Scientists from ITMO in collaboration with international colleagues have proposed new DNA-based nanomachines that can be used for gene therapy for cancer. This new invention can greatly contribute to more effective and selective treatment of oncological diseases. The results were published in Angewandte Chemie.
“If you’re under 40 reading this article, you’re probably not going to die unless you get a nasty disease.”
Those are the words of esteemed futurologist Dr. Ian Pearson, who told The Sun he believes humans are very close to achieving “immortality” – the ability to never die.
Humans have been trying to find a way to dodge death for years.
Continue reading “Want to live forever? You just have to make it to 2050” »
How competing software, hardware and political ideology could accelerate existing divisions in humanity into the future
It’s been great to get people’s thoughts and feedback on the last article on “The iPhone 20”. Some of your responses considered that given Apple’s business model is effectively a walled garden, this makes any integration with the human body very unlikely in the future.
That’s why in this article, rather than focusing on Apple, I’ll look to explore some of the ways tech companies and organisations (including government bodies) will compete on software, hardware and protocols that will shape humanity’s journey to 2029, which may accelerate our existing divisions that stifle collaboration and splinters our future societies.
While Barry applied Western surgical techniques, nineteenth-century travelers in Africa reported instances of indigenous people successfully carrying out the procedure with their own medical practices. In 1879, for example, one British traveller, R.W. Felkin, witnessed cesarean section performed by Ugandans. The healer used banana wine to semi-intoxicate the woman and to cleanse his hands and her abdomen prior to surgery. He used a midline incision and applied cautery to minimize hemorrhaging. He massaged the uterus to make it contract but did not suture it; the abdominal wound was pinned with iron needles and dressed with a paste prepared from roots. The patient recovered well, and Felkin concluded that this technique was well-developed and had clearly been employed for a long time. Similar reports come from Rwanda, where botanical preparations were also used to anesthetize the patient and promote wound healing.
In Western society women for the most part were barred from carrying out cesarean sections until the late nineteenth century, because they were largely denied admission to medical schools. The first recorded successful cesarean in the British Empire, however, was conducted by a woman. Sometime between 1815 and 1821, James Miranda Stuart Barry performed the operation while masquerading as a man and serving as a physician to the British army in South Africa.
#BlackHistoryMonth It was as a pupil at Wolverhampton Grammar School that Robert William Felkin met the explorer David Livingstone, who inspired him with his tales of Africa. And when he met A M Mackay, a medical missionary from Uganda, in London in 1877 at the age of 24, he became determined to visit Africa.
It was as a pupil at Wolverhampton Grammar School 1that Robert William Felkin met the explorer David Livingstone, who inspired him with his tales of Africa. And when he met A M Mackay, a medical missionary from Uganda, in London in 1877 at the age of 24, he became determined to visit Africa.
By 1875 he had become a medical student at Edinburgh University, but before completing his training, he was sent to Uganda in 1878 by the Church Missionary Society. He travelled up the Nile to Khartoum, where he met General Gordon, and then on through what was then wild and unmapped country to the Great Lakes. There he met Emin Pasha, the Governor of the Equatorial Province, and was presented to King M’tesa, whose personal physician he became in 1879. When a Muslim anti-missionary movement threatened the lives of his fellow Christians, Felkin warned the King that, should any harm come to them, a great disaster would befall his people. As a sign he foretold that the sun would be darkened; in due course the anticipated eclipse occurred and Felkin was established as a great “medicine man.” During his stay in Uganda he studied the local diseases and also undertook anthropological measurements of the pygmies. Of particular interest, though, were his studies on childbirth.
Continue reading “Robert Felkin MD (1853–1926) and Caesarean delivery in Central Africa” »
Eva Ramón, a #Mexican Scientist may have done something amazing.
The present study aimed to determine the effectiveness of photodynamic therapy (PDT), using δ-aminolevulinic acid (5-ALA), in the elimination of premalignant cervical lesions in Mexican patients with human papillomavirus (HPV) infection and/or cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN). Thirty women diagnosed with CIN I and/or positive for HPV participated in the study.
Or bad drugs given to good people by doctors who were clueless 🙈
‘’The study found that the gut microbes were responsible for producing 20 percent to 80 percent of the circulating toxic metabolites derived from the three drugs.
Continue reading “Microbiome could be culprit when good drugs do harm” »
CRISPR is a technique that is revolutionizing biomedical research through high-precision genome editing. However, even though it allows the creation or correction of mutations consisting of a single or few nucleotides with relative ease, it still possesses limitations for larger fragments of DNA in the genome. For instance, the genomic insertion of a gene that produces a fluorescent protein such as the widely-used GFP suffers from poor efficiency and involves complicated cloning steps.
