Sometimes scientists think they know how something works only to find out they were wrong. This is not a bad thing, since in finding this out they sometimes find out the facts they needed to determine what the truth is. This was the case when scientists recently discovered they really didn’t know the truth when it came to how blood was formed in the human body. This is one of the things one would have thought we would have known by now. What the scientists found out is blood cells form quickly from stem cells. It was previously thought they formed much further up in our system. One scientists on the project said, “Our discovery means we will be able to understand far better a wide variety of human blood disorders and diseases — from anemia, where there are not enough blood cells, to leukemia, where there are too many blood cells. Think of it as moving from the old world of black-and-white television into the new world of high definition.”

There is nothing else in the world as terrible as a small child with a deadly cancer. It is so heartbreaking it goes beyond the definition of grief. A one year old child Layla Richards from London was diagnosed with a very aggressive type of leukemia which was believed to be incurable. Sometimes when these types of conditions exist people decide to go with unusual treatments which are experimental. It makes sense in a hopeless case like this. Babies are not candidates for chemo and bone marrow transplants since they don’t work. The baby was treated with what is now known as designer immune cells. It uses micro-scissors to engineer a donor’s immune cells. Think of this in terms of writing. When there are mistakes in your letter or article you edit them, you don’t usually start all over. The treatment seemed to work even better than expected, but it will be two years or more before the baby can be declared cancer free. This was the first time human cells engineered in a particular way were given back to a patient.

Another breakthrough in fighting cancer has been realized. Scientists have genetically engineered algae to kill cancer cells while not disturbing healthy ones. When people are treated for cancer today not only are many cancer cells killed, but also many healthy ones. This is the cause of many side effects. Scientists have been searching for many years to find a way to kill cancer cells without harming anything else in our bodies and until now they haven’t been able to do it. Most cancer treatments use deadly chemicals or just deadly radiation or both. The scientists used natural silica-based algae nanoparticles to deliver anti-cancer drugs to cancer cells only. The particles were produced by genetically engineering diatom algae. The algae nanoparticles were then coated with a protein that binds to antibodies. The antibodies then attack the cancer cells, because our bodies have antibodies which are programmed to do this.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to be paralyzed, it has to be one of the most horrible things which could happen to a person. Thanks to some scientists one paralyzed patient at least has something she can do. Her brain was linked to a tablet and now she can control the tablet and surf the internet. This may not sound like much to us, but can you imagine how much it must have helped her? She can do everything on an Android tablet a normal person can do. A doctor stated, “We wanted to move these assisted technologies towards clinical feasibility.” The patient’s prosthetic was recognized by the tablet as a wireless Bluetooth mouse.

Operations are becoming less traumatic. The incision points are getting smaller and the cuts less severe. The time is coming when we may not need to even be opened up to be operated on. This was just proven when an operation was conducted on a patient’s brain without making a cut. One doctor said, “The ground-breaking finding here is that you can make lesions deep in the brain–through the intact skull and skin–with extreme precision and accuracy and safety.” I am not a doctor but it seems to me this has to lessen the chance of infection from an operation. So how was this accomplished? High-intensity focused ultrasound known as HIFU was used. It heats up and destroys diseased tissue.

One of the goals of science is to extend our lifespan. One of the things which has been recognized as a leading factor contributing to senescence and age-related diseases is chronic inflammation of the colon. It seems we all have polyamines or PAs in our guts but as we age we have fewer and fewer. Researchers in Japan fed mice with probiotic supplements and compared them to a control group. The mice being fed with the supplements lived longer. This suggests ingestion of specific probiotics may be an easy approach for improving intestinal health and increasing the human lifespan.

Scientists are now claiming we have some genes which need to be removed and that removing them could extend life by as much as 60 percent. Scientists have been looking for the genes which make us age for over ten years and have found 238 so far. They believe if these genes were removed we would live a lot longer. This could be a dangerous fallacy, because the genes might turn out to be necessary for some process we are yet to find out about, but they may not. I think before each gene is declared a danger the scientists should examine every function of each one carefully and only then think about removing them. The cells examined were from yeast and not in the human body.

A new blood test was devised which can identify any type of virus in the blood. This is very important, because until now labs would look for a particular virus based on several factors, they couldn’t identify just any virus. This new test will save many hours of work and simplify the examination of blood for virus detection. To test the new system the medical team spiked a tissue sample with genes from many different viruses. They even analyzed a stool sample from a bat. The test identified 100 percent of the viruses present.