Feeling a bit thin on top? This cloning story may restore your crowning glory

Last hairs can be duplicated many times over

From The Times

June 2, 2008

David Rose in Rome

Millions of men and women who suffer from premature baldness or hair loss could soon be able to regain their original lustrous locks - by cloning their remaining hair in the laboratory, research suggests.

The new technique, known as "follicular cell implantation", has already shown positive results in continuing clinical trials on human beings. The work, being carried out by a British team, is being hailed as a major advance in hair restoration and is backed by a £1.9 million government grant.

The cell therapy has the potential to provide a limitless supply of an individual's hair to replace that lost because of burns, cancer treatment or simply the onset of age, and could be available to patients within five years.

The latest results of the Phase II trial, presented at a conference of leading hair replacement surgeons in Rome, suggest that the technique can increase hair count in at least two thirds of patients after six months, and four out of five if the scalp is stimulated beforehand through gentle abrasions that encourage hair growth.

The new technique involves extracting dermal papilla (DP) cells, the basic cells responsible for hair growth, from a sample of only about 100 hairs from the back of the scalp – the area where hair usually continues to grow despite losses in other areas. These cells are then multiplied many times over in a special patented culture before being injected back into the scalp in their millions, stimulating the formation of new hair follicles or rejuvenating those that have stopped producing hair on the top of the head.

The procedure is being developed by Intercytex, a British company based in Manchester, which is among many competing to find a cure for hair loss that affects 40 per cent of men over 50. It may require more than 1,000 tiny injections to produce that number of hairs in extensively bald patients but it will be quicker and less invasive than current hair transplant techniques favoured by celebrities including Sir Elton John and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister.

Experts believe that the continual refinements in modern-day hair transplants and proven medical therapies are creating increased demand for hair restoration surgery around the world. About 3,000 such procedures – costing between £2,500 and £7,000 – take place at private clinics in Britain every year. Current hair transplants involve large clumps of follicles being cut from the back of the head under local anaesthetic and separated into individual strands before being transplanted on top of the pate in their thousands. Surgeons are limited by the extent of hair needed to create a graft and the scar that it leaves behind.

Bessam Farjo, a hair-loss specialist and president of the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery, who is leading the research, said that results after six months were now available for 11 patients out of 19 currently enrolled on the trial. Of these, four out of five whose scalp had been stimulated had an increased hair count, noticeable from photographs, while three out of six without stimulation of the scalp had also noticed benefits. Full data was not available for two of the remaining patients, he added.

"We can take a small sample from the back of the head, extract the dermal papilla [DP] cells and then use a patented method of multiplying these basic cells of extracted hairs in the lab," he said. "Within eight weeks they are capable of generating literally millions of themselves, meaning that only around 100 hairs are needed in order to produce thousands of new hairs."

Researchers from the US, Italy and Japan are also exploring the possibility of cloning hair, including techniques designed to extract stem cells from the base of the hair follicles.

But Dr Farjo, who runs the Farjo Medical Centres in London and Manchester, said he was confident that the Intercytex approach was the most advanced and regulated clinical trial for hair loss anywhere in the world. The full results of the 48-week study will be available next year.

"For many men and women the consequences of hair loss can be devastating – whether brought on by pattern baldness or as a result of cancer treatment such as radiotherapy," he said. "There are some effective nonsurgical treatments that can slow down the process but these involve taking daily pills. For those with more significant hair loss one to two operations per bald area can give a natural looking head of hair of reasonable density."

Dr Farjo said that his team was also experimenting with combining the DP cells with keratinocytes – the cells that produce keratin, the basic building material of hair – so that they could grow actual hairs for transplant, rather than injectable cells. This could further improve surgeons' control over the amount, direction and appearance of the transplanted hair, he said.

"Hair surgeons and their patients have been waiting for something like this since the 1980s, but in my view it may be as little as five years before patients start seeing the benefits."

Connor Kiely, a hair restoration surgeon based in Ireland, said: "The possibilties thrown up by this research are very exciting, and we have been waiting for a long time for a solution like this that will deal with the problem at source, rather than simply relocating hair from one place to another."

Andrew Messenger, a consultant dermatologist at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield, sounded a sceptical note. "If they really have done this then that is quite an achievement, but I would like to see all the data.

"It does work with other species, but these are other species who grow hair at the drop of a hat. It's quite a bit more difficult with humans."

Marilyn Sherlock, chairman of the Institute of Trichologists, and a practising specialist in hair loss in Salisbury, Wiltshire, said: "If it works as well as the preliminary findings suggest, this is going to be absolutely superb. Baldness is sometimes only noticed once a lot of hair loss has already occurred and a lot of men who do not have a lot left at the back of their heads cannot opt for current transplants, while the cost is also prohibitive.

"We don't yet know what the cost of these injections would be, but if they were made available they could also be a useful treatment for women whose hair typically becomes extremely thin all over the head. This could allow a lot more people to opt for hair restoration who currently might previously not have considered having anything done."

 

Why Beijing Is In A Risky Place

Why Beijing Is In A Risky Place

As the factory to the world, China may be the nation most vulnerable to collapsing global demand.

George Wehrfritz

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Dec 1, 2008

Workers are losing factory jobs at the fastest rate in decades. Automakers—having failed to anticipate today's sales slump—are lobbying politicians for bailouts. The stock market is a crash heap, home prices are down by 35 percent or more in many cities and toxic assets have begun to weigh heavily on banks. America in 2008? Try China, where the global economic downturn now looks certain to end the country's 30-year growth boom, posing the greatest leadership challenge to Beijing since pro-democracy demonstrations threatened one-party communist rule back in 1989.

That's not the conventional take on China—yet. But with most industrialized countries now in recession and countries the world over hoping against hope that the planet's most buoyant major economy might somehow dampen the global downturn, it's a forecast that increasingly rings true. The reasoning goes something like this: China, despite its deep pool of savings and $2 trillion in foreign reserves, is unprotected from the fall in global demand that began in earnest in mid-2008. Notwithstanding all the hoopla about the rise of China's billion consumers, the body blow that's now landing in the industrial heartland will debunk the notion that China has already begun transitioning toward a new growth model based less on exports and investment and more on household consumption. "We would love to believe it too, but it just ain't so," wrote Standard Chartered bank's highly respected China economist, Stephen Green, last month. He says expecting Chinese spending to save the world from recession is "a pipe dream."

With China at the vanguard, Asia as a whole stands dangerously exposed to external shock. Since the late 1990s, household consumption as a share of China's GDP has fallen from roughly half to 35 percent. On the flip side, the share of Asia ex-Japan's output devoted to exports is now more than 45 percent, or roughly 10 points higher than it was on the eve of the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis. When juxtaposed with America's debt-driven gluttony, Asia's puny appetite for the goods it produces reflects a global economy that's staggeringly out of whack. "We are where we are because of massive imbalances that policymakers and politicians have allowed to build up over the last decade," argues Stephen Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. "Those imbalances were never sustainable, but the longer they went on the more they seduced people. And now we're paying the ultimate price for that seduction."

The tab, in fact, has yet to be tallied, but don't be surprised if Beijing gets stuck with the biggest portion of the bill for the simple reason that China's rebalancing act is actually much tougher than America's. For U.S. households, today's crisis means saving more and consuming less (recent consumption data suggests that is happening quite rapidly). Yet in China, where total household consumption is just 5 percent of America's by value, the challenge is to sustain an economy that's largely investment- and export-driven, which means finding ways to perpetuate industrial overproduction. Michael Pettis, a professor of finance at Peking University, says America found itself in the same bind back in 1929. "The U.S. in the 1920s ran a huge trade surplus and had the largest reserves in history to that point," he says. "So was the U.S. immune to the global crisis? No. It was the country that suffered the most. In that sense it is exactly like China today."

Beijing realizes the growth trap it's in. Why else would it unveil on Nov. 10 a $590 billion stimulus plan—a package nearly as large as Washington's $700 billion financial bailout—just days after it announced that China's economy expanded by 9 percent in the July–September quarter? The consensus view is that China's economy has slowed markedly since then. Year-on-year growth estimates for 2009 are mostly in the 7s, with the latest forecasts adding the scary caveat, "or less." This month the Royal Bank of Scotland said 5 percent growth in China next year couldn't be ruled out. China's economy, which grew by 11.9 percent last year, hasn't dipped below 6 percent annually since 1990.

Beijing's stimulus plan has won plaudits internationally not least because it indicates that Chinese leaders won't stand idly by as the crisis deepens. But just as in Washington at the beginning of the Great Depression, policy miscues could cost China dearly—especially if they undermine the global trading regime that China's economy relies on more heavily than any other major economy in the world. In the early 1930s, America's self-defeating mistake was to cut off world trade, particularly in the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, at a time when it was the leading exporter in a world burdened by massive industrial overproduction. Today, China is the lead exporter, the world again faces massive overproduction, and the mistake Beijing must avoid is moving too hard to sell more manufactured exports at the risk of flooding an already weak market, and triggering a protectionist backlash. That will only push the global market toward deflation—the downward spiral of falling prices leading to falling demand, as stressed consumers wait for even better bargains.

The doubts about China's stimulus plan arise in part because it's all broad strokes with no fine print. Conceptually, however, it seems intended to split the difference between promoting consumption at home, and export sales. It includes commitments to fund rural infrastructure, boost social spending on health and education, and mount an "economic housing" scheme for migrant workers in major cities—all of which, if implemented, would raise household spending over time. But it also contains perks for heavy industry, value-added tax cuts for the export sector and lending provisions that will channel bank funding to state enterprises engaged in road and rail construction and away from private companies. "The two focuses are definitely exports and infrastructure. That's what we're getting from everything we're picking up," says Green. "And that the health and education spending, although it has been listed as one of the eight priorities, is not going to be [well] supported." Economists estimate that only a quarter of the $590 billion is new money as opposed to previously announced spending, future tax cuts and unfunded mandates passed down to local governments. There's reason to expect that much of the promised social spending—and the consumer empowerment it represents—may not materialize. One warning signal is that Beijing has entrusted much of the safety net stuff to the provinces, which historically have put a low priority on building schools, unless the order to do so comes with earmarked funding from Beijing. One new concern: local tax revenues are shrinking due to the economic downturn. Roach says investment in the social safety net would "reduce the precautionary saving that is inhibiting broad-based consumption growth across the nations [of Asia]," though he adds: "China has from time to time flirted with that, but they really have dragged their feet."

To understand the linkage between social services and household consumption, visit a Chinese hospital. At check-in, patients are required to deposit money up-front, and when that funding runs dry they're tossed out onto the street, healthy or not. According to the World Health Organization, China spends less than 1 percent of its GDP on health care, which ranks it 156th out of 196 nations the U.N. agency tracks. Likewise, poor kids can't attend school without paying fees, and most migrants are uninsured against job-site accidents at any price. Families cope by saving an estimated 25 percent of their disposable income, just in case.

That isn't a social contract conducive to the "harmonious society" President Hu Jintao has advocated since 2006, or so concludes a new report co-produced by the United Nations Development Program and the China Institute for Reform and Development. It calls on China to overhaul its social-welfare system to provide universal basic health care, education, unemployment and retirement benefits for the country's 1.3 billion people. It stresses the need to vest forgotten segments of society including farmers, migrant workers and the poor. And it claims that such expenditures—which it estimates would cost $55 billion a year—actually offer a bigger bang for the buck than would the construction of new roads, railways and bridges.

The risk today (and it's one that's already materializing in a mounting exodus from shuttered factories in Guangdong province) is that these workers could, like the boxcar-hopping hobos of America's Depression era, become the flotsam and jetsam of the economic bust. Almost since China's reforms began three decades ago, Beijing insisted that sustaining economic growth rates above 8 percent was paramount to employing the millions of workers pouring in from inland villages. The further growth drops below that level, the higher the percentage of an estimated 15 million workers entering the labor force each year lands in the ranks of the unemployed. Yet even as policymakers stoked fast growth with every means at their disposal, little was done to transform these workers into foot soldiers of a different sort: new consumers with sufficient social protections to save less and spend more.

The prescription for change has been obvious since the late 1990s. It includes balanced growth between booming east and lagging west; efforts to narrow the yawning income gap between China's superrich and everyone else; and policies that channel the massive earnings logged by the state-owned conglomerates that dominate China Inc. back into government coffers to fund social spending. Yet campaigns with names like Go West meant to spur investment in the hinterland never amounted to more than propaganda exercises, and a long-mulled plan for the government to charge state companies dividend on their huge profits remains a small-scale experiment. In October, Standard Chartered noted a "gulf between aspirations and actual policies" illustrated by Beijing's long-standing bias toward investment and exports, and support for "state-protected oligopolies." Pettis argues that Beijing's persistent mercantilism has prepared it for the wrong crisis—specifically, an external debt shock akin to the one that ravaged Asia in 1997-98, against which China's huge savings and foreign reserve pools would make it "superbly protected." Yet as with America in 1929, China is the nation most exposed in the world to a collapse in global demand today.

As such, Beijing finds itself in a fix as 2008 winds to an ignominious close. Export promotion offers a viable short-term means of keeping the factories of China running—yet grabbing more market share amid a global downturn is the surest way to incite protectionism. During the recent gathering of G20 leaders in Washington, much public emphasis was placed on shoring up the global financial architecture and defending free trade. Yet former New Zealand prime minister Mike Moore, who headed the World Trade Organization from 1999 to 2002, believes the backroom talks focused on the imperative that Asia not try to export its way out of today's crisis. It was "the elephant in the room; how China, and to a lesser extent India and the Southeast Asians, must become consuming countries," he says. "It's overwhelmingly in [their] interest to become a lot less reliant on exports, and it also does right by the people they represent. Not to do it could trigger something that's very, very unpleasant." Global trade slumped 70 percent in the 1930s, and any return to the virulent economic nationalism of that era "would turn crisis into catastrophe," warns Moore.

That presents Beijing with a leadership challenge very different from the one it confronted with tanks and soldiers in 1989. Today, it must work to maintain enough harmony in the global trade arena so as not to lose access to vital overseas markets, while telling the Chinese people that fast growth isn't their birthright. In essence, Beijing must offer a new social contract in which consumption bolstered with a social safety net replaces the export-driven growth engine that has powered China's economy for 30 years. FDR did that in America in the 1930s, but it took a decade. Might China's leaders fare any better? In the late 1990s, then Premier Zhu Rongji refrained from devaluing China's currency when many of its neighbors did so; the decision lost China some export momentum but gained its leadership a reputation for responsible global action. Today's leaders have maintained that reputation, but given the enormity of the economic challenges at hand, the only safe bet is that their helmsmanship will be tested to the extreme in 2009. Especially if the pessimists are correct and China's economy grinds to a halt.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/170305

Uma pen cheia de saúde

Uma pen cheia de saúde Numa pen USB é possível guardar radiografias, análises e receitas de uma vida inteira. O conceito acaba de estrear pelas mãos da Mobilwave Ainda tem guardados os raios X de há dois anos? E as análises e o boletim de vacinas sabe onde estão? O Processo Clínico Electrónico (EPCI) promete ajudá-lo nestas questões. Com uma condição: não pode ser um nostálgico das chapas de radiografia ou da letra de médico.Isto porque o EPCI é uma pen USB, com uma aplicação pré-instalada que guarda e organiza, em suporte digital, todos os documentos que acompanham a vida clínica de um indivíduo. A solução foi criada pela Mobilwave e acaba de ser lançada na versão de 1 GB. «Uma das grandes vantagens da solução é não perder os exames ou as análises. Hoje há grandes custos na saúde provocados pela perda de exames ou análises. Com todos estes dados na pen, o utilizador não gasta dinheiro a fazer os exames que perdeu, mas também as seguradoras e Serviço Nacional de Saúde ficam a ganhar», garante Francisco Duarte, administrador da Mobilwave. O EPCI está ser comercializado com uma pen incorporada numa cápsula metálica própria para o transporte diário no bolso ou no porta-chaves. A pen da Mobilwave dispensa a instalação de software nos computadores utilizados para extrair ou inserir informação. «O software que se encontra na pen dispõe de três níveis de acesso. Um de acesso geral onde são inseridos dados ou alertas úteis numa emergência; um segundo para o acesso dos médicos; e por fim, um último com acesso apenas do utilizador. O EPCI recorre a criptografia de 128 bits», explica Francisco Duarte. O software do EPCI não pode ser descarregado da pen para o computador pessoal. Com esta restrição, pretende-se evitar eventuais cópias-pirata e também a dispersão de dados dos pessoais por computadores menos recomendáveis. A Mobilwave prevê vender o EPCI em farmácias, seguradoras, mas também Internet e ginásios. «Pretendemos que evolua ao longo do tempo, com a inserção de funcionalidades adicionais. Além da área da saúde, também queremos apostar num posicionamento relacionado com o estilo de vida», acrescenta o responsável da Mobilwave. Em casa ou no hospital O EPCI deverá começar a ser vendido por cerca de 40 euros (IVA incluído) na versão de 1G B. Posteriormente, a Mobilwave deverá lançar versões de 2 GB, 4 GB ou 8 GB. Apesar do preço, Francisco Duarte acredita que os utilizadores vão sentir-se aliciados por uma solução que facilita a gestão de processos clínicos e até pode repercutir-se em poupanças ao longo do tempo. «Alguns hospitais já entregam raios X e outros exames em DVD. Sabem que é mais barato e que é mais fácil de guardar. Além disso, também tem vantagens do ponto de vista ecológico», recorda Francisco Duarte. Porque a adesão das unidades hospitalares pode ser uma mais-valia em termos comerciais, a Mobilwave já começou a estudar a compatibilidade entre o software do EPCI e aplicações clínicas mais utilizadas, a fim de desenvolver actualizações imediatas dos dados, quando solicitados pelo utilizador (hoje, os dados têm de ser descarregados manualmente de um computador, como se faz com as pen tradicionais). Em inglÊs tambÉm Actualmente, a Mobilwave está a desenvolver uma versão do processo clínico electrónico em inglês, que pode servir de alavanca para o mercado estrangeiro. Outra das apostas da companhia é a venda de módulos digitais do boletim de saúde infantil, da grávida, do diabético ou do hipertenso no site www.myepci.pt. Apesar de conter dados tão valiosos para o utilizador, o EPCI não perdeu as funções tradicionais de uma pen. «Podemos lá colocar o que quisermos, até dados que não são de âmbito clínico. O EPCI tem partições, que permitem dividir os dados por várias temáticas», conclui Francisco Duarte.

O EPCI ao detalhe O software do EPCI foi desenvolvido em tecnologia .Net, da Microsoft. Pode ser utilizado em qualquer computador que tenha porta USB; dispensa a instalação de software no computador que fornece o acesso aos dados. Por enquanto, é apenas compatível com Windows, mas a Mobilwave conta vir a lançar versões para sistemas operativos Linux ou da Apple. A Mobilwave inaugurou o conceito da "pen clínica" com uma versão de 1 GB de capacidade de armazenamento, que custa cerca de 40 euros. Futuramente, serão postos à venda modelos de 2 GB, 4 GB e 8 GB (este último terá um preço a rondar 130 euros). O EPCI permite armazenar fotos, vídeos, ecografias, electrocardiogramas, textos, gráficos, radiografias, digitalizações de resultados de análises, entre outros formatos de imagem e documentos que clínicas, laboratórios e hospitais costumam usar. Para quem se habituou aos computadores, a utilização do EPCI é intuitiva. O acesso é feito em três níveis: acesso geral para os dados de emergência, que dispensa a inserção de uma password; acesso para pessoal clínico, com uma password própria; e por fim, o acesso do proprietário, que tem a sua password e permite distribuir a informação visível nos três níveis de acesso. Por razões de confidencialidade dos dados e protecção antipirataria, o sistema não permite a cópia do software EPCI para o computador. A segurança dos dados é assegurada por encriptação de 128 bits. A actualização do EPCI é feita através da descarga de ficheiros para uma área própria. Posteriormente, o utilizador pode definir em que níveis de acesso os dados são disponibilizados, ou em que menus devem estar arquivados. O menu de utilização dispõe de módulos de configuração e gestão de dados tanto de âmbito temático como de segurança. O software do EPCI dispõe também de um serviço de agenda, que permite inserir lembretes, alertas, notas ou contactos pessoais. O sistema contempla ainda um serviço de vigilância que permite emitir alertas automáticos, caso os índices do colesterol, da tensão arterial sejam anormais. No menu também se encontram áreas específicas para receitas e medicação e descrição do histórico clínico.

'Crippled virus'

'Assassin' cells home in on HIV

Cells have been successfully engineered in the laboratory to overcome one of HIV's most effective defence mechanisms, say researchers.

The immune system cells, created by UK and US scientists, can lock on to HIV, even after it has mutated to throw them off the scent.

It is hoped the Nature Medicine study could lead to a more effective way of tackling HIV infection.

Tests on people with advanced HIV may start next year.

In the face of our engineered assassin cells, the virus will either die or be forced to change its disguises again, weakening itself along the way Professor Andy Sewell Cardiff University

Most viruses can be "cleared" by the body's own defences, partly due to cells called "killer T-cells", which learn to recognise the intruder and eliminate it.

However, HIV's power stems from its ability to mutate rapidly to evade detection and destruction.

The project underway at the Universities of Cardiff and Pennsylvania, in partnership with an Oxford-based biotech company, involves the creation "souped-up" T-cells with the ability to recognise and attack more of these mutated forms.

To do this, the scientists attach extra versions of the "T-cell receptor", the part of the cell responsible for scanning and removing infected cells, which have been preset to identify various HIV mutations.

In laboratory studies, the modified T-cells were able to destroy HIV cells in a laboratory cell culture.

'Crippled virus'

Professor Andy Sewell, from Cardiff, said that he hoped that in humans, the effect would be equally devastating to the virus.

"In the face of our engineered assassin cells, the virus will either die or be forced to change its disguises again, weakening itself along the way.

"We'd prefer the first option but I suspect we'll see the latter. Even if we do only cripple the virus, this will still be a good outcome, as it is likely to become a much slower target and be easier to pick off.

"Forcing the virus to a weaker state would likely reduce its capacity to transmit within the population and may help slow or even prevent the onset of AIDS in individuals."

Dr Ade Fakoya, from the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, said that the work essentially amounted to an "enhanced detection" system to detect HIV as it lay hidden in cells.

However, he warned that it might not be a suitable strategy for everyone with HIV.

"It is very interesting basic research and as such really does contribute to our knowledge of what might work as a immunological treatment strategy. It is early days in the search for an effective immune based treatment for HIV.

One limitation however is that the immunological assassins generated by this technology are done using a specific part of the receptor of the active cells.

"The genetic make up of these receptors do vary with different racial populations."

Garry Brough, from the HIV charity Terrence Higgins Trust, described the research as "potentially very good news for people living with HIV".

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7716449.stm

Published: 2008/11/10 10:11:59 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

Purple tomato 'may boost health'

Purple tomato 'may boost health'

Scientists have developed purple tomatoes which they hope may be able to keep cancer at bay.

The fruit are rich in an antioxidant pigment called anthocyanin which is thought to have anti-cancer properties.

A team from the John Innes Centre, Norwich, created the tomatoes by incorporating genes from the snapdragon flower, which is high in anthocyanin.

The study, published in Nature Biotechnology, found mice who ate the tomatoes lived longer.

This offers the potential to promote health through diet by reducing the impact of chronic disease Professor Cathie Martin John Innes Centre

Anthocyanins, found in particularly high levels in berries such as blackberry, cranberry and chokeberry, have been shown to help significantly slow the growth of colon cancer cells.

They are also thought to offer protection against cardiovascular disease and age-related degenerative diseases.

There is also evidence that the pigments have anti-inflammatory properties, help boost eyesight, and may help stave off obesity and diabetes.

The John Innes team is investigating ways to increase the levels of health-promoting compounds in more commonly eaten fruits and vegetables.

Tomatoes already contain high levels of beneficial antioxidant compounds, such as lycopene and flavonoids.

More benefit

Professor Cathie Martin, from the centre, said: "Most people do not eat five portions of fruits and vegetables a day, but they can get more benefit from those they do eat if common fruit and veg can be developed that are higher in bioactive compounds."

It is too early to say whether anthocyanins obtained through diet could help to reduce the risk of cancer Dr Lara Bennett Cancer Research UK

The John Innes team took two genes from snapdragon that induce the production of anthocyanins in snapdragon flowers, and turned them on in tomato fruit.

Anthocyanins accumulated in tomatoes at higher levels than anything previously achieved in both the peel and flesh of the fruit, giving them an intense purple colour.

Tests on mice bred to be susceptible to cancer showed that animals whose diets were supplemented with the purple tomatoes had a significantly longer lifespan compared to those who received only normal red tomatoes.

Professor Martin said: "This is one of the first examples of metabolic engineering that offers the potential to promote health through diet by reducing the impact of chronic disease.

"And certainly the first example of a GMO [genetically modified organism] with a trait that really offers a potential benefit for all consumers."

She said the the next step would be test the tomatoes on human volunteers.

Exciting

Dr Lara Bennett, of the charity Cancer Research UK, said: "It is exciting to see new techniques that could potentially make healthy foods even better for us.

"But it is too early to say whether anthocyanins obtained through diet could help to reduce the risk of cancer.

"We do know that eating a healthy, balanced diet that is rich in fibre, fruit and vegetables - and low in red and processed meat - is an important way to reduce your cancer risk."

Dr Paul Kroon, of the Food Research Institute in Norwich, said the research was an "important study".

"The technology offers great scope for altering colours of fruits and vegetables, and their content of potentially health-protective compounds."

However, he said it would be wrong to assume the effects seen in mice would necessarily occur in humans.

Anna Denny, a nutrition scientist for the British Nutrition Foundation, stressed there was no "magic bullet" against diseases such as cancer and heart disease.

"Fruit and veg with higher levels of health-promoting compounds should not been seen as a replacement for eating a healthy balanced diet."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7688310.stm

Published: 2008/10/26 15:52:22 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

Too Large To Grow So Fast

The Middle Kingdom is still a powerhouse, but the days of runaway growth are quickly coming to an end.

Ruchir Sharma

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Oct 6, 2008

Anyone forecasting a hard landing for China's boom is typically met with the same skepticism that doomed the boy who cried wolf. But the lesson of the fable is that the wolf did come, the third time. Now, after two false alarms in 2004 and 2006, the slowdown is at the door. China has simply grown too big to keep expanding at the 10 percent rate it has sustained for 30 years, and is likely to slow to 8 percent at best next year and for the foreseeable future. The decisive end of the era of double-digit growth is here, with major implications for the nation and the world.

Until now, China had defied the traditional theories of how fast developing nations could grow, and for how long. Its economic growth has compounded at an annual average rate of 10 percent over the past 30 years, a record that has surpassed the other miracle economies, such as Japan and South Korea. Japan's growth rate downshifted significantly after 1973, when it reached a per capita income of $3,000—a level China hit earlier this year. Now the law of large numbers is catching up to China: in 1998, to grow its $1 trillion economy by 10 percent, it had to expand its economic activities by $100 billion and consume only 10 percent of the world's industrial commodities. Currently, to grow its $3.5 trillion economy that fast, it needs to expand by $350 billion a year and suck in nearly 30 percent of global commodity production. Even more important, there are clear signs in China's response to the slowdown that the leadership understands that this moment was inevitable—that it is abandoning its old growth-at-any-cost mentality, and will not try to artificially revive double-digit growth.

Until very recently, of course, the China headlines had remained entirely bullish. The red-hot expansion had shown only marginal signs of moderation through the first half this year, and most economists blamed weak growth in Western countries, which are China's best export customers. They had also assumed that sluggish exports could be offset by stronger domestic demand, powered by Beijing's big spending on infrastructure projects and the rising purchasing power of the Chinese consumer. However, the latest signs are that the Chinese domestic economy is not immune to slowdown: it is starting to falter, too, and the property sector is the heart of its troubles, as in many countries.

For the first time since the Chinese housing market was fully privatized in the late 1990s, a coordinated real-estate downturn has set in across all major provinces. The feeding frenzy of rising prices and increasing demand has given way to a vicious cycle of falling prices and slowing demand. Housing is increasingly unaffordable, as property prices doubled between 2000 and 2007, and authorities began raising interest rates last year in an attempt to prevent overheating. Still, for much of this year, developers have continued building with abandon, counting on demand to revive and refusing to lower prices, even as sales began to collapse and inventories mounted. Property sales started to drop in October 2007, turning negative in the second quarter of 2008.

Now there is widespread anecdotal evidence that a price war is breaking out from Beijing to Shenzhen. Discounts of 10 to 20 percent are increasingly common on existing residential projects. New construction activity is grinding to a halt. Auctions of apartments in new buildings are failing to attract bidders even in formerly hot coastal cities like Shanghai.

A bear market for real estate will have widely unforeseen ripple effects across the economy: while the consensus forecast is for still-robust growth of 9 to 10 percent in 2008 and 2009, down from 11.9 percent in 2007, those predictions factor in only falling export growth, which is expected to slip from the 20 percent pace of recent years to single digits next year, stalling a sector that accounts for a third of investment spending in China. Businesses in some of the most energetic export hubs, such as the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta regions, have been reporting a softening in demand for months now. But real-estate construction accounts for another third of total investment spending, and its collapse should lop off at least an additional percentage point from economic growth.

The downside risks don't end there.

Falling property prices will further discourage consumption, which was weakening anyway. Many Chinese are feeling decidedly less rich because the local stock market has fallen by two thirds from its peak in October 2007. And historically, as consumer confidence wanes, so too do both the real-estate and auto sectors. In a telling sign, passenger-car sales fell in August, down 10 percent from the same month last year.

Until late 2007, China had in fact been relatively immune to the travails of the U.S. economy, which began to slow dramatically from the middle of 2006. But then inflation started to pick up speed in China, and policymakers responded last November by getting tough, with a strict directive to banks to clamp down on excess lending. The aggressive tightening of monetary policy laid the seeds of the current housing slump in China and dashed hopes of any economic decoupling.

Shakeouts are always necessary to cleanse the system of excesses in prices and spending that accumulate during any bubble. But China's housing excesses are less dangerous than those in the United States and Britain. For one, China's urbanization process is in its early stages, so housing demand is likely to rebound strongly in the long term, and help to swiftly clear unsold inventory. With Chinese household income rising at 10 percent a year, housing will become increasingly affordable if home prices remain flat, even for a year. And unlike Americans, the Chinese are not deep in personal debt; mortgage loans equal 12 percent of China's economy, compared with more than 100 percent of the United States' economy. Banks in China also have relatively small exposure to real-estate developers, who hold just 7 percent of outstanding banks loans. The comparable figure in the United States is 53 percent. The Chinese housing-market-led slowdown poses no systemic risk to its financial system.

The more important questions are how long will the downturn last and where will China emerge at the end of this phase? Some policy help is already on the way. The People's Bank of China recently reduced its benchmark rate by 27 basis points, its first softening in six years. With consumer price inflation slowing, there is further scope for an easing of monetary policy. The government also has ample room to stimulate the economy by raising spending, since its fiscal accounts are almost balanced, and its total debt-to-GDP ratio is very low at 16 percent.

But there is growing disappointment in the Chinese investment community as to why the government is not stepping in more decisively to stabilize growth, particularly in the property sector. The government's reaction reveals a lot about the shifting priorities of the leadership. Following the rapid rise in property prices over the past few years, there was a general feeling in policymaking circles that the average buyer was being priced out of the market and that developers were raking in money like bandits. The government would consequently be happy to see a fall in property prices, possibly a part of its larger objective of achieving a "harmonious society" by dampening the widening income gap.

The government is also wary of turning on the monetary spigots too quickly. It wants to anchor inflationary expectations after the painful experience of the past year, when inflation stayed well above the tolerance limit of 5 percent. The danger with such a strategy is that once a deflationary psychology sets in, it's difficult to turn things around. Consumer price inflation has fallen sharply from a high of 8.7 percent in February to 4.9 percent in August. While the merits of slowly lowering interest rates are debatable, this incrementalist policy does suggest a nuanced shift in the government's growth-at-any-cost approach to a greater emphasis on balanced economic development.

In a way, the commodity-price-led inflation surge of the past year was a message from the marketplace that there are limits to China's growth potential. It is not feasible for an economy to keep growing at a double-digit pace once it achieves a certain critical mass.

The Japanese case is telling. Back in the 1970s, Japan was forced to allow domestic prices and its exchange rate to be more market-determined—all part of an economic evolution process, as larger economies require greater currency flexibility to better tailor domestic money and credit conditions to local needs. Productivity growth in Japan naturally slowed as the exchange rate became less globally competitive, and economic growth averaged 4 percent over the next 15 years.

To be sure, China is not likely to slow to 4 percent growth for some time. China has also moved toward greater exchange-rate flexibility, beginning in 2005, but more gradually than Japan, and it still has a long way to go before it achieves anywhere near the level of modernization that Japan had reached in 1973. China started its modernization drive from a much lower base in 1978, while Japan was already a relatively advanced industrial economy, with modern textile, steel and shipbuilding sectors, at the beginning of its high-growth period in 1955.

Furthermore, China's labor-productivity boom has been driven by the vast migration of rural workers to higher-value-added urban jobs. An estimated 12 million to 15 million people continue to shift from agricultural to manufacturing- and services-based jobs every year. While it is hard to estimate when this labor supply will be exhausted, some early signs suggest that incrementally higher wages are required to move workers to urban centers. This should chip away at productivity growth.

There are also signs that Chinese policymakers are focusing more on shoring up rural infrastructure. Following the food-price shortages of recent years, the government is promoting increased farm growth that will help stabilize prices and—as an unintended consequence—give rural workers less reason to migrate to cities. If that slows factory output, so be it. A further demonstration of the change in mind-set is the recent adoption of a new labor law that, among other things, sets a minimum wage ranging from anywhere between $60 and $110 a month based on the per capita income of each province.

China remains a great economic growth story and is on the path to converging with the industrialized world. But developments of the past year—from commodity-price-led inflation to the slight shift in the government's priorities—indicate that the pace of convergence is set to slow in the years ahead. The 11.9 percent growth rate recorded last year was probably the high-water mark of China's economic miracle; growth could slow to 8 percent or lower in 2009. While that will prompt stimulus measures from the government, it is unlikely that China's growth trajectory will return to the 10 percent-plus rate that it sustained with little inflation from 2003 to 2007. After all, when fixed investment has exceeded 40 percent of GDP for years, there's a limit to how many more new power plants and roads the government can help build.

The $3.5 trillion economy's potential growth rate is probably closer to 8 percent, a rate that hardly detracts from its reputation as an economic miracle. But the shift to a slower growth plane is likely to be painful for many economic agents—from property developers in China to commodity traders worldwide—for whom the idea that anything related to Chinese demand could be bid up to any price had been taken for granted. Although it is starting off as a cyclical downturn, the bigger story is that the law of economic gravity is catching up with China, too.

Sharma is head of global emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/161234

Get Your Green Motor Running

 

Get Your Green Motor Running

Japan's automakers are zooming ahead in the eco-car race. Their lead may turbocharge their country.

Christian Caryl and Akiko Kashiwagi

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 12:36 PM ET Sep 6, 2008

Honda's new FCX clarity feels like a perfectly ordinary car—which may well be the most shocking thing about it. It looks and drives like a run-of-the-mill four-seat sedan. Slip behind the wheel and press the pedal with your foot, and the car accelerates with satisfying punch. But after a few minutes of cruising, you'll notice that something is missing. The only audible engine noise is a faint whir, so faint that you can actually hear the tires swishing along the asphalt.

That's because the Clarity is a hydrogen-fuel-cell car, one of the most advanced in the world. The once bulky fuel-cell stack that supplies energy to the engine has been reduced in size by half over the past decade while increasing the power output by 50 percent. It's the first to be certified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the first to be delivered to retail customers (albeit on a leasing basis). As for CO2 emissions, the only exhaust it produces is a trickle of water. And perhaps most important of all is what stands behind it: A state-of-the-art factory that's ready to produce thousands of the vehicles once the market's ready. Most of Honda's competitors, by contrast, are still bringing concept cars to the auto shows.

The Clarity is also just one of a number of next-generation green automobiles that are beginning to come off assembly lines in Japan. These vehicles, whether powered by fuel cells, long-lasting batteries or renewable biofuels, have been around for years, but almost always as one-off utopian designs or experimental models that were designed mainly to attract good green press. Now Japanese automakers are going to the next level, entering the green-car mass market, in many cases years before their competitors. Nissan plans to introduce an electric vehicle to the United States and Japan by 2010, with a global rollout in 2012. Toyota is road-testing a plug-in hybrid in Japan, the United States and Europe and plans to launch it in 2009 (there's a buzz, unconfirmed by the company, that this hybrid car could use solar power as well). Honda, a distant second to Toyota in the hybrid market, is preparing for the launch of a new car highly anticipated for its innovative green technologies, including its state-of-the-art battery. Mazda will offer the world's first hydrogen-gasoline hybrid in Japan by next March. All of these companies are benefiting from close cooperation with electronics manufacturers, component makers and suppliers that are helping to push Japan to the forefront of green-car technologies. "Globally, Japanese companies are definitely at the top right now, and I expect them to remain No. 1 in the future," says Mike Omotoso, an auto analyst for California-based J.D. Power and Associates. "It's definitely having a positive impact on the Japanese economy."

In large part, Japan's lead in green-car technology is an outgrowth of its old austerity. Japan was obsessed with energy efficiency long before global warming made it a worldwide obsession. For decades Japanese companies have struggled to cope with their oil-poor country's sky-high energy costs by placing a premium on energy-saving technologies, and it has paid off. Even old Japanese industries are cutting-edge in cutting energy costs. Japan continued to make batteries long after U.S. rivals quit, and now makes the most efficient batteries in the world. Japanese steelmakers have ceded ground to cheaper emerging-market rivals but are still unsurpassed in the fine niche art of making superlight steel for car bodies. The hidden strength of Japanese smokestack industries helped create its green cars, and now the success of those cars is pushing more and more Japanese industries—electronic-motor and control-unit producers, all sorts of material companies—to innovate faster.

It's impossible to tally the direct economic effect of the green-car race at this point, but it's huge and likely to grow. The Prius is already the most popular green car in the world, and Toyota plans to raise domestic output of the Prius by 60 percent to 450,000 a year by 2009. By 2015, Goldman Sachs expects the hybrid-vehicle market (including plug-in hybrids) to grow to 2.5 million, up from half a million in 2007, with Toyota and Honda in the lead. Analysts say plug-in hybrids, which run on a battery alone for a short range, are the vehicles that will gradually ease drivers out of the gasoline age and into the electric era. Goldman analyst Kota Yuzawa says hybrid vehicles could account for 5 to 10 percent of operating profits for Honda and Toyota in 2010. And the potential markets look likely to grow as oil prices hit new highs and environmental regulations get tighter.

The focus on green cars reveals the kind of industrial vision that Japan is often criticized for having lost decades ago. Toyota launched the G21 Project, which ultimately produced the Prius, back in the 1990s, when oil prices were low and America's love of SUVs was still growing. The idea was to create a model car for the 21st century, and counter Toyota's reputation for "boring" vehicles. Toyota simply saw the long view before others, assuming that the petroleum-based economy was becoming unviable for a variety of environmental and economic reasons, according to Noriyuki Matsushima, analyst at Nikko Citigroup in Tokyo.

Toyota has since dramatically cut the costs of producing the Prius by achieving economies of scale. Toyota has already reached the break-even point on sales of its hybrids; by contrast, its foreign competitors, like GM, still have years of bleeding red ink ahead of them. Toyota says the parts in its next line of hybrids, due for release next year, will cost about half the current bunch, allowing it to drop prices and raise profits. While the company is estimated to have lost about $10,000 on each car produced when the line was launched back in 1997, "the new Prius is going to be hugely profitable," says Nikko's Matsushima, bringing in thousands of dollars per car. And Toyota aims to cut hybrid production costs over the next decade. With so much more manufacturing experience than its rivals, Toyota will be "the price leader" for the next generation of hybrid vehicles, says Matsushima.

To be sure, virtually every car company in the world is ramping up intriguing green-car projects. Even slow-moving GM plans to debut the plug-in hybrid Volt in 2010, but it is racing from behind against Japanese rivals that work in often exclusive national supply networks, as they have for decades.

Japanese carmakers aim to protect their edge by joining forces with makers of electronics and batteries, the key to the next generation of high-tech cars. Toyota's joint venture with Panasonic (which is majority-owned by the car company) has already made it one of the world's leading battery companies. Similarly, Nissan recently increased its stake in its own battery joint venture with NEC, investing in a big new factory with the aim of marketing its lithium-ion batteries to other carmakers. Japanese battery companies have a big lead in design and mass production, which will make their prices hard to match. A.T. Kearney's Eiji Kawahara says that, even if Japan does not come up with the next big breakthrough in battery design, the technology for putting it into mass production will likely be Japanese.

Mitsubishi's new electric car, the i MiEV, offers another nice illustration of the factors underlying Japan's lead. Until now, many electric vehicles have been limited by range, meager acceleration and long charging times. The four-door i MiEV boasts a range of 160 kilometers per each full charge (compared with 40 for a GM Volt), and, as a recent test-drive around Tokyo demonstrated, its pickup in urban traffic differs in no notable way from a gas-powered car. Other new electric vehicles—like Tesla's much-hyped roadsters—may offer even better performance. But in stark contrast to Tesla—an innovative but tiny start-up—Mitsubishi is reaping the benefits of a tie-up with leading Japanese battery maker GS Yuasa that has the two companies preparing for mass production of state-of-the-art batteries by the end of 2009.

Already the i MiEV's battery weighs in at a mere 204 kilograms (compared with 454 for Tesla's model), and the effect on cost is palpable. Mitsubishi plans to start selling i MiEVs in Japan at the end of next year for a price of about $28,000 after planned subsidies of about $10,000—compared with a cool $100,000 for a Tesla. Meanwhile, thanks to its work with Japanese power companies, Mitsubishi says it's close to perfecting "quick charge" devices that would bring the battery up to 80 percent of capacity in half an hour—thus opening up the prospect that you could recharge your car in the supermarket parking lot while picking up the groceries, for example.

Japanese companies have been plugging away at the green-car challenge for years, in a slow and steady way that plays to the strengths of their manufacturing tradition. While U.S. automakers have spent as much on R&D as top Japanese makers do, the former have been pursing totally different priorities—still sticking money into bulky SUVs while the Japanese were already well down the hybrid road. That money is filtering into other areas of Japanese industry, reinforcing technological progress. "We are now seeing the result of numerous companies' ferocious effort to innovate technologies" to meet carmakers' demands, says Masahiro Ohta, analyst at Fuji Chimera Research Institute.

The secret to making better batteries lies less in blazing transformations than in incremental innovation—something the Japanese are traditionally good at. Japanese battery makers and automakers have been collaborating since the late 1990s. Both sides use the word suriawase, meaning "coordination and integration." Indeed, car-industry observers took note last year at the Detroit Motor Show when Toyota president Katsuaki Watanabe adorned his company's stage with a huge PANASONIC sign (Panasonic supplies batteries for the Prius). The fact that car manufacturers and suppliers have such close relationships in Japan facilitates speedy experimentation and innovation. "It's not like assembling personal computers," says Tatsuo Yoshida, analyst at UBS Securities. "When you're making cars, you just can't put a set of components together to make a perfect product. A car is made of tailor-made parts and tailor-made components."

Slowly but surely, these relationships come together to give Japan an edge. Nissan is also working to develop a next-generation battery, partnering with NEC in an effort to begin mass production next year. A.T. Kearney's Kawahara says, "Those [Japanese] manufacturing technologies are the most confidential of the confidential." Though Ford and GM have been loudly touting hybrid vehicles of their own, those are estimated to be much more expensive, and U.S. manufacturers are already finding themselves compelled to turn to the Japanese for batteries that offer the necessary staying power.

Since the batteries that power cars could also someday be used to heat homes, a lead in the area has vast implications for the broader Japanese economy. Nobuaki Yoshioka is a senior executive at Automotive Energy Supply Corp. (AESC), a joint venture between Nissan and NEC. His company has been pushing the envelope of battery technology by developing lithium-ion batteries with manganese components—something NEC has been working on since 1990. "I think [the potential of this technology] is enormous," says Yoshioka. "We know that oil is going to be depleted, and that's going to make it indispensable to somehow store energy that is generated. Today we're focused on cars. But it's clear that the number of possible applications as storage of energy is huge."

For example, superefficient batteries might store electricity generated at times of low demand for use during peak hours. Batteries could be used to change the infrastructure of the energy industry not just in Japan but also throughout Asia. Fumikazu Kitagawa, an auto-sector consultant at Nomura Research Institute, believes that combining the new generation of batteries with solar-power generators will completely revolutionize household energy systems. "This sort of system will be available at reasonable cost, and fairly soon," says Kitagawa.

Batteries are only one part of a green automotive-components industry, including electric motors, inverters and the like, which Japan already dominates. Nomura estimates that the market for hybrid components alone could triple to $5 billion by 2012, and reach $9 billion by 2015. "Japan now has a huge potential to become a world supply center," says Yozo Hasegawa, author of the book "Clean Car Wars," which details the competition for green-car technology among Japanese carmakers and their foreign rivals.

Japan's push for the ultimate green car will also spill over into the materials sector. Consider the steel industry (steel is the main ingredient in automotive bodies). Amid intensifying global competition and consolidation, Japan's steelmakers have kept their edge, increasingly focusing on high-end innovative products coveted by the auto industries (about 80 percent of Japanese production is in this area, which yields the highest profit margins). Yasuhiro Daisho, a professor at Waseda University, says Japanese steelmakers have been leaders of ultralight and high-strength steel for years. "Nippon Steel and JFE Steel have the technologies that ArcelorMittal is very anxious to have," he says. Asian makers, in particular the Chinese, are also trying to catch up with Japan's lead in steel innovation.

Other materials makers are also scampering to develop new products for high-tech cars. Toray, a pioneer of high-tech materials like the carbon fiber it puts into aircraft wings and into the fuselage of the Boeing Dreamliner, too, is just one of them. The company recently set up a new automotive research-and-development center for advanced materials in Nagoya, just down the road from Toyota and suppliers. Toray holds 34 percent of the world carbon-fiber market, and aims to develop a carbon fiber cheap enough for use in car bodies. It hopes to more than double its sales to the auto sector to $3.5 billion by 2015. Teijin, another high-tech-materials maker, aims to "cut the weight of a car by half" by using a variety of new materials like polycarbonate resin, and a bubble-shaped prototype is on display in its Tokyo showroom. Meanwhile, a superlight sports car produced by Ken Okuyama Design is set for sale this fall in Japan. Using carbon fiber and aluminum generously, the model weighs only 750 kilograms.

Another potential growth industry: bioplastics, which have been attracting R&D money from Mazda and Toyota, among others. Because these materials are derived from plants rather than from petroleum (as most plastics are today), bioplastics are carbon-neutral and require much less energy to make. These companies are experimenting with a range of items, including installment panels and floor mats.

Of course, by betting heavily on all the green-car technologies, Japan could easily find itself getting a couple of calls badly wrong. It's certainly missed forecasts in the past—when, for example, Japanese mobile-phone companies ended up backing the wrong standard in the early 1990s, largely shutting themselves out of the global cell-phone boom that followed. The lithium-ion batteries that Japanese companies are investing in right now have plenty of limits, and it's always possible that nimble non-Japanese entrepreneurs could figure out an even better technology.

So far it's unclear which of the new green-car technologies will triumph in the race for "sustainable mobility." Hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicles like Honda's Clarity still face some serious challenges if they're ever to break though into the market: not only are they costly, but the fuel stations and infrastructure to power them would have to be built from the ground up. While electric vehicles have the huge advantage of being able to tap into existing power networks, they, too, remain costly, and even the best batteries still don't offer the same range as a full tank of gasoline. Lithium-ion batteries hold some safety concerns. The batteries have a tendency to overheat, potentially causing fires; some manufacturers have had to recall lithium-ion laptop batteries for just this reason. Don Hillebrand, director at Argonne National Labs in Chicago and a leading researcher who has testified before the U.S. Congress on battery technology, warns: "This is a time of great potential and huge risk. Those leaders today may not stay leaders, because rules are going to change quickly."

Even the popular hybrids are still a niche product. But as far as Japanese carmakers are concerned, gasoline is no longer where the action is. Hillebrand believes that green technologies are changing the industry in an unprecedented way. If Ford invented modern car manufacturing when it built the first assembly line for the Model T, says Hillebrand, then the emerging green technology represents "the second invention of the auto industry. And it's the Japanese who are leading the charge."

Ecofriendly cars are leaving the auto shows and the design exhibitions and taking to the streets. Honda, for one, has already started leasing the FCX Clarity to a select group of high-profile customers in southern California. As American actress Jean Harris, one of those chosen as a Clarity user, says: "I love that it's not a huge leap from what we're already used to. It feels like a space-age regular car." If Japanese managers have their way, that simple phrase could well provide the key to a new economic boom.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/157508

©  2008

Agricultura biológica

Agricultura biológica Árvores com "chip" incorporado Inovação. No Fundão, o maior produtor de cereja biológica da Europa desenvolveu tecnologia de ponta para gerir o seu pomar. Conceição Antunes

16:00 | Terça-feira, 12 de Ago de 2008 Link permanente: x

Alberto Frias Carlos Mendes, agricultor, confere no PDA os tratamentos a realizar no seu cerejal de quase 120 hectares Parecem rubis a brilhar ao sol radioso da Cova da Beira. As últimas cerejas do ano são colhidas sob o controlo atento do agricultor Carlos Mendes. Nos seus quase 120 hectares de cerejal no Fundão, a produção é 100% biológica. "Esta é a maior área de produção de cereja biológica da Europa", faz notar Carlos Mendes, que está habituado a exportar cerejas para países como França, Inglaterra, Alemanha e até Brasil. "Para vender no Norte da Europa, é fundamental estar certificado. E em 2009, quero estar a exportar 90% da produção". Aquele vasto cerejal do Fundão já deixou de ser gerido "a olhómetro". As árvores têm um "chip" incorporado e todas as operações de rega, colheita ou colocação de adubos são controladas ao milímetro, sendo a informação continuamente encaminhada para um sistema central. "Agora, as árvores podem falar comigo", refere o agricultor. Dar uma voz à Natureza O sistema no pomar biológico de Carlos Mendes está em fase de construção, prevendo-se a sua conclusão até ao final do ano. Vai incorporar um conjunto variado de tecnologias, envolvendo também investigação da Universidade de Coimbra. Para desenvolver esta nova plataforma de "software", o agricultor português juntou-se ao informático e consultor belga Paul Raoul Gailly na criação de uma empresa comum, a SSIAgri, que está a funcionar no Parque de Ciência e Tecnologia da Covilhã. "Sempre tive o problema de conseguir gerir uma área que excede a minha capacidade humana", reconhece o produtor de cereja do Fundão. E acrescenta: "E sou obrigado a fazer o controlo dos produtos que envio para os supermercados europeus". Segundo Paul Raoul Gailly, "o carácter inovador do sistema está em dotar a Natureza de uma voz. Numa produção biológica há mais regras que são impostas, e o grau de rastreabilidade do sistema ultrapassa de longe as regras mais exigentes". Quando estiver finalizado, o sistema permite gerir as colheitas em função da previsão de chuvas ou outras condições de clima adverso que podem danificar as cerejas. "Como numa fábrica, posso informar o meu cliente na Bélgica ou na Alemanha que dentro de xis dias tenho xis quilos de cerejas colhidas. É o que sempre quis fazer e nunca consegui", salienta Carlos Mendes. Ao vender para cadeias como Jumbo e El Corte Inglés, o produtor também reforça o "casamento com a grande distribuição", ajudando ao controlo da fruta que entra nos armazéns. O consumidor também terá acesso, pela Internet (e com o código de barras da embalagem), a toda a informação sobre tratamentos feitos na cerejeira que deu os frutos que vai comer. A 'cereja em cima do bolo' é poder ver imagens da própria árvore, através de câmaras móveis a instalar no pomar. "O que está em causa é a segurança alimentar e a credibilização de origem. Não ficam dúvidas para o consumidor que as cerejas são da Cova da Beira, contrariamente à questão que se fala de pôr fruta espanhola nas casas portuguesas", sublinha o agricultor. "Este sistema foi algo que pensei para mim. Mas aplica-se a qualquer produção, tanto biológica como convencional", frisa Carlos Mendes, referindo que além da cereja, o sistema pode ser aplicado à produção de azeite, vinho, hortofrutícolas e até à floresta, com vista a obter ganhos de eficiência em várias frentes. "Vamos criar um conceito de agricultura para conseguir produtos mais baratos". A meta da SSIAgri é "criar um produto português com uma patente" e exportá-lo para vários países. Numa primeira fase, já em 2009, o alvo é a Península Ibérica, além de Itália, França ou Grécia. "O nosso caminho vai ser evoluir para um prestador de serviços global e um parceiro na gestão florestal", adianta Carlos Mendes. "E aqui já estamos no domínio da inovação pura". Compensa uma produção 100% biológica? "A cereja desenvolve-se em dois meses e requer muito menos intervenções fito-sanitárias que as batatas ou as cenouras, por exemplo", explica o agricultor. "A Mãe-Natureza é a minha grande sócia. É ela que faz 90% das coisas", sublinha. Gestão inteligente do cerejal   Árvores com "chip" O sistema-piloto neste cerejal do Fundão agrega um conjunto de tecnologias que permitem a rastreabilidade total dos frutos desde o campo ao armazém. Cada linha de árvores tem um "chip" incorporado, com informação actualizada sobre todas as operações mecânicas e manuais, ligado a um sistema central Agricultor 'fala' com as cerejeiras No campo, o agricultor, munido com um PDA (terminal móvel multifunções), interage com cada cerejeira que lhe 'diz', em tempo real, todas as operações já feitas ou a fazer ao nível de adubagem e outros tratamentos, rega, colheita, etc Erros de campo reduzidos a zero Os erros mais comuns da agricultura 'a olhómetro', como a dupla adubação, são rejeitados à partida pelo sistema - que regista os nomes dos trabalhadores que asseguraram cada operação Rega controlada por fitomonitorização O sistema mede a humidade da árvore, que varia ao longo do dia em função do ciclo de seiva, para controlar a rega e as necessidades nutricionais da planta Biosensores avaliam a fruta O grau de maturação da fruta é avaliado por biosensores, permitindo determinar a altura ideal da colheita em cada árvore Colheita sob previsão meteorológica Uma ferramenta previsional com informação meteorológica permite gerir as colheitas e informar os clientes sobre a calendarização das encomendas Supermercados fiscalizam "online" Os clientes retalhistas podem controlar online as especificações da produção Consumidores vêem o pomar Através de câmaras instaladas no pomar, o consumidor pode ver na Internet, pela indicação do código de barras da caixa, imagens em tempo real da árvore de onde vieram os frutos que está a comer Produção mais barata Ao eliminar as ineficiências do processo agrícola, economizando energia, água e tratamentos, além de afinar toda a cadeia logística, o objectivo do sistema é obter uma produção mais barata Bases para uma nova certificação Além de dotar as entidades certificadoras de informação mais apurada, o sistema visa ele próprio abrir o caminho para uma nova certificação, contando com o apoio de parceiros e de fornecedores Um sistema para exportar A meta é patentear o sistema, aplicável a toda a produção agrícola e florestal, e comercializá-lo em vários países Comprar com segurança: Selos de certificação   A partir de agora, o consumidor pode deparar com dois tipos de certificação (que aqui reproduzimos) sempre que procurar bens alimentares resultantes do modo de produção biológico. Ambos lhe darão a garantia de que, perante eles, estará a comprar um produto genuinamente biológico. Ou produzido em qualquer outro país da União Europeia ou em Portugal. A marca Portugal Bio é gerida pela Interbio em acordo com os organismos de certificação. Mas, como fazem questão de sublinhar os responsáveis daquele organismo, está aberta a todos os operadores, sejam ou não associados da Interbio. Reunidos há pouco mais de um mês no seu segundo congresso, os agricultores de modo biológico deixaram claro que é necessário uniformizar os critérios e procedimentos das entidades certificadoras. Por outro lado, sempre que forem aplicadas sanções, elas deverão ser divulgadas e tornadas públicas. É que, segundo Alfredo Cunhal, vice-presidente da Interbio, o pior que poderia acontecer ao sector era uma crise de falta de credibilidade.

Gene therapy 'may repair hearing'

Gene therapy has the potential to restore hearing in mice, offering hope for humans too, US scientists suggest.

An Oregon team discovered gene transfer produced functioning hair cells that are essential for the inner ear to interpret sounds, Nature reports.

In people with normal hearing, cochlear hair cells convert sound into electrical signals, which are ultimately transmitted to the brain.

Once the cells are lost or damaged, they cannot be replaced naturally.

Although still a long way from the clinic, the work shows that gene therapy is a potential treatment to combat some forms of congenital deafness Professor Andy Forge Deafness Research UK

According to the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID), there are about nine million people who are deaf or hard of hearing in the UK.

Most of them have lost their hearing gradually with increasing age, partly due to the loss of hair cells in the cochlea.

Repair and replace

Prolonged exposure to loud noise is another culprit, damaging the hair cells.

John Brigande and his team from Oregon Health and Science University showed, at least in unborn mice, gene therapy can be used to encourage other cells to become hair cells.

Gene therapy uses a harmless virus to insert copies of the key gene into cells which then replicate.

The key gene used by the Oregon team was Atoh1 which is essential for hair cell development.

The cells "treated" with Atoh1 functioned exactly like original hair cells.

"This capability is a crucial first step in defining translational therapies to ameliorate the effects of inner-ear disease in humans," the researchers said.

Work in humans is still a way off, but the findings point to a way to repair the damaged cochlea without using a mechanical or electrical device.

Currently, people can have a cochlear implant which works by bypassing the damaged cochlear hair cells and stimulating the auditory nerve directly.

An implant cannot restore hearing to normal but it does give the sensation of sounds.

Andy Forge, Professor of Auditory Cell Biology and advisor to Deafness Research UK, said: "Although still a long way from the clinic, the work shows that gene therapy is a potential treatment to combat some forms of congenital deafness.

"With one in 2,000 children born deaf because of genetic defects, such a therapy would clearly be of value."

Dr Mark Downs, of the RNID, said: "This is an exciting development which completes another important piece of the jig-saw in understanding how we might use gene therapy to eventually restore hearing loss."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7582640.stm

Published: 2008/08/27 23:20:17 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

Hope over 'early arthritis test'

Hope over 'early arthritis test'

A new way of scanning joints which may reveal early warning signs of arthritis is being developed by US researchers.

The MRI scan looks for low levels of the chemical glycosaminogycan, which helps cartilage in joints hold the water that makes it tough and elastic.

New York University researchers told the American Chemical Society conference early diagnosis could reduce the need for surgery later in life.

The Arthritis Research Campaign said the scan could help assess treatments.

Our methods have the potential for providing early warning signs for cartilage disorders like osteoarthritis, thus potentially avoiding surgery and physical therapy later on Dr Alexej Jerschow New York University

The weakening and breakdown of cartilage, which cushions the moving parts of joints, is a key factor in the development of osteoarthritis, which is common in the over-40s.

There are an estimated eight million people in the UK who have the problem in some form or another, and in severe cases patients can require constant painkillers or even joint replacement surgery.

Cartilage is tough and elastic because of its high water content, and existing MRI scans look for lower levels of this as a sign that the disease is developing.

The team is trying to spot the disease even earlier by looking for a substance called glycosaminogycan (GAG), which helps the cartilage hold plenty of water.

The scientists found a way to make the hydrogen atoms attached to GAG emit a signal which can be picked up by the scanner.

Dietary supplements

Dr Alexej Jerschow, one of the researchers, said: "Our methods have the potential for providing early warning signs for cartilage disorders like osteoarthritis, thus potentially avoiding surgery and physical therapy later on."

He said that a patient given early notice of impending arthritis could take steps to protect their joints, perhaps using dietary supplements such as glucosamine and chondroitin, which may be able to slow or halt joint degeneration.

The next stage now is to test the technique in trials.

However, Professor Alan Silman, the medical director of the Arthritis Research Campaign, said that the practical implications of the research were "currently very limited".

"Unfortunately at the moment there is no treatment that could be offered that would change the situation.

"What it may prove to be is a very sensitive test of drug treatment response as new agents are developed."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7574707.stm

Published: 2008/08/22 23:00:17 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

Cell change 'keeps organs young'

Cell change 'keeps organs young'

Researchers may have found a way to halt the biological clock which slows down our bodies over the decades.

A US team thinks it may have found the genetic levers to help boost a system vital to cleaning up faulty proteins within our cells.

The journal Nature Medicine reported that the livers of genetically-altered older mice worked as well as those in younger animals.

They suggested it might one day help people with progressive brain diseases.

These results show it's possible to correct this protein 'logjam' that occurs in our cells as we get older, thereby perhaps helping us to enjoy healthier lives well into old age Dr Ana Maria Cuervo Yeshiva University

The researchers, from Yeshiva University in New York, are focusing on a process which is central to the proper working of cells.

The fundamental chemicals of cells - proteins - often have very short working lives, and need to be cleared away and recycled as soon as possible.

The body has a system for doing just that, but it becomes progressively less efficient as we get older.

This leads to progressive falls in the function of major organs - the heart, liver and brain, some of which contribute to the diseases of old age.

Dr Ana Maria Cuervo, from Yeshiva, created a mouse with two genetic alterations.

The first, when activated, boosted the number of specific cell receptors linked to this protein recycling function, while the second allowed the first to be turned on whenever Dr Cuervo wished simply by modifying the animal's diet.

Switched on

She waited until the mice were six months old - the point at which age-related decline in the protein-recycling system begins - then turned on the receptor gene.

When examined at two years old, the liver cells of these mice were far more effective at recycling protein compared with normal mice.

When the overall liver function of the very old genetically-modified mice was tested, they performed at a comparable level to much younger mice.

Dr Cuervo said: "These results show it's possible to correct this protein 'logjam' that occurs in our cells as we get older, thereby perhaps helping us to enjoy healthier lives well into old age."

She now plans to test animal models of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, believing that the abnormal protein deposits in Alzheimer's in particular might be dealt with more effectively this way.

Thomas von Zglinicki, Professor of Cellular Gerontology at Newcastle University, said that the results were "very exciting".

"It's not often you see studies where they have managed to improve function in this way.

"What they seem to have managed is to maintain the mice at this young stage, and both restore and maintain normal activity."

He said that it should, in theory, be possible to achieve the same effect across the whole body.

A spokesman for the Alzheimer's Society said: "As we age we have an increase in protein misfolding and general faults in protein processing, so the ability to maintain an effective system to clear these would be beneficial.

"However, a direct line to the clearance of defective proteins in the brain is not so clear from this research."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7548874.stm

Published: 2008/08/10 17:05:40 GMT

© BBC MMVIII