The Broad Institute Gets $400 Million

Scientists at the Broad Institute, in Cambridge, MA, must have done a dance of joy this morning, having won some respite from the serious dearth of funding for biomedical research. Eli and Edythe L. Broad, philanthropists who launched the institute in 2003 with $100 million in funding, announced a $400 million endowment this morning, bringing their total contribution to $600 million. (They contributed another $100 million in 2005.)

In the past few years, the Broad has spearheaded major genetic studies, identifying genes involved in diseases like diabetes, Crohn's, and irritable bowel syndrome. Broad scientists have successfully isolated genetic links to diseases that have been resistant to genetic analysis, including schizophrenia, bipolar disease, and autism.

"Of all of our philanthropy, the Broad Institute has been the investment that has yielded the greatest returns," said Eli Broad, founder of The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, in a press release from the Broad Institute. "This truly is a new way of doing science, and the Institute's unique collaborative model for scientific research has resulted in remarkable accomplishments in a very short period of time. Although this is a large gift--the largest that we have ever made--it is only a fraction of what will be needed to unlock the enormous promise of biomedical research at MIT and Harvard. We are counting on others to step forward as partners in the next phase of this grand experiment. We are convinced that the genomics and biomedical work being conducted here by the world's best and brightest scientists will ultimately lead to the cure and even the prevention of diseases."

An article in the New York Times reflects on the unique joint nature of the institute:

The Broad Institute is a rare joint effort between two fiercely competitive institutions, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While Broad has its own scientists, most of the researchers working there are linked to other institutions around the world.

Broad offers them a place to collaborate while maintaining their positions elsewhere and draws together teams of mathematicians, engineers, physicists and scientists from other disciplines to work toward common goals.

"This idea of breaking down the barriers so that scientists view Broad as a sort of free-trade zone for research has been fantastic,' said Eric S. Lander, the founding director of the institute and a leader of the Human Genome Project, which sequenced the human genome.

A selection of Technology Review articles on research from the Broad Institute:

A New Genetic Globe

DNA Deletion Linked to Autism

Wired to Eat

Comcast's Bandwidth Cap Is Likely Only the Beginning

Comcast announced a 250-gigabyte cap on individual consumer broadband usage this week. The company takes care to demonstrate that this is a generous limit--the equivalent of roughly 125 standard-definition movie downloads. The move, however, is probably only the beginning of what promises to be a long struggle to balance growing Internet usage against limited infrastructure--a problem that TR editor Larry Hardesty described in depth earlier this year. As Hardesty's story makes clear, there's no easy answer to the problem. I expect to see a lot of change to Internet service as providers, companies, and consumers wrestle with one another.

Cellular Reprogramming Feats Keep Getting Better

Imagine if a piece of damaged heart muscle could be replaced with a simple chemical trick that triggered neighboring cells to convert themselves into whatever type of tissue was needed. Scientists at Harvard took a step closer to that possibility with a paper published today in the journal Nature. Doug Melton and his collaborators "transformed mouse pancreas cells that aid digestion into the insulin-producing cells that are destroyed in childhood diabetes, potentially giving stem cell scientists a powerful new way to one day grow replacement tissues for patients," according to the Boston Globe.

The findings follow a whirlwind of new advances in cellular reprogramming, which include creating patient-specific stem-cell lines without the need for human eggs or embryos. The new research differs, however, in that one type of adult cell is converted directly into another type. The process doesn't require that the cells first be transformed into undifferentiated cells before developing into the desired cell type.

According to the Washington Post,

Through a series of painstaking experiments involving mice, the Harvard biologists pinpointed three crucial molecular switches that, when flipped, completely convert a common cell in the pancreas into the more precious insulin-producing ones that diabetics need to survive.

"The feat . . . raises the tantalizing prospect that patients suffering from not only diabetes but also heart disease, strokes and many other ailments could eventually have some of their cells reprogrammed to cure their afflictions without the need for drugs, transplants or other therapies.

"It's kind of an extreme makeover of a cell," said Douglas A. Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, who led the research. "The goal is to create cells that are missing or defective in people. It's very exciting."

Melton and others caution that it's likely to take years to translate the advance into useful treatments. From the Washington Post:

"It's an important proof of concept," said Lawrence Goldstein, a stem cell researcher at the University of California, San Diego. "But these things always look easier on the blackboard than when you have do [sic] them in actual patients."

Although the experiment involved mice, Melton and other researchers were optimistic the approach would work in people.

"You never know for sure--mice aren't humans," [Harvard stem-cell biologist George] Daley said. "But the biology of pancreative [sic] development is very closely related in mice and humans."

Melton has already started experimenting with human cells in the laboratory and hopes to start planning the first studies involving people with diabetes within a year. "I would say within five years we could be ready to start human trials," Melton said.

Personal-Genomics Companies Get California License

After sending cease-and-desist letters to a number of companies offering personal-genomics services directly to consumers, the state of California appears to have made peace with at least two of them--Navigenics and 23andMe. Both received licenses this week allowing them to continue to do business in California.

The letters, sent in June by the California Department of Public Health, outlined two main state regulations: laboratories performing tests must be clinically licensed, and a physician's order is required for all clinical tests. (For more on the state's action, see "Genetic Testing for Consumers Scrutinized.")

According to an article published Tuesday in the New York Times,

The companies had argued that they were not offering medical testing but rather personal genetic information services, and that consumers had a right to information from their own DNA. The companies also said they did not need a license because the actual testing of the DNA samples was being done by outside laboratories that did have licenses.

But the two companies do their own interpretation of the raw genetic data. Now, after reviewing the procedures used by the companies, the state is satisfied that the companies' interpretation is based on the scientific literature, Ms. Billingsley [a senior official in the California public health department] said.

Ms. Billingsley said the companies also satisfied the requirement for a doctor to be involved. Navigenics already was paying a physician to review customer orders and now it appears that 23andMe might be doing something similar.

It's not yet clear what this latest development portends for future regulatory debates, especially at the federal level; few federal regulations for these types of tests exist. As their popularity grows, scientists, regulators, and entrepreneurs will need to grapple with the central question of how to define this new breed of medical information, which falls short of being a diagnostic tool and, unlike risk factors such as cholesterol level and blood pressure, is deeply personal and ultimately immutable.

For more on regulation of direct-to-consumer genetic testing, check out the review "Personal Genomics: Access Denied?" in the September issue of Technology Review.

Huge Solar Power Farms

Last week's news in the New York Times about massive new solar installations in California is both good and bad news. The good: Solar power plants are at last beginning to rival conventional plants in terms of peak power production. Two new installations will combine to produce 800 megawatts of power when the sun is overhead, the amount a small to midsize nuclear power plant produces at its peak. About two years ago, Technology Review reported on plans for solar farms of unprecedented size, but those would produce only 100 megawatts or less. The new installations increase this output by almost an order of magnitude. Clearly, solar power is on its way to becoming a significant source of electricity.

The bad news: It's still not that much electricity. The very fact that 800 megawatts of solar power is big news indicates just how far we've still got to go. For one thing, 800 megawatts of solar is not equal to 800 megawatts of nuclear or coal. That's because solar works only during the day--and even then it doesn't generate peak levels in the morning and evening. Nuclear can keep cranking at near peak output day and night. The new solar installations will produce far less electricity than a comparably sized nuclear plant.

What's more, we're still talking about megawatts of electricity. To supply anticipated energy needs, we need to be thinking not just in thousands of megawatts--that is, gigawatts--but in thousands of gigawatts, or terawatts, of power. According to one report, all of the solar panels produced so far can only generate about 12 gigawatts.

This is all just to say we've got a problem of enormous scale on our hands. There are also concerns about cost--solar is still more expensive than electricity generated from fossil fuels.

But enough of the negative. The new installations are yet another sign of a rapidly expanding solar industry. This expansion will fuel itself by bringing down the cost of making solar panels. Meanwhile, technology continues to improve. That includes the development of cheaper ways to store solar power, so it can be used at night.

Neurons Control Robot

Researchers at the University of Reading, in England, have developed a robot controlled by a biological "brain." Hundreds of thousands of rat neurons communicate via a multielectrode array--a dish with over 60 two-way electrodes that transmit signals between neurons and outside electronics--to control the movement of a wheeled robot. When the neurons receive signals that the robot is nearing an object, their output moves the wheels in an attempt to avoid obstacles. The researchers, led by neuroscientists Mark Hammond, Ben Whalley, and cyberneticist Kevin Warwick, suggest that by stimulating the neurons with different signals as the robot returns to a familiar location, they will be able to study how a brain stores data. Their goal is to eventually understand memory formation and disorders, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Researchers have used live neurons to control robots in the past, but those involved a computer between the neurons and robot. One of the more public projects, MEART (multielectrode array art), turned signals from cultured rat neurons at the Georgia Institute of Technology into the movements of a picture-drawing robot at the University of Western Australia.