The Unsung Hero Who Discovered The Double Helix....!!!!!!!!!!!

It's commonly believed that James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix shape of DNA. But in fact, they based their work on one of their colleagues at King's College in London - Rosalind Franklin, an x-ray diffraction expert whose images of DNA proteins in the early 1950s revealed a helix shape. It wasn't until they saw Franklin's work that Watson and Crick began hunting for the long, braided twist that turned out to be DNA's true shape.

Why wasn't Franklin honored for her contributions? Many have argued that her early death prevented her from getting the recognition she deserved, since Nobel Prizes can only go to living people. Others have suggested something slightly more sinister.

Franklin's groundbreaking work was so good that she was able to secure a highly coveted position in the biology department at a top university - even though she lived at a time when it was widely believed that women could not become scientists. And yet she could not have casual meetings with colleagues in her own college's Common Room, which was reserved for men only. To be fair, many of her scientifically-minded colleagues also avoided the Common Room, which was said to be packed with stuffy old reverends.

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And yet the same prejudices that prevented her from entering the Common Room appear to have bled over into her colleagues' views of her. Watson, who was in 2007 suspended from his research position for making sexist and racist comments, dismissed Franklin's contributions to the discovery of DNA's structure in his memoirThe Double Helix. Many years later, both Watson and Crick admitted that they had been too dismissive of Franklin's work, and that her discoveries were what led to their own.

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There is now ample evidence from multiple sources that Franklin's colleagues and graduate students at King's College showed her x-ray images of DNA to Watson and Crick without her permission or knowledge. The so-called Photo 51 (pictured here) provided proof that DNA's structure was probably a helix. Several witnesses - including Crick and Watson themselves - say that the two researchers saw this photo before "discovering" the double helix.

ACTUAL SOMATIC HYBRIDISATION !!!!!!!!!!

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In somatic hybridisation or cybridisation it is not the male and female gametes that are merging into one zygotic embryo, but two somatic cells are combined. The combination is achieved by fusing the membranes of cells. In this way, cytoplasm and nuclear content of the parental cells are mixed, leading - in principle - to hybrids with a summation of the chromosomes and, hence, a polyploidisation.

However, when the parental cells originate from species that are not closely related, the final chromosomal constitution of the hybrids can show aberrations in number and composition. This is also true for the cytoplasmic components such as chloroplasts and mitochondria. Preferential loss of one parent's organelles or recombination can occur.

Specific combinations of beneficial traits not feasible by sexual crosses or transfer of cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) can be the goals of somatic hybridisation.

The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks...................leads to The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture...!!!!!!!

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. 

The cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials....

Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen?

Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

        THIS IS HOW WE GOT THE FIRST IMMORTAL CELL FOR RESERCH WORKS FROM A LADY WHO DIED ......BUT HER CELLS CANNOT BE IGNORED BY SCIENCE........

New Procedure Reveals the Secrets of the Brain

The new procedure, developed by scientists from the MPI for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, accurately maps the activity in primate brains by means of the BOLD-Signal (Blood Oxygen Level Dependent Signal). The combination of electrical microstimulation and FMRT promises more precise insights into brain circuitry and its functional organization, reports Neuron.

Electrical microstimulation has been often used in the last two centuries to demonstrate causal links between neural activity and specific behaviors or cognitive functions. It has also been used for the treatment of several neurological disorders, such as Parkinson's disease.Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, have for the first time developed a technique to record brain activity using the blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal, while applying electrical microstimulation to the primate brain. 

The researchers found that the spread of activity around the electrode in macaque area V1 is larger than expected from calculations based on passive spread of current, and therefore may reflect functional spread by way of horizontal connections. To support this functional trans-synaptic spread, they also obtained activation in expected projection sites in extra-striate visual areas, demonstrating the utility of their technique in uncovering in vivo functional connectivity maps.
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Use of the microstimulation/MRI technique in conscious, alert primates holds great promise for determining the causal relationships between activation patterns across distributed neuronal circuits and specific behaviors.

This method could also prove useful in understanding and optimizing the method of intra-cranial electrical stimulation in the treatment of neurological disease.
Use of the microstimulation/MRI technique in conscious, alert primates holds great promise for determining the causal relationships between activation patterns across distributed neuronal circuits and specific behaviors.

This method could also prove useful in understanding and optimizing the method of intra-cranial electrical stimulation in the treatment of neurological disease.