Golden orbweaver spiders from Madagascar secrete the only spider silk that is gold in color, not white. And now a five-year project to create a cape is finished and on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. This is the first spider silk textile made since the late 19th Century.

Nicholas Godley and Simon Peers with Their Spider Silk Cape

Clothing designer Nicholas Godley designed the garment. He says, “The color is just incredible. It’s incredibly strong, incredibly soft, incredibly sticky.” But his creation goes beyond being just a fashion experiment. He adds, “In the scientific and medical world at least spider silk is many ways the Holy Grail — in many ways it’s one of the most incredible materials.”

1.2 million spiders made the golden silk thread that built the gold brocaded cape.

Textile expert Simon Peers explains the process, starting with the spiders. He says, “You can’t keep spiders together because they are cannibals — they eat each other.”

Golden Orbweaver Spiders from Madagascar

Once the spiders have finished their work, four strands of silk are twisted together to make an ultra-strong and extremely flexible golden thread for a team of humans to sew into fabric. This particular spider silk stretches another forty percent of its resting length, which makes it very difficult to work with as a textile.

Peers is a British expatriate who moved to Madagascar over 20 years ago where he established a business to promote and explore the island nation’s heritage of weaving.

According to Wired.com in 2009,

Peers conceived the idea of weaving spider silk after learning about the French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué built a small, hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them.

Science News tells a slightly different tale.

At some point, Peers shared what he had learned with a friend who was doing academic research on Madagascar’s textiles. “And she enthused about this whole idea of spider silk,” Peers recalls. “In fact, she pursued it a little further than I did,” turning up details of the original machine that was used to “silk” spiders for that World’s Fair fabric. While in France, she had one small element of the silker reproduced and made Peers a present of the mechanical piece.

It then sat on a shelf in his office for years. Many, many years.

At the time the Godley and Peers project had made a large piece of fabric but had not cut the garment yet into a cape yet.

Textile expert Simon Peers and Fashion Designer Nicholas Godley Flank Model Bianca Gavrilas Wearing a Hand-Embroidered Spider Silk Cape

Molecular biologist Randy Lewis is also stuck on spider silk and is always looking for new practical applications for the material in the real world. With a tensile strength greater than steel and even kevlar (used in bullet-proof vests) spider silk is an ultralight weight material that could stop a speeding bullet.

Lewis lives in Wyoming and decided to combine his knowledge of animal husbandry with cutting-edge genetics. In the process he made transgenic goats that produced spider silk in their milk. That’s one way to overcome the spider labor problem faced by Godley and Peers.

Peers estimates that the spider silk project took hundreds of thousands of hours when you factor in the work of the spiders.

Excerpt from NOVA’s Making Stuff show about spider silk, featuring Simon Peers and Randy Lewis.

After several deaths of people in Cambodia, Vietnam and China recently, the bird flu is making a comeback in public discourse. Concerns are growing about the H5N1 strain of the influenza virus. A few years ago the world-sweeping swine flu stole headlines but the bird flu, which is much more virulent than it’s porcine cousin, has been spreading from poultry to people.

An 18-year-old duck farmer in Vietnam died last week, becoming the first bird flu fatality in that country in two years. The World Health Organization also reports that a two-year-old boy in Cambodia died from bird flu after being exposed to sick poultry in his village. Those deaths follow quickly on the heals of a 39-year-old Chinese bus driver dying on December 31 just outside of Hong Kong. And a 24-year-old man and five-year-old toddler in Indonesia also reportedly died from the bird flu this year.

The WHO says that makes 343 deaths from 582 cases of bird flu since 2003 when the virus first began hopping from birds to people.

But now growing fear over the necessary research to better understand this pathogen, which has a 60 percent mortality rate, is forcing bird flu scientists to take a 60-day break.

Researchers studying a more deadly version of the H5N1 virus that can be spread through the air voluntarily suspended their research for two months after bioethicists raised concerns of the virus being turned into a bioweapon.

Electron Micrograph of the H5N1 Influenza Virus

This deep concern began in late December when a U.S. federal government scientific advisory board asked two peer-review journals not to publish the papers if they explained how they were able to genetically modify the current, naturally-occurring strain of bird flu. The government scientists made the virus even more deadly by making it airborne.

Just days after that announcement and before the papers could be published, government advisers demanded the details be kept secret and not published in scientific journals to keep the information from falling into the wrong hands.

The scientists who created the deadlier H5N1 in the lab say they needed to know if the current strain has the potential to mutate into an airborne one. It does. They just sped up the process. Knowing that key piece of information will allow countries to take more severe measures to eradicate the newly emerging illness.

Now the story about bird flu has mutated as well, raising concerns that the manmade strain of the virus is now a bigger threat than the naturally-occurring one, which seldom hops from poultry to people.

In a letter that appeared in both journalsScience and Nature, several key bird flu researchers explain why they are temporarily halting their research.

The principal investigators at the labs where the bird flu research is being conducted say that perceived fear of the new manmade strain of the flu virus escaping the lab is making them push the pause button for 60 days.

Drs. Ron Fouchier, Adolfo García-Sastre, Yoshihiro Kawaoka and 36 others recognize that they and the rest of the scientific community need to more clearly explain the benefits of bird flu research and reassure the public that the biosafety measures taken minimize its possible risks.

They say, “We have agreed on a voluntary pause of 60 days on any research involving highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 viruses leading to the generation of viruses that are more transmissible in mammals.”

The controversial research that prompted government warnings and the voluntary research suspension centered around ferrets. The researchers proved that viruses possessing a haemagglutinin (HA) protein from highly pathogenic avian H5N1 influenza viruses can become transmissible in ferrets.

Scanning Electron Microscope Image of H5N1 Avian Flu Virus

But now the perceived fear of the ferret-infected virus escaping from the secure labs is creating a fear pandemic instead.

They continue, “We would like to assure the public that these experiments have been conducted with appropriate regulatory oversight in secure containment facilities by highly trained and responsible personnel to minimize any risk of accidental release.”

The scientists agree their research is absolutely necessary to help to public health efforts detect when the H5N1 influenza virus might change in the wild, sparking a human pandemic. But Fouchier of Erasmus Medical College in the Netherlands, Garcia-Sastre of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the lead authors on the letter in Science and Nature nevertheless are voluntarily suspending it so public perception can catch up.

Censorship in Science

When a U.S. government advisory panel told the editors of Science and Nature to censor a submitted bird flu paper, the complex issue also enjoined the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The reason for asking for censorship was noble. Biosecurity experts fear an airborne version of the H5N1 flu virus that becomes transmissible between humans could create a pandemic worse than the 1918-19 outbreak of Spanish flu that killed between 20 million and 40 million people.

The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) made the following recommendations about the publication of two papers submitted on the highly pathogenic avian influenza, H5N1:

1. Neither manuscript should be published with complete data and experimental details.

2. Conclusions of the manuscripts be published but without experimental details and
mutation data that would enable replication of the experiments.

a) Text should be added describing: 1) the goals of the research, 2) the potential
benefits to public health (including informing surveillance efforts, pandemic
preparedness activities, and countermeasure development and stockpiling efforts), 3)
the risk assessments performed prior to research initiation, 4) the ongoing biosafety
oversight, containment, and occupational health measures, 5) biosecurity practices
and adherence to select agent regulation, and 6) that addressing biosafety, biosecurity,
and occupational health is part of the responsible conduct of all life sciences research.

b) The NSABB should develop a statement that explains their review process and
rationale for the recommendations. This statement will be provided to the journals to
consider for publication.

c) The USG should encourage the authors to submit a special
communication/commentary letter to the journals regarding the dual use research
issue.

In other words, don’t publish the whole genome and don’t explain exactly how this mutation occurred.

Both journals responded by agreeing to the recommendations in part.

Science writer Carl Zimmer sums it up best. He describes the journals’ response, “In essence, “We haven’t decided yet. It would be nice if you let us know how responsible scientists could get hold of the data.”

Since science is rooted in reproducibility this type of censorship flies in the face of the method.

But the U.S. government does have a history of censoring sensitive science, including the recipe for nuclear fission and fusion. And now the formula for ferret to ferret transmission of bird flu.

Columbia University virologists Vincent Racaniello tells Zimmer the censorship move doesn’t make any sense. He says, “The point of a science paper is to enable others to duplicate the findings. Are we going to set a new precedent, where security matters override the reason for publication? This is setting a very dangerous precedent for virology and biological sciences in general.”

But in the end, the scientists themselves agreed to grudgingly redact contested parts of the papers.

Albert Osterhaus of Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands says this type of activity is unprecedented. He believes that public health is best served by making the information widely available. A spokesman for Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin, Madison also says the lead author will modify the paper and resubmit it.

Meanwhile the editors of Nature and Science are working with government officials to iron out a “written, transparent plan” for relevant scientists to have access to the critical details of this research, which will likely not make the published version of the papers. Science editor-in-chief Bruce Albersis confident that this all can be resolved in a couple of weeks.

For years, scientists have been talking about the era of personalized medicine. While many preparations are underway, the biggest hurdle to widespread adoption has been the prohibitive cost to read a person’s entire DNA. Our genetic code provides a full road map to preventing and treating disease. We just don’t know how to read it yet.

Since the first entire human genome was sequenced in 2000, the price and time it takes has tumbled into affordability.

But the entire biotechnology industry has rested on the belief that personalized medicine won’t work until it takes a day or less to map a whole human genome and the cost reaches the $1,000 price point.

Well, 2012 is the year. At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Life Technologies unveiled its latest gadget, a $150,000 high-speed gene sequencer, which allows entire human genome sequencing for $1,000 per genome.

Outfitted with a semiconductor chip instead of tiny microscopes, the Benchtop Ion Proton sequencer is ready to read our DNA fast and cheap. That means this technology will quickly move from the research lab to the doctor’s office where patients will pay a little more than the $1,000 it costs to sequence a full genome.

There are companies already doing some high-speed, fast-turnaround gene sequencing. But they rely on just pieces of a genome, looking for particular markers to identify risk for specific diseases. No company until now has been able to run a full genome for $1,000 in less than a day.

Life Technologies’ Dr. Robert Bennett says, “For the first time, you’ll be able to sequence an entire human genome in a matter of a few hours.”

Immediately following the announcement, the company said that Baylor College of Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, and The Broad Institute have signed on as the first three customers of the new semiconducting gene sequencer.

Dr. Richard Gibbs, Director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor says, “A genome sequence for $1,000 was a pipe-dream, just a few years ago.”

Not to be outdone, another company that builds gene sequencers also just announced that its new generation of machine will read an entire genome in less than 24 hours. Illumina hasn’t announced how much it will cost on a per genome basis.

It’ll be a year or so before these lightweight machines will begin showing up in doctor’s offices. But when they do it is still unclear what running a person’s genome will show.

Doctors must first be trained to use the new technology. The power of personalized medicine and the promise of rapid, inexpensive gene sequencing lies in being able to identify genetic mutations to make medicine more effective, reduce drug interactions, improve preventive health and give the patient more information about his or her health.

But this kind of broad ability could also open up a pandora’s box of privacy concerns. Namely, how much of a person’s genetic information should be accessible to insurance companies, which conceivably could discriminate against people with predisposed genetic risks for certain diseases.

Regardless of any controversy, reaching the genome milestone of $1,000 per genome is changing the face of medicine forever.

Richard Lifton, Chair of the Department of Genetics at Yale School of Medicine says, “The technological advances in the new instrument promise to be game-changing for both research and clinical applications.”

Rosie Redfield, at Home in the Lab

The scientists led by a young researcher named Felisa Wolfe-Simon claimed they were able to get Mono Lake bacteria to substitute arsenic for phosphorus in their physiology and even in their DNA. NASA even hyped the work ahead of the paper’s online publication in the journal Science. The press release announced, “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.”

However, Dr. Redfield read the paper and immediately knew it was wrong. She hopped online and pointed out the problems in her blog, RRResearch, which contains her frequent musings about life in her lab working with graduate students. On Dec. 4, 2010 she wrote a long post (and one she thought would be read by few,) which set off a firestorm over the arsenic paper.

Since then, she has appeared in the media and at science conferences talking about her post-publication comments of Felisa Wolfe-Simon’s arsenic life paper. This year the journal Nature named her one of the ten science newsmakers of the year. In addition to saying what many other evolutionary biologists thought about the veracity of the arsenic DNA experiment, she also decided to use her blog as an open notebook where she has been busily trying to replicate the original arsenic experiment.

Her documentation of the process is not just fascinating from a technical perspective (which it is) but she carefully crafts experiments to test each question she has about the Wolfe-Simon study, slowly poking bigger holes in what many biologists regarded as a weak experiment anyway. Redfield isn’t concerned whether she is wrong or right. She just follows the science and looks for explanations along the way.

Her writings almost appear motherly and it’s easy to imagine her as a thesis or dissertation adviser to her students. In one post where she recounts her criticisms of the now-infamous biology paper, she admonishes lead author Wolfe-Simon for having sloppy experimental habits.

Within two days of reading the original paper in the journal Science, Redfield saw the flaws in the Wolfe-Simon experiment. She sees scientists making mistakes as just part of the process. But she chastises the all the scientists involved in that research for remaining silent and never correcting the problem.

She says, “Scientists in particular need to be able to admit their errors – we’re working not only at the frontiers of knowledge but at the frontiers of our abilities. Failure to admit we’ve been wrong is a betrayal of the scientific process.”

Since Wolfe-Simon didn’t admit making any mistakes Redfield says she had to prove the findings wrong.

Of the original arsenic research, she says, “Lots of flim-flam, but very little reliable information. If this data was presented by a PhD student at their committee meeting, I’d send them back to the bench to do more cleanup and controls.”

So after she completed teaching her genomics class in the spring she turned her attention back to the arsenic experiment, which was clearly nagging at her.

On June 1, she outlined her plan of action for reproducing the original Wolfe-Simon experiment. But from the get-go she said, “If I can’t readily get GFAJ-1 [bacteria cells] growing nicely on the phosphate-based version of the medium the paper specifies, I’ll know that I’m out of my depth. At that point I’ll leave the whole mess for someone else to test.”

Her work revolved around two big questions.

Q. 1. Is the approximately tenfold growth difference between arsenic and phosphorus due to the cells’ use of arsenic in place of phosphorus in DNA, RNA and other biomolecules?

Q. 2. Does DNA purified from cells grown with less phosphorus and more arsenic contain significant amounts of covalently incorporated arsenic?

Just before Christmas, she told me, “This is a really simple experiment, a no-brainer,” which originally she thought might take a couple of weeks. It took her six months.

To start her experiment she sent away for GFAJ-1, the allegedly arsenic-loving bacterium on which Wolfe-Simon based her research of Mono Lake in California. (In some science circles GFAJ stands unflatteringly for Give Felisa A Job).

In September, after several months of open experimentation, Dr. Redfield discovered the arsenic-treated bacteria cells only grew when the cells were streaked out on agar plates. When she tried to use a liquid culture medium, she says, “The cells didn’t look so good.”

But for some reason they grew on the agar plates. And when Dr. Redfield fed the bacteria an amino acid she says they grew like crazy. Once she was able to stabilize the cell growth she grew enough GFAJ-1 to analyze its DNA. She wanted to see if the cells were assimilating arsenic into their DNA in place of phosphorus.

Dr. Redfield didn’t think that such a thing would be possible and for decades chemists have concluded the same thing. Yet, That’s what the Wolfe-Simon experiment concluded. Redfield relies on the chemistry which says that the bonds with the arsenic would be so weak that they would fall apart within a fraction of a second. According to the chemistry, she says, “The DNA will just fall apart and the cells will die.”

But she also refutes the Wolfe-Simon conclusion based on biology. Dr. Redfield imagines DNA is like a zipper. She says, “The teeth of the zipper have to be the same size or the zipper will get stuck.” Arsenic is too big to work in place of phosphorus.

After getting the arsenic-laden bacteria to grow, she figured out that the Wolfe-Simon experiment only worked because the agar plates the original researchers used for the cell growth contained a minute amount of phosphorus, which contaminated the experiment by giving the cells just enough to grow.

She says, “I think they used a reagent that wasn’t purified and discovered it had three or four micro molars of phosphorus.” In the paper and in responding to Redfield and other criticism, Wolfe-Simon says that the bacteria couldn’t grow on the little bit of phosphorus on the agar plate. To that Redfield says, “It was lame. I said, ‘Wait a minute.’”

When she did her own experiment, Redfield used reagent grade chemicals and grew her bacteria in arsenate almost to the specified density. When she added just three micro molars of phosphorus she got the same result as the Wolfe-Simon paper.

Once she was able to stabilize the growth of GFAJ-1 cells containing different amounts of arsenic, she sent the bacteria off for analysis at Princeton to see if any of the arsenic made its way into the DNA of the bacteria, as posited by the Wolfe-Simon paper. She expects those results in a couple of weeks.

She says,” I’ve grown the bacteria with and without arsenic and extracted the DNA and sent it off.” Once she gets the DNA analysis she’ll do some more experiments and then write a paper about the whole process.

For the last year Dr. Redfield has helped demonstrate how science can be self-correcting. In the media coverage, experts quickly reached a strong consensus — that the arsenic paper was flawed. And with her open science experiment on a blog, Redfield invited curious colleagues to contribute to the experiment, which was working at the edges of what is known in biology and experimenting in unfamiliar territory.

Unfortunately, many people look to this newsmaking event as an example of how science gets things wrong. Some people only heard the original arsenic life story and missed the vibrant discussion of the research and its correction.

In the process of the hub-bub around whether arsenic is a building block of life one evolutionary biologist with a popular blog said, “Rosie Redfield must be the tyrant queen of science.” P.Z. Myers, the outspoken atheist blogger biologist gave her the title, which she wears proudly.

Through it all, Dr. Redfield has remained very sympathetic to Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the young post doc responsible for the paper about arsenic life. Redfield has not spoken directly to Wolfe-Simon but sent her an apologetic e-mail after an interview she gave appeared more strident than she intended.

Rosie Redfield understands what it’s like to be a misunderstood scientist. For the last 20 years she has focused on how bacteria reproduce. In 2000 her work raised eyebrows when she wondered, “Do bacteria have sex?” She believes they do, despite what conventional biology says.

To Wolfe-Simon she says, “I understand having an exciting, important idea where everyone thinks you’re wrong.” But, she cautions, “You have to do good science; that’s the only thing that will see you through.”

She feels sorry for how this biological brew-hah went down. Despite what Redfield considers an error in not admitting a mistake, she thinks that the other co-authors on the paper were also complicit in not correcting things before they reached publication and public discourse.

Redfield says, “You can be seen to screw up and it’s not a disaster. That’s just science.”

Science writer David Dobbs followed the story since it broke and says Wolfe-Simon is now caught in the fallout from an over-the-top media press of which she is both part author and something of a victim.

Redfield agrees with his characterization of how both NASA and Wolfe-Simon’s mentors and former lab bosses seem to have abandoned her. In a Wired article in September he notes, “It appears they bought and fueled the bus; put bright lights and banners on it; cheered as Wolfe-Simon drove it a bit wildly honking the horn; and have now thrown her under it.”

Redfield says, “Everyone involved made big mistakes. But the big betrayal wasn’t the errors but the failure to admit them.”

And of her new moniker as tyrant queen of science, she says, “Finally the recognition I’ve been waiting for.”

The first scientific team to sequence the genomes of 100 one-hundred year olds wins $10 million. It’s the latest offering from the science competition organization, X Prize Foundation, a non-profit designed to spur science and technology by awarding big cash prizes for significant breakthroughs.

Their most famous and first prize was the Ansari X Prize which started the commercial race to space.

Now the foundation is challenging biologists to sequence the genetic code of 100 centenarians in an effort to learn something new about longevity. Is there a longevity gene or are these folks just doing the right combination of eating right and exercising to get the most out of their lives?

Studies of very healthy elderly people show that they don’t eat a vegetarian diet. They are often obese, smoke and drink and get little exercise. Those who study the healthy elderly find there is something inexplicable that prevents them from getting diseases like Alzheimer’s and they just don’t age like other people.

With more people living longer, the new X Prize genomics competition will shed some light on aging and to see if the secret to a long life is written in our DNA.

Dr. Thomas Perls, an Alzheimer’s researcher at Boston University is the director of the New England Centenarian Study, the largest study of centenarians in the world. He is thrilled that Archon Genomic X Prize is focusing on sequencing the genomes of 100 centenarians.

And he is helping the competition find the one-hundred-plus year olds, drawing from his own study which has a minimum age requirement of 105 to participate.

He says, “It’s very hard to get there without some genetic advantages.”

Noted biologist Craig Venter is co-chairing the Archon Genomics X Prize, which will be judged on accuracy, completeness and the speed and cost of sequencing.

He says, “We need 10,000 genomes, not 100, to start to understand the link between genetics, disease and wellness.” This X Prize is merely the first step in revealing the genetic secrets of a long life.

Irving Kahn, oldest living financial analyst

In 1978, he began his own firm, which now manages more than $700 million in assets. He adapts to the changing times and now communicates with friends and clients all over the world via the Internet. BBC News interviewed him about the 2008 financial crisis in 2008.

If you know people like Irving, send them to the Medco 100 over 100. That’s the search to find the 100 centenarians to have their genomes sequenced.

These people could hold the secrets to better health for us all, hidden within our own genetic code. This prize could also unleash the era of personalized medicine where health and disease treatment will vary based on a person’s DNA.

After the healthy centenarians have been selected the teams will race for the $10 million prize, which will be given to the first team that accurately sequences the whole genome of 100 subjects within 30 days for $1,000 or less per genome, at an error rate no greater than one per million base pairs (that’s 98% accuracy).

The human genome contains more than six billion pairs of nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA. Ultimately, the competition looks to usher in a new era of personalized medicine through sequencing the whole human genome to a level of fidelity never before measured.

Kahn, the oldest living money manager says, “I’m at the stage in life where I get a lot of pleasure out of finding a cheap stock.”

With the new twist on the genomics X Prize, science will begin taking stock of healthy elderly people and study their secret to a long and healthy life.

History of the Archon Genomics X Prize
The $10 million Archon Genomics X PRIZE presented by Medco was originally launched in
October 2006, its purse underwritten by a generous donation from Dr. Stewart and Marilyn
Blusson, challenging scientists and engineers to sequence 100 whole human genomes in 10
days or less for less than $10,000 per genome at an unprecedented rate of accuracy.
In the following years, sequencing technology progressed through multiple platforms, carving
out niche research markets, each with its strengths and weaknesses. Teams originally registered
to compete were not yet able to meet the requirements.

In 2010, Grant Campany, who has 20 years of experience in the life sciences industry, signed on
as Senior Director for the Archon Genomics X PRIZE. A new approach to the competition was
developed by Mr. Campany, X PRIZE Foundation leadership and the competition’s Scientific
Advisory Board, including Dr. Venter, X PRIZE Foundation Scientific Advisory Co-Chair, and
one of the first to sequence the human genome in 2000 and create the first cell with a synthetic
genome in 2010. Recognizing that no single technology was serving medical/clinical
requirements, the Archon Genomics X PRIZE presented by Medco was revitalized to be more
inclusive, relevant and robust.

Wyllie O Hagan is a pair of visual artists working in different media, from silkscreen paintings to film. They became fascinated by Rosalind Franklin, the woman who captured the first x-ray image of DNA, which immediately led to James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA and their Nobel Prize in 1962.

In 2007, the pair of European artists Denise Wyllie and Clare O’Hagan were inspired by Franklin’s unfinished work and also wanted raise awareness of the disease that took her life.

At the age of 37, the British chemist Franklin died of ovarian cancer and was relegated to a footnote in Watson and Crick’s momentous achievement. Though without her crystallographic x-ray image, they would have struggled to figure out the exact double helix structure of the the genetic code.

While artist O’Hagan was deeply involved in their Rosalind Franklin: Discoveries in DNA project she was also diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Unlike Franklin, she beat the disease and still continues to paint and create art today.

She says, “When diagnosed with ovarian cancer, I really wanted to act out in anger, to make a big noise, to shout and scream and say, ‘This disease is just awful, it kills women, listen to what I am saying.’”

Since then the artists have continued to explore the intersection of art and science through additional collections, including a permanent exhibit called Transformations in Science and Art in the Royal Mint building in London. It is a large floor to ceiling banner that stretches 120 feet long and celebrates the life and work of the scientists in the Department of Oncology at University College London and the patients they’ve helped.

They also went on to further explore DNA through art with a series called Art Science DNA.

Wyllie O Hagan told a South Carolina newspaper, “Even without a deep knowledge of science, people respond to the aesthetics of the work.”

Beginning with their discovery of Rosalind Franklin’s forgotten place in science history, these two women stumbled into the world of science and expressed themselves through their artwork. They began by representating Franklin’s famous Photo 51 in vibrant colors, unlike the fuzzy x-ray original she took in 1952. Since that experiment Wyllie O Hagan has continued to demonstrate a keen ability to capture the beauty and magnificence of science.

“In my view all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall succeed in our aims; the improvement of mankind.” — Rosalind Franklin

A meta-study in the journal Science says – changing global temperatures are pushing species towards the poles and higher altitudes.

A meta study is a study that rounds up all the other related studies (in this case 54) and analyzes them for trends or patterns that emerge. After looking at the scientific literature on species migration for the last 40 years, it appears that animals and plants are responding to a changing climate by moving further north and to higher elevations.

While it may sound strange that trees are picking up and moving in essence that’s what’s happening. Of course, they can’t uproot themselves and walk up a mountain or further north to a more suitable climate. But researchers have found that 2,000 species of plants and animals are finding new homes thanks to climate change.

And the rate at which the they are moving to a more suitable climate is staggering, much faster than the commonly accepted rates found in the scientific literature.

Chris Thomas, Biology professor at the University of York in England and the meta study project leader says, “These changes are equivalent to animals and plants shifting away from the equator at around 20 centimeters [8 inches] per hour, for every hour of the day, for every day of the year.”

That’s a rate three times faster than scientists thought plants and animals were migrating because of climate change. That amounts to a shift of 10.1 miles to the north per decade. And species are moving higher up hills and mountains as well at a rate twice what scientists thought. On average species are moving at a rate of 36.1 feet higher per decade.

While it may not sound like a lot of movement Dr. Thomas says that there is no other explanation why plants and animals would be permanently shifting their habitats to higher latitudes and higher elevation. He also says the speed at which the change is occurring is very dramatic.

I-Ching Chen, another lead researcher on the meta study says this project shows that global warming is pushing plant and animal species toward the poles and to higher elevations. Dr. Chen says, “We have for the first time shown that the amount by which the distributions of species have changed is correlated with the amount the climate has changed in that region.”

This analysis of the literature spells trouble for animals in Arctic regions where the climate is warming twice as fast as anywhere else. There is nowhere for these species to go. The same holds true for plants that are already perched on mountain tops. They can’t climb any higher.

Dr. Thomas and other scientists fear that many of the species that are unable to adapt by shifting their homes will simply die out.

The meta study focused on the scientific literature in Europe and North America, leaving a gaping hole in what’s happening in equatorial regions, where temperatures are warming much more slowly than higher latitudes. In the tropics moisture not temperature may be having the same overall effect on species. That’s the subject for another meta study.

And while the overall trend pointed toward a warming world forcing the migration of plants and animals toward the poles and to highter elevations, a significant minority of species moved to lower latitudes and lower elevations. Dr. Thomas attributes this to other pressures that have an effect on species distribution. Habitat loss, land use, and other pressures besides climate change do have an impact on species movement.

He told the New York Times, “Land use change, habitat loss — there’s a long list of pressures which must all be balanced. Climate change is a huge pressure, but it’s just one pressure facing species around the world.”

Already heralded as the biggest step in cancer research in decades, a new cancer treatment is forcing conservative doctors and scientists to use words like, “Amazing.”

It’s premature to call this new treatment a cure since it has only been tried in three patients, all of whom have experienced either full remission or seen a significant drop in the number of cancer cells.

The experimental treatment boosts a leukemia patient’s own immune system by turning infection-fighting T-cells into cancer cell serial killers.

The process involves taking the patient’s own blood, removing the T-cells and replacing them with a harmless, modified version of the HIV virus. Then the genetically engineered treatment is infused back into the patient where the army of cancer fighters are unleashed on cancer tumors and cells as they form.

For two weeks after the treatment was given to the patients there was no reaction. Then the patients became violently ill, which meant the treatment was working. Reporting the worst flu symptoms of their lives, the patients were flushing all the cancer out of their bodies and it made them sick.

After that episode, two patients remain cancer free one year post-treatment and the third is much improved. All three patients had late-stage leukemia with few other treatment options.

Doctors are cautiously optimistic. They don’t know how long the genetically engineered cells will remain in the body or if the cancer will return after a certain period of time. But already this treatment is being explored to fight pancreatic, brain and other cancers to see if it has the same results.

Dr. Carl June and a research team at University of Pennsylvania discuss new leukemia cancer treatment using modified HIV virus. (5:26)

Gender stereotypes about math and science abound. Boys are known for performing better in math and science while girls tend to excel in history and language arts. Though the U.S. still leads the world in scientific discovery and vision, another stereotype is that the U.S. education system is failing students and allowing other countries to out compete citizens for global jobs.

The results of the six-month long Google Science Fair blew both of those stereotypes right out of the water. Three girls, all from the U.S. won the first annual science competition. They beat out 10,000 other students from 90 countries, demonstrating female and U.S. prominence in science.

But perhaps more notable than breaking stereotypes is the potential real science that these young women are doing. One has discovered a way to make ovarian cancer treatments more effective. Another wants to revise the Clean Air Act using her model, quantifying air pollution among asthmatics. And the third winning project could lead to a barbeque meat marinade that reduces carcinogens.

Shree Bose, Age 17

When not in the cancer lab, Bose enjoys a good cattle drive near her home of Fort Worth, Texas.

For her ground-breaking science project, she won $50,000 from Google as well as a trip to the Galapagos Islands on the National Geographic Discovery research ship. She will also have an opportunity to have a once in a lifetime internship experience at CERN, the nuclear physics lab in Switzerland.

Alice Bell, one of the judges for the Google Science Fair and a writer for the UK paper The Guardian says that the teens she met through the judging process are not the public. She says, “It is perhaps best to think of schoolchildren as holding a liminal position with respect to science and the rest of society. They are not quite inside the scientific community or squarely outside it either. They are both science and ‘the public’, and they are neither of these things, yet. Their lives could go in a range of directions.”

One thing is for sure, after winning this new scientific accolade, none of these girls lives will ever be the same.

Naomi Shaw, Age 16

In her project she quotes a common saying among environmentalists, “The genetic make-up is like loading a gun. The environmental pollutants represent the trigger!”

Shah noticed that doctors are quick to prescribe steroids and other inhalers, instead of addressing the quality of the air asthma sufferers are breathing. She learned that’s because nobody had figured out how much air pollution affects lung function. So she did.

Online environmental magazine Grist calls Shah awesome, not because she is a budding scientist but because she “let’s her green flag fly.” Shah describes herself as an environmentalist as well as an objective scientist in training.

She says, “Air quality doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves, and should be one of the top sustainability goals for the coming future.”

Shah took first place at the Intel Science Fair earlier this year. Since then she has sent President Obama and Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Lisa Jackson a letter asking for her mathematical model to be used to revise the Clean Air Act.

Lauren Hodge, Age 14

She found that lemon juice and brown sugar cut the level of carcinogens sharply, while soy sauce increased them.

Shah and Hodge each received $25000 scholarships and internships at Google and LEGO.

Girl power ruled the day at the first Google Science Fair.

Bose is proud of that fact. She told the New York Times, “Personally I think that’s amazing, because throughout my entire life, I’ve heard science is a field where men go into.” She added, “It just starts to show you that women are stepping up in science, and I’m excited that I was able to represent maybe just a little bit of that.”

Google science fair judge Vint Cerf was secretly pleased by the female sweep in all three age groups. Of the 15 finalists, there were 9 boys and 6 girls.

Though the competition was completely gender neutral, he says, “I was secretly very pleased to see that happen. This is just a reminder that women are fully capable of doing same or better quality work than men can.”

When the final mission of the U.S. space shuttle program blasted off flawlessly on Friday, over one million onlookers gathered in Florida for the launch. Tens of millions more watched on television. But what they couldn’t see amid the liftoff fire and smoke was all the science that was en route to the International Space Station.

Space Shuttle Atlantis has a lot of experiments, including one from a Hawaiian biotech company called Tissue Genesis Incorporated. The company has been working with NASA for ten years to study the effects of microgravity on stem cells regenerated from fat tissue.

The research can be applied to fight vascular disease, improve heart bypass surgery and orthopedics.

Houston’s Odyssey Space Research put two Apple iPhones on the last shuttle mission, not so they can phone home from space but to conduct experiments using mobile applications.

Astronauts will use an app called SpaceLab. The experiment app was built to test iPhone cameras and gyroscopes as well as test the effects of radiation on the devices.

Others hope that iPhones will be able to replace some of the expensive and faulty navigation equipment that generally accompanies most space missions.

Besides biotech and high tech companies sending experiments into space the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program has sent a few projects as well.

A mini lab, about the size of a brick contains both professional and student science experiments. The Materials Dispersion Apparatus (MDA) houses about 90 different experiments, including 11 student experiments.

Ranging from yeast to tomatoes and from goldfish eggs to mouth bacteria student experiments will study the effects of microgravity by comparing samples on the ground to those that flew into space. Students will look for differences in cell structure, behavior or growth of their samples.

And though it is the last shuttle mission to the ISS, one experiment will perform a white-glove test of the space station to see if it is remaining biological clean after years of use. a state of the art lab on a chip will be able to detect biological and chemicals on any surface.

Another novel experiment comes from Arizona State University, where Cheryl Nickerson is working on developing next generation vaccines.

The microbiologist has been studying infection in microgravity and has already discovered that the salmonella bacteria becomes more virulent in zero-gravity.

She says, “Our earlier work showed the potential for spaceflight to provide novel insight into the mechanisms of microbial virulence that may lead to innovations in infectious disease control here on Earth.”

Now Nickerson and her colleague Roy Curtiss III, the director of the Biodesign Institute are hoping to find cures to hepatitis B, tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid fever, AIDS and pneumonia by enlisting the help of salmonella.

When the final flight of Atlantis returns she and Curtiss will examine their Recombinant Attenuated Salmonella Vaccine (RASV) payload to determine if microgravity makes the experimental vaccine that already proves powerful against pneumonia even stronger after going to outer space.

It sounds backwards; HIV cure leads to treatment. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? In this case, an accidental cure in one man of the debilitating autoimmune disease has given new hope to a new genetically-engineered treatment.

Sangamo Biosciences Inc. is developing a new form of gene therapy driven by the case of patient Timothy Brown who may be the only person that’s ever been cured of AIDS.

Brown received a stem-cell transplant in Berlin in 2007 that transferred genetic material to him from one of the 2 percent of people with natural immunity to HIV, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Feb. 14 issue.

He’s been off treatment since then, and no trace of the AIDS virus has been found in his body, according to Brown’s hematologist.

Here’s Timothy Brown’s story:

Bloomberg’s Shannon Pettypiece reports.

A cancer patient is helping doctors at the Mayo Clinic unlock a few genetic secrets. Rose Ellen Heley allowed oncologists to decode her DNA and map her genome.

Mayo Clinic researchers have learned something about her bone marrow cancer in the process that could help others suffering from cancer.

Dr. Keith Stewart says we are entering into the era of individualized medicine and using genetics will help treat all sorts of diseases including cancer.

For years, people thought the Egyptian king was murdered but new DNA evidence is pointing to a different killer. the 3,300-year-old pharaoh King Tutankhamun likely died from complications of a broken leg that was exacerbated by malaria, according to a two-year study of his mummy and family members.

They found that the young king had a club foot and cleft palate and probably walked with a cane.

Agricultural scientists in India say they have developed a variety of rice that requires no cooking and can be eaten simply after being soaked in water.

One thing is for sure. Science doesn’t do certainty. No matter how close a researcher gets to complete certainty there is always room to know more. Therefore uncertainty is a scientific fact. And we need to get comfortable with it.

From taxonomic tussles over classifying the giant panda to more controversial science like climate change and genetics, uncertainty is a driving force pushing science forward and opening up the opportunity for insight and breakthrough discoveries.

The International Cancer Genome Project is the largest genetic undertaking since the Human Genome Project. It is trying to sequence the DNA of 50 types of cancer over the next few years.

Researchers decoded the genome for lung and skin cancer in mid December. CBC reports.

Fun fact: Scientists discovered one mutation per every 15 cigarettes smoked in lung cancer patients.

Christian pastor Ray Comfort decided to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by writing his own introduction and handing out free copies of the book to college students across the country.

Comfort is responsible for handing out over 100,000 copies of the abridged Darwin book. His version includes 54 pages that attempt to debunk the theory of evolution that Darwin lays out in the book.

Did this anti-science stunt work or backfire?

The Comfort campaign targeted the top 100 college campuses, where students were were just happy to get a free copy of the book.

National Center for Science Education video:

NCSE public service announcement.

Every year the brightest science minds head south in July–somewhat like the swallows to Capistrano. This is more like the string theorists to the world Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

There, they meet in an unconference, trade brilliant notions and form collaborations to address real-world problems. Sponsored by Nature and O’Reilly Media, SciFoo ’09 included a raft of science celebrities, scientists and interested looky-loos.

SciFoo attendee Dr. Shirley Wu was on the scene and gave REALscience a bird’s eye view. Dr. Kirsten “Kiki” Sanford (The Bird’s Brain blog) also gives a little report from SciBarCamp, another science unconference nearby and just before SciFoo. The host of This Week in Science (and good friend of REALscience) talked about “spinning science.”

Most of what happens at SciFoo stays at SciFoo. But a few things trickle out, once the excitement settles. Here’s the REALscience report from last year for reference.

Watch the video Science Foo Camp 2009: by Nature Video

Watch science comedian Brian Malow on Late Night with Craig Ferguson.

Photo of SciFoo courtesy of Duncan Hull

For the full SciFoo ’09 report listen here.

Swine flu is racing across the world, spreading a deadly virus from continent to continent. The World Health Organization is worried about the beginning of a pandemic. The Center For Disease Control is trying to learn all it can about the new strain of human influenza A H1N1. And, vaccine manufacturers are hoping to offer some protection against this virus by fall.

But what makes this virus so tricky, so unusual and so deadly? Well, science is rushing to answer those questions.

Listen here.

Here’s the live virus outbreak map.

Photo by C. S. Goldsmith and A. Balish, CDC

Science is facing some big questions, like how will we capture excess atmospheric carbon dioxide or how will we overcome antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections?

But, a one-celled organism that lives in the sea may have the answers to health and environmental issues living inside.

Cyanobacteria and bacteriophages are knocking down barriers in biology and could even help the environment down the road. But first, scientists need to figure out how these tiny sea creatures tick.

After a very private battle with cancer best-selling author Michael Crichton died in Los Angeles. The man who made a career of making scientists perpetually angry could not outwit a devastating disease.

He opened the minds of hundreds of millions of readers around the world to scientific possibilities. Unfortunately his what ifs were enough to terrorize and tantalize audiences.

But his nuggets of scientific truth were layered with intriguing fiction that often blurred the lines between the two. And that is what angered the scientific research community.

But I suspect even his most vocal critics will miss the fascinating machinations of this creative mind.

Bruce Edwards Ivins was the man behind the anthrax terror scare in 2001, according to an FBI task force. The agency, working for seven years with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, says the evidence shows that Dr. Ivins, a respected government microbiologist acted alone when he mailed the deadly substance to members of the media and to politicians.

After Dr. Ivins killed himself, possibly due to the pressure the FBI was placing on him, the task force release some of the accumulated documents, pointing to Dr. Ivins as the anthrax mailer, who injured 17 and killed 5.

Scientists who worked with Dr. Ivins and those in the same field think the evidence is not as airtight as the government would have us believe.

REALscience will stay with this story and follow the science leads to try to answer the big questions in this case.

Some of the top scientific minds met at University of Washington last spring. Their purpose–to discuss the future of personal genomics.

They met on the eve of the passage of the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act.

MIT biology professor Eric Lander, The Wellcome Trust’s Dr. Leena Peltonen, Bill Gates III, and Harvard Geneticist George Church discussed the state of the science.

Dr. Maynard Olson moderated the panel as they discussed the implications of knowing genetic predispositions for disease, talked about ways to get the public more engaged and, they shared whether or not they each had their genome sequenced or would if the chance arose.

Bill Gates, through his foundation, is trying to find cures to what ails us. He’s taking on malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases that kill millions every year. With better understanding of genes and our whole genetic map–our genomes–he says we can eradicate these global killers.

Eric Lander Background (26 minutes)
eric-lander-biology-background.mp3

Discussion moderated by Maynard Olson (37 minutes)
moderated-discussion-with-maynard-olson.mp3

Bill Gates comments (8 minutes)
bill-gates-on-personalized-genome.mp3

What’s the difference between a human and a prehistoric fish-like worm? Well, scientists are just beginning to answer that question.

It will likely take them years to figure it all out. But new research is already uncovering how genes evolve to perform different functions.

Sometimes the world seems too complex to be natural. But scientist continually prove that nature is both complicated and natural.

From a butterfly’s wings to the perfect spirals of a seashell, it’s all just patterns. Now new research is showing how cells migrate–also a pattern.

And, this holds great promise for stopping the spread of cancer.

There are few examples in nature of a species returning to its more primitive self.

But a tiny freshwater fish has done just that and it might help answer some big questions about human disease like cancer.

Some of us must have sugar. It might come in the form of sweet soda or piles of cookies. We affectionately refer to those cravings as a sweet tooth or those having a taste for sugar.

Well, scientists are learning that a genetic mutation might be triggering those insatiable cravings.

A group of scientists is banking on the world to help solve some big diseases. Cures to finding proteins to stop cancer, Alzheimer’s or HIV may lie in global game players.

A new online videogame project, called FoldIt is looking for players to help biologists better understand protein structures.

The high score could win you a Nobel Prize in Medicine.

The current rice shortage being felt around the world doesn’t have just one source. It seems that many reasons are causing the food shortage. And, one is quite elemental.

Today marks the 55th Anniversary of the discovery of DNA’s structure. It’s also the 5th Anniversary of the fully sequenced human genome. Yesterday the U.S. Senate passed the first genetic non-discrimination bill. It heads to the House where it will likely pass and President Bush says he’ll sign the GINA into law.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is calling for a National DNA database to help solve more crimes and protect innocent people from being convicted. He’ll appear on Fox’s America’s Most Wanted tomorrow.

To mark all of these genetic occasions, National Institute of Health has declared April 25 National DNA Day.

Everybody has 23 pairs of chromosomes. It’s just part of our genetic makeup. We get half from our mothers and half from our fathers. And that combination of genes outlines our natural abilities, our appearance and even what diseases we could develop. Now a company in California is trying to make decoding individual genome’s as common as a basic medical test.

British scientists now have permission to create human-cow hybrid embryos to further stem cell research of diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Protests began last fall leading up to the decision on January 17. Many are opposed to the crossing of the line between animals and people. Previously mouse-cow hybrid embryos proved that this process would probably work with human cells.

Just in time for the Holidays. Cats that glow under ultraviolet light. Researchers in South Korea have successfully inserted a fluorescent gene into cloned cats. The purpose is to show that cats can be created with genetic disorders to be better studied and to find cures to human hereditary diseases.

Scientists in Japan have created a genetically modified mouse that is unafraid of cats. It’s like the old Tom & Jerry cartoons…but real.

Most people spend a lot of time and energy trying to kill bacteria–especially the ones in our mouths. Most of the 600 types of bacteria are helpful but some help destroy our teeth. Now dentists are trying to use new DNA knowledge to identify bad bacteria that can do more than just rot teeth.