A viral outbreak at a California monkey research facility that killed 80% of the titi monkeys (right) it infected also sickened a researcher who worked closely with the animals, scientists reported on Friday at the Infectious Diseases Society of America conference in Vancouver, Canada (see news report in HealthDay).

The virus to blame appears to be a new species of adenovirus, says Charles Chiu, a virologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who led a study assessing the monkey epidemic. It’s also the best evidence to date that adenoviruses can jump species, Chiu says.

“Adenoviruses are very species-specific,” he told Nature today, but his team’s findings suggest that “it’s possible that adenoviruses are kind of an underappreciated agent of infectious disease.”

Adenoviruses are responsible for a wide assortment of respiratory, stomach and other ailments in humans – including diseases ranging from common cold and pneumonia to conjunctivitis and gastroenteritis.

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The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) yesterday announced awards worth $72 million to fund stem cell researchers in the state in a second series of grants meant to move experimental stem cell treatments into the clinic (press release).

Last year, in the initiative’s first round, the state stem cell agency funded 14 researchers to the tune of $230 million (see our coverage here).

At a meeting of the agency’s 29-member board yesterday, 19 grants worth $67 million were approved, mostly to researchers at California academic institutions, each of whom received awards ranging from $1.7 million to $6.7 million. There’s also one biotech company, San Francisco-based iPerian, in the mix. Another $4.8 million award went to aid in recruiting Peter Coffey from the University College London to the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Funded by $3 billion in bonds OK’ed by California voters in 2004, CIRM has $1.6 billion remaining in its coffers. Last week, at a three-day meeting held largely behind closed doors, a blue-ribbon panel conducted a comprehensive assessment of the agency’s activities to date. Its conclusions will be released in December.

How many genes does a human have, anyway?

Here’s an answer: 22,333 – maybe. But no one really knows for sure.

That’s the answer that bioinformatician Steven Salzberg from the University of Maryland gave this evening (Monday, 11 October) in a keynote lecture at Beyond the Genome, a conference running in Boston, Massachusetts.

The figure Salzberg said he favors is one proposed by a public database of DNA sequences called RefSeq. But not all of those have been individually confirmed, he noted, and other databases have proposed other figures generally falling in about the 20,000 range, give or take a few thousand.

It’s not a simple question. Researchers generally define a gene as a protein-coding piece of DNA, with regulatory elements on each end, but “we don’t know how many proteins are produced by each gene,” said Salzberg. Increasingly, studies are showing that most single genes can be transcribed to produce different snippets of RNA. “So the number of proteins may be much greater” than the gene count.

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When Francis Collins first took the helm at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) last year, he marked global health as one of five “themes” that would receive special priority from his office. A series of grants worth a total of $130 million awarded to universities and health institutes in a dozen countries in sub-Saharan Africa announced today shows the NIH director is putting his money where his mouth is – at least with the help of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

The 5-year initiative funds African universities partnering with institutions in the United States. Eleven $10 million grants specifically focus on medical education and research training relating to HIV/AIDS, but smaller awards will take a broader tack. The idea is to transform medical education in Africa, with the ultimate goal of training more health care workers and thereby boosting primary care.

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The US government issued a formal apology for a 1940s study on the efficacy of penicillin in which as many as 695 Guatemalan prisoners, insane asylum inmates, and soldiers were infected with syphilis.

Study subjects were encouraged to pass the infection to others, and about a third never got fully treated, MSNBC reports.

John Cutler, one of the researchers involved in that study went on to help conduct the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment, a long-term study of syphilis progression in African American sharecroppers in Alabama in which researchers deliberately did not treat subjects even after penicillin became available. Both studies received funding from the Public Health Service (now the Department of Health and Human Services).

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As participants of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals Summit took stock of stalled progress on objectives set a decade ago to ease global poverty by 2015, the UN on Wednesday announced a $40 billion dollar push, pledged by numerous nations and organizations, to prevent the deaths of as many as 16 million mothers and children in the world’s poorest countries. [Reuters]

Earlier this summer, G8 nations pledged a smaller sum toward the goal of reducing mortality rates in young children and pregnant women, as Nature reported in June. However, success in meeting the target for child and maternal health, as with the other Millennium Development Goals, may depend on science even more so than money.

On a related note, in a hotel ballroom across the street from the UN, Rajiv Shah, head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), stressed the relevance of science to international development at a fair, co-hosted by USAID and the New York Academy of Science. Over the next three years, he said, USAID intends to launch a series of Grand Challenges that it hopes will inspire innovators to come up with technological solutions to endemic poverty.

Participants at the fair displayed about 20 inventions, ranging from those in the early design phase to others already on the market. Here’s a look at some of the bright ideas that were on parade at the event:

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Grabbing hold of an injured area of the body can ameliorate acute pain. Researchers have known that touch can reduce pain, but why then are we often reluctant to let someone else put their hands on the injury?

To answer that question, Marjolein Kammers at University College London and her colleagues subjected volunteers to a modified version of a classic sensory trick called a “thermal grill illusion” (TGI). Normally, this illusion is achieved when you touch a grill made up of interlaced warm and cool bars – touching both warm and cool simultaneously elicits a feeling of burning pain.

For this study, explains Kammers, because her team was interested in changes in body representation, they applied the stimulus to the fingers directly: Submerging a subject’s index and ring fingers in warm water and the middle finger in cool water created the sensation of painful heat in the middle finger.

When both hands experienced this apparent heat pain, pressing the fingers of each hand together after removing them from the water cut the pain levels by 64%. Partially overlapping the fingers on the two hands, or having their “burning” fingers pressed on the experimenter’s, didn’t have this effect. The study was published online yesterday in Current Biology.

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Both the plaintiffs and the defendants in a US lawsuit challenging the government’s right to fund research using human embryonic stem cells filed court documents declining to consent to another party – the University of California – from joining the case.

Earlier this week, the University of California petitioned the court to participate in the case as a so-called intervener – meaning it would be neither a plaintiff nor a defendant, but would file in support of the government’s position in the case. The court asked the plaintiffs (adult stem cell researchers James Sherley and Theresa Deisher) and the defendants (the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Services) to reply to the request today before it makes a decision.

In their response (PDF here), the plaintiffs argued that UC has not demonstrated “exceptional and imperative reasons” for intervening. They also state that “the Government will adequately represent whatever interests the Regents may have in this case.”

The government – aka the defendants – seems to agree. UC has a “valuable and significant perspective to offer this Court,” says their court filing (PDF here). “We decline to consent to intervention, however, because the federal government defendants adequately represent the University’s interests in this appeal.”

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The University of California (UC) has requested permission from a US court to participate in a lawsuit that challenges the government’s right to fund research using human embryonic stem cells.

In a motion filed yesterday (PDF here) to the Washington DC Court of Appeals, lawyers for the state’s university system argue that UC has a major stake in the case. The UC system is the single largest recipient of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the interests of grantees are currently not represented, the motion states.

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The legal battle over federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research in the US continues: in yet another court filing today (PDF here), government lawyers reiterated their arguments for why an appeals court should lift a ban on such funding imposed by a district court judge last month.

On 23 August, Washington DC district court judge Royce Lamberth called a halt to federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research while a lawsuit charging that such funding was illegal was in process. On 9 September, responding to a plea from lawyers representing the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Services (the defendants in the case), the district’s appeals court (right) temporarily stayed Lamberth’s injunction while considering the issue.

Last week, lawyers for the plaintiffs, adult stem cell researchers James Sherley and Theresa Deisher, filed documents opposing the appeals court’s move (PDF here). Today’s 12-page document from the defense refutes the claims made in that filing.

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