One of the big science news stories this week was the announcement of the 1000 Genomes Project. The goal: sequence the whole genomes of 1000 people from around the world, using newer, faster, cheaper sequencing technologies (not the traditional Sanger method) and use them to map in more detail a wider range of genetic variations than in previous projects (such as the HapMap project, which looked only for single nucleotide changes).

But already, according to this Nature News story, there’s doubt about how accurate the sequences will be, given that the budget for it will be a mere $30 to $50 million. David Altshuler of MGH/Broad is one of the chairs of the consortium of researchers involved.

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David Sachs, head of MGH’s Transplantation Biology Research Center, and his team reported this week in the “New England Journal of Medicine”:https://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/358/4/353 that they have transplanted kidneys into five patients and four of them have not rejected the organ, two to five years post-transplantation, and have even been taken off immunosuppressive drugs. A big goal in transplantation biology research is to find ways to transplant organs in a way that would allow patients to stop taking these drugs over the long-term, which can cause side effects such as the increased risk of heart disease and infections.

The Globe has a long “story”:https://www.boston.com/news/health/articles/2008/01/24/rejecting_defeat/ describing Sachs’s struggles to perfect his protocol, which involves giving patients chemotherapy, radiation, a specific immune-cell-killing drug, and a bone marrow transplant from the organ donor a few days before the operation, as well as administering more donor bone marrow during the operation. This, in effect, ‘trains’ the immune system to recognize the organ as self. Other transplantation biologists quoted in the article said this was a pivotal achievement.

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And finally, “MIT’s energy initiative”:https://web.mit.edu/mitei/, a project first announced back in 2006 to launch university-wide research projects on alternative energy and energy efficienty, appears to be getting off the ground. It recently “announced”:https://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2008/01/16/a_surge_for_energy_research_at_mit/ that it has raised $85 million from oil and petroleum companies, as well as a car manufacturer.