01/03/2007
Births and Improving Life After Birth
With the birth of a new year, I’ve noticed a number of other recent births of an unusual nature. For example, a panda in Japan gave birth to two pandas. This isn’t that unusual except for the fact this birth put the number of pandas bred in captivity at a record 30 for one year. Until I read an article by Dorie Turner of AP in the December 29 Star-Ledger, I didn’t fully appreciate the dedication needed to maintain pandas in a zoo.
I knew pandas relied on bamboo for subsistence in the wild but I didn’t realize how finicky they are. According to the article, Zoo Atlanta relies on four full-time bamboo hunters to feed the zoo’s pandas Lun Lun and Yang Yang. They not only demand bamboo but they also insist on certain types of bamboo, changing their preference depending on the time of year! They also won’t touch stale bamboo with wilted leaves. This keeps the bamboo hunters busy scouring the bamboo patches of Georgia to supply the 20 to 30 pounds a day each of the pandas devours.
Back to unusual births, there were media reports of a human mother with two wombs giving birth to triplets in England. Identical twin girls occupied one womb, while a fraternal twin girl occupied the second womb prior to birth. This was reportedly the first known case of triplets born under these conditions. I hadn’t heard of a woman having two wombs, but gather that it occurs in about one in a thousand women. Equally surprising was the birth of twins to a Spanish mother in Barcelona. The woman was 67! She reportedly received artificial insemination in the U.S.A. but chose to have the babies in a hospital in Barcelona that specializes in premature births.
A third birth of note hasn’t happened yet as far as I know but the pregnancy fits in with the Christmas season. This is the virgin pregnancy of a Komodo dragon in a London zoo. It seems that this female Komodo has been deprived of any contact with a male Komodo. Nevertheless, she became pregnant on her own initiative. How she accomplished this feat is unknown, although certain female lizards have been known in the past to dispense with the need for male partners in the reproductive process.
Let’s turn from births to the prolonging or improving the quality of life after birth. In deference to StocksandNews editor Brian Trumbore, consider two significant scientific contributions from his alma mater, Wake Forest University. Last night, Brian was in Miami watching Louisville defeat Wake in the Orange Bowl – no cause for celebration there. Here, however, we can celebrate the efforts of two teams of researchers from Wake Forest in the fields of diet and in tissue engineering.
The December Harvard Health Letter ranked trans fat as number two in its list of the top ten health stories of 2006. Today, New York City puts into effect a law phasing out the use of all but traces of trans fats in restaurant food. The January 2007 issue of Discover magazine ranks the work of Lawrence Rudel and his colleagues at Wake Forest on trans fats as number 14 in its top 100 science stories of 2006. Their work was a key study that is helping put the nail in the coffin of these nasty fats.
Last year saw the culmination of their six-year study targeted at finding the effects of trans fats on atherosclerosis in two groups of vervet monkeys. One group received trans fats, the other traditional monounsaturated fats in their diets. After six years, the trans fat group had gained 7.2 percent in body weight while the monounsaturated group gained 1.8 percent, only a quarter of the weight gain of the trans fat group. The trans fat group’s diet was high in trans fats but not much different from the diets of those of us who really love their French fries and donuts. The weight gain also was concentrated around the abdomen, the pattern associated with cardiovascular disease in humans. In addition, there was an alarming pattern of atherosclerosis and insulin resistance in the trans fat monkeys.
Walter Willett of Harvard was led by the study to proclaim, “Trans fats are clearly toxic to humans and have no place in human diets.” You may remember Willett as the fellow who shook up the dietary establishment with his new food pyramid that replaced the one previously promoted by dietary authorities.
The second Wake Forest contribution was rated number 2 in Discover’s top 100 science stories of 2006. Actually, it was a joint effort by Anthony Atala, formerly at Harvard and at Wake since 2004, and a team of Wake and Harvard researchers. In the April 15 issue of The Lancet, a British medical journal, they described their work with spina bifida patients ranging in age from 4 to 19. These patients had abnormal bladders in addition to their spinal cord defects. Such abnormal bladders not only pose problems with control of urination but also lead to severe kidney problems. In 1999, Atala and his colleagues began to implant lab-grown bladders in these patients.
For patients such as these, Atala, then a pediatric surgeon at Harvard, was performing a century-old operation in which a new bladder was formed from sections of the bowel or stomach. This operation has drawbacks due to the nature of the tissues used. Stomach and bowel tissues absorb chemicals whereas the bladder is supposed to store and eliminate chemicals. The surgical bladders therefore tend to absorb chemicals that should be gotten rid of, leading to higher chances of cancer and other problems. Atala wasn’t happy with this situation and wondered if it would be possible to grow an artificial bladder.
The bladder is a 3-layered structure, the inner wall consisting of urothelial cells that hold in the urine and other waste liquids. The middle layer is collagen and the outer layer is muscle. It took Atala about ten years to come up with an artificial bladder. The first step is a biopsy to remove a small dime-sized section of the patient’s bladder. The three layers are separated and cells from the muscle and urothelial layers are cultured and grown separately until, after several weeks, there are enough cells to form a bladder.
A mold of collagen is formed and the inside is covered with the urothelial cells while the outer surface is coated with the muscle cells. The whole structure is then placed in a special nutrient solution and incubated at 90 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 days. The result is a shiny pink ball, an artificial bladder ready to be implanted. Since the bladder contains cells cultivated from the patient’s body, there should be no rejection problems.
The Discover article by Bijal Trivedi cites the case of a patient, who received her artificial bladder five years ago at age 12 and now lives without diapers, has stopped having kidney infections and enjoys a vastly better quality of life. Atala and his colleagues are hoping that they can expand the use of artificial bladders to other patients such as those with bladder cancer.
As of today, the past two months have not seen a speck of snow on the ground in our part of New Jersey and temps are slated to be in the mid fifties this week. We often get a “January thaw” but this year we’ve had no really cold weather from which to thaw. Tulips are actually poking their shoots above the ground under our breakfast room window – way too early! While our unusual weather cannot be ascribed definitively to global warming, it may well be that 2006 was the year when the evidence accumulated to such an extent that no rational person can deny the existence of global warming, whether or not due to human activities.
And to those poor souls suffering in the monstrous storms west of here, you have our sympathy. If our local warmth is due to global warming, remember that such warming is not a uniform affair.
Happy New Year.
Allen F. Bortrum
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