Nature Newsblog
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'Terahertz' detectors could one day help police to detect contraband.
British forensic scientists have developed a new scanner that could spot concealed drugs and explosives in packages or under clothes. They hope that the device, which uses 'terahertz' rays to peer through a wide range of materials, could become a fixture in mail-sorting offices, police stations or mobile forensic labs.
Read the story here.
Will Critical Mass woo students to the field?
You are deep underground in a lab that once housed some of the finest minds in chemistry. But robots directed by a crackbrained artificial intelligence have taken it over and plan to use its equipment to destroy the world! After freezing an evil robot with your handy wrist-mounted hot-and-cold gun, you reach the Haber-Bosch room. And now you must correctly synthesize ammonia or die.
Read this story.
Experts call for focus on fertilizing exhausted earth.
African countries must boost the fertility of the soil underfoot if they want to fill empty bellies, said a group of dignitaries gathered in New York City this week.
Read the story here.
Clinical trial of prayer draws fire from critics.
Distant prayers do not help people recovering from heart surgery and could even cause them more health problems, according to the results of a large and controversial clinical trial that critics have labelled a waste of money.
Read the story here.
Better superconducting strips hold hope for a perfect national grid.
Twenty years ago this month, two researchers discovered a class of materials that sparked dreams of electricity grids that would transmit power without any losses and trains that would levitate along friction-free tracks.
Read more here.
Meeting stirs debate over rocketing rate of C-sections.
An expert panel convened to advise healthy women about the risks of caesarean sections concluded that they cannot do so, because there is so little hard evidence. But at least some specialists feel that the procedure should be discouraged.
Read the full story here.
Good news is tempered by continued global rise.
The number of people with HIV seems to be dipping in southern India, adding to the evidence that prevention efforts are biting into the epidemic in some parts of the globe.
Read the story here.
It is a beautiful morning in Atlanta. The mockingbirds are singing; the cherry trees are in bloom; small children are running around in the fountain in the park. Too bad there are so few chemists here to appreciate it.
As I checked my suitcase into rolly daycare this morning (the bag check that minds about 800 bags over the conference) I realized the atmosphere had changed. Most food outlets are closed. Those that are open are practically stockless, and superintended by bored-looking people flipping the pages of novels. The exposition is now a landscape of wooden crates. The conference center as a whole is filled with the voluminous hush of the Death Star on a government holiday. I do feel sorry for those who give their presentations today.
Just once, I would like to see an ACS conference end with a bang. Why not group the hotshot presentations together at the end and then throw a huge open-bar party with a cocktail recipe contest? I can only imagine what marvelous and strange drinks chemists could come up with.
Just to prove that I can handle a non-quirky session, here is a quick summary of a much more typical ACS presentation. The thing is, all these stories are interesting. Well, okay, nearly all of them.
In a session on natural products, I saw a talk by Craig Crews of Yale, which I admired for its clarity. He took the audience through what must have been several years of work on a compound called epoxomicin...
Click to read on.
which was found back in 1992 in a strain of actinomycete, a hairy-looking bacteria [see ref]. The molecule was said to have anti-tumor properties, but Crews couldn't get a hold of any of it, so he had to make it from scratch (scratch being itsy bitsy things available off the shelf).
Chemists call this "total synthesis," which means that in my notes, I am always writing that a group "totally synthesized" something, which doesn't sound quite right. Anyway, total synthesis is totally cool, I think. It is as near as I can think of to making something from nothing.
Crews and his lab went on to show that epoxomicin was messing with a specific sub-units of the 20S proteasome. The proteasome is a little recycling center in your cells that receives proteins deemed junk and with three enzymes—snip, snip, snip—totally un-synthesizes them, more or less. Blocking this action tends to kill the cell. Crews has started a spin-off company, Proteolix, to see what can be made of a souped-up version of the molecule. At least one cancer drug on the market works by inhibiting the proteasome, Velcade.
The new news from Crews is that his lab has also totally synthesized fellutamide B, and that it is also a potent proteosome inhibitor as well as a stimulator of nerve growth. And, lo, epoxomicin also turns out to stimulate nerve growth. So it seems that perhaps the two effects are linked.
Just one of the thousands of interesting stories at the meeting. There are plenty more to pour through on the Skeptical Chymist.
Research results reignite intelligence controversy.
Researchers say that a remarkable data set on the developing brain adds to the idea that IQ is a meaningful concept in neuroscience. The study, which is published on page 676 of this issue, suggests that performance in IQ tests is associated with changes in the brain during adolescence.
Read the story here.
Simple blood test could screen for enzyme diseases in newborns.
A simple blood check that can detect some rare but devastating disorders is being trialled in New York state as a screening test for newborns.
Read the story here.
UK government energy strategy pushes ‘microgeneration’.
British politicians are urging people to turn their homes into power plants, by embracing ‘microgeneration’. The scheme could see more homeowners installing solar panels, rooftop wind turbines and a range of other measures to cut their power bills and ultimately reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
Read more here
An exclusive interview with Dejie Johnson, concierge at the Georgia World Congress Center. Johnson has been giving ACS attendees tips on restaurants and attractions for three days now. I asked her how chemists compare to the average conference-goer.
Click to find out.
“I am amazed at how many are vegetarians,” she tells me. “I was told that that’s because they know what chemicals are shot into meats. I have found that they are a little—do I want to use this word?—needy. Usually I am out of here by six. I’ve been staying until 7:30. The chemists seem to need a little more babysitting.”
And what are the chemists doing in any free time they manage to carve out?
“The pamphlets that are flying off the shelves are for CNN tours and World of Coca-Cola. A lot of people went to the Martin Luther King Museum, and there is a lot of interest in Jimmy Carter.”
Sounds like a lot of work. Has it been a headache?
“No, I love nerd boys, so I am a happy camper.”
A roundup of the pleasant and the very un at the ACS, with an emphasis on facial hair.
Click below to get the skinny.
The Good:
-enthusiastic students (overheard at the undergraduate poster fair: "Yeah, proteins are cool.")
-the food at the Division of Chemistry & the Law reception.
-No cell phones have gone off in any of the sessions I have been in.
-No one has been unable to load their PowerPoint.
-The variety and fierceness of the beards and moustaches on display, from the ZZ Top to the Wyatt Earp to the scruffy hipster look. Go unshaven chemists!
The Bad:
-a few small crowds in very large halls. Always makes the speaker look like he or she failed to draw an expected crowd.
-The escalators in the convention center are only one person wide. Therefore, there is none of the "stand on the right, walk on the left" stuff I am used to, and I am forced to just stand there on escalators as they creep up and down at sloth speeds. Actually, the fact that I have found this so deeply irritating has made me wonder if three years of living on the East Coast is starting to get to me.
-Despite CNN being across the street, I have not casually run into Wolf Blitzer—the on-air correspondent who perhaps did more than any other media figure to bring back the beard.
-No peaches are in evidence anywhere, even in the press room fruit plate. C'mon Georgia!
Remember acrylamide, that nasty substance (neurotoxin, probably carcinogenic) that was formed in the process of frying carb-rich foods to various golden crispy lovely tasty states? They found it in Sweden in 2002, and everyone went nuts.
Well, the world's food chemists are on the case—trying to reduce acrylimides in their products without sacrificing flavor compounds.
Click to read more.
Mei Lin Low at the University of Reading has developed a kinetic model that describes what happens when a potato cooks. The comforting flavor of a fried potato relies on compounds known as " Strecker aldehydes " and "pyrazines" that form during the delicious Maillard reaction. Techniques to stop those same reactions from forming acrylimides include dumping in a little citric acid to change the pH and mixing in a bit of glycine. Alas, both options also mess up some of these key flavor compounds.
But, says Low, they do different things to the different compounds. (Even something as straightforward as nummy potato taste is a complex bouquet of the things) So if you do a little bit of each, you can theoretically get your acrylamides down without noticeably changing the flavor.
All her work is on paper. No tasters have yet brought in. But scan your bag of potato chips in a year or so and see if both citric acid and glycine are in the ingredient list.
I was having a plastic cup of red wine with Bartow Culp at a Division of Chemical Information reception (always good fun, those). Culp is the head of the chemistry library at Purdue, and a co-author on a number of chemistry reviews. Having a librarian collaborate on a review strikes me as an excellent idea. Someone who has been in the field for a long time undoubtedly knows all about their topic, but everyone has lacunae. A good librarian can fill in those gaps.
And an eloquent librarian, like Culp, can answer my question about why he finds the working with chemical information so satisfying. "Just look at the periodic table," he said. "Chemistry is very concise and very visual. Chemists will always start to draw on tablecloths." And then, after a sip: "You can't draw a picture of a black hole."
Royal Society buys historic manuscript minutes before it was to go for auction.
Britain’s Royal Society has won a last-ditch battle to regain possession of one of its most valuable treasures, a seventeenth-century manuscript handwritten by the physicist Robert Hooke, which the society claims was taken from its archives some 300 years ago.
Read more here
An old lead coin looks like it was plated with silver.
An ingenious counterfeit-coin scam has been rumbled by scientists in Italy. But no one is going to jail, because the forgers lived more than 2,000 years ago.
Read the story here.
Failed rocket's cargo lands back on Earth, but doesn't survive the trip.
When the privately funded experimental Falcon 1 rocket exploded shortly after lift-off, its designers vowed to rebuild it and fly it again (see 'Private rocket crashes and burns'). But it looks like it's curtains for the rocket's payload, an ill-fated little satellite called FalconSAT-2.
Read the story here.
At a talk about polyurethane insulation (this meeting has everything), Mike Mautino from Bayer Material Science showed a slide of a system he had designed to evaluate the insulating properties of picnic coolers. He had this to say: "This is my contribution to humanity. I am keeping my fellow man's beer colder longer. What more noble cause is there?"
Yesterday I tested my receptivity to 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP), by touching a paper with the substance with my tongue. According to researchers, about 25 percent of people can't taste PROP at all, 50 percent perceive it as somewhat bitter, and 25 percent find it horrifically bitter.
One tiny touch and I was running for Atlanta's favorite beverage, coca-cola, to quench the flavor. It tasted wretched! The taste lingered for hours, but it was worth it to know that I am in the elite club of the supertasters.
Click below to read more.
According to Linda Bartoshuk, a health psychologist at the University of Florida in Gainsville, supertasters more than usually sensitive to taste, and have more tastebuds on their tongues. This is good news for me, because supertasters have a lower risk of heart disease, roughly because they need less fat and sweet to please them. But it is also bad news—supertasters often find vegetables unpleasant because of their slight bitterness and texture, so they eat less of them and therefore have a higher risk of colon polyps.
Luckily, I can act as a living example that these kinds of generalizations, while often useful in public health, are by no means rigid sentences handed down by the almighty gene gods. I quite like vegetables.
Interestingly, Bartoshuk has found that chefs are more likely to be supertasters. And, she says, "Caucasian men win the international booby prize" for being non-tasters—those 25 percent that don't taste PROP at all.
Bartoshuk herself is a non-taster. She put the whole PROP paper in her mouth, which made me cringe. She says she has never tasted anything that was "too sweet". Meanwhile, when I am in the south I take my meals with "unsweet" iced tea, which is how you order it if you don't want them to sugar it for you. Sweet tea, to me, tastes revoltingly sweet. So, are you a supertaster or a non-taster?
Read more about Bartoshuk's work at www.nature.com/news/2001/010222/full/010222-13.html
Copper chemistry helps researcher tap into Africa's past.
Ancient copper jewellery and ingots in sub-Saharan Africa have been found to bear the unique signature of copper ore from Morocco. This strongly suggests that trans-Saharan trade began hundreds of years earlier than previously thought.
Read the story in news@nature.com here.
Hormone treatment could help people to overcome phobias.
Does the prospect of public speaking make you panic? Do you run for the hills at the mere mention of spiders? Help could be at hand: researchers have come up with a way to ease the crippling symptoms of phobia.
Read more here
Falcon launcher travels less than 100 metres on maiden flight.
The rocket revolution has been postponed. The privately funded Falcon 1 launcher, which its builders hope will make access to space relatively cheap, failed half a minute into its first flight on 24 March. Early analysis points to a fuel leak as the cause of an onboard fire that brought the rocket down less than 100 metres from its launch pad on the Pacific atoll of Kwajalein.
Read the story here.
A new standard is being rolled out at the meeting today. ThermoML – "an XML-based approach for storage and exchange of experimental thermophysical and thermochemical property data" is a system was developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in conjunction with the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.
Click below to read more...
Interestingly, some journal publishers are already on board. ThermoML files corresponding to papers in several journals will be available on the main site: http://trc.nist.gov/ThermoML.html
The system is designed to be readable both by people and by computers. Now that there is a standard, the hope is that computers can talk to each other better. Why not let them do the grunt work while the researchers think lofty thoughts?
Each file captures many of the same things as a regular article: citation data, chemical compounds involved and data about them (sample source, purification methods and so on), information about who did the work and why, methods, results, and even information about uncertainty and level of precision.
The most interesting technical challenge seems to have been the uncertainties, which were based on the Guide to the expression of Uncertainty in Management (GUM), which has been around since 1995 but does not seem to be used very much.
"We need an efficient, well defined way to get information from measurements to engineering applications," says Rob Chirico, from NIST.
This conference is full of great stories. Take this one, from the fabulous four-day symposium on food color quality. Surimi is a seafood product made of white fish and additives that often stands in for crab—its most familiar incarnation is the "crabstick". The fish is headed, gutted, and mashed up into a paste, which is then poured out and cooked in thin sheets and rolled into tubes. The tubes, cut just so, simulate the flaky texture of crab meat. Somewhere along the line, a bit of red is added to make it look really crabby.
In the United States and Europe, one of the most common dyes used for this is carmine, which, as you may know, comes from the crushed bodies of tiny insects that live on cacti in Peru and thereabouts. The bug is called the cochineal, and the dye is, according to Jae Park, surimi expert at Oregon State University in Astoria, "stable to light, oxidation, and heat." It does bleed a little bit, but this can be fixed with a good emulsifier, like polyglycerol polyricinoleate.
Carmine is not just used in the seafood stuff that one finds in the ubiquitous California sushi roll, but in a number of consumer products, including cosmetics. As Park says, "Crabstick and lipstick: basically same color."
US team argues for a lifelong approach to beating heart disease.
Think you're too young to worry about cholesterol? Think again. Many people could drastically reduce their future risk of heart disease by lowering their cholesterol levels from as early as their 20s. That's the bottom line of a study showing that people born with low cholesterol are protected from heart problems.
Read the story here.
Microscopic creatures may have been having secret sex for millions of years.
Imagine going more than 200 million years without sex. That's what zoologists thought had happened to a microscopic shrimp-like animal called Vestalenula. But now it seems that the crafty creatures might have been at it all along.
Read the story here.
Fluoride leaching from rocks is turning kids' teeth brown.
The maximum allowable limit of fluoride in US drinking water is too high, according to a report from the National Academies' research unit this week.
Read the story here.
Procedure could yield an ethically sound source of stem cells.
Researchers in Germany have identified a potential source of reprogrammable cells in adults that could be used for regenerative therapy. The cells would be taken directly from the testis and cultured. No cloning or destruction of embryos would be necessary.
Read the story here.
I just saw my first periodic table tie. The ACS is on!
At a talk on green nanotechnology this morning, Barbara Karn—currently on leave from the Environmental Protection Agency to work at the Woodrow Wilson Center—said that the model and inspiration for the eco-savvy nanotechnologist could be a living cell...
Green nanotechnology has the dual aims of making nano safe for health and the environment, and making nano that improves health and the environment. They want the bitsy tools to save the world, through remediation and so on, but they also want to make sure that they are made in a green way (and, presumably, that they don't turn on their masters and engulf us all in nano-chaos).
The cell does this already. Using DNA as a cookbook, it makes proteins that are just there at the nano size—useful, complex proteins. And it does it all at room (or, I guess, body) temperature with a nontoxic solvent: water.
"It's a challenge to make what we need in the same kind of environmentally benign way that nature makes what it needs," said Karn, who called cells "nanofactories".
Karn's group at the Woodrow Wilson Center launched a website earlier this month that lists products available to consumers that include nanotechnology. So if you want to check out the nano-content of your sun-block, pants, or computer screen, visit their database, a link to which is available on their website: http://www.nanotechproject.com/.
It is chilly in Atlanta on this first day of the American Chemical Society (ACS) conference, but thousands of chemists are here, name-badged, lining up for coffee, and toting poster tubes. For the next five days, I'll be blogging the weird and wonderful from the Georgia World Congress Center.
Meanwhile, many of the chemistry editors at Nature Publishing Group will be doing the same over at the The Sceptical Chymist, which is at http://blogs.nature.com/thescepticalchymist/
And NPG has put together a bunch of goodies, including top session picks, at a special page for the conference: http://www.nature.com/conferences/acs/index.html
Finally, I will be hanging out at the Nature booth for an hour on Tuesday, between 2 and 3 PM, for those of you at the conference.
Stay tuned...
http://blogs.nature.com/thescepticalchymist/http://www.nature.com/conferences/acs/index.html
Homely stars make perfect targets for planet-finders.
It looks like a home away from home. Astronomers trawling through a catalogue of known stars have found one that is nearly identical to our Sun, and they say it's an ideal place to start looking for small blue-green planets that could host alien life.
Read more here.
Fresh predictions about climate change prompt news@nature.com to ask what we know about the future of our oceans.
The polar ice caps may melt far faster under the pressure of global warming than experts previously thought. New predictions suggest that, without efforts to curb the rise of greenhouse gases, the world's ice sheets could retreat farther by the year 2100 than they have in the past 130,000 years, leading to a huge rise in sea level.
Read more here
Our sense of position can rely on signals from the brain rather than the body.
To sense where the various parts of our body are, we sometimes rely on signals that originate in our brain rather than in our fingers or toes, a new study shows.
Read the story here.
Looking for the point of seemingly pointless research.
At the tender age of 16, I excitedly unwrapped a parcel that had come all the way from Lynchburg, Tennessee. Inside was the key to rock-and-roll rebellion: a Jack Daniel's T-shirt, just like the one worn by the lord-of-mayhem lead guitarist with Guns N' Roses.
Fortunately, my fondness for that T-shirt has long expired, and I never really got the taste for Mr Daniel's whiskey. But is it mere coincidence that my seventeenth year also saw the beginning of a long and fruitful campaign of social drinking?
Researchers from the Dartmouth Medical School in Lebanon, New Hampshire, suggest that such 'alcohol-branded merchandise' (ABM) could have triggered my slide into intemperance.
Read more here.
Autonomous technology may make mine clean-ups safer.
An underwater craft that can seek out and destroy mines has been unveiled. The sub, dubbed Talisman, relies on computer software that allows it to complete its mission without being guided by an operator.
Read more here.
Sunshine is better growth-booster than water for ancient forest.
Some trees in the Amazon rainforest grow fastest not in the wet season, but in the dry, sunny part of the year, researchers have found. The discovery underlines the importance of preserving old-growth forest that is likely to be more resistant to drought.
Read more here
Nature has a series of news features and commentaries looking at how tomorrow’s computer technology will change the face of science.
The stories are all going live on news@nature.com at midnight tonight, and will be gathered in a web focus on Wednesday. Have a look!
One of the challenges at any large conference is being in the right room at the right time - and then hoping that you can find a seat near the back in case the talk is not all it could be. It also helps if the speakers turn up - flu, problems with connecting flights and "a meeting in Washington" were three of the excuses on offer in Baltimore.
And one of the challenges for the organizers of any large conference is putting the right talk in the right room. Occasionally a speaker will find themselves speaking to a handful of people in a large hall, while, somewhere along the corridor, a 100 people might be trying to squeeze into a room with 64 chairs. A senior APS figure was overheard to speculate in Baltimore that the reason that some sessions were oversubscribed was because they were highlighted on the Nature site!
Posted on behalf of: Peter Rodgers, Nature Nanotechnology
This creature was way out in front.
Talk about sticking your neck out: palaeontologists working in Mongolia have discovered a dinosaur that was far ahead of its peers. The creature had one of the longest necks of all time, measuring a staggering eight metres.
Read more here
Chest asymmetry might reveal underlying ill health.
Women with very lopsided breasts may be more likely to develop breast cancer, according to a preliminary study.
Read the story here.
The first results from the Japanese Hayabusa mission have been presented here at the Lunar and Planetary Science conference, and have generally got a warm response. Hayabusa visited the small asteroid Itokawa late last year, and managed to survey the lumpy rock in great detail, despite coping with some major technical problems.
[read more here]
The Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) mission was largely about testing new spacecraft technology, such as Hayabusa’s xenon gas-powered ion drive. The ambitious project also hoped to land on the asteroid, grab some rocks and dust, and bring them back to Earth. It could still deliver the first sample ever returned from an asteroid.
Sadly, the sampling mechanism didn’t work, so scientists estimate that at best the craft may be carrying a few hundred milligrams of Itokawa that slipped into the collection pod by accident. Since it’s control system also broke, the crippled probe is now limping home using little puffs of its remaining xenon gas to steer. After making contact for the first time in three months on 6 March, Hayabusa is now expected to be back on Earth by 2010, which is way past its bedtime.
However, the probe did manage to land – well, bounce – twice. But it was only in contact for a few seconds before flying off into space again.
More successful was the earlier part of the mission, where Hayabusa hovered about 7 kilometres above Itokawa’s surface to take its vital statistics.
The asteroid – which always reminds me of a cosmic coprolith – has a surface area of 0.393 kilometres squared, and measures 535 x 294 x 209 metres. It appears to be very porous, implying that it is little more than a pile of rubble held loosely together.
By counting the number of craters on the surface, the science team confirm previous estimates that Itokawa was born between 10 and 100 million years ago. They suspect that it was created after an impact on a much larger asteroid threw up a spray of boulders, which then aggregated to create the misshapen asteroid. Itokawa is also rich in minerals like olivine and pyroxene, making it very similar to one of the most common types of meteorite.
Although not terribly surprising, this is all good for understanding where asteroids come from, where they go, and how we might go about deflecting one that is on a collision course with our planet. Many of the US scientists here made a real point of congratulating the Hayabusa team before they asked questions about the presentations. “It’s a pretty gutsy mission,” says Don Yeomans of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who leads Hayabusa’s US science team. But can the disabled craft really make it home? “I wouldn’t bet against it,” says Yeomans.
A few days ago, someone from the European Central Bank emailed Dirk Brockmann to ask for advice on how contaminated Euro notes might influence the spread of bird flu. Brockmann, who recounted this story in his invited talk today, explained that they’d made a common mistake in misunderstanding his work.
Back in January, Nature published an article by Brockmann and his colleagues that looked at how dollar bills travel across the United States. The paper is here. The idea was to study the dollar bills' movements as a proxy for how people travel. A model based on the dollar bills’ diffusion pattern could then be used in epidemiology, to help predict how diseases spread. But he was not, he emphasised, suggesting that bank notes themselves spread disease.
There’s another interesting aspect to this story, too.
The data for the study came from Where’s George?! - a website that collects sightings of marked dollar bills from enthusiasts across the United States. If you register, you get a small rubber stamp that says “Track me at www.wheresgeorge.com”. You mark your bills, throw them back into circulation (ie, spend them) and then watch to see where they turn up. People that really get into this call themselves “Georgers” and meet up around the country.
A few turned up at today’s session, to hear Brockmann speak. Before I took my spare dollar bills back to Britain, I went to talk to them…
Karin Printz, a Georger who lives not far Baltimore, had heard about the game from her brother but only got sucked in herself after getting a marked bill in change at a restaurant. She registered her first notes last month, and got her first hits yesterday. “I was terribly excited.”
Next to her was a veteran of the game. Jim Malone, from Annapolis, had started playing in 1999. He said that he had personally registered around 7,000 bills and got “hits” (meaning new sightings) on 1,100 of them. “One got to Puerto Rico,” he said. But he said others have done more: the site’s record-holders have registered hundreds of thousands of bills and seen their cash go right round the world.
It’s not that they’re obsessive, he said. “We prefer extremely focussed.”
A special guest at the session was Hank Eskin, who had set up the Where’s George?! website. He’d had to struggle to keep the site online as news of Brockmann’s work appeared on news sites around the world last month. Right now, nearly 80 million bills are registered.
For the Georgers, having Brockmann use their data has been a blessing. A hobby that friends used to laugh at has suddenly become something useful.
Malone was looking forward to going out for dinner with Brockmann, to quiz the man about his work. He unfurled a copy of Brockmann’s Nature paper, which had been stashed in an inside coat pocket. “I’ve read the paper about five times now, and each time I pick up something different.”
Impacts on our planet could have sprayed life into space.
Earthly bacteria could have reached distant planets and moons after being flung into space by massive meteorite impacts, scientists suggest.
Read the story here.
Study reveals risks of interfering with immune system.
Researchers are trying to explain how a prototype drug that manipulates the immune system triggered devastating side effects in a British clinical trial.
Read the story