Glowing rats & adventure!

The other Nobel Prize I felt qualified to comment on was that awarded for chemistry, where researchers were honoured for the discovery of green fluorescent protein (GFP), which is a protein native to jellyfish and, as implied by the name, can glow green. Now green glowing proteins may not seem like a big deal, but this discovery also brought about fundamental changes in the way we do biology (although the use of luciferase, a light-generating protein from fireflies, was also a big step along the same direction).

In my last post I talked about using the HIV virus a "shuttle" for genetic material, able to insert genes into a host's DNA after infection. Now, if you wanted to look at whether your cells were infected or not, a great way to do that would be to make the virus carry GFP. If you want to know whether a gene is being expressed, you can make a construct that has the same regulatory regions as your gene of interest, but make it code GFP. Instead of performing time-consuming experiments to measure expression, you can literally just look. And then there's the "Brainbow" mice, which have genes for several fluorescent proteins in their neurons. Their stunning pictures (amazing gallery here) will drastically change neuroanatomical methods forever.

Discoveries of this magnitude, like the discovery of the HIV virus, are huge not because of any single aspect of the discovery, but also for the development of tools that literally change the way science is done. The same thing was true of Mello and Flame's Nobel last year for the discovery of RNA interference. This was such a paradigm-shifting discovery that the committee gave out the Nobel to what must be two of the youngest researchers to ever be considered for it, and a discovery that was barely a decade old; normally the Nobel is reserved for the final coup-de-gras of a senior scientist's long and storied career (like Kandel, Greengard and Carlsson in 2000). It heartening to see the Nobel going to researchers who are changing the ways we do science, rather than given out as an honorarium, like a degree to PhD students who've been chugging along as best they can for the last decade.

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Most interesting thing I've read this week: in high school, I was taught about a 1953 experiment by a guy named Miller, which remains one of the most fascinating I've ever heard of. He designed a closed system with an atmosphere similar to what was, at the time, believed to comprise the early Earth's atmosphere - methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide and such. He introduced some sparks and water vapour, and voila - found a couple of amino acids were produced, perhaps giving some insight into abiogenesis (how life came from inorganic precursors).

Miller died last year, and the researcher who inherited his labs and equipment found a series of tubes marked "experiments 1952-1953." He took some vials from the very same experiment and subjected it to much more advanced analysis than was available at the time. These researchers found dozens of organic compounds Miller was unable to detect, lending great support to the original experiments.

While today we acknowledge that the early atmosphere of the planet was not exactly what was envisioned in 1953, this experiment is a fascinating example of a sort of adventurous scientific spirit that I don't think is as prominent today as it was 50 years ago, and I think science is probably the worse for it.

Viral Marketing

Well, no surprises for me in the election, which frankly makes me sad, actually. I am predicting that the Libs will have a new leader by November 2009 (if not sooner) and will force another election 18 months or so thereafter. Not really Dion's fault, but he didn't help himself much. It was very telling that the separatist leader Gilles Duceppe is significantly more comfortable in English than the Liberal PM hopeful.

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I wanted to speak briefly about the Nobel Prizes this year, or at least those in medicine and chemistry - I don't know enough about physics to even begin to comment on that work. And of course, the Nobel Prize in economics is really the Swedish Central Bank Prize in memory of Alfred Nobel, because economics isn't so much a science as it is a crapshoot.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine went to a number of people (details here) for work on viruses, two of them for the discovery of the HIV virus. It was a little shameful that a certain other party didn't get some credit, but the Nobel can only be given to 3 people, and he doesn't seem as broken up about it as it might be.

What you probably don't know about the HIV virus is how it blew away the biology community when they discovered how it worked. It is literally capable of taking its own genetic information and downloading it into the hard drive of your genome. Then your own cells start manufacturing the virus and it spreads. It uses a special enzyme for this, known as reverse transcriptase, which itself allowed the development of a process called RT-PCR, one of the most important tools in the field molecular biology.

Now, AIDS and other retrovirally-transmitted diseases are important enough on their own to merit consideration for a Nobel, but an important development in recent years has made the discovery even more important. Since this virus can insert genetic material, scientists wondered if they could use the virus as a tool to put genes into mammalian cells.

I wouldn't be talking about this if it was unsuccessful. The virus has been extensively genetically engineered to be able to carry genetic payloads into cells that it can infect, without replicating new virus and harming the host. Today, I myself use a heavily modified version of the AIDS virus to insert genes into rat brain cells and perform experiments looking at how certain genes affect the expression of other genes.

The importance in this case wasn't just the discovery of the viral agents, or showing that these agents caused much more serious diseases. These things were vital contributions to medicine. This discovery went on to reverberate through the field of biology and changed the way we do experiments and perform the science. There are few nobler things that could have been honoured.

Soon - the chemistry Nobel, another (related) paradigm-shifter.