Ask a Scientist

Take a few extra strength aspirin first. Platelet aggregation is a bitch.

 

So, does anyone have an idea why someone would have red eyes, but only in the exterior corners? Is the distance from the tear duct enough to have white eyes near the nose, but red on the other side of the iris? Not looking for a diagnosis, just a list of possible reasons. (only getting half-drunk, sleeping slightly better than "poorly", etc.)

 

What would happen if you flew a space craft into a black hole?

 

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As in if you were on a spacecraft flying in, or what would you observe if you were watching?

 

Not sure if this video explains exactly what you're wondering, but it's interesting and relevant.



Unless you have some super tough spaceship that can withstand the extreme gravity, I assume that the same thing would happen.

Oh, and in another video this guy explains how it's possible (at least with the current math and theories) to do some sort of figure 8 around 2 nearby black holes, getting close to the event horizon without actually falling in, and leave the area at an earlier time than you went in. Backwards time travel without a flux capacitor. GREAT SCOTT!

 

I'm wondering if the type of stuff Ray Kurzweil talks about, technological singularity etc, has much backing behind it? I'm especially interested in anything that has to do with mind uploading/transfer, and anything that goes along the "immortality" type route. On that note, I am also interested in whether Aubrey De Grey and SENS is considered to be feasible. I know there was about a page of discussion about this on the old board, and I found it really interesting. If anyone can answer these questions and/or direct me to somewhere where I can learn for myself, it would be much appreciated.

 

My Bio teacher brought this stuff up. Apparently there's some chick that died a long time ago from cancer but we're still making her cells reproduce in a medium to test drugs on etc.
My question, would we theoretically be able to clone her from those cells? And is she really dead (considering her cells are in labs all over the world)?

 

I'm writing a bit of science fiction, and although it isn't going to be overly heavy on scientific accuracy, I'd like it to be as close as possible.

My question is this: is there a specific term for engineering a virus so it is airborne? (I want to use the term 'weaponise', but I don't know if that is right). Also, what would the term be for taking a cure for that same virus, and making that airborne as well, or would it be the same term?

 

HeLa cells are cancer cells from "Helen Lane" (not her real name). No, we can't clone her from those cells. By definition, cancer cells are normal cells that have mutated. Furthermore, since those cells were cultured a few decades ago, they've mutated further and further still.

 

Aerosolize?

 

A lot organisms or cells used in labs are more or less clones because it makes genetics work easier. When you're doing crosses to figure out, for example where gene X is, it's easiest if the background (i.e., all the other genes which you're not interested in) is as homogenous as possible. Otherwise you get complicated genotype ratios or odd phenotypes. Basically it is a way to curb the complexity to make the lives of scientists easier.

I'm a bio major at UT, I work in a genetics lab.

 

I couldn't tell you the rationale behind HeLa cells, as I've never worked with them, and Wikipedia doesn't explain it either. They are immortal cells, which mean that they can divide an infinite number of times as long as the proper growth conditions exist. Wikipedia tells me that they are rather hardy and adapted to living in growth culture mediums. I imagine it's similar to how Chinese Hampster Ovary cells are used a lot - they just happen to be convenient to work with.

It seems you're asking the questions as though the cells are being used to research anti-cancer drugs. I couldn't tell you if they are or aren't used that way, but my suspicion is that they aren't. For what it's worth, HeLa cells are derived from a cervical carcinoma (and her real name was Henrietta Lacks, "Helen Lane" being a cover name to hide the fact the guy who first cultured them did so without permission). Cancer is not a monolithic disease, it just describes growth of abnormal cells in the body. Every type of cancer is different, so much so that you could very well say that each person's cancer is different. Some types of breast cancer, for example, over-express an estrogen receptor. If someone's breast cancer does over-express that receptor, we have a drug, Herceptin, which specifically targets the cancer cells through that receptor and inhibits their growth. HeLa cells would be useless when researching that drug; what they do is infect animal models with HER2+++ breast carcinoma so that they grow lots of tumours, then give the mice Herceptin, and then look at the results. So, when you ask "hasn't the disease changed in 30 years?", that question doesn't quite make sense; it's still fundamentally the same pathology. We could treat cancer from 30 years ago with modern anti-cancer drugs, if that's what you mean, and we could do the opposite (30 year old drugs on modern cancer) but the latter would be stupid.

 

You won't get very far in many research programs if you can't narrow in on something specific. This is obviously not true in all cases, since the prevalence of genome-wide association studies is and has been going through the roof for the past decade (ever since we could sequence entire genomes at a reasonable pace/price). In them your basic outlook is "Let's come up with as much raw data as possible, and try to figure it out later".

In classical molecular genetic studies, you want to strip away the noise because you're typically after something very specific. Homozygoused lines enable this ability. So I suppose the answer to your question "is the kind of randomness that's removed by this method still a bit too complex for current research?" is not in every case but sometimes yes.

 

Along the same line of thinking ZPA explained; scientists are always trying to explore, define, or defend a hypothesis. In order to give an answer to the hypothesis that minimizes ambiguity, all potential influences and their respective effects are identified and an experimental design is created that eliminates undesired effects. So in the case of cancer, nucleotide sequence is an influence and having a test pool with an identical sequence removes that factor from consideration when considering explanations for the results. There are many layers and permutations of the idea, but in the end all of this is done so that a researcher can put their name on a paper and say "See I proved/explored this idea and proved that I'm right!"

 

This statement might have been true before the mid-90s, when good ARVs finally came to market (and, curiously, life expectancy of HIV+ individuals skyrocketed, combined with an overall drop in death rates due to infectious diseases). Not so much anymore. This article happens to be from 1998, so maybe it gets a pass, but the claim that ARVs make HIV/AIDS worse - which is patently untrue - is pretty much a hallmark of quackery.

Frankly, nothing I know about HIV/AIDS has room for syphilis in its paradigm. I'm not so arrogant to think that we'll never be proved wrong, as knowledge of immunology changes at a ridiculously fast pace, but I frankly don't lend a lot of credibility to HIV denialist claims, much less explanations made in their favour by lay magazines. I'm sure you can agree that the one place HIV/AIDS research is lacking is in cheap, affordable anti-retrovirals. They work, and it's hard enough as it is to put out good information about HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, and find compliant patients in the third world.