Fight Aging!

It's easy to become frustrated with the seemingly bucolic rate of progress in biotechnology and medicine: when what you really want is the medical technology of the 2040s, living in 2010 can be a cruel tease. But it's all an illusion; this is a time of tremendously rapid progress in all forms of technology. It only seems slow when you're living it one day at a time, paying close attention, and waiting for the pot to boil.

Consider that a great deal of what takes place in the laboratory today is science fiction from the perspective of the 1980s: a time in which the human genome had yet to be sequenced, and tasks that a post-grad could now knock out in a few weeks and few thousand dollars required a full laboratory and serious investments in time and money. If they were possible at all. Times change, progress happens - and it's getting faster.

To illustrate the point, have a look at these three items with the eyes of someone living in the days prior to low cost cell phones, when identifying a single genetic association and its consequences was a major triumph and work of engineering.

Rewiring a damaged brain

Scientists believe that as the brain develops, it naturally establishes and solidifies communication pathways between neurons that repeatedly fire together. Nudo and others have found that during the month following injury the brain is redeveloping, with fibers that connect different parts of the brain undergoing extensive rewiring.

"The month following injury is a window of opportunity," Mohseni said. "We believe we can do this with an injured brain, which is very malleable."

Mohseni has been building a multichannel microelectronic device to bypass the gap left by injury. The device, which he calls a brain-machine-brain interface, includes a microchip on a circuit board smaller than a quarter. The microchip amplifies signals, called neural action potentials, produced by the neurons in one part of the brain and uses an algorithm to separate these signals - brain spike activity - from noise and other artifacts. Upon spike discrimination, the microchip sends a current pulse to stimulate neurons in another part of the brain, artificially connecting the two brain regions.

Sneaking Spies Into a Cell's Nucleus

Using silver nanoparticles cloaked in a protein from the HIV virus that has an uncanny ability to penetrate human cells, the scientists have demonstrated that they can enter the inner workings of the nucleus and detect subtle light signals from the "spy." ... "The ability to place these nanoparticles into a cell's nucleus and gather information using light has potential implications for the selective treatment of disease," Gregas said. "We envision that this approach will also help basic scientists as they try to better understand what occurs within a cell's nucleus."

...

"Our ultimate goal is to develop a nanoscale delivery system that can drop off its payload -- in this case nanoparticles with other agents attached - into a cell to enhance the effectiveness of a drug treatment," Vo-Dinh said. "Theoretically, we could 'load up' these nanoparticles with many things we are interested in - for example a nanoprobe for a cancer gene - and get it into a cell's nucleus. This would provide us a warning signal of the disease at its earliest stage, thus allowing faster and more effective treatment."

'Firefly' Stem Cells May Help Repair Damaged Hearts

In his University of Central Florida lab, Steven Ebert engineered stem cells with the same enzyme that makes fireflies glow. The "firefly" stem cells glow brighter and brighter as they develop into healthy heart muscle, allowing doctors to track whether and where the stem cells are working.

Researchers are keenly interested in stem cells because they typically morph into the organs where they are transplanted. But why and how fast they do it is still a mystery. Now Ebert's cells give researchers the ability to see the cells in action with the use of a special camera lens that picks up the glow under a microscope.

Researchers forge further ahead with each passing year. Patience is a virtue, but then so is helping these researchers to move faster - and especially in the fields you yourself value.