Scientists pause research with lab-bred bird flu

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists who created easier-to-spread versions of the deadly bird flu said Friday they are temporarily halting more research, as international specialists debate what should happen next.

Researchers from leading flu laboratories around the world signed onto the voluntary moratorium, published Friday in the journals Science and Nature.

What the scientists called a "pause" comes amid fierce controversy over how to handle research that is high-risk but potentially could bring a big payoff. Two labs — at Erasmus University in the Netherlands and the University of Wisconsin-Madison — created the new viruses while studying how bird flu might mutate to become a bigger threat to people.

The U.S. government funded the work but last month urged the teams not to publicly reveal the exact formula so that would-be bioterrorists couldn't copy it. Critics also worried a lab accident might allow the strains to escape. The researchers reluctantly agreed not to publish all the details as long as the government set up a system to provide them to legitimate scientists who really need to know. The National Institutes of Health is creating such a system.

"We recognize that we and the rest of the scientific community need to clearly explain the benefits of this important research and the measures taken to minimize its possible risks," lead researchers Ron Fouchier of Erasmus and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of Wisconsin wrote Friday in the letter. They were joined by nearly three dozen other flu researchers.

They called for a public international meeting to debate how to learn from the work, safely. And they agreed to hold off on additional research with the existing lab-bred strains or that leads to any new ones for 60 days.

A U.S. official praised the development.

The moratorium "is a really good idea, because a lot of very important issues are at hand," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who expects most flu researchers doing such work to sign on. "There aren't a lot of people who are doing that, I can assure you."

The U.S. also wants international input; researchers are talking with the World Health Organization.

Today, the so-called H5N1 bird flu only occasionally infects people, mostly those who have close contact with sick poultry. But when it does, it is highly lethal. The lab-bred H5N1 strains were a surprise because they showed it was easier than previously thought for the virus to mutate in a way that lets it spread easily between at least some mammals — in this case, ferrets.

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UK scientists grow super broccoli

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LONDON (AP) — Popeye might want to consider switching to broccoli. British scientists unveiled a new breed of the vegetable that experts say packs a big nutritional punch.

The new broccoli was specially grown to contain two to three times the normal amount of glucoraphanin, a nutrient believed to help ward off heart disease.

"Vegetables are a medicine cabinet already," said Richard Mithen, who led the team of scientists at the Institute for Food Research in Norwich, England, that developed the new broccoli. "When you eat this broccoli ... you get a reduction in cholesterol in your blood stream," he told Associated Press Television.

An AP reporter who tasted the new broccoli found it was the same as the regular broccoli. Scientists, however, said it should taste slightly sweeter because it contains less sulphur.

Glucoraphanin works by breaking fat down in the body, preventing it from clogging the arteries. It is only found in broccoli in significant amounts.

To create the vegetable, sold as "super broccoli," Mithen and colleagues cross-bred a traditional British broccoli with a wild, bitter Sicilian variety that has no flowery head, and a big dose of glucoraphanin. After 14 years, the enhanced hybrid was produced, which has been granted a patent by European authorities. No genetic modification was used.

It's been on sale as Beneforte in select stores in California and Texas for the last year, and hit British shelves this month. Later this fall, the broccoli will be rolled out across the U.S.

The super vegetable is part of an increasing tendency among producers to inject extra nutrients into foods, ranging from calcium-enriched orange juice to fortified sugary cereals and milk with added omega 3 fatty acids. In Britain, the new broccoli is sold as part of a line of vegetables that includes mushrooms with extra vitamin D, and tomatoes and potatoes with added selenium.

Not enough data exists to know if anyone could overdose on glucoraphanin, but vitamin D and selenium in very high quantities can be toxic.

Mithen and colleagues are conducting human trials comparing the heart health of people eating the super broccoli to those who eat regular broccoli or no broccoli. They plan to submit the data to the European Food Safety Agency next year so they can claim in advertisements the broccoli has proven health benefits.

"There's a lot of circumstantial evidence that points to (glucoraphanin and related compounds) as the most important preventive agents for (heart attacks) and certain cancers, so it's a reasonable thing to do," said Lars Ove Dragsted, a professor in the department of human nutrition at the University of Copenhagen. He previously sat on panels at the International Agency for Research on Cancer examining the link between vegetables and cancer.

Dragsted said glucoraphanin is a mildly toxic compound used by plants to fight insects. In humans, glucoraphanin may stimulate our bodies' natural chemical defenses, potentially making the body stronger at removing dangerous compounds.

Other experts said eating foods packed with extra nutrients would probably only have a minimal impact compared with other lifestyle choices, like not smoking and exercising.

"Eating this new broccoli is not going to counteract your bad habits," said Glenys Jones, a nutritionist at Britain's Medical Research Council. She doubted whether adding the nutrients in broccoli to more popular foods would work to improve people's overall health.

"If you added this to a burger, people might think it's then a healthy food and eat more burgers, whereas this is not something they should be eating more of," Jones said. She also thought the super broccoli's U.K. price — it costs about a third more than regular broccoli — might discourage penny-pinching customers.

But that wasn't enough to deter Suzanne Johnson, a 43-year-old mother of two young children in London.

"I'm very concerned about the food they eat and would happily pay a bit more to buy something that has an added benefit," Johnson said.

But for her children, taste is ultimately more important than any nutritional value. "Broccoli is one of the vegetables they actually like, so I'm glad it's the one (scientists) have been working on," she said. "This wouldn't work if it had been mushrooms or asparagus."

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British Scientists Grow Super Broccoli

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Popeye might want to consider switching to broccoli. British scientists unveiled a new breed of the vegetable that experts say packs a big nutritional punch.

The new broccoli was specially grown to contain two to three times the normal amount of glucoraphanin, a nutrient believed to help ward off heart disease.

"Vegetables are a medicine cabinet already," said Richard Mithen, who led the team of scientists at the Institute for Food Research in Norwich, England, that developed the new broccoli. "When you eat this broccoli ... you get a reduction in cholesterol in your blood stream," he told Associated Press Television.

An AP reporter who tasted the new broccoli found it was the same as the regular broccoli. Scientists, however, said it should taste slightly sweeter because it contains less sulphur.

Glucoraphanin works by breaking fat down in the body, preventing it from clogging the arteries. It is only found in broccoli in significant amounts.

To create the vegetable, sold as "super broccoli," Mithen and colleagues cross-bred a traditional British broccoli with a wild, bitter Sicilian variety that has no flowery head, and a big dose of glucoraphanin. After 14 years, the enhanced hybrid was produced, which has been granted a patent by European authorities. No genetic modification was used.

It's been on sale as Beneforte in select stores in California and Texas for the last year, and hit British shelves this month. Later this fall, the broccoli will be rolled out across the U.S.

The super vegetable is part of an increasing tendency among producers to inject extra nutrients into foods, ranging from calcium-enriched orange juice to fortified sugary cereals and milk with added omega 3 fatty acids. In Britain, the new broccoli is sold as part of a line of vegetables that includes mushrooms with extra vitamin D, and tomatoes and potatoes with added selenium.

Not enough data exists to know if anyone could overdose on glucoraphanin, but vitamin D and selenium in very high quantities can be toxic.

Mithen and colleagues are conducting human trials comparing the heart health of people eating the super broccoli to those who eat regular broccoli or no broccoli. They plan to submit the data to the European Food Safety Agency next year so they can claim in advertisements the broccoli has proven health benefits.

"There's a lot of circumstantial evidence that points to (glucoraphanin and related compounds) as the most important preventive agents for (heart attacks) and certain cancers, so it's a reasonable thing to do," said Lars Ove Dragsted, a professor in the department of human nutrition at the University of Copenhagen. He previously sat on panels at the International Agency for Research on Cancer examining the link between vegetables and cancer.

Dragsted said glucoraphanin is a mildly toxic compound used by plants to fight insects. In humans, glucoraphanin may stimulate our bodies' natural chemical defenses, potentially making the body stronger at removing dangerous compounds.

Other experts said eating foods packed with extra nutrients would probably only have a minimal impact compared with other lifestyle choices, like not smoking and exercising.

"Eating this new broccoli is not going to counteract your bad habits," said Glenys Jones, a nutritionist at Britain's Medical Research Council. She doubted whether adding the nutrients in broccoli to more popular foods would work to improve people's overall health.

"If you added this to a burger, people might think it's then a healthy food and eat more burgers, whereas this is not something they should be eating more of," Jones said. She also thought the super broccoli's U.K. price — it costs about a third more than regular broccoli — might discourage penny-pinching customers.

But that wasn't enough to deter Suzanne Johnson, a 43-year-old mother of two young children in London.

"I'm very concerned about the food they eat and would happily pay a bit more to buy something that has an added benefit," Johnson said.

But for her children, taste is ultimately more important than any nutritional value. "Broccoli is one of the vegetables they actually like, so I'm glad it's the one (scientists) have been working on," she said. "This wouldn't work if it had been mushrooms or asparagus."

—By MARIA CHENG

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Scientists Say Texas Agency Edits Out Climate Change

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Scientists and conservationists accuse the state environmental agency of editing references to climate change and sea level rise out of a public report — because the agency, like Gov. Rick Perry, is skeptical of global warming.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

RENEE MONTAGNE, host: The Texas coast has also battled its share of dangerous floodwaters. Now a controversy over alleged scientific censorship is roiling Galveston Bay. It involves the administration of Texas Governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry.

ARI SHAPIRO, host: Scientists and conservationists accuse the state environmental agency of editing references to climate change and sea level rise out of a public report because the agency and the governor remain staunch global warming skeptics. NPR's John Burnett reports.

JOHN BURNETT: Galveston Bay is a large estuary on the upper Texas coast whose deteriorating health is of great concern to stakeholders, from fishermen to boaters to birders. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the TCEQ, commissioned a scientific report called State of the Bay, but it wasn't happy with some of the results. The report's authors are in agreement that sea-level rise caused by global warming is threatening wetlands surrounding Galveston Bay, but the TCEQ did not want any mention of human-caused environmental calamities and pulled out its red pencil.

L'OREAL STEPNEY: Let's call the meeting to order. I'll guess I'll do my official gavel thing.

BURNETT: And that's what brought issue before 50 people Wednesday morning inside a meeting room in a mosquito-infested marsh a few miles from the troubled bay. L'Oreal Stepney is deputy director of the Office of Water at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

STEPNEY: Let me say this clearly. We are not an agency that is about censorship. It is not what we do, it is wrong, it is not who we are.

BURNETT: Stepney played down the firestorm as merely professional differences between her agency and the report's authors. But the scientist who wrote the offending chapter claims what happened is nothing less than the muzzling of an inconvenient truth.

JOHN ANDERSON: One of the most striking edits that was made was the deletion of a figure that was taken from Science magazine that showed the measured rate of sea level rise over the long term in historical time, and the predicted rate of rise, and again, that was taken from Science magazine, one of the most credible journals on Earth.

BURNETT: The author is John Anderson, a ruddy-faced 67-year-old oceanographer from Rice University, who among other things has spent 26 seasons studying ice sheet changes in Antarctica, and its effect on global sea level rise. He says the agency deleted passages that Galveston Bay is currently rising three millimeters a year, a six-fold increase, and that human-induced global warming is the cause.

ANDERSON: And I think the travesty here is that this chapter was actually written for teachers. They're my target audience, and this to me is just an outward attempt to keep scientific information, scientific fact, from getting into classrooms.

BURNETT: The agency also deleted a reference that manmade dams on rivers have disrupted important sediment deposition into the bay. L'Oreal Stepney said in an interview that the report should focus on the overall health of the bay and avoid controversial theories. She said the TCEQ is not ignoring the reality of sea-level rise - it's mentioned elsewhere in the report - it's only Anderson's chapter linking it to global warming that they object to.

STEPNEY: It's unsettled science, in our opinion, and that's our position, and we've been clear about that.

BURNETT: At the meeting, the TCEQ offered a compromise - the agency would publish "State of the Bay" without Anderson's chapter and dissident scientists could publish the unedited chapter on their own. But that didn't placate the Galveston Bay Council that held the meeting. One after another members spoke up. The chair of the council said they wanted the state to publish the complete report unexpurgated. A representative from the EPA, which helped fund the study, echoed her comment. Then concerned citizen Albert Gonzalez spoke his mind.

ALBERT GONZALEZ. TEXAS: The political climate in our nation right now seems to be anti-regulation, anti-science. That just is very, very upsetting, and I just wanted to make that comment.

BURNETT: The world's leading science academies state that most of the global warming in recent decades is likely the result of human activities. Rick Perry, his commissioners on the TCEQ, and some members of Congress, mostly Republicans, say that human-caused climate change is junk science. The governor's office said he would have no comment on the Galveston Bay censorship controversy, which has yet to be resolved. John Burnett, NPR News, Houston.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

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Talk of treaty ban on mercury concerns scientists

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LONDON (AP) — Scientists are warning officials negotiating a global treaty on mercury that banning the deadly chemical completely would be dangerous for public health because of the chemical's use in vaccines.

The ban option is one of several proposals on the table for a meeting later this month in Nairobi, but a final treaty isn't expected until 2013.

According to the World Health Organization, mercury is one of the top 10 chemicals of public health concern and is highly toxic. Most of the worry is centered on mercury emissions from burning coal, gold mining and people eating mercury-tainted fish.

Mercury in small amounts is also found in many products including light bulbs, batteries and thermometers. WHO advises such products to be phased out, suggesting for example, that health systems switch to digital thermometers instead.

The problem is that a proposed ban might include thiomersal, also known as thimerosal, a mercury compound used to prevent contamination and extend the shelf life of vaccines, many scientists say. It is used in about 300 million shots worldwide, against diseases including flu, tetanus, hepatitis B, diptheria and meningitis.

"Not being able to use mercury is not a viable option," said David Wood, a WHO vaccines expert.

Wood said there isn't a viable alternative to thiomersal at the moment. If banned, pharmaceuticals would likely have to switch to preservative-free vaccines, which would complicate the supply chain and vaccination campaigns in poor countries, since the injections would have a much shorter shelf life. Costs would also spike since manufacturers would need to reconfigure their factories.

In 2009, the United Nations Environment Programme, or UNEP, began working on a legally binding global treaty on mercury. At the end of October, the third of five meetings to hammer out a treaty will take place in Nairobi.

"The document is a draft at the moment, so some of these proposals have to be taken with a grain of salt," said Tim Kasten, head of the chemicals branch at UNEP. Kasten said the amount of mercury in vaccines is so minute it doesn't threaten the environment. He said there could be provisions to allow mercury for certain uses, such as in dental fillings and vaccines.

But according to an annex in the draft document, there is currently no "allowable use exemption" for mercury products in pharmaceutical products, putting vaccines in the same category as banned mercury-containing paints and pesticides.

"That would be a terrible idea," said Paul Offit, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Pennsylvania. "It would be another tragic example of us not being able to explain to the public where the real risk lies."

Thiomersal has mostly been removed from childhood vaccines in the U.S. and Canada. In some European countries, including Norway and Sweden, manufacturers have been encouraged to make thiomersal-free vaccines — and no other uses of mercury as a medical preservative are allowed.

Fears about thiomersal in vaccines were raised after a flawed medical study in 1998 linked a common childhood injection to autism. Even though that study didn't involve mercury, it ignited fears about vaccines in general, including those containing thiomersal.

Concerns were also heightened after the U.S. decided to largely remove thiomersal from many injections as a precautionary measure in the 1990s. Numerous studies have found no sign the mercury compound is risky but many anti-vaccine groups still believe it may be linked to autism and other health problems.

Experts hope countries won't go overboard in their attempts to control the substance.

"Provided you know the risks and it's handled properly, there isn't a problem," said Andrew Nelson, a toxicology expert at the University of Leeds. "The health of so many millions of children benefit from vaccines containing mercury that an absolute ban is ridiculous."

___

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Talk of treaty ban on mercury concerns scientists

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LONDON (AP) — Scientists are warning officials negotiating a global treaty on mercury that banning the deadly chemical completely would be dangerous for public health because of the chemical's use in vaccines.

The ban option is one of several proposals on the table for a meeting later this month in Nairobi, but a final treaty isn't expected until 2013.

According to the World Health Organization, mercury is one of the top 10 chemicals of public health concern and is highly toxic. Most of the worry is centered on mercury emissions from burning coal, gold mining and people eating mercury-tainted fish.

Mercury in small amounts is also found in many products including light bulbs, batteries and thermometers. WHO advises such products to be phased out, suggesting for example, that health systems switch to digital thermometers instead.

The problem is that a proposed ban might include thiomersal, also known as thimerosal, a mercury compound used to prevent contamination and extend the shelf life of vaccines, many scientists say. It is used in about 300 million shots worldwide, against diseases including flu, tetanus, hepatitis B, diptheria and meningitis.

"Not being able to use mercury is not a viable option," said David Wood, a WHO vaccines expert.

Wood said there isn't a viable alternative to thiomersal at the moment. If banned, pharmaceuticals would likely have to switch to preservative-free vaccines, which would complicate the supply chain and vaccination campaigns in poor countries, since the injections would have a much shorter shelf life. Costs would also spike since manufacturers would need to reconfigure their factories.

In 2009, the United Nations Environment Programme, or UNEP, began working on a legally binding global treaty on mercury. At the end of October, the third of five meetings to hammer out a treaty will take place in Nairobi.

"The document is a draft at the moment, so some of these proposals have to be taken with a grain of salt," said Tim Kasten, head of the chemicals branch at UNEP. Kasten said the amount of mercury in vaccines is so minute it doesn't threaten the environment. He said there could be provisions to allow mercury for certain uses, such as in dental fillings and vaccines.

But according to an annex in the draft document, there is currently no "allowable use exemption" for mercury products in pharmaceutical products, putting vaccines in the same category as banned mercury-containing paints and pesticides.

"That would be a terrible idea," said Paul Offit, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Pennsylvania. "It would be another tragic example of us not being able to explain to the public where the real risk lies."

Thiomersal has mostly been removed from childhood vaccines in the U.S. and Canada. In some European countries, including Norway and Sweden, manufacturers have been encouraged to make thiomersal-free vaccines — and no other uses of mercury as a medical preservative are allowed.

Fears about thiomersal in vaccines were raised after a flawed medical study in 1998 linked a common childhood injection to autism. Even though that study didn't involve mercury, it ignited fears about vaccines in general, including those containing thiomersal.

Concerns were also heightened after the U.S. decided to largely remove thiomersal from many injections as a precautionary measure in the 1990s. Numerous studies have found no sign the mercury compound is risky but many anti-vaccine groups still believe it may be linked to autism and other health problems.

Experts hope countries won't go overboard in their attempts to control the substance.

"Provided you know the risks and it's handled properly, there isn't a problem," said Andrew Nelson, a toxicology expert at the University of Leeds. "The health of so many millions of children benefit from vaccines containing mercury that an absolute ban is ridiculous."

___

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www.unep.org

www.who.int

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Scientists hail gain in human embryonic stem cell research

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The achievement is an "important step" in stem cell research, scientists say They used a technique similar to the one used to clone Dolly the sheepThe motivation for the research was to eventually cure diseases such as Parkinson's, diabetes

(CNN) -- For the first time, researchers have succeeded in creating human embryonic stem cells by injecting DNA from a skin cell into an unfertilized egg, according to a study published Wednesday.

To achieve what is being called an "important step" in stem cell research, scientists in New York used a cloning technique similar to the one used to clone Dolly the sheep.

"This work now demonstrates for the first time that the human egg has the ability to turn a specialized cell into a stem cell," said Dieter Egli, who along with fellow study author Scott Noggle led the research team at the New York Stem Cell Foundation.

"The goal of this research was to create patient-specific embryonic stem cells with the patients' DNA for the eventual use in cell replacement therapy," Egli told CNN.

He said the motivation for the research was to eventually cure diseases such as Parkinson's, diabetes and many other illnesses.

In 2005, researchers in South Korea claimed to have created the first human embryonic stem cells by cloning an embryo. A year later, it was revealed that the data had been faked.

This new study, published in the journal Nature, shows researchers have finally succeeded in creating human embryonic stem cells. They weren't perfect though because they have too many chromosomes -- 69 instead of the usual 46 -- making the cells suitable for research purposes only, not actual treatments.

In the past, efforts to create human stem cells using cloning meant taking an unfertilized egg, removing egg's nucleus with its 23 chromosomes and replacing it with the nucleus of a skin cell (which has 46 chromosomes) and placing the egg in a chemical bath to make it divide as if it had been fertilized by sperm.

Researchers started out with 270 donated oocytes or unfertilized eggs, provided by sixteen egg donors, Noggle said.

Egli said through a process of elimination, he and his colleagues determined that it was the removal of the egg's genome, not the introduction of new DNA or chemically initiating cell division, which was preventing the egg to develop far enough along so stem cells can be extracted. Noggle says 63 eggs were needed to develop two cell lines, of which one was viable.

"It's the machinery within the egg that allows the egg to progress normally in development," said Ted Golos, who is a professor of Comparative Biosciences at the school of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Golos, who is not involved in this new research, says this new study isn't a giant leap forward but it's an interesting one. Now the challenge is to figure out how to remove the egg's chromosomes, without removing the machinery or spindle, which helps the egg divide. Egli said he and his colleagues are working on just that.

Researchers have been using adult stem cells like bone marrow for treatments for decades. But adult stem cells have been programmed for one part of the body and are not easily converted to correcting problems in other parts of the body.

Then the first major advance in human embryonic stem cell research came In 1998, when Jamie Thomson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, extracted the first stem cells from an existing human embryo.

In 2007, researchers in Japan and California reported the creation of stem cells by bypassing eggs altogether and reprogramming skin cells directly into dividing like fertilized eggs with the addition of four viruses.

These cells are called induced pluripotent stem cells or iPS cells. Since then, researchers have found these cells have some limitations as well. While some opponents of embryonic research believe advances in the "less controversial" adult stem cell and iPS cells eliminate the need for embryonic stem cell research, most experts in the field believe all three research paths need to be explored to eventually find the right treatment for the right disease.

Dr. Alan Trounson, who heads the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which funds embryonic and adult stem cell research, says if researchers are able to take the next step and figure out how to make embryonic stem cells without the excess chromosomes, then they can begin to compare them to iPS cells and determine how different or similar they really are.

Egli agrees.

"We need to better understand the biology of the human egg for reprogramming without the egg genome," he said.

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Three Scientists Win Nobel Prize In Physics

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T.S. Eliot wrote in a poem that the world will end not with a bang but a whimper. He was spot on. The Nobel Prize for physics will go to three scientists who discovered that, after the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding at an accelerating rate.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

GUY RAZ, host: It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.

MELISSA BLOCK, host: And I'm Melissa Block.

As T.S. Eliot put it in his poem, "The Hollow Men," the world ends not with a bang but a whimper. He was spot on. This year's Nobel Prize in physics goes to three scientists who discovered that the universe will not only end with a whimper, but with a rather perplexing one.

NPR's Richard Harris has our story.

RICHARD HARRIS: Scientists know how the universe got started. First came the Big Bang, which created matter, and that stuff has been spreading out for more than 13 billion years. As it cruises outward the distances between all the galaxies keep getting bigger and bigger.

Dr. SAUL PERLMUTTER: But we'd always thought that gravity would be slowing that expansion.

HARRIS: Saul Perlmutter, at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, wanted to find out just how much gravity was actually putting the brakes on our expanding universe.

PERLMUTTER: We didn't know whether there was enough stuff in the universe to slow it to the point that it would come to a halt and perhaps someday collapse.

HARRIS: So in the 1980s, Perlmutter set out to figure out whether the universe would collapse and end with the bang, or just keep expanding forever and end with a whimper. He did that by seeking out distant supernovas, exploding stars, to see what the universe was doing billions of years ago. And finally, after 10 years of searching, Perlmutter came up with an answer so bizarre he wasn't at first sure whether to believe it.

PERLMUTTER: We thought we were finding out how much the universe was slowing down, and whether it was slowing down enough to come to a halt. And, of course, the answer was that it's not slowing down enough to come to a halt. In fact, it's not slowing down at all. It's speeding up.

HARRIS: Speeding up - how could that be? Matter in the universe was supposed to be coasting since the Big Bang, but not so. Somehow or other it was picking up speed, accelerating.

PERLMUTTER: And this was, of course, a big shock.

HARRIS: Borderline unbelievable, but as luck would have it, Perlmutter and his colleagues weren't the only team probing this question. A second team was also on the case, including Adam Riess, now at Johns Hopkins University, and Brian Schmidt, an American, now working in Australia.

ROBERT KIRSCHNER: Well, these are my children.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

HARRIS: Robert Kirshner at Harvard is speaking here in terms of his academic progeny.

KIRSCHNER: Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess were both graduates students with me, working on supernovae and working on using supernovae to measure cosmic distances.

HARRIS: And, as Kirschner tells a story, one day Schmidt came to him and said he wanted to track down distant supernova and try to answer the same kinds of question that Saul Perlmutter's team was after. He would need to write new software to pick through telescope images and identify those rare supernovas.

KIRSCHNER: And I said, well, these other guys have been working on it for five years - three people - that's 15 years. He said yeah, yeah, I could do it in a month. So...

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

KIRSCHNER: He did, too. It was terrible software. It had crashed all the time and, you know, gave false results some of the time. But he really did whip it together very quickly.

HARRIS: And it really did work. After a time, Adam Riess moved on to U.C. Berkeley to continue this work. And Schmidt stayed at Harvard through most of the next few exciting years, racing with Perlmutter to determine the fate of the universe. In the end, this team also came up with the same odd result at about the same time - namely that the universe will not only and in a whimper, but the expansion toward that ultimate demise is picking up speed as it goes.

Something weird is at work here driving that acceleration. Exactly what this is nobody can say, but they call it dark energy. And Kirschner says it seemingly makes up 75 percent of the universe.

KIRSCHNER: The simplest kind of dark energy would be everywhere. And so that means it would be present here on the earth. If we could figure out a smart way to detect its presence in a physics laboratory, that would be fantastic.

HARRIS: But nobody knows how to do that for now. So astronomers are hoping to gain more clues about it by looking out more into the universe.

And, as for the Nobel Prize, the rules say it gets split at most three ways, no matter what. So the committee doled it out to three of the deserving principles in this story: Perlmutter, Riess and Schmidt.

Richard Harris, NPR News.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

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Three Scientists Share Nobel Medicine Prize

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When Scientists Fail, It's Time To Call In The Gamers

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Enlarge istockphoto.com

Proteins are incredibly complex, yet tiny — so tiny that conventional imaging techniques often can't capture them.

istockphoto.com Proteins are incredibly complex, yet tiny — so tiny that conventional imaging techniques often can't capture them.

Researchers at the University of Washington were stumped. They were looking at a protein that causes AIDS in rhesus monkeys, but after 14 years of study, no one was able to figure out the protein's exact structure.

Researcher Firas Khatib tells Rachel Martin, host of weekends on All Things Considered, that even the most advanced imaging techniques couldn't capture this little particle.

"The reason that the problem is so hard is that proteins are so small you can't see them with a microscope," he says.

Also, a protein can fold up into so many possible shapes that a computer can't run through them all.

But when scientists failed, gamers came to the rescue.

Seth Cooper, creative director of the university's Center for Game Science, had invented a computer game called Foldit, in which players compete against one another to design the most accurately folded proteins.

"There are all these little pieces and atoms that need to fit together in just the right way for the protein to fold," Cooper says. "It's a lot like a 3-D jigsaw puzzle, or kind of like a 3-D Tetris."

Cooper describes proteins as a sort of phone cord, which begins to coil up on itself even as it's being manufactured. Foldit players are trying to figure out exactly how those coils fit together in a given protein.

Khatib decided that human intuition might succeed where high-powered computers and microscopes had failed. He gave the Foldit players a task: take the best available models of the mystery protein and see if you can actually figure out the structure correctly.

They did it in 10 days.

Now, Khatib says, his team can begin working on drugs that target the AIDS-causing protein.

"That's basically the essence of being able to solve proteins," he says. "Until you know exactly how they look like, you can't target them in any way with drugs."

The Foldit team isn't just trying to figure out the structure of existing proteins, it's working on designing brand-new ones. Right now, the game is challenging players to come up with a protein that could fight the flu.

"We can actually take the proteins that are designed by players in the game, and ... synthesize them in the lab, and actually make their designs real," Cooper says, "and see if they work as we expect them."

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Italian Scientists On Trial Over Deadly Earthquake

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The trial of seven Italian scientists began this week. They are charged with manslaughter for failing to adequately warn the residents of L'Aquila, Italy, about the risk of an earthquake in 2009. Host Scott Simon speaks with Rick Aster, president of the Seismological Society of America, about the trial.

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SCOTT SIMON, host: This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. The trial of seven Italian scientists began this week. They're charged with manslaughter, for failing to adequately warn the residents of L'Aquila, Italy about the risk of an earthquake in 2009. Now the scientists were members of a provincial disaster risk committee. They met in March 2009 to discuss the earthquake risk posed by recent small tremors.

The scientific community tells me there is no danger, a committee spokesman said at the time, because there is an ongoing discharge of energy. The situation looks favorable. Six days later an earthquake killed more than 300 people in L'Aquila. Now the scientists who sat on that committee could face up to 12 years in prison.

Rick Aster is president of the Seismological Society of America. He and his colleagues around the world sent a petition with more than 5,000 signatures calling for the charges to be dropped. Dr. Aster joins us from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Thanks for being with us.

RICK ASTER: My pleasure, Scott.

SIMON: What was your first reaction when you first heard about these charges?

ASTER: Well, the initial reaction of the seismological, and I think the broader scientific community, was that this was outrageous, given the fact that earthquakes are unpredictable at this stage in our state of knowledge. Indeed, they're the last great natural disaster for which there is no predictive capacity. And the statement that an ongoing discharge of energy was occurring, so the situation looked favorable was demonstratively scientifically incorrect. Small earthquakes do not function as a safety valve, in a sense, for large earthquakes.

SIMON: Can you see where families of people who've lost loved ones would feel from would feel a lot of frustration by being told the situation looks favorable and then just six days later, well, just six days later 300 people die.

ASTER: Indeed. That really was a tragic miscommunication on the part of Italy's Department of Civil Protection.

SIMON: Why then have you organized this petition and why do you feel that geologists shouldn't be held responsible (technical difficulty).

ASTER: Well, I guess again, Scott, one has to realize one's dealing with an inherently unpredictable phenomena. So the ability to inform people and keep the population ready has to be weighed against the cost of false alarms in this situation, which is very high.

SIMON: Mm-hmm.

ASTER: Because if in a situation like this, you told people to expect an earthquake then you'd be wrong 99 times out of 100. So you get into both the disruption to society and the crying wolf scenario, where you worry that if, you know, you issue false alarms much, much more frequently than you issue true alarms, that process is also useless, unfortunately.

SIMON: Do you have any concern as a scientist, Dr. Aster, that when even if scientists are right, as you suggest 99 percent of the time, that when a mistake like this is made it tends to undercut the credibility of everybody in the field?

ASTER: Well, I think people have to realize, and the community is very honest about it, that earthquake prediction is an extremely daunting scientific, technical and indeed, a political issue, so I don't think we're misrepresenting our ability to predict earthquakes; everyone would agree is essentially null.

SIMON: Rick Aster is the president of the Seismological Society of America. Thanks very much.

ASTER: Thank you, Scott.

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Scientists Back Down From Viral Cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

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A new paper published online in Science on Thursday has failed to confirm a link between a mouse retrovirus called XMRV and chronic fatigue syndrome. Along with the new study, the authors of the controversial original study that first associated the virus with the illness in 2009 published a partial retraction of that work.

For the new study, conducted by the Blood XMRV Scientific Research Working Group, researchers analyzed blood samples from 15 people who had previously tested positive for XMRV or a similar mouse leukemia virus; 14 of these people had chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and one person had contact with a patient with the disease. The researchers also looked at 15 blood samples from healthy donors who did not have XMRV or CFS.

The samples were blinded and sent to nine different labs — including the Whittemore Peterson Institute lab and a National Cancer Institite lab, which participated in the 2009 study — for testing for XMRV. Seven labs could not find XMRV or any related viruses in the blood samples. The two labs that were involved in the original research did find the retroviruses, but they didn't find them in the same people and they were equally likely to find the viruses in controls as well as those who had earlier tested positive. Neither lab was able to replicate its own findings.

The origins of chronic-fatigue syndrome, which causes severe pain, exhaustion and memory and concentration problems, and has no cure, have long been a mystery. Studies have fingered immune system inflammation, the herpes virus and the Epstein-Barr virus as possible culprits. But there is no definitive cause, and many sufferers of the disease say that doctors don't always believe they're sick.

When the 2009 paper was published in Science, it came as a great relief to people with CFS — an estimated 1% of the world population — and to the scientists who study it. If a cause could be identified, then it could open the door to potential treatment.

But since that time, the original research has repeatedly come under fire. Seventeen studies have been published since the 2009 paper, showing no link between XMRV and chronic fatigue. One particularly damning study published in May found that the retrovirus found in the original blood samples got there by laboratory contamination.

All 13 of the authors of the 2009 study signed the partial retraction published in Science on Thursday. However, Judy A. Mikovits of the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Reno, Nev., which led the original research team, said the initial work deserved continued follow-up study. The Wall Street Journal reported:

Dr. Mikovits said she stood by the theory that there was a retrovirus associated with chronic-fatigue syndrome, though not necessarily XMRV. "We have to dig in to find the right viruses. We need to keep looking," she said.

Many other experts, including Kim McCleary, president and CEO of the Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome Association of America, said they thought it was time to move on to other lines of research.

"We share the deep disappointment of many CFS patients and scientists that the initial data did not hold up. Whether you have been diagnosed recently or have been ill for decades, this news comes as a blow to hope for rapid advances in the care available to CFS patients," McCleary said in a statement.

Meredith Melnick is a reporter at TIME. Find her on Twitter at @MeredithCM. You can also continue the discussion on TIME's Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.

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Scientists make virus discovery

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22 September 2011 Last updated at 21:05 GMT The scientists wanted to know how viruses such as bird flu infect humans Scientists have gained new knowledge into how viruses such as flu and HIV jump between species.

The research, by Edinburgh and Cambridge universities, should help predict the appearance of new diseases.

The scientists wanted to understand how viruses such as bird flu infect distant species like humans.

They found they were better able to infect species closely related to their typical target species than species that were distantly related.

However, the research also suggested that when diseases make a big leap they may then spread easily in species closely related to the new victim, regardless of how closely related these are to the original target species.

Dr Ben Longdon, of Edinburgh University's school of biological sciences, who led the study, said: "Emerging diseases such as Sars, HIV and some types of flu have all got into humans from other species.

"Understanding how diseases jump between different species is essential if we want to predict the appearance of new diseases in the future."

More susceptible

By infecting more than 50 species of flies with three different viruses, the researchers showed that species closely related to a virus's usual target species were more susceptible than distantly related flies.

They also showed that groups of flies that were closely related were similarly susceptible to the same viruses.

The study, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Natural Environment Research Council, the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society, was published in the journal PLoS Pathogens.

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