Josh+Li

Food From The Lab Week 3: 1-7 June 2014 This week, we had a day in class where we discussed and debated many dilemmas and questions related to biology, including some ethical topics. One debate that has been going on is whether or not it is a good idea to start growing meats in the lab for consumption, and over time i have read several newspaper articles about this. At Johnson and Johnson, we discussed some real life situations about how scientists apply science at their work to do good for humanity. Although lab grown meats may have ethical and health concerns, it may be needed in the near future if we are to try and help the environment and animal welfare itself. One thing we have to consider is the scale of human meat consumption and how it affects both human, environmental and animal welfare. In the US alone, Americans eat about a million chickens an hour. We need to keep in mind that meat is a very resource expensive thing to produce. For those million chickens, think about all the feed needed to feed those chickens. Think about all the water and chemicals used to grow the feed (water footprint throwback to last week), and think of all the mountains of chicken poop. Then, think about how its ONLY an hour, and think about other animals such as cows and pigs. People consume tons of meat- and fast. Yet worse, think about all the resources needed to make the meat itself. To put this problem into perspective, David Pimentel of Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences says the grain used to feed U.S. livestock could feed 800 million people if fed directly to them. He calculates that raising animals for protein requires more than eight times as much fossil fuel as the equivalent in plant protein. Essentially, to reduce great carbon and water footprint, we must gradually make the shift over non-naturally derived meat sources. Eating meat grown from stem cells can potentially greatly benefit the environment. As this is a growing issue, there already has been research into it as well as some semi-successful trials! I did some online research and found that bacon and hamburger meat have been grown in labs to some degree of success. Most food critics say it has the general taste and texture, but it's not there yet. This is mainly because lab grown meats are 80% protein and 20% water and random nucleic acids while real meat is 99% protein. Of course, the cost is still very high as it is a new concept, but I am optimistic it will get cheaper and better with time.

If this technology is furthered, we may grow to be more adept in growing human organs for transplants as well, saving more human lives. The applications are numerous! Sources I used for research: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/15/stem-cell-pork-scientists_n_424759.html http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/stories/scientists-grow-bacon-from-stem-cells# http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-23576143 http://www.nbcnews.com/health/diet-fitness/lab-grown-meat-here-will-vegetarians-eat-it-f6C10830536 The World's Tap Will Run Dry  Week 2: 25-31 May 2014 The topics discussed this week in-class revolved around sustainability and the environment, and Mrs. Lilliendahl gave a demonstration to roughly depict just how small the amount of fresh, clean and usable water is available to the human race. The proliferation of the human race has caused many noticeable global problems such as global warming, ozone destruction, climate change, pollution, loss of habitats and biodiversity, increased rate of extinctions...the list can go on and on. Consumerism and industrialization has led to near-permanent pollution of water sources including oceans, rivers and streams. It is estimated the 90 percent of wastewater in developing countries is discharged into rivers and streams without any treatment. As the world population continues to burgeon, our demand for viable drinking water increases. Clean, accessible and drinkable water is VERY important to people on Earth. According to waterinfo.org, an estimated 2.4 billion people lack adequate sanitation and so 1.1 billion people are left without access to safe water. The effects of this? 1.6 million annual deaths worldwide due to dirty water and poor sanitation. How much total accessible drinking water is there available on Earth currently? Sources vary, but the general consensus is that only about 1% of all of Earth's water volume is freshwater and less than 1% (~0.007% of all water on Earth according to www.globalchange.umich.edu) of that is accessible for direct human uses because most freshwater is frozen as polar icecaps or deep underground or absorbed as soil moisture. Let's do some math. There is a LOT of water on the earth. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, there are over **332,519,000 cubic ** miles of water on the planet. This is equivalent to 3.66142373 * 10 20 gallons of water, and 0.007% of this is 2.563 * 10 16 gallons. This is still a lot of water, and seems to be a virtually endless supply. However, consider that there are more than 7 billion people on the planet and people consume a surprising amount of water. Freshwater is needed for agriculture, industry, maintenance and everyday drinking. In fact, over 70% of existing freshwater is used for irrigation and agriculture. A concept called water footprinting can help one visualize just how much water is needed for things you may take for granted such as the steak you had for yesterday's dinner. Water footprint measures the total net volume of water used to produce a certain mass of product. Take a look at this: @http://www.waterfootprint.org/downloads/Poster-A3-WaterFootprint-of-Products.pdf For just a small 300g steak, an estimated 4650 liters (1228.4 gallons) of water are used in its production. This involves the water used to grow the ingredients of the feed and the water drunk by the cow itself as well as any other water involved in the creation of the steak. When you think about how many restaurants there are in the world and think about how many worldwide steaks are served in a day and multiply that by 1000+ gallons of water per steak...that's a lot of water. And that's just steak. There's other meat cuts, other types of meat, other food, other clothes, other manufactured things, and if you add every single bit of everything up, that is a LOT of water we're dealing with. Just think about it. No wonder why water is such a precious resource. Some more interesting infographics on water footprints that I highly recommend you check out (they're pretty interesting to look at as well) @http://www.waterfootprint.org/downloads/2010-US-Infrastructure.png  @http://www.waterfootprint.org/downloads/2009-GOODTransparancy.jpg Ultimately, humanity needs to do two important jobs: conserve water and invent both economically and environmentally viable methods for water purification. One fantasy goal which would provide virtually an unlimited amount of water is to easily turn saltwater into freshwater in large quantities in a short period of time, but this is far from reality. A current method, desalinization, isn't exactly cost-effective because it uses a lot of energy. However, in the future as technology develops, the cost could become economically viable. I am hopeful and optimistic about future water purification technologies. The Dawn of Personalized Medicine for Cancer Patients Week 1: 18-24 May 2014 //(Disclaimer: I know that these weekly posts have to be about topics we learned during the week, but I was essentially absent from class for nearly the entire week due to many extracurricular trips and stuff. Therefore, my post this week will be about Personalized Medicine, a biological field I am quite interested in. I will make my next post relevant to in-class topics!)// ====One particular biological topic that I have been interested in is personalized medicine (PM), a developing field of medicine and cancer treatment. My science fair project was on PM this year as well. PM aims to customize ("personalize") disease treatment based on the molecular characteristics of the disease in question. Cancer, one of the most prominent medical diseases today, is unique to every single cancer patient on a molecular basis. Because cancer is such a heterogeneous disease by nature, PM has been considered by some to be the ultimate solution to the treatment of cancer.====

Clump of prostate cancer cells. ====The basic idea is this. Genes dictate how a cancer behaves and develops because they are the underlying molecular mechanisms. If significant gene expression differences between cancer cells that respond and do not respond to a particular drug or drug cocktail (genetic markers) can be identified, prediction models can be created to determine the best treatment regimen for each individual cancer patient.====

====Ideal and mature personalized medicine would involve massive amounts of data conglomerated into a computer prediction database. Cancer patients would arrive and take a biopsy, and the tumor cells' gene expressions would be determined and fed into the computer model. Based on the gene expression patterns of the tumor, the computer would return a list of drugs or drug combinations that would be most effective for the patient with high confidence, greatly reducing cancer mortality rate.====

====The ultimate realization of personalized medicine can only be achieved with temporally and economically feasible methods to generate massive amounts gene expression data to construct robust prediction models. In our biotechnology unit earlier in the year, we briefly touched upon systems biology and gene microchip arrays, used to measure gene expression levels en masse. With the recent advent of genomic sequencing and profiling and rapid improvement of speed and economic feasibility, personalized medicine may be on its way to becoming a major avenue for cancer treatment and this is why I take interest in it!====

====After some research, I found some modern day examples of the emerging concept of PM. There are drugs out there that target and are effective specific cancer patients who have mutations on a certain gene.====

====One of these drugs is Herceptin, a well established drug used to treat (mainly) breast cancers and other cancers that overexpress the HER2 gene. HER proteins located on cell membranes stimulate cell proliferation and in some cancers, a gene called HER2 is overexpressed and results in uncontrolled growth and multiplication of cells. Herceptin exemplifies a basic form of PM because some patients with cancers that have one significant gene difference in expression (HER2 in this case) will take Herceptin in hopes of it being effective.====

STP Diagram of Herceptin Mechanism (Herceptin is a Monoclonal Antibody) ====Another drug is Tarceva, which is a treatment for patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). A small portion of NSCLC patients have tumors with mutations in their epidermal growth factor receptor genes (EGFR) and these patients can potentially benefit from Tarceva. Tarceva can help prolong survival length in NSCLC patients and surpress tumor cell growth, until a mutation against EGFR is developed, rendering Tarceva ineffective. Again, Tarceva is a basic form of PM: if patients have NSCLC and the tumors have EGFR mutation, then Tarceva is an effective treatment regimen for those patients. One specific drug for one mutation.====

EGFR normal STP. Tarceva, a small molecule, blocks the binding area of the ligand.receptor. ====This is only the beginning! Eventually when people amass colossal amounts of genomic data for various drugs and cancers, hopefully humanity can use PM to cure cancer and solve one of the toughest medical challenges.====