The use of genes for performance enhancement: doping or therapy?

Recent biotechnological advances have permitted the manipulation of genetic sequences to treat several diseases in a process called gene therapy. However, the advance of gene therapy has opened the door to the possibility of using genetic manipulation (GM) to enhance athletic performance. In such ‘gene doping’, exogenous genetic sequences are inserted into a specific tissue, altering cellular gene activity or leading to the expression of a protein product. The exogenous genes most likely to be utilized for gene doping include erythropoietin (EPO), vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), insulin-like growth factor type 1 (IGF-1), myostatin antagonists, and endorphin. However, many other genes could also be used, such as those involved in glucose metabolic pathways. Because gene doping would be very difficult to detect, it is inherently very attractive for those involved in sports who are prepared to cheat. Moreover, the field of gene therapy is constantly and rapidly progressing, and this is likely to generate many new possibilities for gene doping. Thus, as part of the general fight against all forms of doping, it will be necessary to develop and continually improve means of detecting exogenous gene sequences (or their products) in athletes. Nevertheless, some bioethicists have argued for a liberal approach to gene doping

Three-dimensional evolution of body and fluid motion near a wall

Evolution of three-dimensional body motion within surrounding three-dimensional fluid motion is addressed, each motion affecting the other significantly in a dynamic fluid–body interaction. This unsteady problem is set near a wall. The spatial three-dimensionality present is a new feature. For inviscid incompressible fluid, a basic nonlinear formulation is described, followed by a linearised form as a first exploration of parameter space and solution responses. The problem reduces to solving Poisson’s equation within the underbody planform, subject to mixed boundary conditions and to coupling with integral equations. Numerical and analytical properties show dependence mainly on the normal and pitch motions, as well as instability or bounded oscillations depending on the position of the centre of mass of the body, and a variety of three-dimensional shapes is examined

Reflections by a member of the Editorial Board

I thank Co-Editors Ass. Prof. Dr. Jože Kropivšek and Prof. Dr. Katarina Čufar for the opportunity to serve as an Editorial Board member of Les/Wood, an international journal firmly grounded in the broad sweep of Slovene wood science and technology. The Editorial Board works to extend the relevance and impact of Les/Wood within and beyond Slovenia to the international community of wood science and technology in the broadest sense. We see the journal as a tool to support research and development of specific technologies, as well as to develop common terminology. I would like to use this opportunity to sketch out how I came to be involved with wood science in Slovenia. In retrospect that involvement seems inevitable, but the path was not always clear at the time! After completing my postgraduate education in plant pathology and mycology in the USA in 1982, I accepted my current position as supervisory plant physiologist for the USDA Forest Service, a US federal land management agency with a strong commitment to research & development and to international forestry. Throughout my career, my personal research has involved tree growth and wood decay in response to injury, infection, and environmental change. These tree responses affect forest health, the economic value of wood for art and industry, the tree-ring record of environmental conditions, and the performance of trees in urban and community environments. My USDA FS mentor and colleague Dr. Walter Shortle met Prof. Dr. Niko Torelli and Prof. Dr. Katarina Čufar at the IAWA conference in Hamburg (1983) and at the IUFRO World Conference 1996 in Ljubljana, where the two of them were local organizers. Afterwards they obtained a joint Yugoslav American Project, “Possible alterations of wood in air polluted trees”, which defined my earlier collaborations with Professor Torelli and Katarina Čufar on silver fir decline in Slovenia and Europe. Later, Katarina Čufar, Dr. Tom Levanič, and I identified changes in the climatic responses of silver fir in Slovenia and of red spruce in the northeastern US. I also worked with Dr. Primož Oven on special considerations for the health and safety of city trees. Later, Katarina Čufar and I both served on the Executive Council of the Tree Ring Society, an international association for dendrochronological research. We co-taught a tree biology section at the Dendro Fieldweek as part of the World Dendro conference 2010 in Finland. We found that our combination of research experience both intensified and broadened our understanding and presentation of wood structure and function. Since then, we have worked to provide Slovene students and scientists a platform to share techniques and experiences that both extend the science and community of scientists in the international research community. As an active researcher, I see Les/Wood as noteworthy because of the potential breadth of articles reporting on topics from wood mechanical properties to technologies and industrial processing to underlying anatomy and the biological processes that result in wood formation and preservation. In addition to the high level of scholarship and technical expertise within Les/Wood, I find collegiality of spirit, openness of approach, and pride of history and context. These qualities lift up and support ongoing and future research for Slovenia, its geographic surroundings, and the broader world research community. I’m excited at the prospect of Les/Wood extending its traditional strengths to meet the critical need for wood science to optimize wood utilization, ecological understanding, and cultural patrimony

Kinematic Orbits and the Structure of the Internal Space for Systems of Five or More Bodies

The internal space for a molecule, atom, or other n-body system can be conveniently parameterised by 3n-9 kinematic angles and three kinematic invariants. For a fixed set of kinematic invariants, the kinematic angles parameterise a subspace, called a kinematic orbit, of the n-body internal space. Building on an earlier analysis of the three- and four-body problems, we derive the form of these kinematic orbits (that is, their topology) for the general n-body problem. The case n=5 is studied in detail, along with the previously studied cases n=3,4.Comment: 38 pages, submitted to J. Phys.

Paying More for the American Dream III: Promoting Responsible Lending to Lower-Income Communities and Communities of Color

This report analyzes 2007 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data and finds that, in low- and moderate-income communities, depositories with CRA obligations originate a far smaller share of higher-cost loans than lenders not subject to CRA. It also finds that lenders covered by CRA are much less likely to make higher-cost loans in communities of color than lenders not covered by CRA

The role of inflammation in age-related disease.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Geroscience Interest Group (GSIG) sponsored workshop, The Role of Inflammation inAge-Related Disease, was held September 6th-7th, 2012 in Bethesda, MD. It is now recognized that a mild pro-inflammatory state is correlated with the major degenerative diseases of the elderly. The focus of the workshop was to better understand the origins and consequences of this low level chronic inflammation in order to design appropriate interventional studies aimed at improving healthspan. Four sessions explored the intrinsic, environmental exposures and immune pathways by which chronic inflammation are generated, sustained, and lead to age-associated diseases. At the conclusion of the workshop recommendations to accelerate progress toward understanding the mechanistic bases of chronic disease were identified