Imagine having a spare copy of your immune system on ice, ready to replace your existing one should you fall victim to AIDS, an autoimmune disease, or have to undergo extensive chemotherapy for cancer.

An Anglo-American company called Lifeforce has received permission from the US Food and Drug Administration to do just that.

From the web site:

The Immune System Bank™ facilities consist of secure locations for the frozen storage of the white blood cells from whole blood. The white cells form the basis of an individual’s immune system. Sampling immune cells from a patient, enhancing them, and then returning them to the patient is called Adoptive Immunotherapy or Biological Therapy. These terms are also used to describe therapies that naturally assist your immune system to fight disease.

Lifeforce® takes a sample of your healthy blood. We then extract the white blood cells from the whole blood and freeze them after division into three separate samples. These immune system cells will be stored in liquid nitrogen vapour in three geographically remote and secure freezers.

Before the advent of Lifeforce®, the immune system cells in Biological Therapy had been collected from patients only after they had fallen ill, and were therefore of inferior quality, i.e. diseased and only partially, if at all, effective. Lifeforce® preserves a sample of an individual''s white blood cells before they fall ill, at a time when their immune system is pristine, more complete, and uncontaminated by disease. Lifeforce®, when requested, then supplies the cells back to the patient’s physician for reinfusion.

Storing a representative sample of a person''s immune system prior to them becoming ill is unique to Lifeforce®. World medical leaders in immunology consider the Lifeforce® Immune System Bank™ service will enable valuable therapies. The Lifeforce® service can save life, extend life and enhance the quality of life whilst reducing personal and healthcare industry costs.

Lifeforce® charges an initial fee of £395, followed by a monthly fee of £12.

Create a back-up copy of your immune system

You've got until June 30th to download a free copy of the July issue, which sports a spiffy redesign and, over all, a more accessible look. (Same good old content, though.)

The July issue of Scientific American is FREE

“It’s so far beyond anything you’ve ever seen, you can’t believe it,” Dr. Fay said. “You think you’re hallucinating.”

In Sudan, an Animal Migration to Rival Serengeti

Complex nonlinear dynamics arise in many fields of science and engineering, but uncovering the underlying differential equations directly from observations poses a challenging task.

The ability to symbolically model complex networked systems is key to understanding them, an open problem in many disciplines. Here we introduce for the first time a method that can automatically generate symbolic equations for a nonlinear coupled dynamical system directly from time series data. This method is applicable to any system that can be described using sets of ordinary nonlinear differential equations, and assumes that the (possibly noisy) time series of all variables are observable.

Previous automated symbolic modeling approaches of coupled physical systems produced linear models or required a nonlinear model to be provided manually. The advance presented here is made possible by allowing the method to model each (possibly coupled) variable separately, intelligently perturbing and destabilizing the system to extract its less observable characteristics, and automatically simplifying the equations during modeling.

We demonstrate this method on four simulated and two real systems spanning mechanics, ecology, and systems biology. Unlike numerical models, symbolic models have explanatory value, suggesting that automated "reverse engineering" approaches for model-free symbolic nonlinear system identification may play an increasing role in our ability to understand progressively more complex systems in the future.

On the cover of the current issue of PNAS.

Automated reverse engineering of nonlinear dynamical systems

This post is about MIT biologist Drew Endy. But first, a spot of news:

Kiwi scientists have bred a herd of "green-top" cows that produce skim milk from the teat.

If you think sex is kinky, wait till you see the alternatives.

Life 2.0:

One of synthetic biology's most radical spirits is Drew Endy. Dr Endy, who works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to the subject from engineering, not biology. As an engineer, he can recognise a kludge when he sees one. And in his opinion, life is a kludge.

In coming years, Endy says, we'll begin to see the first custom-crafted biomachines: cells that can keep track of how old they are or bacteria engineered to hunt down and kill tumor cells. These "devices" will guard against disease, create new fuels, manufacture chemicals and, in the wrong hands, produce horrific bioweapons. These are still the very early days; scientists do not know how to build such devices right now. They are just beginning to know how to build the tools that would build the biological micromachines.

"Drew just does it and doesn't have a big ego."

One roadblock to synthbio's future is the messed-up patent environment in biotech, where every tiny protein pathway and gene sequence has an owner wanting to get paid.

The bigger fear is that synthetic biology could be the end of us all.

"It's immediately obvious when you encounter a DNA sequence that this is a program, and that you could change it."

"The biological systems that we find in nature are not themselves designed by nature to be easy to understand. And so if I wanted to have biology that I understand, I'd be better off building it myself."

The Implications of Synthetic Biology:

“I like to make things -- that’s what I do.”

"We’re going from looking at the living world as only coming from nature, to a subset of the living world being produced by engineers who design and build hopefully useful living artifacts according to our specifications."

Open Source Biology:

Drew Endy describes three major issues: how to develop biological systems when the basic building blocks have been patented, how to assure the quality of constructed DNA code and how to establish rights to reuse and reengineer new genetic products. He sees a solution in an open-source approach to DNA whereby, just as with open-sourc... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Jeffrey Sachs introduces Jared Diamond, who talks about the ideas in his book, Collapse.

Jared Diamond at The Earth Institute

This course provides a comprehensive and concise review of the neurosciences, with special emphasis on recent and important developments in the field. Topics include basic neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, neuropharmacology, neuroendocrinology, neurochemistry, and neurogenetics. The course is intended for clinical psychologists as well as graduate physicians and residents in neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry.

Video, slides, and transcripts are freely available.

There are a few other seminars you might want to check out, as well:

Introduction to the Art of Venture Valuation

In this e-seminar, Professor Oren Fuerst of Columbia Business School will provide an overview of the main methods of valuation and then demonstrate some of the adjustments that are typically necessary for early-stage technology companies or projects. The e-seminar includes video, audio with slides, case-study examples of valuation, and an interactive final exercise.

Mathematics of Finance

Professor Mikhail Smirnov's Mathematics of Finance is a two-part course on the basics of probability and finance. This course requires a solid understanding of calculus.

In the following lessons, we will explore the notions of derivatives, futures, and options, as well as theories of volatility, arbitrage, and hedging. We will describe and apply the Black-Scholes formula for pricing options and the theory of Brownian motion as it applies to calculating price and risk.

Small Wonders: The World of Nano-Science

The nanoscale, just above the scale of an atom, is the place where the properties of most common things are determined. It is here that the disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering meet and conspire. In this e-seminar, Professor Horst Stormer magnifies the wondrous nano-world and reveals its enormous potential to shape our future.

Basic and Clinical Neurosciences

Research reported this week by three different groups shows that normal skin cells can be reprogrammed to an embryonic state in mice. The race is now on to apply the surprisingly straightforward procedure to human cells.

If researchers succeed, it will make it relatively easy to produce cells that seem indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells, and that are genetically matched to individual patients.

Simple switch turns cells embryonic, removes need for eggs or embryos

The Knowledge Web today is an activity rather than a web site — an expedition in time, space, and technology to map the interior landscape of human thought and experience. Thanks to the work of a team of dedicated volunteers, it will soon be an interactive space on the web where students, teachers, and other knowledge seekers can explore information in a highly interconnected, holistic way that allows for an almost infinite number of paths of exploration among people, places, things, and events.

The Knowledge Web

In what sense might something as intrinsically human as the imagination be biological? How could the products of the imagination – a novel, a painting, a sonata, a theory – be thought of as the result of biological matter? After all, such artefacts are what culture is made of. So why invoke biology? In this essay, I will argue that the content of the imagination is of course determined more by culture than biology. But the capacity to imagine owes more to biology than culture.

the biology of imagination