I work with models

I work with models. I have to get close to them, get personal and intimate with them. That’s part of my job. Sometimes my boss asks me to go slow or else I might scare them away, so I spend a few hours each day touching them, playing with them, stroking them, letting them get used to my body and odors (I don’t smell btw, I smell like Old Spice). I have also given nicknames to them; they eat out of my hand, literally. I have complete control over them. I control their sleep cycle, feeding. I have them under my wand; they do what I tell them. Sometimes I get emotionally attached (I am human after all), but my job demands me to be a cool-detached-objective guy. And I do it. For the greater good of mankind. I am selfless. I use my models with a cold-blooded planning and clarity. I choose them according to their attributes, some for their eyes, some for their inability to put on weight, some for their bodies, some for their heart. After I get what I want with them, I dispose them, carefully with love and tenderness with the most stress-free method available to me.

I want to share some info and photos of the more exotic models with whom my colleagues around the world work with.

Armadillo
Researchers have found that the core body temperature of the armadillo is low enough to favour the growth of the leprosy-causing bacterium Mycobacterium leprae. Using the armadillo, scientists have been able to develop a vaccine against leprosy, and one day these unusual South American mammals could help to provide a cure for the disease.

Bee
The natural products of bees, such as royal jelly, honey and even their venom, have been found to have significant effects in cancer treatment and prevention. The application of these products inhibited tumour growth and increased survival of the animals they were tested on. These results may lead to human clinical trials using royal jelly or honey, combined with chemotherapeutic agents

Hamster
An interesting use of hamsters in medical research is the study of the neural basis of our internal daily (circadian) rhythms – in humans this controls our sleep-wake cycle over a 24h period. The control centre for these rhythms was found in the hypothalamus of the brain, and the use of hamsters clearly demonstrated the role of the hormone melatonin in this daily cycle

Jelly Fish

These ocean creatures may have a painful and sometimes deadly sting, but they have proved to be very useful in scientific and medical research. Some researchers have used jellyfish to search for an effective anti-venom to save victims of Sea Wasp stings, whilst others are studying the chemicals in jellyfish for possible use in treating cancer. A bioluminescent chemical found in a type of jellyfish from the Pacific has already allowed doctors to trace the movement of specific chemicals through the body and could help reveal ways to inactivate defective genes, such as those in Huntington's disease.

Octopus
The Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 regulates scientific procedures which may cause pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm to "protected animals"; it refers to these as "regulated procedures". Protected animals are defined in the Act as all living vertebrate animals, except man, as well as one invertebrate species, the common octopus. The octopus was added 12 years ago after extensive discussion concluded that its well developed nervous system may make it capable of feeling pain. However, no regulated procedures have been carried out using the octopus since its inclusion

Quail
Research into head and facial development is an important use of quails. In one study, the embryos from both quails and ducks were used to implant neural crest cells (simple cells that arise very early in development) from one species into the other. The result was quails with duckbills or "duails", and ducks with quail beaks or "qucks". This suggests that head and facial diversification is due to neural crest cells, and further work should help to unravel the underlying causes of craniofacial defects, which are among the most common birth defects. Quails are also used to test the safety of agrochemicals in the environment.

Tamarin
Cotton-top tamarin monkeys have a high rate of spontaneous colon cancer. They develop colon cancer in a very similar way to humans, so investigations of whether colon cancer is heritable – as it can be in humans – are now a focus of research. Other monkeys used in research include macaques and marmosets, mostly in brain research and in safety testing of new medicines.

Vole
Voles are commonly used in studying social traits. A particular gene that produces a protein called vasopressin in their brains contributes to these behaviours. Adult male offspring with the long version of the gene have more of the protein in brain areas involved in social behaviour and parenting. These males tend to investigate female odours, greet strangers more readily and nurture their young. So variability in the length of the gene could help account for differences in normal human personality traits, such as shyness, and could perhaps influence conditions like autism and social anxiety disorders

I stole all info from

http://www.rds-online.org.uk/pages/page.asp?i_PageID=2096&i_ToolbarID=2

…go there for a complete list.

Magic mushrooms. - A tool to study the neurobiology of human consciousness?

Back in the 60’s when Hendrix was setting fire to his amplifiers, people were really happy. Not just because he played some kick-ass rock and roll but they also had drugs, lots of it. Psychedelic drugs like mescaline (from cacti), LSD (synthetically produced) and psilocybin (from mushrooms) were freely used. Then the government had to clamp them down, they just can’t stand any part of the society have some fun. (Actually these happy unemployed music lovers with drug induced world view started turning in large numbers to anti-war rallies). Unfortunately this also meant an end to research on these substances which were regarded as a promising candidate for treating chronic pain and depression in terminally ill patients.

Quick jump to the beginning of the next millennium, when boy-bands are tearing up the scene, sending 15 year old girls into a crying frenzy every time they are seen in public and at the same time propelling sales of atrocious giant sized posters with their baby faces on them. People are sad, not because they don’t have good drugs (some genius boiled powder cocaine with baking soda to give the world crack) but the music truly sucks. But there is hope for the people who really need new drugs. No, not the aging ex-rock stars, (even David Bowie has gone clean and is the CEO of his own internet company), but the chronically ill and depressed thanks to a renewed interest in psychedelic drugs by the scientists.

In a double-blinded study, the effects on psilocybin administration was studied by Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University and his colleagues on several volunteers and published in Psychopharmacology. The subjects reported their experience after taking the drug(below).

Twenty-two out of the 36 volunteers described a so-called mystical experience, or one that included feelings of unity with all things, transcendence of time and space as well as deep and abiding joy

Two months later 67 percent of the volunteers rated the psilocybin experience as among the most meaningful of their lives, comparing it to the birth of a first child or the death of a parent.

The long term effects and mechanism of the drug is not known completely. According to Charles Schuster, a neuroscientist at Wayne State University, this drug should be further investigated as to how they can be used to treat diseases like "the ennui and anguish of impending death" as well as "alcoholism and other forms of drug addiction."

Pheww… a long journey for the simple magic mushrooms.

Machines Maketh Us.

The list of the most outrageous/exciting/pushing the frontiers of science/fantastical/I-am-running-out-of-adjective kind of scientific discoveries has just got a little smaller. A feat accomplished by a multi-disciplinary group of neurosurgeons, computer scientists, and electrophysiologists have struck off ‘bionic man’ from the list of impossible dreams.

In the latest issue of Nature, John Donoghue a neuroscientist from Brown University and a pioneer in this field along with other colleagues have reported a successful control of a computer cursor by a paralyzed man by the just his ‘thoughts’.

Matt Nagle who was paralyzed neck below after a knifing incident, has a microchip implanted in his brain and a wire coming out of his head connecting him to a computer. He is able to move the cursor with just his intention to do so. He is able to send emails, play basic games, control his TV and draw a circle with modified painting software. He was able to do this with minimal training.

Technically known as NMP (Neuroprosthetic Motor Prostheses), these interfaces uses signals from the brain to drive prosthetic devises. They come under a large category of BCI (Brain Computer Interface), which interfaces any part of the brain to machines. The NMPs uses signals from a specific area of the brain which controls all movements of our body called motor cortex.

How does this work?
legend for pic is given below
It starts with implantation of a chip in the area of the brain that controls movement and recording activity when he is asked to ‘move the cursor’ on the screen in front of him. The cursor is actually being moved by someone else, he traces the movement mentally, that is his brain is sending the required information to the muscles for the particular movement of the cursor. Although he can’t move any of his muscles, there will be activity in the motor cortex which has information for the movement, like direction. Then this pattern of activity will be fed to an algorithm that separates these signals into intentions - for example- assigning the pattern of activity of ‘move left’ into instructions for the cursor to ‘move left’. Then another algorithm has to detect these patterns and changes them into coordinates for the position of the cursor on the screen.

This work is a culmination of animal studies done earlier by many groups. An exhaustive list will look like a review for IEEE, and so I will just refer to a couple of experiments done by Nicolelis and group at Duke University who is well known in this field.

In a paper published in PLOS in 2004, Nicolelis trained monkeys to use a cursor to reach a target on the computer screen by moving a joystick. They were also trained to grip the joystick with varying force according to size of a cursor in the screen. The monkey had to vary the force and velocity to reach to do the task. They then recorded from various parts of the motor, premotor (required for planning for movement) and somatosensory area (where perceptions of touch arises, this is needed because touch feedback is essential for movement) while the monkey was doing this task. They used an Artificial Neural Network to extract information about hand grip force and velocity of hand trajectory from the brain recording. They then moved the cursors with these signals alone. The monkeys soon realized that they don’t have to move their hand to move the cursor, all they had to do was to think of doing it and they stopped using their hands. The brain signals were also used to drive a robotic arm which used parameters derived from the recorded activity alone. This study showed the possibility of using brain signals from paralyzed patients to drive bionic arms.

In earlier work published in Nature Neuroscience the same group trained rats to press a lever with their paws to obtain a water reward from a spout (the authors call it robotic arm). Simultaneously neuronal activity patterns from motor cortex (and other areas in thalamus) were recorded. These neuronal activity patterns were put through mathematical transformations to convert them into signals to control the spout. Rats then had a choice to press the lever or just ‘think’ of pressing the lever and the program would convert those signals to move the spout to give them water. After repeated trials the rats reduced or stopped pressing the lever. They got water by just ‘thought’.(Lazy rats).

Although this is exciting the situation is akin to the prototype Hondas one sees in Motor expos. There is a long way to go before it is implemented in patients routinely. There are a handful of groups around the world (and we are one) working on developing BCIs for the paralyzed, what separates them is the area in the nervous system where they choose to record neuronal activity from and the kind of algorithm they use to extract signals that can be used to control.

But whatever it is now, its exciting times ahead.

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a- chip on the penny and connector which will be fixed to the skull

b- chip under electron microscope

c-MRI of Matt's brain, red square shows area where the chip is implanted

d-Matt connected to the setup

Donoghue has started a company ..this is their URL http://www.cyberkineticsinc.com/

The experiment videos are available on the website, so is the original paper for free and some news item about it.

http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/brain/experiments/videopage1.html

Are we patenting nonsense?

A recent news article in Nature has asked some uncomfortable questions about India’s patenting plans. Council of Scientific Industrial Research (CSIR) is India’s largest research organization funding 38 national laboratories across the country. For many years they did nothing. Traditional Indian natural products like turmeric and neem were patented by US firms which woke up Indian scientists to harsh reality. Eventually they fought and got the patents revoked.

When Ragunath Mashelkar took over as its head, he also brought a culture of patenting with him. He encouraged patenting anything that the CSIR laboratories invented that passed the basic criteria without considering whether the discovery has any economic value.

This drive has resulted in a large amount of patents, between 2002 and 2006 there were 542 US patents — more than the total number granted to CSIR’s counterparts in France, Japan and Germany combined. It seems like a good idea to patent everything and then think about which ones can make money for us, but the costs involved are high. Each US patent costs $25,000 for filing and $4000 annually for maintenance and many patents are not worth that much money like a US patent in 2002 by CSIR of cow urine extract claiming to enhance activity of antibiotics. This has not been proved by any peer reviewed study till now.

This smells dangerously of our country’s inclination to parcel pseudo-scientific/religious ideas as science. Remember the college degree courses in Astrology by UGC started by Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi and the general acceptance of Vedic mathematics?

This patenting overdrive is also seen in the Indian Patent Office also. In the fast moving field of biotechnology, CSIR filed more patents that any other companies. In the year 2004, CSIR filed 202 patents while BASF has filed 88 patents, Novo Nordisk 79 and Procter and Gamble 55.

But Mashelkar has a different take on things. He says "There is a clear sign that the reverse flow in technologies has begun from India to the West. In the new IPR regime, the country will not be found lacking in the field of frontier technologies. We have been doing great research work thus far at our labs, but we had lacked the industry-institutions networking. That is happening now." referring to the fact that CSIR was in top 50 US patent applicants in 2002.

But there are good points also, Masheklar points out to a cluster of three US patents on a potential anticancer molecule has been licensed out to an Indian entrepreneur in the United States for around $100,000.

“Considering that only about 3% of US patents are ever licensed, it is too early for the CSIR to expect big returns” he says.

All this costs money, and the strategy of ‘patent first and think later’ approach my Mr. Mashelkar seems like we will end up spending a lot of money patenting utter nonsense. The IPO should have tighter regulation and someone should tell Mr. Mashelkar that no one is giving prizes for number of patents but it’s the quality and promise of licensing or application that matters.

Bigger..hotter.

I am not rambling about my sexual preferences; I am referring to an obsession of the masses whose only scientific exposure is to read some kind of digested scientific stuff in bad blogs run by depressed grad students like this one or in fancy magazines which make technical complications that took the best part of a few post docs look as simple as opening a can of coke.

The obsession I am talking about is dinosaurs; I am not talking about the sex life of dinosaurs either. (I have to pay the price of having a fancy title and get the point in such a round about way).

The topic is about temperature regulation in dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are large animals reaching up to 42 feet in height and 90 tonnes in weight. They were arguably the most successful tetrapods ever to have lived on this planet. But not a lot is known about their physiology, obviously. (Sigma doesn’t sell knock-out dinosaurs. I wish they did). How did they maintain their body temperature (homeothermy) is a big issue in biology for a long time.

The initial controversy was whether to slot dinosaurs into warm blooded (like birds and mammals) or cold blooded (reptiles, amphibians and fishes). Warm blooded animals, also known as endotherms maintain high body temperature supplied by large amount of internal metabolic heat and keep a constant body temperature in different thermal environments. They also have elevated rates of lung ventilation, oxygen consumption which allows them to thrive in many environmental niches unlike the cold blooded animals also called ectotherms.

The problem with slotting dinosaurs under endothermic animals is that endothermy or warm blooded animals evolved later and are found in birds and mammals. Slotting the dinosaurs under ectoderms is that they were thought to have lower metabolic rate and would depend on the sun to increase their body temperature which would make them sluggish.

But ‘Inertial homeothermy hypothesis’ carves a new category. This shows how being cold blooded doesn’t mean that they can’t maintain constant high body temperature (homeothermy). Many large reptiles bask in the sun and are able to maintain high temperatures all year long because of minimal surface-to-volume ratio and minimal heat loss. The commodore dragons, Galapagos tortoises and alligators are examples of large reptiles who maintain homeothermy in this way. Thus it was possible for the large dinosaurs to have large homes, pursue, hunt large prey and defend themselves fiercely.

A recent modeling study has shown direct evidence that dinosaurs maintained high body temperature by the ‘inertial homeothermy hypothesis’ which predicts the body temperatures to increase with body size. Their model based on growth curves of dinosaurs show that the body temperature of dinosaurs increased from 25.8 C at 12 Kg to 41.8 C at 13000 kg. To validate the model it was used to predict body temperature of crocodiles with different body masses which when tested empirically and was shown to be an accurate.

Blue balls

Blue balls

Here is a fun experiment. Catch a vervet monkey, paints its balls bright blue and let him back into a cage with other members of his troupe. Your fine brushwork would have elevated his status in the troupe and the other monkeys with paler blue balls are behaving as his subordinates.

This was an experiment performed to understand the relationship between secondary sexual skin color and the status of the monkey in its troupe. Many primate species have colored sexual skin (pads in its bottom) and the face also. In rhesus macaques reddening signals readiness for mating, but in vervet monkeys they signal the position of the monkey in the social hierarchy. Male monkeys with brightest blue testicles in a troupe get to mate with his choice and boss the other males who have paler shade of blue testicles.

So blue balls are not always a bad thing….at least for the vervet monkeys.

Mating Madness

Joe is a good man, average looking, caring, sensitive, supportive, has a good job, car, savings and makes the safe and sensible choice in life. But he can never get a date and none of his classmates from school remember him. Fonzi on the other hand, drives a motorbike, sports a killer leather jacket, which makes him dashingly good looking. He doesn’t have a job, drinks in the morning, and eats off his mother’s savings, but is charming as the devil.

If you were a woman looking for a date, whom would you fall for? The sensible Joe or Fonzi?

Fonzi right. Why would women want to make the risky decision and choose Fonzi?

Evolutionary biologists working on cockroaches have given us proof for a theory that explains this kind of behavior. The reason we have to drag in evolutionary biologists to explain this behavior is that this is an evolutionary conundrum, because mate choice is believed to bring about better fitness (survival of genes) to the female and male. But in such behavior it’s the opposite effect for the females. Imagine Fonzi’s girlfriend bringing up a kid with no support from Fonzi. This is detrimental to the fitness of the woman. This has been reported in other animals also. (So we are not the only superficial animals who make stupid decisions).

So how does the organism reconcile with the loss of fitness when it goes for the hot guy? Scientists have found out that this direct cost of choosing the hot guy is exceeded by the fitness that offsprings enjoy when mating with the hot guy. In other words offsprings from mating with a hot guy has more chance of survival and passing on his genes than when mated with Joe.

Although this theory has been around for some time, recent experiments with cockroaches have proved this idea. Cockroaches were separated into ‘attractive’ and ‘unattractive’ (believe me, there are attractive cockroaches). They did this by letting males have sex with females in two different ‘mating tournaments’, the males that were able to get laid twice were ‘attractive’ and ones that couldn’t even once was ‘unattractive’. The fitness of the offsprings from random females mated with attractive and unattractive males were measured. For offsprings from mating with attractive males, both offsprings had better fitness than offsrings of females that mated with unattractive males. Males were more attractive and females produced larger number and size of eggs.

So all you angry dads. Be Calm; your daughter has made the right choice. Your grandkids gonna rock!