President Bush Signs GINA Into Law!

Washington, D.C. – May 21, 2008

 

 Grisha Enikolopov, Ph.D.

April 28, 2008

Scientists Find Stem Cells For the First Time in the Pituitary

Their presence in the hormone-secreting gland of mice suggests a means of adapting to stress and life changes

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – A team of researchers led by scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have for the first time identified stem cells that allow the pituitary glands of mice to grow even after birth. They found that, in contrast to most adult stem cells, these cells are distinct from those that fuel the initial growth of this important organ. The results suggest a novel way that the hormone-secreting gland may adapt, even in adolescents and adults, to traumatic stress or to normal life changes like pregnancy. Seeking Adult Stem Cells Maturity, in some respects, brings diminished possibilities. As a fertilized egg cell repeatedly divides to grow into a mature animal, most of the resulting cells become ever more specialized. But a small number of cells, known as stem cells, remain uncommitted even as they spawn more specialized progeny. The most versatile stem cells, taken from days-old embryos, are able to form any cell type — but studying them in people is controversial. Even in adults, however, other types of stem cell persist that have a more limited repertoire. Some replace specific cells as they wear out; others help to rebuild damaged tissues. Still other stem cells are suspected by some scientists of starting or maintaining cancers.   In spite of their importance, stem cells are hard to spot among the multitude of cells in complex tissue. Several years ago, neuroscientist Grigori Enikolopov, Ph.D., an associate professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), and his colleagues developed a tool to look for stem cells that give rise to new adult brain cells. Researchers had known that a gene called Nestin was active in these neural stem cells. The CSHL team genetically engineered mice so that the same conditions that activate Nestin in a particular cell also make it glow green under ultraviolet light.   Using these mice gives researchers an important pointer to cells that may be adult stem cells. Almost 100 research teams around the world have now used these special mice to help find adult stem cells in hair follicles, liver, muscle, and other tissues.   Looking at the pituitary One place where stem cells had been suspected — but never found — is the pituitary gland.  This organ, which in people is about the size of a pea, sits at the base of the brain, where it secretes hormones that regulate various processes throughout the body. In mice, the gland develops in the embryo, but then has a second growth spurt. “A few weeks after they are born,” says Dr. Enikolopov, “the pituitary undergoes massive expansion” that suggests a role for adult stem cells.   Anatoli Gleiberman, Ph.D., a researcher in the lab of pituitary expert M. Geoff Rosenfeld at the University of California, San Diego, initiated a collaboration between the two labs to look for pituitary stem cells.  The researchers used the Nestin-tracking mice to identify candidate cells in the anterior pituitary, the section of the organ that secretes hormones. They then used other techniques to show that these are true stem cells. “There are six main lineages in the adult pituitary,” says Dr. Enikolopov, “and we can demonstrate that one adult stem cell can generate all six lineages,” with each cell type secreting a different hormone.   A distinct kind of stem cell These cells differ from most adult stem cells, however. “In most cases that we know,” says Dr. Enikolopov, “cells that become stem cells of the adult have been also contributing to embryonic development and continue to serve as stem cells in the adult.” The research team demonstrated that adult stem cells in the pituitary did not help construct the embryonic organ.   Their research, the scientists suggest, indicates that the adult mouse pituitary includes two similar — but not identical — types of hormone-producing cells: some that grew in the developing embryo, and some that appeared later. They speculate that having two sets of cells may let the organ respond differently to changing body conditions. Dr. Enikolopov notes that hormones strongly influence human neuropsychiatric phenomena, including stress and depression that are his main research focus. “All are mediated through the pituitary,” he said, so changes that happen during the later growth of the gland could have lasting effects.    “Genetic approaches identify adult pituitary stem cells” appears in the April 29, 2008 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Along with Dr. Enikolopov, Dr. Michael Geoff Rosenfeld, who is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine, is a corresponding author of the paper. The complete citation is as follows: Anatoli S. Gleiberman, Tatyana Michurina, Juan M. Encinas, Jose L. Roig, Peter Krasnov, Francesca Balordi, Gord Fishell, Michael G. Rosenfeld, and Grigori Enikolopov. The paper is available online at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0801644105.   Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is a private, nonprofit research and education institution dedicated to exploring molecular biology and genetics in order to advance the understanding and ability to diagnose and treat cancers, neurological diseases and other causes of human suffering.

For more information, visit www.cshl.edu

  

 

Here is an excerpt from the book>

 

 "New worlds are coming into existence; others are dying. It is enough for man to know that the earth, life and man are still in the throes of creation"-

Sir Arthur Keith

 

 

Only in our day has the mind of man grasped the bold outlines of its own history-the origin and history of life on the earth. Today, too, the history of earth itself is being thrown backward into cosmic cloud. Triumphs of endless inquiry have so lifted man in the scale of living things that he may now meet and understand essential truth concerning his own nature and his place in nature. Indispensable fragments of this story of life rest securely in hundreds of volumes-the tributes of a dozen sciences. Can the outline and meaning of these many fragments be fitted into a few pages? This seems possible.

The whole of the known drama of life was performed in a narrow zone-quite near to the very surface of our own small planet. Even bacteria disappear in the upper reaches of the earth's atmosphere, while other life extends downward only to the ocean's floor. At no earlier time in earth's history has this been different. Though fossil fragments of once living things are found in coal and rock strata now a few thousand feet beneath the soil on which we walk, it is clear that these veins were land surfaces or ocean floors when they trapped the bodies of organisms. If, in an Arabian Nights' excursion, we could scan the earth from afar (say from a point 24,000 miles away, which -is one tenth of the distance to the moon), we could rightly sense the narrow spread of life. On the great sphere that would largely fill our view to East or West we should then see all life imprisoned in a thin film-a living skin-tightly fitted to the very surface of that sphere. As we now know it, life sticks to the place where there is liquid water, with salts dissolved in it; where carbon, nitrogen and oxygen abound; where temperatures do not much outrun the meager range now obtaining in our lower atmosphere; and where surfaces can absorb sunlight for a continuous flow of free energy. On many planets or distant stars living matter probably finds a similarly cramped existence. That, however, is a thing unknown, and, if true, all such life probably arose only ages after the birth of the planet that is its home. Life thus presents itself as the most circumscribed and contingent thing in a world of things. It seems to be among the newer products of an ever-building universe.

Though life is most narrowly limited in space, the events that led to its origin (creation) fill an amazing lapse of time. Formation of earth and solar system was no affair of haste. And, thereafter, one or two billion years were necessary to form the compounds, and to attain the conditions of temperature and moisture on the earth's surface, that led lingeringly to the first and simplest living matter. The history of these two prolonged epochs is of surpassing interest. Though there are firm facts bearing upon the origin and earlier state of the earth, much is still unknown. It is not surprising, therefore, that the known facts are now summarized in two different ways.

An older view treats the earth as a fragment of the sun-its original gaseous materials as fiery hot as are those of the sun's surface today. It would follow that later stages of earth history were mainly an epoch of cooling and condensation, associated with a continuous formation of new and increasingly complex substances. The newer view, largely born of additional facts only recently obtained, traces both earth and sun-or at least the earth-from a cold cosmic cloud. This view derives our solar system, including the meteorites that fall upon the earth today, from an immense cloud of gaseous matter in which floated relatively smaller amounts of dust and solid particles. Probably the sun was formed from the much larger and perhaps more-or-less detached portion of that immense cloud. The rotational and orbital speeds of remaining portions of the cloud were of rates that precluded the formation of an accompanying smaller sun and provided instead an elongated cloud circling the sun. That elongated and disc-shaped cloud later broke into many pieces which were destined to form the planets and the meteorites. Repeated fractures o€ the thinner edge of cloud-the part nearest the sun-gave origin to the smaller planets, including earth. Against the strong pull of the sun, or perhaps because of the limited gravitational fields of the gaseous particles, the lighter gases of the cloud could not be held by the smaller planets. For this reason, these planets were built mainly or solely from the cold meteoric dust and solids. Thus a variety of fairly complex molecules, already formed in the prehistory of the pregnant cloud, fell toward a common center and gave form and mass to an early and growing earth and to its midget twin, the moon.

       How conditions favoring the eventual origin of life would arise under each of these two views can now be sketched. And first to be noticed is the course of events under the older view. When the earth-building material first separated from the sun, both its temperature and its gaseous state assured that several hundreds of millions of years must elapse before conditions favorable to the origin of life could exist on a sun-fragment of the size or mass of the earth. Following separation from the sun, the process of cooling and condensation of gases was speeded up. And though very few chemical compounds could exist in the superheated gases of either the sun or the newborn earth, many such compounds would be formed while the isolated earth slowly acquired lower temperatures. Under chemical laws new compounds must form in cooling gases.

            The continued formation of a variety of new chemical substances was essential to the origin of life, and also to its maintenance after it had arisen. Some such stable and durable combinations (rocks, minerals) are still being formed from the release and cooling of heated gases within the hot volcanoes of the earth today. The building of solid-earth material from super-heated gases continues to occur in our own day and is witnessed by our own eyes. Some of the events and conditions that would attend the building of earth from cold dust and solids-the second view are of highest interest because with each passing year it becomes more probable that they are parts of actual earth history. First of all, such materials would provide the earth with what geologists regard as its original composition and structure-a central core of iron overlaid with a mantle of silicates of iron and magnesium and encased in an outer layer of basalt. Perhaps, however, iron and silica may have been fairly equally distributed within the early core of the solid earth and may have attained their separation only in later phases of the planet's history. Among other things, this newer view also satisfactorily accounts for such facts as the presence of water-although the earth-cloud early lost its lighter gases-and for a newly found constant chemical (isotopic) composition of the matter of earth and of meteorites.

While the cloud was condensing under gravitational forces to form the earth, its gaseous material was lost and its particles of iron and silica were concentrated toward the center of the mass. The condensing cloud, by that time, was heated appreciably by the gravitational fall of particles and also from the exposure of its rotating surface to the sun. Heat was also being lost continuously both through outward, radiation and by the escape of gaseous material. Warmth, but nothing resembling solar heat, should have prevailed in the earth-cloud at that period. At a still later stage, after condensation was largely accomplished, the more important internal source of heat came and still comes from radioactivity within the mantle and basalt layers of the earth. Uranium, thorium and other members of the radioactive series continue to sustain this powerful though now slowly decreasing fountain of heat.

      This supply of heat from within and below the earth's crust was apparently capable of decomposing a part of the basalt layer into the granite that rose in the crust to form the continents and mountains. It also accounts for the presence of water and for the several gases of the atmosphere. Thus the heating of hydrated silicates and aluminates released steam, which rose to the surface as water. When carbides reacted with oxides of iron they formed carbon dioxide. Nitrides were hydrolyzed by steam to ammonia; and in hot regions ammonia decomposed into nitrogen and hydrogen. Finally, at a later epoch, chemical changes induced by light added our present supply of oxygen.

    Most alluring is Kuiper's approximation to proof that not merely a few stars, as hitherto supposed, but literally billions of stars must have formed systems of planets as did our sun. This greatly increases the number of places in the universe where conditions are suitable for separate and independent origins of life.

The events of later earth history, which prepared the way for the origin of life and to careers for living things, may now be considered almost wholly apart from any special view of the way in which this planet acquired its substance, its temperature, and its atmosphere. Parts-though not all-of that fertile history can be outlined here.

    When the earth became cool enough to permit its water vapor to condense and remain in liquid state on its surface, or when steam was released from hydrated silicates in its self-heating interior to form water on its surface, this planet of ours surrendered to the agent that would thereafter dominate and repeatedly remold its surface (and eventually assist in stopping its daily rotation by tidal action) and as a by-product build the cradle for life. Forever thereafter water would accumulate in smaller and larger amounts in oceans and billions of pools; and always thereafter water would leach chemical compounds from the diversified rocks, thus giving opportunity for endless inter-actions of these compounds in that unrivaled chemical laboratory-an aqueous solution. The purely natural forces that attended either a cooling or a slowly heating earth, and which later formed its first pool of water, decreed that innumerable new combinations of matter-each combination with new properties-would assemble in those waters.

The few gases that remained in a free state on a cooling earth, or the more abundant gases released by chemical action on a slowly heating globe, together with the sunlight, which now became an intermittent external source of light and energy, assured  a still greater variety of new chemical transformations, because gases and light rays both actively invade water. Under the superlatively favorable conditions of an aqueous medium, these rays and gases early began their unending work on the water-held leaching's of the rocks. In the older view, that primeval atmosphere probably contained very little nitrogen or carbon dioxide or oxygen in the free state, but ammonia, aqueous vapor, hydrocarbons (methane), and traces of carbon dioxide from active volcanoes-along with ammonia and oxides of nitrogen from the flame of lightning-were doubtless present.

    In the newer view, all the gases of our present atmosphere, like the earth's huge supply of water, are amply accounted for. The atmosphere of the newly contracted earth-cloud was probably rich in hydrogen, methane, ammonia and water, but without carbon dioxide. Along with the gradual loss of hydrogen, in the manner noted above and through later, photochemical dissociation of water in the high atmosphere, the whole atmosphere shifted to the "oxidized" compounds-carbon dioxide, nitrogen, water and oxygen. And in either view, the nitrogen of ammonia, along with other nitrogen and oxygen earlier imprisoned in the great rock that is the earth, then awaited the rendezvous at the pool-the water crucible-for nuptials with compounds of carbon, sulfur, iron and molecular hydrogen, whose issue would exhibit the properties of life.

But who could be more handicapped in identifying the simplest manifestations of life and organism than the unschooled human being of today who views both of these things from present high attainments within himself-from products of a billion years of further growth of both life and organism? To men in general, an apprehension of even those large and up-to-date clumps of life called mushroom, clam, cow and elm is sufficiently vague and unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, the view that life and organism-two names, but inseparable in thought-in their crudest and simplest forms can be conceived to result from groupings and reactions of purely inorganic substance, may be maintained and well defended by the penetrant knowledge of today's specialist. "Life is the manifestations of organism, when manifestation is defined as anything perceivable by an observer, and organism is defined as a group of chemical systems in which free energy is released as part of the reactions and in which some of this free energy is used in the reactions of one or more of the remaining systems. Any pair of chemical reactions satisfying these conditions is an organism. Things as simple as two inorganic systems can meet the requirements”.

Here; however, the case for naturalism-a case on precisely that item which so halts and baffles thought in most men really rests on a base much broader than a wealth of inorganic compounds. This follows from the fact that the materials at hand for the building of earliest life and organism were not limited on an unstable earth to inorganic substances. At that time and place organic materials too had been arising during perhaps a billion years. That process and several of the naturally arising organic molecules and colloidal particles now become additional subject matter in the development of life.

The very simplest pre-existing organic matter was simple hydrocarbon-the gift of air and stone-and this earliest union of carbon and hydrogen, under the action of photochemical processes (ultraviolet light, and lightning in the "reducing" atmosphere) 4 must have yielded a variety of substances such as aldehydes, alcohols, ketones and organic acids. These derived compounds can, in their turn, react with ammonia to form amides, amines, "ring" compounds such as porphyrins, and other nitrogenous substances. These later interactions of ammonia with the derivatives of hydrocarbon hurdled many steps in the long march to life. In the course of a thousand million years they could give to the waters of early earth a rich supply of organic material, including amino acids and other substances highly significant to living matter. Again, carbon dioxide as well as hydrocarbon could add to the store of organic substance in the primitive waters of our planet. Recently it was learned that radioactivity-then more forceful than now-acting on carbon dioxide and water results in the formation of formaldehyde and formic acid. Significantly, moreover, this reaction is hastened (catalyzed) by that abundant inorganic substance, iron sulfate.

     To return to the question of organism: one may observe a way in which even that simplest "inorganic organism" could develop a system of transport of free energy. If that organism (note its worthy definition above) so evolved as to obtain its free energy from the oxidation of (abundant) hydrogen sulfide and used that energy to reduce carbon dioxide to an organic compound such as formic acid, with both o€ these reactions catalyzed by then existing inorganic substances, it developed the ability to produce adenylic acid. This substance, adenosine monophosphate, is of great importance to the living state. Organic phosphate compounds are present in all known persisting organisms where they serve to store free energy, transport it, and later release it to energy-using systems. Blum" has noted that "means of free energy transport may have been this key factor in the transition from the nonliving to the living state."

In ways not to be recounted here, but recently stated precisely by Blum and by Madison, the arrival of adenosine monophosphate provided a mold for recasting the "inorganic organism" into one that was mainly organic. Thus additional carbon compounds in the environment became available for use by the primitive organism; new organic molecules were formed within the organism; a means of multiplying the chance linkages of amino acids to form peptides and proteins was established; the process by which adenosine was formed involved also the presence and use of purine rings; and "if the adenylic acid system introduced the purine ring pattern which later became incorporated into nucleic acid structure, it seems reasonable to suppose that this pattern was perpetuated in association with nucleoproteins."

This stage in the development of organism and life, though equipped with nucleoproteins, was deficient in some properties those particular substances exhibit in the organisms familiar to us today. These properties relate especially to self-duplication, mutation and continuity on a genetic basis. A means of bridging this breach has been outlined by Madison. His proposal indicates how the now familiar nucleotides might be formed and a one-gene-one-enzyme system established. He bases his proposal on the fact that "a simple mechanism for genetic continuity of the organism and its progeny developed with the formation of the first nucleoprotein molecule"; that the chances for error in the duplication of molecules of nucleoproteins would be large in a mixture such as the primitive organism; and that when accompanied by the appropriate enzyme (catalytic) activity these molecular changes (mutations) would be transmitted to offspring, and genetic evolution would be thus initiated.

    It is possible, however, that the most primitive or very earliest matrix of organism and life involved organic substances to a greater extent than is indicated in the preceding account. In any case, only the uninformed may doubt that a rich variety of organic substances-some quite complicated ones among them preceded life in the waters of a bacteriologically sterile earth.

           

 

 

Here are some interesting thoughts concerning you and your life.

 

Normally, here is how people have come into this world.

 

A man and a women meet under an infinite number of circumstances, decide to mate, and then intentionally or accidentally produce offspring. From the point of view of either person engaging in this union of bodies, different choices and surroundings led to this new life’s existence into this world of time and space. An average set of circumstances might have proceeded like this; A man sees a woman and thinks to himself, ”O, what great shape she has, or eyes or personality” or whatever led to his choices was largely based on a social situation or physical appearance of the woman involved.

From the woman’s point of view her choice to mate may have been, “wow is he handsome and well manicured with fantastic manners”; or she may have thought, "he is well experienced in mating methods and desires the tenderness of his caress", or “he has a wonderful sense of humor and seems to care for my feelings”; or she may think to herself,” he is so intelligent and has the haircut I like or has fashionable dress, and his social stature is what I want.”

     So, for any number of personal choices and circumstances they both make, they mutually agree to mate, and Wa-La, a union of the couples DNA is produced based on their choices.

       But, how many men and women involved in this normal human activity consider, on the average, choosing a mate based purely on the fact that the new DNA entity they are producing is of a higher quality DNA? A life that will be less disease ridden from the lineages they came from and one that will have the highest possible intelligence available to that producing couple at that time. I think very few even consider such matters. Making a higher quality human should be the priority, whatever your race and lineage is. It is a fact that more than 50% of all retarded children are the result of the woman consuming alcohol during her pregnancy. Why should we as individuals continue to propagate legacy diseases when we now have the tools available in this lifetime to eliminate such things? If each one of us would consider getting control over his or her biology and produce a better person, then slowly, but eventually we would have a world of much less suffering. My challenge is to each one of you that reads this, unleash what it takes to get control over your biology and thus leave a legacy to your family lineage that is of incomparable value!, whoever you are. I speak not of a certain race, but of humanity as a whole. These great wars over “my book or religion is better than yours” between nations are the epitome of stupidity. We are and always will be one human race, and we are responsible to ourselves and not some “cloud” up there.The simple fact is that we all came from the same place originally.