NIH pulls the plug
oncontroversial alcohol trial
The National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, last week killed a controversial clinical study
that was already on life support: the Moderate Alcohol and Cardiovascular Health trial. A working group
assembled to review the study found that senior officials at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and
Alcoholism actively and secretively courted the alcohol industry to fund the $100 million project,
and saw to it that a favored principal investigator won the funding.
The Aztecs sacrificed thousands of people in their capital city of Tenochtitlan. Priests cut the victims’
hearts from their chests, then decapitated the bodies and defleshed the skulls. Most of these skulls
were bound for the tzompantli, a monumental rack of skulls in the center of the city. Now,
archaeologists at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History have discovered and excavated
its remains underneath a colonial period house in downtown Mexico City.
Creating a new gene in a single day could soon be possible, thanks to a new technique that mimics
the way the body copies its own DNA. Though the technology needs to clear a few more hurdles, it
could one day let researchers speedily rewrite microbe genes, enabling them to synthesize new medicines
and fuels on the fly.
Marine conservation and addressing climate change are out. Jobs and national security are in. That’s
just one message sent by a new executive order detailing a revised U.S. oceans policy released this week
by President Donald Trump. The order formally revokes the 2010 oceans policy issued by then-President
Barack Obama, and replaces it with a markedly different template for what the government should focus
on in managing the nation’s oceans, coastal waters, and Great Lakes.
Until now, the best insights into the neurology of Neanderthals—our mysterious, extinct relatives—came
from analyzing the shape and volume of the spaces inside their fossilized skulls. But a recent marriage of
three hot fields—ancient DNA, the genome editor CRISPR, and “organoids” built from stem cells—offers
a provocative, if very preliminary, new option. At least two research teams are engineering stem cells to
include Neanderthal genes and growing them into “minibrains” that reflect the influence of that ancient DNA.
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