Developments to Watch
Edited by Paul Raeburn
Afghanistan: Seeds of Destruction
If Afghanistan is to rebuild and recover from decades of war, it will need to be able to feed its people. Researchers report that this goal has now been jeopardized by the looting and destruction of Afghanistan's largest seed collection.
It might sound odd that Afghanistan's agricultural future could depend upon a few handfuls of seed. But these seeds, collected over generations, were the germ of crops that were especially adapted to thrive in the sere, rocky croplands of Afghanistan. Many of the strains may not exist anywhere else.
The seeds were stored in plastic jars hidden in houses in the city of Ghazni in northern Afghanistan and Jalalabad in the east, according to Future Harvest, a foundation dedicated to ensuring food security around the world. The looters--who were probably local villagers--took only the plastic containers, destroying their contents or leaving them behind, Future Harvest reports.
Future Harvest is working with a network of international farm research centers to comb through other seed banks for duplicates of the lost Afghanistan seeds. Among the crops affected are wheat, barley, melons, pistachios, almonds, and pomegranates, the researchers say.
A Sedimental Journey to Find Natural Gas
The ocean floor, Along the edges of the continents, is rich with frozen deposits of natural gas. But much remains to be learned about how and why these deposits, called gas hydrates, are formed.
A just-completed expedition by the international Ocean Drilling Program collected data on gas hydrates off the northwest coast of the U.S. Researchers say such deposits are forming rapidly in an area 60 miles from the Oregon shore called the Hydrate Ridge. The researchers drilled into the seafloor at nine sites, measuring a wide variety of hydrate characteristics. The measurements will allow researchers to estimate the volume of natural gas in the sediment. "We worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for two months," says Frank Rack of the Ocean Drilling Program, a cooperative program involving 22 countries.
Natural gas is a cleaner fuel than coal. If the hydrates can be harvested economically, they could become an important source of fuel in the future.
Let No Wine Be Served After Its Time
Is that bottle of 1961 Chateau Petrus really worth $2,000, or has oxygen leaked in and turned the wine to vinegar? Chemists at the University of California at Davis are now able to tell--without uncorking the bottle. They've built a wine analyzer based on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), the technology used in hospital MRI scans. It spots the magnetic "signature" of acetic acid, which can make wine unpalatable. The wine scanner can also detect levels of acetic acid too low to affect the wine's taste significantly but signaling that the bottle should be enjoyed soon.
One of the device's developers, associate professor Matthew Augustine, figures it could find a market among auction houses and serious wine collectors. It could be installed at wine-storage warehouses or even mounted on a truck to make house calls. NMR analyses also might provide a new tool for studying how various ingredients in wine affect flavor, color, and aging. Augustine has applied for a patent and hopes to license the concept.
By Otis Port
Clones Have Ills the Naked Eye Can't See
Cloned animals might look just like their natural counterparts, but a new genetic analysis has uncovered disturbing differences. Using DNA chips to scan about 10,000 different genes, researchers have found in the placentas of cloned mice that about 1 gene out of 25 is "abnormally expressed"--which means it is not functioning properly. The report appears in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., says these genetic abnormalities may explain why aging cloned mice are often afflicted by premature death, pneumonia, liver failure, or obesity.
The genetic differences would not show up in a cursory physical examination of a cloned animal, Jaenisch and his colleagues say. Earlier studies have provided only hints that this might be a problem.
Even seemingly normal-looking clones could carry these genetic abnormalities, with consequences that would become apparent later. It's not clear whether it is the cloning procedure that produces the abnormalities or something inherited from the cells used to do the cloning, the researchers say. Either way, they conclude that cloning human beings is unsafe and unethical because these abnormalities would probably occur.
The researchers emphasize, however, that cloning can be safely used to create new cells to treat Alzheimer's disease, say, or diabetes--a technique known as therapeutic cloning. The abnormalities become important only in efforts to clone whole animals.
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Copyright 2002, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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