

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JAPAN:
New Program to Aid Smaller Universities

Dennis Normile

TOKYO--A new $160-million-a-year program to help universities build up strengths in specific areas will give scientists at Japan's smaller universities a chance to compete against the scientific heavyweights at larger universities for precious government funding. Last week the Ministry of Education launched its 21st Century Centers of Excellence program and invited all universities, public and private, to compete.

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GENE TRANSCRIPTION:
Demolition Crew Gets a Hand From Chaperones

Jean Marx

The biochemical machinery that responds to certain hormones is so large and seemingly cumbersome that researchers have long wondered how it manages to react quickly to changes in hormone concentrations. New results, described on page 2232, suggest a solution that might provide a new role in regulating gene expression for the proteins known as chaperones. The work indicates that the chaperone proteins p23 and Hsp90 help disassemble regulatory complexes shortly after they form on the DNA. When thus released, the receptor can detect when hormone levels fall off--a feedback needed to tell the regulatory complex to stop overseeing the genes.

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News Focus

STEM CELLS:
Plasticity: Time for a Reappraisal?

Constance Holden and Gretchen Vogel

Long-standing biological dogma--that a cell, once committed, can't alter its fate--has been challenged by recent research. But now scientists are taking a more critical look and finding that some apparent reprogramming of adult cells might instead be a case of cell fusion, prompting calls to establish rigorous standards for demonstrating plasticity. The political stakes are high, because opponents of embryonic stem cell research are using the prospect of reprogramming of adult cells to argue that embryonic stem cells are not needed to develop medical treatments.

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CLIMATE CHANGE:
Russia Can Save Kyoto, If It Can Do the Math

Paul Webster

MOSCOW--Russia's ratification of the Kyoto protocol might make the treaty a going concern. It would also give Russia huge amounts of pollution credits that under Kyoto's emissions-trading system could be sold to other countries for billions of dollars. But some take a chilly view of the reliability of Russia's greenhouse gas emission numbers.

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NEUROSCIENCE:
A Generation Gap in Brain Activity

Laura Helmuth

As the field of cognitive neuroscience matures, researchers are using imaging studies to get a better fix on what happens to the brain as it ages. Some researchers have observed that certain brain areas physically shrink over time, whereas others have found that the patterns of neural activity in 60- or 70-year-olds often bear little resemblance to those in the 20-something subjects who populate most brain functional imaging studies. Exactly how these changes relate to cognitive failings in old age remains unclear, however.

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ASTROPHYSICS:
Physicists Prepare to Catch Cosmic Bullets

Robert Irion

Researchers can't agree where the most energetic particles in the universe come from, or even how many of them strike Earth. Theories about the source abound, from the nearby descendants of quasars to ultramagnetic neutron stars to the annihilation of clumps of superheavy dark matter. Now physicists from 19 nations are building a giant observatory that they hope will end decades of confusion about the origins of particles called ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, each of which can pack as much energy as a fastball from a professional baseball pitcher.

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