The potential use of genetic engineering, the alteration of the genetic material (i.e. DNA) in living organisms, for therapeutic purposes, or “gene therapy”, holds the promise of curing many diseases. The potential use of gene therapy as a preventative treatment for genetic diseases, however, has been controversial, primarily because such preventative measures may involve manipulating the embryo. The beginning of life is an event so universally cherished that any interventions made in this somewhat ambiguous period that marks the beginning of existence, even to prevent disease, is simply too sacrilegious to consider. Yet, at the rate that science is progressing,…

In today’s experiment, we are going to isolate chemical A, purify chemical B, quantify chemical C, and characterize chemical D. Then we will somehow combine A, B, C, and D in a Dr. Frankensteinesque attempt to synthesize chemical E. Chemicals A, B, C, and D are probably interchangeable, and there is no particular sequence in which the reactions need to take place. No lab manuals, and no rules. Experiment ad lib! We should expect a small explosion which will consist of a bang, a crack, and a flash of light. Scary, perhaps, but it is not at all dangerous…. Or…

In 1907, Dr. Alois Alzheimer published the first case study on a patient with what is now known as Alzheimer’s disease. Shakespeare almost beat him to it in the “All the World’s a Stage…” monologue from As You Like It, describing the last “scene” of a 7 part life ending in “second childishness and mere oblivion/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” The Canada Study on Health and aging estimated that 8% of the Canadian population over 65 years of age had a form of dementia and that 5.1% had Alzheimer’s disease (1). Alzheimer’s dementia has a devastating impact…

The Scientists base their research on a principle hypothesis that complex systems can be understood by seeking out its most fundamental constituents. In other words, the complex problems are resolved by dividing them into smaller, simpler and more tractable units. Hence, physicists search for the basic particles and forces; chemists seek to understand chemical bonds; and biologists explore DNA sequences and molecular structures focusing on a particular gene or a protein in their efforts to understand organisms. This approach of “divide and conquer” is termed reductionism (Williams, 1997; Ahn et al, 2006a). The Biologists Reductionism approach is a science of…

(August 2004) Biological Diversity For approximately 4.5 billion years, the Earth has been evolving from a barren volcanic landscape into the vibrant globe full of life that it is today. The first forms of life, small microorganisms, have been found in fossils from 3.5 billion years ago. Around 1.5 billion years ago, motile microorganisms emerged allowing life to migrate to different environments with different environmental conditions like increased exposure to ultraviolet radiation or higher temperatures. Microorganisms began to evolve with the changing environmental conditions of the planet. These new environmental conditions, acting as selective pressures, drove the evolutionary process. They…

(August 2004) 1.0 The Beginning The planet Earth is approximately 4.6 billion years old. During the initial 0.7 billion years following its formation, the early Earth was heavily bombarded by solar system materials, such as comets and asteroid-sized objects. The energy released by the largest impacts was sufficient to evaporate the oceans and destroy any existing life on the Earth’s surface. The first signs of life evidenced by the fossil record came into being approximately 3.5 billion years ago [1]. Figure 1. The early Earth’s reducing atmosphere provided conditions for the formation of organic polymers from either terrestrial or extraterrestrial…