Eternal Embrace Unearthed

From the Toronto Star:

Feb 07, 2007 11:33 AM

Ariel David
Associated Press
ROME — They died young and, by the looks of it, in love.

Two 5,000-year-old skeletons found locked in an embrace near the city where Shakespeare set the star-crossed tale “Romeo and Juliet” have sparked theories the remains of a far more ancient love story have been found.

Archeologists unearthed the skeletons dating back to the late Neolithic period outside Mantua, 40 kilometres south of Verona, the city of Shakespeare’s story of doomed love.

Buried between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago, the prehistoric pair are believed to have been a man and a woman and are thought to have died young, because their teeth were found intact, said Elena Menotti, the archeologist who led the dig.

“As far as we know, it’s unique,” Menotti told The Associated Press by telephone from Milan. “Double burials from the Neolithic are unheard of, and these are even hugging.”

Archeologists digging in the region have found some 30 burial sites, all single, as well as the remains of prosperous villages filled with artifacts made of flint, pottery and animal horns.

Although the Mantua pair strike an unusual and touching pose, archeologists have found other prehistoric burials in which the dead hold hands or have other contact, said Luca Bondioli, an anthropologist at Rome’s National Prehistoric and Ethnographic Museum.

Bondioli, who was not involved in the Mantua dig, said the find has “more of an emotional than a scientific value.” But it does highlight how the relationship people have with each other and with death has not changed much from the period in which humanity first settled in villages, learning to farm the land and tame animals, he said.

“The Neolithic is a very formative period for our society,” he said. “It was when the roots of our religious sentiment were formed.”

Menotti said the burial was “a ritual, but we have to find out what it means.”

Experts might never determine the exact nature of the pair’s relationship, but Menotti said she had little doubt it was born of a deep sentiment.

“It was a very emotional discovery,” she said. “From thousands of years ago we feel the strength of this love. Yes, we must call it love.”

The couple’s burial site was located Monday during construction work for a factory in the outskirts of Mantua. Alongside the couple, archeologists found flint tools, including arrowheads and a knife, Menotti said.

Experts will now study the artifacts and the skeletons to determine the burial site’s age and how old the two were when they died, she said. The finds will then go on display at Mantua’s Archeological Museum.

Establishing the cause of death could prove almost impossible, unless they were killed by a debilitating disease, a knife or something else that might have left marks on the bones, Menotti said.

The two bodies, which cuddle closely while facing each other on their sides, were probably buried at the same time, an indication of a possible sudden and tragic death, Bondioli said.

He said DNA testing could determine whether the two were related, “but that still leaves other hypotheses; the Romeo and Juliet possibility is just one of many.”

Self-assembling gel stops bleeding in seconds

• 13:15 10 October 2006
• NewScientist.com news service
• Robert Adler

Swab a clear liquid onto a gaping wound and watch the bleeding stop in seconds. An international team of researchers has accomplished just that in animals, using a solution of protein molecules that self-organise on the nanoscale into a biodegradable gel that stops bleeding.

If the material works as well in humans, it could save thousands of lives and make surgery far easier in many cases, surgeons say.

Molecular biologist Shuguang Zhang, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, began experimenting with peptides in 1991. Zhang and colleagues at MIT and the University of Hong Kong in China went on to design several materials that self-assemble into novel nano-structures, including a molecular scaffold that helps the regrowth of severed nerve cells in hamsters (see Nano-scaffolds could help rebuild sight).

Their work exploits the way certain peptide sequences can be made to self-assemble into mesh-like sheets of "nanofibres" when immersed in salt solutions.

In the course of that research they discovered one material's dramatic ability to stop bleeding in the brain and began testing it on a variety of other organs and tissues. When applied to a wound, the peptides form a gel that seals over the wound, without causing harm to any nearby cells.

Vessels and arteries

"In rodents it works in all the blood vessels and arteries, including the femoral artery, the portal vein, and in the liver," says MIT neuroscientist Rutledge Ellis-Behnke.

The peptides assemble into a gel that looks "like a hairy ribbon, but at the nanoscale" says Ellis-Behnke, although precisely how it stops bleeding is not yet clear. "It's critically important to understand the mechanism so we can rationally design new self-assembling materials," Zhang says.

Some surgeons are already excited about the material. "I see great potential in the eye field, the gastro-intestinal field, and in neurosurgery," says Dimitri Azar, head of ophthalmology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, US.

Paradigm shift

"In the eye, even a drop of blood will blur your vision for a long time," Azar adds. "A material that would stop the bleeding could lead to a paradigm shift in how we practice surgery in the eye."

Ed Buchel, who teaches general and plastic surgery at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg, Canada, sees equal potential for treating trauma and burns. "If this works as well on humans as it does on rats, it's phenomenal," he says.

Still, they caution that extensive clinical trials are needed to make sure the materials work properly and are safe. The MIT researchers hope to see those crucial human trials within three to five years.

Their research will appear in the 10 October 2006 edition of online journal Nanomedicine.

Indian Organ Mafia Busted

From Wired News:

Police have begun to make arrests in tightly knit ring of organ smugglers who have been operating in Tamil Nadu, India for the last two to ten years. In the last month there have been a slew of media reports about the organ racket, and while many of the details are still a bit fuzzy the implications are clear.

The first reports came during a public meeting of disenfranchised tsunami survivors in the village of Eranavoor who were airing their disappointment with government efforts to find them shelter and alleviate some of the more crushing aspects of poverty. In that meeting a group of 35 women admitted to having sold their kidneys to brokers and that they were put up in posh hospitals in nearby Chennai for a few days before being cast out on the street without after care. They women were primarily upset because the brokers offered them large sums of money, but ended up cheating them out of the lions share of the rewards.

Since the initial report over 150 people have come forward as victims of kidney brokers. Police from around the state are estimating that the total number of illegal transplants edges closer to 500. There have also been reports that some of the brokers also dealt in liver and bone marrow.

Other reports have suggested that many of the buyers are medical tourists from the middle east who have come to Chennai in order to skip over lengthy waiting lists in their home country while also saving a great deal of money on the surgery.

More after the jump...

The police have already begun investigations into some of the hospitals that preformed the operations, yet the magnitude of the racket threatens to destabilize the medical administrations across the state. After a slew of illegal transplants in the 1990s, the government issued a law making it illegal to perform an operation without a thorough review from an ethics board.

The rules specifically state that no transplant should be undertaken if there is payment involved, and that all live transplants should be donations, preferably from family members. The organ mafia seems to have been able to provide false documents for the would be patients.

But it now appears that the state level ethics committee chaired by the Director of Medical Education in Chennai was complicit in the illegal dealings and authorized surgeries that they knew were about to be preformed under sham circumstances.

As one reporter I spoke to today said, "The ethics board would have to have been mad to think that all of these people flying in from around the country for transplants had poor, illiterate tsunami survivors for relatives living in the vicinity of the hospitals." Members of the local ethics boards maintain that they did nothing wrong.