News / Reviews

IF A new and deadly strain of influenza were to arise, putting together a vaccine against it in the least possible time would be a priority. To test how quickly that could be done a group of researchers have just had a race with themselves. They have not quite matched the show sometimes given by workers at the Venetian arsenal, who would assemble a galley in a single day in order to overawe visiting foreign dignitaries. But Philip Dormitzer, Craig Venter and their colleagues did create the crucial component of a flu jab in four days and four hours.Dr Dormitzer, who works for Novartis, a drug company, and Dr Venter, eponymous founder of the J. Craig Venter Institute in San Diego, reported their record-breaking attempt in this week’s Science Translational Medicine. It began with the transmission to them from America’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority of the sequence data for the haemagglutinin and neuraminidase genes of a (to them) unknown flu virus.The team took this information and used it to make DNA that contained both the gene sequences themselves and the genetic apparatus needed to let a cell read those sequences and produce proteins from them. They then put these pieces of synthetic DNA—which were, in effect, tiny chromosomes—into cell cultures derived from dog kidneys, which have been found particularly effective for this...

IN 1887 Albert Michelson and Edward Morley used an interferometer (a device that splits and recombines a beam of waves, to determine whether the recombined beam is still coherent) to measure the speed of light. It was thought at the time that light was the result of vibrations in an invisible “aether� that pervaded the universe. Since the Earth, as it journeyed through space, must move relative to that aether, Michelson and Morley expected that the daughter beams, which took different paths relative to the Earth’s movement, would move at different speeds.But they didn’t. The aether therefore did not exist. And that observational pebble, gathering speed as it rolled downhill, produced an avalanche which swept away classical physics and cleared the field for Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity—one of which, the general theory, encapsulates the modern description of gravity.It is therefore poetic justice that the latest attempt to sweep away Einstein’s version of the world in its turn also relies on an interferometer. This time, though, the beams travelling through it are made not of light, but of atoms.The second big difference, besides relativity, between classical and modern physics, is quantum theory. This depends on all waves also being particles, and all particles waves. So it is possible to make an atomic wave-beam, split it, and recombine it just as if it were...

TO MOST people, bumblebees are charming, slightly absurd creatures that blunder through garden and meadow with neither the steely determination of the honeybee nor the malevolent intention of the wasp. If you are a plant, though, things look rather different—for from the point of view of some flowering plants many bumblebees are nothing more than thieves. They...

PANCREATIC cancer is a dreadful disease. Even in rich countries, only about 4% of those diagnosed with it are still alive after five years. In America it is the third-most-common cause of cancer deaths among women, after lung and breast cancer; among men it is fourth, after lung, prostate and colorectal cancer. Dispiritingly, there has been little progress in treating it for more than a quarter of a century.The reason pancreatic cancer is so deadly is that it metastasises quickly. This spreading of secondary tumours around the body damages other organs and has proved impossible to stop. But a group of researchers led by Claudia Gravekamp of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York, have an intriguing idea for changing that. As they describe in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they plan to do it by infecting people with radioactive bacteria.Dr Gravekamp came up with the idea following her discovery that weakened bacteria (specifically, a modified form of Listeria monocytogenes) she was using for other purposes in tumour-afflicted mice, and which were cleared from most of the animal’s body by its immune system over the course of a few days, remained in the tumours. This was thanks to the ability cancer cells evolve to suppress the immune system’s activities within their purview. Without...