Research Blog

Soft Matter, Or Just Marshmallows?

On November 16, 2012

In Chemistry, Science Communication & Education, Students

By Ashley Mooney

When a chemist whisks cake batter, he’s not just thinking about the deliciousness that awaits. Whisking can actually induce chemical reactions integral to the texture of the dessert.

In a class being taught next term, Patrick Charbonneau, assistant professor of chemistry and physics, will help students apply science to creating edible masterpieces. For example, they will make two traditional Quebec desserts as an experiment in phase transitions. The ingredients in both are essentially the same, Charbonneau said, but one requires whisking while the other rests as it cools.

Students will measure the stiffness of marshmallows using chocolate bars, maybe it will end in a gooey s’more.

“By whisking you actually induce micro-crystallization and in the other one you remain in the glass phase, so the texture is completely different,” he said. “They’re going to be cooking—these are real desserts and real recipes—but the science is very controlled.”

Charbonneau works in a sub-discipline of chemistry called “soft matter,” but this doesn’t just mean marshmallows. The subject combines aspects of chemistry, physics, chemical engineering and material sciences—and fits perfectly with the science of cooking.

“The demos [in the class] are centered on food, so one of the cool ones is this material properties experiment measuring the [stiffness] of marshmallows using a chocolate bar,” Charbonneau said. “The chocolate bars are calibrated—you know their weight—and you just need a ruler to measure how much the marshmallow compresses.”

Although Charbonneau usually teaches an advanced physical chemistry course, he said he rediscovered old cuisine—and the science behind it—with the help of his friend from college and chef Justine de Valicourt, who is a visiting artist at Duke. De Valicourt has an undergraduate degree in biomedical sciences, but opted for culinary school rather than medical school. She will teach the cooking components of the seminar.

The class will meet once a week in spring semester for two and a half hours, with the first half dedicated to theory and food-centric demos, followed by cooking experiments and a dinner run by de Valicourt.

While cooking may make science more appealing to the non-scientists at Duke, Charbonneau said a basic understanding of chemistry is required in order to discuss the material in detail.

“Sure there’s the detailed chemical reaction when you’re browning something, but browning is not the entire thing,” he said. “There are some structural issues, and taste is something that is much more complicated than just a chemical that touches a receptor—there’s a texture, there’s a look.”

Since there is limited space in the kitchen—and thus limited space in the class—Charbonneau said he hopes he can make the topic more accessible to the Duke community through de Valicourt’s office hours and a final banquet.

“The students from the class will help with the cooking and serving of the banquet,” he said. “It’s the chef’s job to be able to teach them (how to cook properly) and to supervise them, so that should be fun. Hopefully we’ll be able to reach as many people as possible. We got amazing support from everybody in the administration that we talked to. I’m very grateful.”

Since bringing together a chef, a chemist and class space took a “special alignment of the planets to make it happen,” the class—which is being taught for the first time in the spring—may also be its only run.

“The chef is here for a semester, and I would never have dared—because I’m a theorist—to do a thing like this without her or the TA’s,” Charbonneau said. “I do hope though that some of the material we’ve built up will be able to be used as a special topic in general chemistry. I would like to have a module where I would be able to reuse the demonstrations and the content, and maybe even bring in a local chef at that point who would be interested. That’s one way to project it in the future.”

For those interested, the course is called Chemistry and Physics of Cooking, listed as Chem 89.

“It’s listed under chemistry, but it’s really about chemistry and physics,” Charbonneau said. “We’re looking at more physical chemistry—physics processes, denaturing of proteins. We’re also looking at the material science idea, such as viscosity, elasticity—viscoelastic moments, which chemists would never talk about… in a general chemistry class.”

When the Genome Gets Personal

By sa160@duke.edu

On November 15, 2012

In Genetics/Genomics, Lecture, Medicine

By Nonie Arora

It has been almost ten years since the first draft sequence of the human genome was completed in 2003, and some patients are starting to see benefits in clinic.

Dean Nancy Andrews

Dr. Nancy Andrews, Dean of the School of Medicine, recently spoke to undergraduate students about “When the Genome Gets Personal” over a hearty dinner of chicken stuffed with goat cheese, rice pilaf, and caramelized brussel sprouts. She was the latest guest in the 2012 Chautauqua West Lecture Series.

Andrews explained how DNA sequencing analysis can lead to a new diagnosis for patients. Even if the disease is not treatable, a diagnosis can mean a lot to patients and families, said Andrews.

“We are pushing boundaries between taking care of patients and doing research. The lines are blurry,” she said. Researchers want to sequence patient DNA to find causes for genetic diseases and, at times, to help individual patients who don’t have a diagnosis, according to Andrews.

She said it is easy to find variations in DNA sequence, but much, much harder to know how to interpret the changes. One of the tricky situations researchers face is telling parents or patients what they have found when they are not certain of the finding’s significance. She chairs a committee at Duke that is working on standards to help guide researchers to know what to report and how to design informed consent forms.

Andrews said DNA sequencing is already being used in clinical care: about $5 billion a year is spent on clinical sequencing. However, this sequencing is highly focused on genes relevant to the clinical situation; insurance companies will not yet support exploratory whole-genome sequencing. Andrews pointed out that there is a potential for exploitation by private for-profit companies with DNA sequencing capability, which may overstate their claims or capabilities.

Complicated scenarios can arise when sequencing is done in families. Among other issues, “There is a very real possibility of learning dad is not the biological father,” Andrews said.

Example of a pedigree generated from discussion of family history with patients, modified from Wikimedia Commons

Andrews said that clinical geneticists are going to need algorithms for interpreting sequence data and standard principles for revealing information for patients. These are under development at Duke and across the country.

Ultimately, Andrews thinks that personalized medicine “shouldn’t just be about genetics and genomics but [it should] also incorporate many other types of clinical data, including imaging studies and patient preferences, as well as a deep understanding of environmental factors.”

New Technologies Threaten Cognitive Liberty

By sa160@duke.edu

On November 15, 2012

In Behavior/Psychology, Lecture, Medicine, Neuroscience

By Nonie Arora

Nita Farahany, Duke Law School Professor

Where do we draw the lines when it comes to new technologies in neuroscience?

Duke Law professor Nita Farahany is setting out to answer this question through an exploration of something she calls cognitive liberty. She spoke to a crowd of physicians, nurses, faculty members, and students at the last Trent Center Humanities in Medicine Lecture Series event.

“What does it mean if our conscious awareness of making a decision happens after the decision has already been made by our brains? Does that tell us anything about the concepts of responsibility or freedom of thought?” Farahany asked.

She doesn’t buy into the idea that we are absolved of responsibility because we are essentially predetermined machines, even if scientists like Benjamin Libet have shown that there is brain activity before conscious awareness. She argues that although some things are predetermined, we still have the flexibility of choice. For instance, having many fast-twitch muscle fibers may be a precondition of becoming a world-class track athlete, but the choice remains of whether to train extremely hard to reach the goal.

“We are more than preprogrammed bits and bytes,” Farahany said. Under the assumption that we retain flexibility of our thoughts, Farahany is exploring how those thoughts ought to be protected.

Although neuroscience is still in its infancy, it holds the potential to detect and tamper with memories, she said. But she hopes to explore what types of rights we ought to retain and what limitations there ought to be on the technology.

Farahany said that the mind might hold a lot of information that is very valuable to the government and to businesses. She pointed out that our brains can uniquely identify speakers and sounds. New technologies could detect this information, which could be very valuable to a criminal investigation. But it is it permissible to detect our recognition of objects or people?

Eyewitness testimony has a high rate of falsity and sometimes witnesses lack memories of key information. However, what if false memories could be planted in eyewitnesses easily? Most people would agree that it would be impermissible for the government to create its own “star witness,” Farahany maintained.

Propranolol, a beta-blocker that may stop consolidation of fear. Courtesy of Mind Disorders

While many may worry about enhancement of selves or memories, diminishing memories is another concern. The drug propranolol, a beta-blocker, has significant promise for people who have suffered from a traumatic experience because it can block consolidation of fear, said Farahany. For instance, rape victims who take propranolol may be less likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder. “When given the opportunity to intentionally diminish experience of an emotion, should [people] be able to do so?” she asked. Compensation through the tort system is based upon the degree of suffering. Would the compensation for a victim of a rape be decreased by using the drug? Alternatively, do victims have a responsibility to reduce their own suffering by taking the drug?

There are many more questions to answer, and Farahany hopes to do so with her framework of cognitive liberty that considers the pillars of self-determination, consent, freedom of thought, and risks and benefits to individuals and society when deciding where to draw the lines.

Gecko's stick inspires adhesives and even superheroes

By Ashley Yeager

On November 9, 2012

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Engineering, Lecture, Physics

By Ashley Yeager

A single hair on a gecko’s foot has enough “stickiness” to pick up an ant. Credit: Kellar Autumn, Lewis & Clark College.

Sticky feet driving you up the wall?

Well, maybe not. But they are for Cicak, or Gecko-Man. After a few sips of coffee contaminated by a virus-infected gecko, a loser lab scientist suddenly becomes a Malaysian superhero, sticking to walls, using his tongue to scale skyscrapers and even eating bugs.

“Gecko feet are nature’s best adhesion and removal device,” said Lewis & Clark College biologist Kellar Autumn. He gave the keynote speech during the awards ceremony of the third annual Abhijit Mahato photo contest on Nov. 7.

While Autumn riled up the audience with his images and videos of the science behind gecko feet and their inspiration for new adhesives, robots and superheroes, he also used the talk to remind the photographers in the audience that appearance and scientific images can be misleading.

The science of how geckos climb up walls and across ceilings is at least a 200-year-old question, one that even Aristotle tried to answer. In the late 1960s, one scientist took some scanning electron microscope images of gecko feet and thought they revealed suction cups as the mechanism that let geckos scale walls and ceilings. But that idea was wrong.

It wasn’t until Autumn and his collaborators began looking more closely at the creature’s feet in the late nineties and early 2000s that scientists realized it wasn’t suction, but nanometer-scale interactions between a surface and the gecko’s foot hairs, or setae, that let them stick, release and climb. His team took a single gecko foot hair and made the first direct measurement of its adhesive function. Turns out the stickiness in one hair is so strong it can lift the weight of an ant.

The team also discovered that geckos release their feet as they climb by changing the angle of their feet hairs. That means that the contact geometry of setae are more important that any other factor in their ability to climb, Autumn said, adding that the discovery demonstrated “we could make this stuff.”

Tom Cruise climbs a skyscraper with “gecko gloves: in MI:Ghost Protocol. Image courtesy of: Danny Baram.

He showed videos of both the kinematics and kinetics of the way geckos climb and compared and contrasted the physics the creatures use to the human-engineered “nanopimples” and wedge-shaped nanoridges that resemble geckos’ sticky feet. The animal’s foot physics is “different than pretty much everything else out there,” Autumn said, though he did describe several developing projects to try to mimic the animals’ movements.

Still, he said, he’s convinced that “had geckos not evolved their sticky feet, humans would not have invented adhesive nanostructures.” And, there’s no way we’d have gecko gloves or could even think of gecko band-aides and the other cool applications of gecko-feet science, he said.

Citations:

“Adhesive force of a single gecko foot-hair.” Autumn, K., et. al. (2000). Nature 405, 681-685.

“Evidence for van der Waals adhesion in gecko setae.” Autumn, K., et. al. (2002). Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 99, 12252-12256.

“Evidence for self-cleaning in gecko setae.” Hansen, W. and Autumn, K. (2005). Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 102, 385-389.

Wimberley LEAPED into Action with Refugees

By sa160@duke.edu

On November 7, 2012

In Field Research, Students

By Nonie Arora

Wimberley in front of Egyptian post-revolution graffiti, Courtesy of Wimberley

Many Duke students are unaware of the significant refugee population in Durham. But this is not true of the twelve students who brought back the stories of many Iraqi and Bhutanese refugees from Egypt and Nepal last semester.

DukeImmerse LEAPED (the Law, Ethics, and Political Economy of Displacement) provided students the opportunity to immerse themselves in another culture, both at Duke by taking four related courses and abroad in Cairo, Egypt or Damak, Nepal. Trinity sophomore Ronnie Wimberley was one of the lucky twelve. Wimberley, originally from Detroit, MI but most recently from Columbus, Georgia has lived in four different states and has attended ten different public schools, so he was already accustomed to acclimating to new environments.

He heard about the program because he had already been involved with The Kenan Institute for Ethics through the Ethics, Leadership, and Global Citizenship FOCUS program. Wimberley is actively involved with Duke’s Debate team, is a Duke Colloquium Fellow, and works closely with the First Generation College Student Network.

While in Cairo, Wimberley had the chance to work with the UN Refugee Agency in Cairo, Egypt (UNHCR) and NGOs working with refugee communities. Duke students travelled to homes to interview refugees in groups of two accompanied by a translator.

Wimberley recounted how many refugees were ripped from their home environments in Iraq – as it was bombed severely – and sought refuge in Egypt. The Egyptian government did not support the refugees.

Some of his experiences were completely unexpected. “In Egypt they are a lot more patriarchal. I was the only male in the Egypt group, so they would assume that I was the leader of the group. They would divert from her [the translator] and come talk to me, even though she was the one who understood Arabic better. That was the most shocking part for me. I wasn’t prepared for that,” he said.

The view from Wimberley’s apartment depicting refugee apartments, Courtesy of Wimberley

After the trip, the students chose the most compelling stories to present to local Durham schools (watch online) and to publish in the magazine Uprooted/Rerooted. Wimberley focused on the ways in which people’s ideas of masculinity changed after displacement. He said that displacement “changed power dynamics in the home, such that the men wanted to maintain control and influence, but they expressed concern about losing control of their children.”

His desire to combat the inadequacies of UNHCR and focus on international aid and development led him the following summer to the Duke in Geneva study abroad program, where he took classes in the political philosophy of development and international business to develop his analytical skills.

After Duke, Wimberley wants to work with the International Monetary Fund and learn how to move money more effectively to serve people. He said that money is not always effectively used, even by the United Nations, and he wants to tackle that problem.

Film Presents Alan Turing In Full; Duke Preview Monday

By Karl Bates

On October 24, 2012

In Behavior/Psychology, Computers/Technology, Mathematics, Science Communication & Education

Guest post by Pender M. McCarter, Trinity College (1968), Senior Public Relations Counselor, IEEE-USA/Washington

A scene from the movie “Codebreaker” about the life of Alan Turing.

Alan Turing has been hailed as a digital Darwin, an Einstein and a Newton who helped to “catapult civilization in to the digital age.” The British mathematician laid the groundwork for everything we do with computers today, according to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. The Turing Machine incorporated all the basic aspects of computer input and output. His 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” posited that computers can be programmed to mimic human behavior. And at the end of his life, Turing wrote about pattern formation in biology, what he called morphogenesis, that could be observed in animal stripes and spirals and even exist in ecosystems and galaxies. Turing is best known for leading the British Bletchley Park code breakers team that cracked Germany’s Naval Enigma Code, helped end World War II, and saved perhaps millions of lives.

Yet until recently Turing’s contributions have been little known or appreciated outside of the sci-tech community. And his personal life as a gay man has generally been glossed over. In 2012, the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth, hundreds of events have been held worldwide. A new film, Codebreaker, presents Turing’s personal and professional life without flinching, including how his sexual nature contributed to his extraordinary achievements and tragic downfall.

The drama documentary emphasizes that the support and encouragement Turing enjoyed with other eccentric and brilliant technologists at Bletchley Park motivated and sustained him. When he lost this community after World War II, at a time when there was a craving for normalcy and scant tolerance for non-conformists, Turing learned how unforgiving the world could be.

The drama scenes in Codebreaker center on the psychotherapy sessions Turing participated in during the last 18 months of his life. In these final months, Turing faced persecution as a gay man under the same 19^th century British laws that were used to prosecute Oscar Wilde. In 1954, at the age of 41, Turing committed suicide leaving us to wonder about potential future accomplishments in a more accepting and tolerant time. In 2009, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized posthumously to Turing: “We’re sorry; you deserved so much better.”

Codebreaker will be screened at the Duke Center for LGBT Life (02 West Union Building) on Monday, Oct. 29, from 7-8:30 p.m., with underwriting from IEEE-USA, the Washington-based office of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional association for the advancement of technology. The drama documentary will be introduced by Executive Producer Patrick Sammon, who will also answer questions about the film.

Here’s a link to the trailer: http://www.turingfilm.com/

Science Under the Stars!

By Pranali Dalvi

On October 23, 2012

In Biology, Chemistry, Science Communication & Education, Students

By Pranali Dalvi

The 8^th annual Science under the Stars, held in the lower lobby of the French Family Science Center, brought together several Duke departments, research groups, and organizations. Kids of all ages were busy participating in hands-on science activities.

Bioluminescence demo by Dr. Hendricks

Lab administrator Dr. Diane Hendricks had a station to illuminate the bioluminescent properties of Pyrocystis fusiformis, a marine dinoflagellate. Dinoflagellates bioluminesce when their cell wall is exposed to sheer stress, which triggers the light response. When asked why dinoflagellates glow, some kids hypothesized that dinoflagellates glow to look larger and more threatening so they can ward off predators. Scientists mistakenly thought so for a while, too. However, scientists now favor the burglar alarm hypothesis, based on the idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

“Rather than trying to scare away the predators, they are actually attracting the predators of their predators,” Dr. Hendricks explained. Because the color blue is most easily seen in the ocean, many sea creatures bioluminesce blue. As a memento of Dr. Hendricks’s demo, kids were able to take home glowsticks of various colors!

The physics department showed students how to make Oobleck. Oobleck is a mixture of 2 parts corn starch and 1 part water. It displays shear thickening behavior, meaning that its viscosity – or resistance to flow – increases with shear rate. When the shear rate is low, the corn starch grains can easily move past one another and oobleck flows easily. However, under high shear stress, the corn starch grains pack tightly together and prevent the flow of grains past one another.

The process of preparing oobleck

Oobleck is an example of a non-Newtonian fluid. Non-Newtonian fluids are those whose resistance to flow changes according to the force that is applied to the fluid. One application of non-Newtonian fluids is in the soles of running shoes. The sheer thickening fluid hardens in response to the forces exerted during running or walking.

A favorite stop for the kids was CSI Durham presented by the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology and Anatomy. Students were required to perform cranial, pelvic, and femoral assessments to identify who the “missing victim” was. The skull and pelvis have distinct features in males versus females, and the femoral head and length diameter predict stature pretty accurately.

The event was sponsored by the Chemistry Department and organized by Dr. Kenneth Lyle.

Even ferns get Gaga

By Ashley Mooney

On October 23, 2012

In Biology, Faculty, Lecture

by Ashley Mooney

Biology professor Kathleen Pryer discussed the sex lives of ferns with a group of students Monday in the Center for LGBT Life.

“We’re trying to develop a new lifecycle (of ferns) that we hope textbooks will pick up,” Pryer said. “There are a range of ways that ferns have sex and each of these has is own evolutionary consequences and genetic outcomes.”

At the lunchtime lecture, Pryer also revealed her lab’s newly discovered fern species, Gaga germanotta, named after pop star Lady Gaga.

By naming a species after somebody outside of the world of scientific research, Pryer said she wanted to give Lady Gaga a namesake that will recall her activism efforts.

“The work that she’s done, the money that she’s put behind the Born This Way foundation, I think is incredible,” Pryer said. “She’s a real champion for justice and equality, and I wanted to do this so that she would have a scientific namesake—something that will last forever long after she’s gone.”

Lady Gaga also bears some likeness to a fern gametophyte, which is a fern early in its developmental cycle. At the 2010 Grammys, Lady Gaga wore a costume that strongly resembles a gametophyte, Pryer said.

The new species is part of a genus containing 19 species that were originally listed as cheilanthes. True cheilanthes—ones that have kept their original designation—are South American ferns that are nearly indistinguishable from Gaga ferns in appearance. Their differences, she said, are in their DNA.

“When we line up all our sequence data [of the Gaga ferns]… in a particular gene there is a string of GAGA,” she said. “The closest relatives of the genus Gaga doesn’t have that synapomorphy.”

Flowering plants—the most diverse types of plants on the planet with approximately 350,000 species—reproduce using seeds. Ferns on the other hand reproduce through spores contained on the undersides of their leaves.

Pryer noted that many people do not understand the vast diversity of ferns. There are about 12,000 species, including the typical forest ferns, aquatic ferns, desert ones and ferns that are the size of trees. Pryer’s main focus has been on desert ferns—most of which appear similar but have different DNA patterns.

Beyond the variation in appearance of fern species, Pryer said the plants have multiple mating strategies, even though textbooks usually only teach one form.

Pryer describing the fern lifecycle often depicted in textbooks. Credit: Ashley Mooney.

One of the lifecycles they’re investivating involves a bisexual gametophyte, which is usually the first gametophyte in a population to mature. It forms a notch where it produces archegonia while antheridia develop on the outside. Most ferns have archegonium—the female component where eggs are located—and antheridia, which contain sperm. The gametophyte emits a pheromone that signals to all nearby developing gametophytes that they should become male.

Pryer said the diversity she found in ferns is only one type of sexual diversity in the world, and she hopes that a common interest in such differences will connect her field with the general population.

“We live in this world and we’re all interested in diversity in many different ways,” she said. “This makes a connection between what [scientists] do and human diversity and it also makes people who are Gaga fans say, ‘hey, what’s up with these botanists.’ I’m hoping that we can engage the two communities. When people talk about interdisciplinary work, I’m taking it to ‘the edge of glory.’”

YouTube Video about the naming: 19 Species of Ferns Named for Lady Gaga

Duke Today coverage: http://today.duke.edu/2012/10/gagafern

Refereed physics for Twitter and Facebook, maybe

By Ashley Yeager

On October 19, 2012

In Computers/Technology, Lecture, Physics, Science Communication & Education

By Ashley Yeager

These library stacks of science journals are going out of style as more publishers opt for online-only, open access formats. Credit: UCSF.

When journal publishers send peer-reviewed tweets, they’ll have truly entered the digital age. They’re not there yet, but that doesn’t mean they’re not trying, said Gene Sprouse, editor-and-chief of the American Physical Society(APS) and a physics professor at Stony Brook University.

Sprouse, speaking at an Oct. 17 physics colloquium, described how the Internet is changing the way scientists share their research. They used to submit papers to journals, have their ideas vetted by other scientists, and then see their arguments and data in print — or not. He said it has been this way since the 1660s when the first journal, Philosophical Transactions, was first published.

But with online journals available right on researchers’ desktop and open-access digital archives, such as arXiv.org, journal editors, like those at the helm of magazines and newspapers, are trying to figure out how to shift print publications online while still making a profit.

“Eventually print journals will disappear,” Sprouse said, explaining that sans paper, authors and publishers could include new types of content like movies and active graphics in their articles. But even with new media features, “what physicists want is rapid acceptance of their paper into a prestigious journal with no hassles during peer review. They want attention for their work, and they want it widely distributed.”

To meet those demands in the new media landscape, APS has developed a Creative Commons license for authors to share their articles on their personal web sites and encourages them to publish pre-prints in online digital archives, such as arXiv.org.

Hoping to merge the prestige of the “baby Nature” journals – Nature Photonics, Nature Optics, Nature Physics, etc. – with the open-access model of the Public Library of Science, or PLOS, journals, the society has also created Physical Review X.

It’s the society’s first online-only, fully open-access journal. The one-year-old publication, which charges authors $1,500 per accepted article, is already comparable in prestige to APS’s other leading journal, Physical Review Letters. The difference is that now authors have an open-access journal to submit to at APS, which is important as more funders push researchers to submit to that type of publication, Sprouse said.

The society isn’t ignoring Twitter and Facebook either. When asked when the society would post the first refereed physics tweet, Sprouse said he couldn’t really say because he personally doesn’t use social media. But, APS, he added quickly, is working on its social media strategy and would “welcome any advice from those of you exploring that realm.”

Stem Cells Raise Tricky Questions

By sa160@duke.edu

On October 8, 2012

In Lecture, Medicine

By Nonie Arora

Medicine is about more than difficult diagnoses and cutting-edge research. Research and treatments often raise tricky moral questions.

Jeremy Sugarman Credit: Berman Institute for Bioethics

Dr. Jeremy Sugarman, the founding director for the Trent Center for Bioethics, returned to campus last week to give a talk on the ethics of stem cell research and treatment for the Humanities in Medicine Lecture Series.

“Stem cells are a hot topic that have captured the imagination of people around the world,” he said.

“Is it better to use leftover embryos from IVF or to create them for research?” Sugarman asked. He said there is little consensus on this issue, and the question remains whether there is a moral distinction between discarded embryos or those created for research purposes. There is also the thorny issue of whether it is morally acceptable to destroy embryos to create human embryonic stem cells, said Sugarman, who is now at the Berman Institute for Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University.

Amidst the controversy surrounding the moral status of embryos, there has also been scientific controversy within the stem cell field. Sugarman spoke of Hwang Woo-Suk, who claimed to have cloned human embryos and extracted their stem cells. However, his data was fabricated, Sugarman said. Sugarman elicited laughs from the packed audience when he joked about Woo-Suk’s former title “Supreme Scientist of Korea,” an honor that was later revoked. The laughter was tempered by the understanding of how unethical it is to fake any research, but especially on this scale. Still, Sugarman says Woo-Suk’s example serves to show the effectiveness of peer review in realizing false claims.

Human Embryonic Stem Cells. Source: "Follow the Money – The Politics of Embryonic Stem Cell Research." Russo E, PLoS Biology Vol. 3/7/2005, e234 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0030234

Another issue many people are concerned about are chimeras – organisms that have parts from two different genetic lines. Already, bone marrow transplants create human-to-human chimeras, Sugarman explained. Some people have qualms about combining materials from human and non-human animals.

Other countries differ from the U.S. in policies on what can be done with human embryonic stem cells. For instance, in Germany it is a criminal offense to destroy an embryo to create a human embryonic stem cell line. It is also illegal for a German citizen to do such work abroad, Sugarman said. He brought up this point to illustrate why local oversight within academic institutions is necessary to not only make sure that research is “ethically and scientifically sound” but to also be certain that researchers are being protected.

Ethics in delivering care is equally important. “The desire for access to investigational treatments abounds, especially for devastating disorders,” according to Sugarman. But this is no reason for unsafe treatments to be delivered to patients. “It turns out some stem cell-based interventions are being delivered to patients without sufficient published data regarding safety or efficacy,” he explained.

Ultimately, scientific and commercial interests will be considered along with the hopes of patients and politicians when it comes to stem cell research and treatments, Sugarman said.