Scientists bring back to life mouse killed and frozen 16 years ago, nudging the world closer to era of Frankenstein science

*Frightening, indeed.*

The world nudged closer to an era of Frankenstein science after an animal killed and frozen 16 years ago was cloned.

Ethical watchdogs branded the experiment disturbing and warned it could lead to people being ‘brought back to life’ after decades or centuries in deep freeze.

In a pioneering experiment, researchers took tissue from a laboratory mouse frozen in the early 1990s and used it to create a healthy, fully formed clone.

It is the first time scientists have been able to clone a frozen animal.

The scientists say their work will benefit mankind – and could be used to bring back extinct animals such as the woolly mammoth or sabre tooth tiger.

But critics say the experiment brings the world closer to the day when people attempt to clone long dead relatives stored in cryopreservation clinics.

It could also lead to a macabre new industry – where people leave behind ‘relics’ of their bodies in freezers in the hope that they could one day be cloned.

The latest experiment comes more than 11 years after British scientists stunned the world with Dolly, the first sheep to be cloned from an adult.

Cloning is the creation of life with just one parent. It involves taking a single cell from an animal or human, using the cell to create an embryo and implanting that embryo in a surrogate mother.

The resulting clone is a genetic copy of the original animal or person.

Although scientists have been able to clone a host of animals – including sheep, mice, cattle, goats, pigs, cats and dogs – they have never before been able to clone a frozen animal.

Previously it was thought that ice crystals from the freezing process would shred and destroy the DNA in cells, making them unusable.

Josephine Quintavalle, an expert on the ethics of fertility and reproduction, said the experiment pushed the boundaries of acceptable science even further.

‘This kind of research raises disturbing questions about what happens to our bodies – and any tissue we leave for medical science – after we die,’ she said.

‘It means that tissue donated for medical research, or stored in laboratories, could be used many years later for cloning research.

‘It has never been more important that when people leave tissue for research, the consent should be very specific given the potential for all kinds of scientific developments in the future.’

But British scientists welcomed the breakthrough.

Prof Malcolm Alison, biologist at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, said: ‘It is absolutely fascinating.

‘The researchers obtained cell nuclei from mice that had been deep frozen for 16 years and then generated new mice by the same technology that created Dolly.

‘While 16 years is not a long time for cells to be frozen – IVF clinics often have viable sperm frozen for longer periods – there are no scientific reasons why extinct animals like mammoths could not be similarly generated.’

The research was carried out by Dr Teruhiko Wakayama and colleagues at the Centre for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan.

He took brain cells from ordinary dead male mice stored in a freezer for up to 16 years and removed their nuclei – the blobs in the centre of cells that contain DNA.

Each cell’s nucleus was injected into a hollowed-out egg cell from a female mouse. When the egg was fused with electricity, it began to divide and grow just like a newly conceived embryo.

After a few days, the embryo clone was implanted into the womb of a surrogate mouse and three weeks later, the clone was born.

‘These cloned mice did not show any abnormalities and grew to adulthood,’ the researchers report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers tried to clone mice from other parts of the body, but found that brain cells were the most successful.

They believe the high fat content of brains – and the extra protection that brains get from the skull – could reduce the damage to brain cells when bodies freeze.

Even using brain cells, the success rate was low.

In total, more than 1,100 attempts using frozen tissue, produced just seven healthy clones. More than 500 embryo clones died after being implanted into the wombs of a surrogate mother.

Helen Wallace of Genewatch UK said: ‘Cloning produces high failure rates because many eggs and fetuses do not develop normally. It would therefore be extremely dangerous for both mothers and their babies to attempt this kind of experiment in humans.’

Dr Robin Lovell-Badge of the Medical Research Council’s National Institute for Medical Research in London said the breakthrough could help scientists researching disease.

‘It could be a valuable practical tool – not just for work on animals but on humans as well,’ he said.

‘There might be human material stored by laboratories that you could work on. If it came from people with genetic diseases, it could help explore the causes of those disease.’

However, he suspects it will have most use in the research on extinct animals, such as mammoths, whose bodies are preserved for thousands of year in ice. It could also be used on frozen cavemen recovered from glaciers.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1082776/Scientists-bring-life-mouse-killed-frozen-16-years-ago-nudging-world-closer-era-Frankenstein-science.html

Prepare for chaos: U.S. electoral system warned it ‘can’t cope’ as historic number of voters cast their ballot

*Tomorrow should be quite interesting…*

The American presidential election could descend into electoral chaos on Tuesday as unprecedented numbers of voters turn out to cast their ballot in a system that is largely untested.

The U.S. has an electoral system that is not organised, designed or funded to cope with ‘anywhere near a 100 per cent turnout’, a director of a leading independent electoral reform group has said.

As an estimated 130 million Americans head to the polls, Doug Chapin, director of The Pew Charitable Trust’s Electionline.org, said voter turnout will ‘dwarf’ all other problems in this year’s presidential election.

And with the nation’s voting system largely untested for what is expected to be an unprecedented turnout, the potential for chaos is high.

His warning came as John McCain today threw himself into a final frenetic dash across America to save his bid for the presidency.

He was flying to seven cities in seven states to try to close an 11-point gap in the polls before Americans vote tomorrow, defiantly telling supporters that the media and pundits had made a mistake in writing him off.

‘They may not know it, but the Mac is Back! And we’re going to win this election!’

He added defiantly: ‘I’m an American. And I choose to fight.’

After Florida, the former US Navy pilot was bound for Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Indiana, New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona.

At the same time, Barack Obama was openly confident as he swept through three battleground states won by George W Bush four years ago: Florida, North Carolina and Virginia.

The latest polls show Obama leading in Pennsylvania, which McCain has to win, and other key states. Nationally, several major polls indicate Obama has a 7-8 percentage-point advantage.

A USA Today/Gallup poll published this found likely voters favouring Obama by 11 points over McCain, 53-42 per cent. A survey for ABC/Washington Post showed the same margin.

With the economy in turmoil and the approval levels of President George W. Bush, Democrats look set to capture the White House and expand their majorities in both chambers of Congress.

But the process may be hampered by something other than politics if the voting system fails to cope with turnout.

Six years after the largest federal overhaul in how the U.S. elections are run, voting experts are still predicting machine and ballot shortages in several swing states and late tallies on election night, U.S. media have reported.

About half of all voters will vote in a way that is different from what they did in the last presidential election, the New York Times reported, and most will use paper ballots rather than the touch-screen machines that have caused concern among voting experts.

But paper ballots come with their own problems: the scanners reading them can break down, and up to a third of them will be counted later at a central polling station, meaning that if a voter has made a mistake filling out the ballot it will not be caught until it is too late.

Lawsuits have been filed in the key states of Pennsylvania and Virginia by voting rights groups accusing officials of not having enough paper ballots in stock, the New York Times has reported.

In states with early voting, there have been scattered reports of touch-screen machine malfunctions, ballot misprints causing scanners to jam and vote-flipping, in which the vote cast for one candidate is recorded for another.

An estimated 70 per cent of registered voters will try to cast their ballots, with that number rising even higher in some states.

‘The challenge is we will get closer to 100 per cent turnout on election day this year than ever before,’ Mr Chapin said.

He said the U.S. typically sees a turnout in the ‘high 50s to 70 per cent range’ but added: ‘You now see some states forecasting, 80 per cent, 85 per cent, even 90 per cent turnout of their registered voters on election day.

‘And this flood of new voters is going to challenge the system in a way that it really never has been before.’

He said if there was a problem at the front of the line at a polling station, this was an inconvenience if there were ten people in the queue.

But he went on: ‘If there are 100 people in line it is a problem; if there are a 1,000 people in line, it’s a crisis. Given the number of folks that we have coming out to vote this year, any problem that occurs at the point of voting has the potential to be a real challenge on election day.’

He said many states were ‘overwhelmed and in many ways overrun’ by the number of voters during the primary season, but were ‘fully prepared, or what they think is fully prepared, for record turnout across the country’ on Tuesday.

‘It is an article of faith and job mission of every election official in the U.S. that every eligible American who wishes to do so should have the right to cast a ballot and have that ballot count,’ he said.

The truth however, is that, given how decentralised our system is and the disputes over our system, we do not necessarily have a system that is organised, designed or funded to handle anywhere near a 100 per cent turnout.’

He said the voting system was ‘startlingly’ decentralised.

‘It is a myth that there is a United States’ election system. We have at least 50 separate state systems; in actuality, probably closer to thousands of state and local election systems’, he said.

‘I would be very surprised if we don’t hear more of, “We need to centralise elections more” after this election.’

He said the problems caused by voter turnout were already being seen in reports of early problems related to long queues, scattered reports of machine problems, and a ‘system characterised by overwhelming demand’.

Mr Chaplin also said he could see another problem such as the one in Florida which dogged the 2008 election and said three states would be worth watching closely for any problems.

Florida, the home of the ‘hanging chads’ and spoiled ballots of 2000, has been a ‘symbol of election reform’ since and has seen ‘as much change, if not more, than any other state in the country’.

Ohio, a ‘plumb political catch’ is usually very closely fought and ‘no dispute in this country has taken place since 2000 without taking place in some meaningful way (here),’ he added.

And Colorado, also a key battleground state this year, is ‘as unsettled in its election administration as any state in the country right now’, he said.

It was one of the last in the country to complete a required upgrade to its state-wide voter rolls, its chief state election official is a candidate for the US Congress, and its state election director recently resigned.

Mr Chapin, who also wrote a report subtitled “What if we had an election and everyone came?”, said: ‘If we have a problem… it will be because of something completely unexpected, not because of a lack of preparation.’

He said voters had shown increased interest this year, not just in the candidates but also in the mechanics of casting their votes.

‘So while we won’t know until polls close on election day whether or not we have avoided the problems of the past, there are signs for optimism.’

In the UK, the 2005 General Rlection saw a national turnout of 61.36 per cent.

Last week, MPs were told that Britain should learn from the expected high turnout in the presidential election.

Commons leader Harriet Harman said a lack of voter registration and low turnout was something that had to be tackled in Britain, particularly among people living in inner cities.

‘It looks set to be an election with very high turnout from people who previously have not necessarily voted, people who have registered to vote and then have gone out to vote,’ she said in the House of Commons.

‘One of the things that all of us should be preoccupied to tackle is lack of registration, particularly in inner city areas and among poorer people and low voting turnout.

‘If there is something we can learn from the American elections about more people voting and more young people voting then that is something we should look to.’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1082591/Prepare-chaos-U-S-electoral-warned-cope-historic-number-voters-cast-ballot.html

Museum of Tolerance atop Muslim cemetery: a war against the dead

Jerusalem / – With the Israeli Supreme Court decision to allow the building of a “Museum of Tolerance” atop what was Jerusalem’s main Muslim cemetery until 1948, national and religious figures are calling for major protests.

Arab and foreign consuls met in East Jerusalem’s Ambassador Hotel to discuss the situation and create a plan of action in light of the loss of the court case that began in 2006.

Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Mohammad Hussein said that the Israeli ruling is criminal as it allows for the “attack on the tombs and bones of Muslims.” The Israelis began exhuming Muslim graves in Mamilla Cemetery in 2006. Construction was ordered to halt during court proceedings. However, Israeli developers continued to exhume graves.

Head of the Islamic Movement, Sheikh Ra’ed Salah described the situation as catastrophic. He noted that 70,000 graves fill the 200 dunam cemetery which has tombs dating back thousands of years.

Sheikh Salah said that Israeli projects include building a large hotel on part of the cemetery, extending a sewage network, laying streets and establishing the “Independence Park.”

He said that naming the museum “Tolerance” illustrates “their utter disdain. They have raped our holy places in the name of tolerance.” Sheikh Salah also noted that an Israeli American is undertaking the project with 200 million USD coming from California. It is backed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The museum is a sister project for the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The Head of the Islamic Movement, Sheikh Salah, said, “This resolution is a serious violation of all the holy sites and not only to one cemetery. There are other graves under threat, graves that symbolize our historical background, our culture and religion.”

Sheikh Salah called on the citizens of Jerusalem to continue visits to shrines and the graves of their relatives buried in the cemetery and to continue with maintenance of graves, stressing the need to initiate practical steps to preserve Jerusalem and its holy sites.

For his part the governor of Jerusalem Adnan Husseini said that the Mamilla Cemetery is an “important site in Jerusalem. With the seizure of the west of the city the cemetery is going from 200 dunams to 20. This is unacceptable. It’s a war on the dead.”

Husseini noted, “The Department of Islamic Endowments gave to the Jews 300 dunums of land to bury their dead but they are now attacking the Islamic cemetery which is a safe place. The Israeli courts did not allow for any Palestinian rights since 1948, but instead have manipulated time and deferred to the Israeli government’s plans to swallow the ground. The Israeli authorities prevented the restoration of the cemetery safe and build a fence to protect them.”

Advisor to Prime Minister Salam Fayyad on Jerusalem Affairs, Hatem Abdel Qader denounced the Israeli claim that building the Museum of Tolerance on the cemetery would have no Palestinian reaction. “This is reckless disregard, an unprecedented assault on the land. The issue is not just of bulldozing the graves and bones, but the bulldozing of dignity.”

Abdel Qader said he had contact with a number of Arab ambassadors who expressed their willingness to work to prevent such work in Mamilla Cemetery. Part of the new campaign includes outreach to European officials and a concerted effort from Palestinian Muslims and Christians. Chairman of the Commission on Graves, Mustafa Abu Zahra, said that delegations are currently being formed to visit Arab states and Islamic institutions to support their demands to stop the ongoing violations of the cemetery.

http://www.uruknet.de/?s1=1&p=48476&s2=03