Lifeboat Foundation

The patients always knew that when he stimulated their arm, it was him doing it, not them. And when they stimulated their arm, they were doing it, not him. So Penfield said, he couldn’t stimulate the will. He could never trick the patients into thinking it was them doing it. He said, the patients always retained a correct sense of agency. They always know if they did it or if he did it.

So he said the will was not something he could stimulate, meaning it was not material.

Continue reading “Why Pioneer Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield Said the Mind Is More Than the Brain” »

We have finally found time cells in the human brain – they help explain how we recall when events happened, and they could be a target for Alzheimer’s therapies.

The director of the National Institutes of Health explains promising developments in the efforts to deal with the novel coronavirus spreading across the globe.

Researchers of the Hubrecht Institute (KNAW) in Utrecht, The Netherlands, and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, United Kingdom, have discovered a new way in which the human body repairs DNA damage caused by a degradation product of alcohol. That knowledge underlines the link between alcohol consumption and cancer. The research groups of Puck Knipscheer and Ketan J. Patel worked together on this study and published the results in the scientific journal Nature on the 4th of March.

Our DNA is a daily target for a barrage of damage caused by radiation or toxic substances such as alcohol. When alcohol is metabolized, acetaldehyde is formed. Acetaldehyde causes a dangerous kind of DNA damage—the interstrand crosslink (ICL)—that sticks together the two strands of the DNA. As a result, it obstructs cell division and protein production. Ultimately, an accumulation of ICL damage may lead to cell death and cancer.

WUHAN (China Daily/ANN): With the public eagerly anticipating effective drugs to cure the novel coronavirus pneumonia, a medical ethics committee at the forefront of fighting the outbreak in Wuhan has quickened the pace of approving clinical trials.

Several programmes related to the diagnosis and treatment of the disease have gained ethical approval from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and are being carried out by the university, including two drugs that are under clinical trials, said Chen Jianguo, vice-president of the university.

The two drugs are remdesivir, a drug being developed by US-based pharmaceutical company Gilead, and chloroquine phosphate, which is available on the market to treat malaria.

Rutgers engineers have created a tabletop device that combines a robot, artificial intelligence and near-infrared and ultrasound imaging to draw blood or insert catheters to deliver fluids and drugs.

Their most recent research results, published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, suggest that autonomous systems like the image-guided robotic device could outperform people on some complex medical tasks.

Medical robots could reduce injuries and improve the efficiency and outcomes of procedures, as well as carry out tasks with minimal supervision when resources are limited. This would allow health care professionals to focus more on other critical aspects of medical care and enable emergency medical providers to bring advanced interventions and resuscitation efforts to remote and resource-limited areas.

These types of therapies are used when there are no other alternatives available for diseases that can be very serious or even fatal.

A treatment that has already been used by several hospitals in Wuhan, although experts consider that ‘the evidence on its effectiveness is scarce.’

Continue reading “HIV drug successfully treats coronavirus patient in medical first in Spain’s Andalucia” »

China’s biotech companies have been gearing up to repurpose existing drugs, approved in the West for other viruses, as treatments for the coronavirus outbreak originating in Wuhan.

Last month, Hangzhou-based Ascletis Pharma applied to the Chinese authorities to test two HIV protease inhibitors (ritonavir and ASC09) in clinical trials to treat COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus (Table 1). And Suzhou-based BrightGene Bio-Medical Technology announced in early February that it would begin to manufacture Gilead Sciences’ remdesivir (GS-5734), a broad-spectrum investigational antiviral, as a treatment for coronavirus infection.

Existing antivirals and knowledge gained from the SARS and MERS outbreaks gain traction as the fastest route to fight the current coronavirus epidemic.

Scientists at Uppsala University have proposed an addition to the theory of evolution that can explain how and why genes move on chromosomes. The hypothesis, called the SNAP Hypothesis, is presented in the scientific journal PLOS Genet ics.

Life originated on Earth almost 4 billion years ago and diversified into a vast array of species. How did this diversification occur? The Theory of Evolution, together with the discovery of DNA and how it replicates, provide an answer and a mechanism. Mutations in DNA occur from generation to generation, and can be selected if they help individuals to adapt better to their environment. Over time, this has led to the separation of organisms into the different species that now inhabit all ecosystems.

Current theory holds that evolution involves mistakes made when replicating a gene. This explains how genes can mutate over time and acquire new functions. However, a mystery in biology is that the relative locations of genes on chromosomes also change over time. This is obvious in bacteria, as different species often have the same genes in very different relative locations. Since the origin of life, genes have apparently been changing location. The questions are, how and why do genes move their relative locations?