Do Transplanted Organs Have Memories?
February 23, 2010
Care2.com
By Jurriaan Kamp
Transplant patients sometimes take on part of their donors’ personalities.
Glenda lost her husband, David, in a car crash. She made his organs available for transplant. A few years later, as part of a study by neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall, she met the young Spanish-speaking man who had received her late husband’s heart. Filled with emotion, Glenda asked if she could lay her hand on his chest. “I love you, David,” she said. “Everything’s copacetic.”
The young man’s mother, also present, was startled. “My son uses that word now,” she said. “He never said it before his heart transplant. I don’t know that word; it doesn’t exist in Spanish. But it was the first thing he said after the operation.”
Her son appeared to have changed in other ways too. Before, he had been a health-conscious vegetarian; now he craved meat and greasy food. He had loved heavy metal music; now he played nothing but fifties rock ’n’ roll. Glenda’s husband had been an ardent meat-lover and played in a rock ’n’ roll band.
Does the heart have a memory? Is part of an organ donor’s personality also transferred to the recipient in a transplant? Yes, contends Pearsall in his book The Heart’s Code, which provides other remarkable examples of transplanted hearts with memories.
An 8-year-old girl received the heart of a 10-year-old girl who had been murdered. The recipient ended up at a psychiatrist’s office, plagued by nightmares about her donor’s murderer. She said she knew who the man was. After a few sessions, the psychiatrist decided to notify the police. Following the girl’s instructions, they tracked down the murderer. The man was convicted on evidence she had provided the first clues about: the time, the weapon, the place, the clothes he wore, what his victim told him. Everything the girl said turned out to be true.
Pearsall’s book is based on 73 heart-transplant cases in which parts of the donors’ personalities appear to have been transferred to the recipients.
Pearsall argues that the brain is not the only centre of human intelligence. The heart, he says, carries equal importance. He posits that the body is made up of cells that transmit “information.” Cells communicate this information to each other electromagnetically. Thus a transplanted organ can continue to broadcast old information, something like amputees’ experience of pain in lost limbs. Phenomena like these suggest cells have memories.
Critics deny the existence of proof that memories can be transplanted along with organs, and fear such assertions will cause donor numbers to fall. Some non-believers attribute personality changes in transplant recipients to the heavy drugs they must take to prevent organ rejection.
But what should we make of the documented story of an 8-year-old Jewish boy who died in a car wreck? His death was the salvation of a 3-year-old Arab girl with a dangerous heart condition. As soon as the girl woke up from the anaesthesia after surgery, she asked by name for a type of Jewish candy she could not have known existed.
Pearsall’s book raises fascinating questions that shake the foundations of science.
Click here for the full report.
Scientists Warn of Fraud of Stem Cell ‘Banks’
Febraury 22, 2010
BreitBart
Clinics that offer to “bank” stem cells from the umbilical cords of newborns for use later in life when illness strikes are fraudsters, a top US scientist said.
Clinics in many countries allow parents to deposit stem cells from their neonate’s umbilical cord with a view to using the cells to cure major illnesses that could occur later in life.
In Thailand, for example, parents pay in the region of 3,600 dollars to make a deposit in a stem cell bank, thinking they are taking out a sort of health insurance for their child.
But Irving Weissman, director of the Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Stanford University in California, said the well-meaning parents were being fleeced by the stem cell bankers.
“Umbilical cords contain blood-forming stem cells at a level that would maintain the blood-forming capacity of a very young child,” Weissman told reporters at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
“They could also have derived mesenchymal cells — fiberglass-like cells that have a very limited capacity to make scar, bone, fat — but they don’t make brain, they don’t make blood, they don’t make heart, they don’t make skeletal muscle, despite what various people claim,” he said.
Weissman said these “unproven stem cell therapeutic clinicians” tend to set up shop in countries with poor medical regulations, but AFP found websites for umbilical cord stem cell banks in European Union member states and in the United States.
“They do the therapies, then they let the patients go on their own, short of maybe 50-150,000 dollars for a therapy that has no chance — taken away from a family that needs them when they have an incurable disease,” Weissman said.
“It is wrong.”
The International Stem Cell Society is due to issue a report in April about unproven stem cell therapies such as banking a baby’s umbilical cord blood for future use.
Click here for the full report
Scientists Using Heat to Freeze Water?
February 11th, 2010
Live Science
By Charles Q. Choi
Imagine water freezing solid even as it’s heating up. Such are the bizarre tricks scientists now find water is capable of.
Popular belief contends that water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius). Surprisingly, if water lies in a smooth bottle and is free of any dust, it can stay liquid down to minus 40 degrees F (minus 40 degrees C) in what’s called “supercooled” form. The dust and rough surfaces that water is normally found in contact with in nature can serve as the kernels around which ice crystals form.
Now researcher Igor Lubomirsky at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and his colleagues have discovered another way to control the freezing point of water — via what are called quasi-amorphous pyroelectric thin films. These surfaces change their electrical charge depending on their temperature.
When pyroelectic surfaces are positively charged, water becomes easier to freeze, and when they have a negative charge, it becomes harder to freeze.
The researchers saw that supercooled water could freeze as it’s being heated, as long as the temperature changes the surface charge as well. For instance, when supercooled water is on a negatively charged lithium tantalate surface, it will freeze solid immediately when the surface is heated to 17.6 degrees F (minus 8 degrees C) and its charge switches to positive.
Curiously, positively charged surfaces inspire supercooled water to freeze from the bottom up, while negatively charged surfaces cause it to freeze from the top down. This likely has to do with how water molecules orient themselves — the negatively charged oxygen atoms in water molecules naturally point toward positively charged surfaces, while the reverse is true with hydrogen atoms.
“The difference between the positive and negative charge was unexpected,” Lubomirsky said.
The ability to better control the freezing temperature of supercooled water could be critical for a variety of applications, including the survival of cold-blooded animals, the cryo-preservation of cells and tissues, the protection of crops from freezing, and the ability to understand and trigger cloud formation.
Click here for the full report
Study Links Soft Drinks to Pancreas Cancer
February 8, 2010
Reuters
By John O’Callaghan
People who drink two or more sweetened soft drinks a week have a much higher risk of pancreatic cancer, an unusual but deadly cancer, researchers reported on Monday.
People who drank mostly fruit juice instead of sodas did not have the same risk, the study of 60,000 people in Singapore found.
Sugar may be to blame but people who drink sweetened sodas regularly often have other poor health habits, said Mark Pereira of the University of Minnesota, who led the study.
“The high levels of sugar in soft drinks may be increasing the level of insulin in the body, which we think contributes to pancreatic cancer cell growth,” Pereira said in a statement.
Insulin, which helps the body metabolize sugar, is made in the pancreas.
Writing in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, Pereira and colleagues said they followed 60,524 men and women in the Singapore Chinese Health Study for 14 years.
Over that time, 140 of the volunteers developed pancreatic cancer. Those who drank two or more soft drinks a week had an 87 percent higher risk of being among those who got pancreatic cancer.
Pereira said he believed the findings would apply elsewhere.
“Singapore is a wealthy country with excellent healthcare. Favorite pastimes are eating and shopping, so the findings should apply to other western countries,” he said.
But Susan Mayne of the Yale Cancer Center at Yale University in Connecticut was cautious.
“Although this study found a risk, the finding was based on a relatively small number of cases and it remains unclear whether it is a causal association or not,” said Mayne, who serves on the board of the journal, which is published by the American Association for Cancer Research.
“Soft drink consumption in Singapore was associated with several other adverse health behaviors such as smoking and red meat intake, which we can’t accurately control for.”
Other studies have linked pancreatic cancer to red meat, especially burned or charred meat.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest forms of cancer, with 230,000 cases globally. In the United States, 37,680 people are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in a year and 34,290 die of it.
The American Cancer Society says the five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer patients is about 5 percent.
Some researchers believe high sugar intake may fuel some forms of cancer, although the evidence has been contradictory. Tumor cells use more glucose than other cells.
One 12-ounce (355 ml) can of non-diet soda contains about 130 calories, almost all of them from sugar.
Click here for the full report
Heal Yourself in 15 Days (Part 2)
February 1, 2010
Natural News
By Mike Adams
This article continues our 15-part article series called Heal Yourself in 15 Days. In part one, we looked at why the real secret to rapid healing is to remove the barriers to healing. In part two, we look at why your healing potential is so powerful that you can’t even turn it off!
When you scrape your elbow, a bit of blood oozes out to clean the wound and wash away bacteria. It then forms a protective scab that keeps out invading microorganisms while your skin has a chance to heal underneath. There, some real magic takes place: Your skin cells innately recognize the need to divide and grow to fill the wound. A cancer-like process is unleashed at the cellular level, activating nearby cells to divide and grow. Your DNA is replicated in the nucleus of each cell with the help of some of the most astounding nanotechnology every witnessed in human civilization. (The best scientists in the world can’t even come close to recreating it.)
As your cells multiply, nutrients and building blocks are carried to them through a blood supply that adapts to the particular size and shape of the wound. If a blood vessel was destroyed in your accident, the growth of new blood vessels is spontaneously initiated to take their place, and they grow into the tissues within mere hours.
As your skin cells fill in the previous wound, the replication effort is delicately turned off, one by one, so that replicating skin cells don’t keep replicating beyond what they need to — a process that would cause the creation of a skin tumor. Your body’s cells know exactly when to grow and exactly when to turn off, and when it’s all said and done, you’re left with a perfect replacement for the skin you previously lost.
Completely automatic healing
The truly amazing part of all this is not the cancer-like processes that are delicately controlled by your body wisdom; it’s not even the fact that your body has the ability to re-grow lost cells — it’s the fact that all this takes place without any conscious involvement on your part.
Healing yourself is automatic, in other words. You don’t have to direct blood to the wound, direct the cells to start replicating, direct the molecular waste products to be carried away and decide when cell replication should be stopped. All this happens without your involvement — even without your awareness! Much of it happens while you sleep, in fact. While your conscious mind is dreaming, your innate body wisdom is working the biochemistry and energetic transformations necessary to repair your tissues.
You can’t stop this process even if you wanted to. You could try to focus all your mental power on your skin not healing, and yet your skin would heal itself anyway.
That’s because your body is a powerful self-healing organism. It heals itself automatically, innately, without your conscious awareness or involvement. Your ability to heal yourself is so powerful that you can’t stop yourself from healing!
Why we don’t always heal
If this is true, then why aren’t you healing everything else? Why aren’t you always in perfect health? The answer, as you’ve seen throughout this article series, is because we tend to erect barriers to our own healing. And we often misread the symptoms of sickness that are asking for help, “treating” them in a way that makes the situation worse.
Click here for the full report
Exercise Great for the Brain, too
January 22, 2010
BBC News
The report, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found mice which exercised performed better on memory tests.
These mice also grew more new cells in a part of the brain linked to memory than those which did not exercise.
The authors believe the new brain cells were behind the improvement in cognitive performance.
The aim of the study, which was carried out by scientists from the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge and researchers at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, was to find out why exercise might improve brain function.
Previous research had suggested that exercise helps mental performance in both people and animals. Studies had also shown that exercise increases the number of new brain cells in rodents.
Unlimited action
The new finding in this study is that mice which exercise are better able to distinguish between memories of similar things. The authors believe this is explained by the additional brain cells generated by exercise.
The study was conducted on two groups of mice over a period of 105 days. The mice were trained to touch a box on a computer screen to get food pellets.
One group were then allowed unlimited access to an exercise wheel. They ran over 20km (12 miles) a day on average. The control group were not able to exercise.
Both groups were then repeatedly shown two boxes on a screen, one of which provided a treat when it was touched.
The mice learned which box released the treat, and then the boxes were moved around. First the boxes were moved close together, which made it harder for the mice to remember which one to touch to get the food.
The exercising mice did better on this task than the non-exercising mice.
Similar memories
The task was then made easier by placing the boxes further apart so that they seemed more distinct. This time there was no difference in the performance of the exercising and non-exercising mice.
“Keeping similar memories distinct is an important part of having a good memory” says the senior author of the study, Timothy Bussey from Cambridge University.
“It is this aspect of memory that is improved by exercise, our study shows.
“The human equivalent might be remembering which car parking space you have used on two different days in the previous week. It becomes difficult to distinguish memories when events are similar.”
By the end of the experiment, the animals which exercised had more than twice as many new brain cells as those that did not.
These cells were in the hippocampus, an area of the brain which is important in memory and learning.
The Cambridge team believes the results of their study may well extrapolate to humans, a view shared by another researcher who studies the impact of exercise on memory.
Stan Colcombe, from Bangor University, said: “Their data strongly suggest that new neurons created after exercise can play a role in improving cognitive function, which likely has direct implications for human research into the effects of exercise on neurocognition.”
He described the research as “a very elegant experiment” which “made a valuable contribution in understanding the effects of exercise on brain health and function”.
Click here for the full report
Flu Bug – New Vaccine Comes from Insect Cells
November 20, 2009
Reuters
By Maggie Fox
More safety data would be needed before a new type of influenza vaccine made in insect cells should get approval, federal advisers said on Thursday.
A divided committee advising the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said the new Protein Sciences Corp FluBlok vaccine appears effective among adults under age 50 but said the company has not shown that it is safe enough to be approved.
The vaccine is made using genetically engineered pieces of flu virus inserted into caterpillar cells, instead of the current method of growing virus in chicken eggs. The company says it could produce a vaccine much more quickly — in two months, versus five to six months for vaccines made using eggs.
“This is a promising technology, and I think we need it,” said Dr. Bruce Gellin, head of the Health and Human Services Department’s National Vaccine Program Office and a member of the panel. He said companies making such new vaccines would be paying close attention to the panelists’ comments.
The U.S. government is struggling to vaccinate the population against H1N1, which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates has infected 22 million Americans and killed 3,900 since April.
Fewer than 50 million doses of H1N1 vaccine are now available.
Some panel members were concerned about some side-effects seen in a few of the 3,200 people who volunteered to test it, such as a woman who had Bell’s palsy, a temporary paralysis of the face, that flared up an hour after she was vaccinated.
They also worried that several people who volunteered to test the vaccine had been “lost to follow-up”, meaning the researchers had been unable to find out how they fared after being vaccinated.
“I don’t feel the safety database is large enough,” said Pamela McInnes of the National Institutes of Health. She said the vaccine is a new formulation and so the burden of proof is higher than simply changing the influenza strain from one season to another.
“I feel the safety data do not raise significant red flags,” disagreed Dr. Jack Stapleton of the University of Iowa.
“What we are dealing with, rock bottom, is a pretty mediocre vaccine,’ said Dr. Theodore Eickhoff, a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and a panel member.
The vaccine is made using cells from a caterpillar and would be the first influenza vaccine made using cell cultures approved in the United States.
The FDA usually follows the recommendations of its advisory committees.
The Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee said the data show the vaccine works well enough in adults aged up to 50, but six of 11 members said studies do not show the vaccine works safely.
Click here for the full report
Medications Causing Birth Defects by Blocking Folic Acid
November 19, 2009
Natural News
By Paul Louis
(Natural News) An epidemiological study in Israel that included 84,832 babies born at Soroka Medical Center, in Beer-Sheva concluded that medications taken during the first trimester that block folic acid more than double the risk of congenital malformations.
The study team involved Epidemiologists, Pediatricians, Clinical Pharmacologists, Obstetricians and Gynecologists who examined birth and abortion data collected in Israel between 1998 and 2007.
The medications that act as folic acid inhibitors are the antibiotics trimethoprim, sulfasalazine for treating ulcerative colitis, and the chemotherapy drug methotrexate. This group of drugs prevents folic acid from being converted to its active metabolites.
Anti-epileptic drugs and cholesterol lowering drugs are among the group of medications that lower serum and tissue concentrations of folic acid.
All about folic acid
Folic acid (B9) is also known as folate or folacin. It is essential for building new cells, and everyone needs it. But it is especially crucial for a woman’s physiological fetal function during pregnancy. Abundant folic acid during early pregnancy is important for preventing neurological and spinal birth defects.
Doctors are now recommending extra folic acid intake for women during the first trimester of pregnancy. Folic acid is abundant in leafy green vegetables, grains, dried beans, peas, nuts, and fruit. Adding daily supplements of folic acid is usually recommended.
The most common major birth defect from folic acid deficiency is spina bifida, or open spine. It is the result of the fetal spinal cord not closing completely during the first month of pregnancy. Nerve damage can result in the child’s paralysis of the legs, fluid in the brain, learning difficulties, and urinary or bowel problems. There is no cure for this birth defect.
Click here for the full report
Low Vitamin D May Be Root Cause of Cancer
June 15, 2009
NaturalNews.com
by S. L. Baker
(NaturalNews) What initially causes cancer to develop? The current scientific model assumes that a genetic mutation begins the genesis of a malignancy. But what if that assumption is wrong and there’s another key to the start of cancer? Scientists at the Moores Cancer Center at the University of California (UC) in San Diego have raised that possibility. And they’ve come up with another, brand new model of how cancer develops.
Reporting online in the current Annals of Epidemiology, they point to a host of research that suggests cancer develops when cells lose the ability to stick together in a healthy, normal way -- and the key factor to this initial triggering of a malignancy could well be a lack of vitamin D.
In the article, Cedric Garland, DrPH, professor of family and preventive medicine at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, and his research team explain that previous theories associating vitamin D with many cancers have been tested and confirmed in over 200 epidemiological studies. In addition, more than 2,500 laboratory studies have been conducted that provide an understanding of the physiological basis of vitamin D’s link to cancer.
According to Dr. Garland, researchers have documented that with enough vitamin D present, cells adhere to one another in tissue and act as normal, mature epithelial cells. But if there is a deficiency of vitamin D, cells can lose this stick-to-each other quality, as well as their identity as differentiated cells. The result? They may revert to a dangerous stem cell-like state and become cancerous.
In a statement to the media, Dr. Garland suggested that much of the process that starts cancer in the first place could be stopped at the outset by maintaining enough vitamin D in the body. “Vitamin D may halt the first stage of the cancer process by re-establishing intercellular junctions in malignancies having an intact vitamin D receptor,” he said. And, he added, that if diet and supplements restore appropriate levels of vitamin D, the development of cancer might be prevented. According to Dr. Garland, vitamin D levels can be easily increased, if needed, by modest supplementation with vitamin D3 in the range of 2000 IU/day.
The “cure” for cancer already exists…
This new model of cancer’s cause has been dubbed DINOMIT by Dr. Garland and his colleagues. Each letter stands for a different phase of cancer development: “D” refers to disjunction, or loss of communication between cells; “I” is for initiation, where genetic mutations begin to play a role; “N” refers to natural selection of the fastest-reproducing cancer cells; “O” is a for overgrowth of cells; “M” stands for metastasis, the spread of a malignancy to other tissues; “I” refers to involution and “T” for transition, both dormant states that may occur in cancer and can potentially be altered by increasing vitamin D.
“Competition and natural selection among disjoined cells within a tissue compartment, such as might occur in the breast’s terminal ductal lobular unit, for example, are the engine of cancer,” Dr.Garland said in the press statement. “The DINOMIT model provides new avenues for preventing and improving the success of cancer treatment.”
In their Annals of Epidemiology report, the UC scientists point to a host of studies that show an apparent beneficial effect of vitamin D (and, to some extent, calcium) on cancer risk and survival of patients with breast, colorectal and prostate cancer. In fact, Dr. Garland and his team have published epidemiological studies about the potential preventive effects of vitamin D for some twenty years.
In 2008, Dr. Garland and his colleagues found an association between a lack of sunlight exposure, low vitamin D and breast cancer. In earlier work, they showed linkages between increased levels of vitamin D3 or markers of vitamin D and a lower risk for breast, colon, ovarian and kidney cancers, too.
As reported earlier in Natural News, clues about a possible cause-and-effect association between a lack of vitamin D and cancer’s development have rapidly accumulated over the past few years. For example, researchers have found that women who are deficient in vitamin D at the time they are diagnosed with breast cancer are nearly 75 percent more likely to die from the disease than women with sufficient vitamin D levels. Moreover, their cancer is twice as likely to metastasize to other parts of the body.
Healthy levels of vitamin D have been found to slash the risk of numerous cancers by 77 percent.
Click here to get more information on this NaturalNews.com article.
