Life as an Extreme Sport

Cure found for Huntington disease in mice offers hope for treatment in humans

...and everything else, Bioethics

Holy crap! This is…amazing. It might very well be one of the most significant medical break-throughs of the last 50 years.

Cure found for Huntington disease in mice offers hope for treatment in humans
Researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics (CMMT) have provided ground-breaking evidence for a cure for Huntington disease in a mouse offering hope that this disease can be relieved in humans.

Published today in Cell journal, Dr. Michael Hayden and colleagues discovered that by preventing the cleavage of the mutant huntingtin protein responsible for Huntington disease (HD) in a mouse model, the degenerative symptoms underlying the illness do not appear and the mouse displays normal brain function. This is the first time that a cure for HD in mice has been successfully achieved.

Shock therapy hurts kids at school

...and everything else, Bioethics

Oiy. Where to even start?


A state report on a Massachusetts school for the disabled said electric shocks were administered to students – sometimes as they bathed – for offenses as minor as nagging, swearing and sloppy appearance.

“Various injuries to students have been reported” at the Judge Rotenberg Center, according to the report released Wednesday by the New York Education Department.

The school in Canton, Massachusetts, receives $50 million a year from New York state to care for and educate about 150 youths because there is no space available in New York for the intensive treatment.

The Rotenberg Center provides an intensive, 24-hour program that begins with a typical school setting, but about half the residents require the “aversive therapy” of electric shock, according to Rotenberg staff. The center describes the one- to two-second shocks as similar to a bee sting.

For years, the state has contracted with the facility, where autistic and other disabled students wear backpack-like devices that shock them when they misbehave.

Even the folks at AJOB appear relatively speechless.

Physiological markers for cutting, other self-harming behaviors by teenage girls found

...and everything else


on-fatal, self-inflicted injuries by adolescent and young adult females are major public health problems and researchers have found physiological evidence that this behavior may lead to a more serious psychological condition called borderline personality disorder.

University of Washington psychologists have discovered that adolescent girls who engage in behaviors such as cutting themselves have lower levels of serotonin, a hormone and brain chemical, in their blood. They also have reduced levels in the parasympathetic nervous system of what is called respiratory sinus arrhythmia, a measure of the ebb and flow of heart rate along with breathing.

South Korea adopts cash-per-paper system – SciDev.Net

...and everything else, Bioethics


Starting later this month, South Korean researchers will receive three million won (US$3,000) if they are leading authors of papers published in key journals.

The relevant journals will be chosen by a ten-member committee of government officials and researchers, and will probably include Nature, Science and Cell. Researchers will be rewarded if they are first or corresponding authors of a paper.

From the nation that gave us the stem cell fiasco…

But seriously, it’s a good idea. Maybe the US could take up the idea – encourage more people to do cutting edge research. (And now that Cell has decided to publish bioethics articles…)

Wild vs. lab rodent comparison supports hygiene hypothesis

...and everything else

In a study comparing wild rodents with their laboratory counterparts, researchers at Duke University Medical Center have found evidence that may help to explain why people in industrialized societies that greatly stress hygiene have higher rates of allergy and autoimmune diseases than do people in less developed societies in which hygiene is harder to achieve or considered less critical.

The moral of the story? Ix-nay the frackin antibiotic soaps!