First baby born with IVF that uses stem cells to pep up old eggs

He has been called the world's first stem cell baby. Zain Rajani was born three weeks ago in Canada after his parents opted for a new type of IVF marketed under the name Augment. The procedure is supposed to enhance the quality of a woman's eggs by injecting them with mitochondria taken from her ovarian stem cells.

Some media reports say this is the breakthrough that will usher in the next big advance in IVF, but experts New Scientist spoke to were sceptical. Let's weigh up the evidence.

So women have stem cells in their ovaries? Does this mean they can make new eggs? I thought women were born with all the eggs they were ever going to have.
That was the dogma until a few years ago, when a group at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston discovered stem cells tucked away in the protective lining of the ovary that mature into fresh eggs. The finding suggested that new eggs are produced throughout life and was hailed as revealing that there are limitless eggs for IVF treatments. It was suggested at the time that this could also allow older eggs to be rejuvenated.

The team that made the discovery, led by Jonathan Tilly, then partnered with OvaScience. It was this company that announced the birth of Zain on 7 May.

How did the stem cells help Zain's mother conceive?
The idea is that the mitochondria – cellular energy generators - in young, primitive cells function much better than those in the mature eggs collected for IVF. Collecting these mitochondria and injecting them into the prospective mother's mature eggs is supposed to improve their quality. In its press release, OvaScience says: "This treatment is designed to improve egg health by increasing the eggs' energy levels for embryo development."

It seems to have worked, at least in the Rajani case?
It's hard to draw any conclusions from the information released so far. The OvaScience press release says that "initial positive experiences of pregnancies with the treatment have been reported".

Time magazine reports that 36 women in four countries have tried the technique, and eight are currently pregnant. It also says that there have been no formal clinical trials of the procedure but that OvaScience are planning to carry out 1000 rounds of IVF around the world this year using Augment, partly to convince the US Food and Drug Administration to approve the treatment in the US.

Although the procedure appears to have worked for the Rajanis where traditional IVF failed, we don't know for certain that Zain owes his existence to Augment. "The fact a baby has been born is one case, but you can't prove that the technology they used is the one reason for this success," says Adam Balen, a professor of reproductive medicine at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust in the UK and chairman of the British Fertility Society.

When New Scientist contacted OvaScience for a response, they said: "The evidence is based on the mother's medical history, including a prior IVF cycle failure which showed very poor embryo quality, as well as her diagnoses.

"There are other pregnancies in poor prognostic patients across all the clinics offering the treatment."

What else do independent fertility researchers think?
Balen and others we contacted cited a lack of evidence that adding fresh mitochondria would help make old eggs youthful again. "The reason old eggs are less fertile is because they don't have the integrity to go through cell division in an ordered way, which is why you get chromosome imbalances," says Balen. "There's no peer-reviewed evidence that mitochondria from immature eggs would correct this."

"There's a lack of evidence of efficacy, efficiency and safety," says Alison Murdoch of Newcastle University, UK. "The problem in older women is the quality of the nuclear genome in their eggs, and adding more mitochondria will not help that problem," she says. "Also, manipulation of the embryo at that very sensitive time could cause more problems for the nuclear genome, which is why safety data is critical."

Has anything like this been done before?
Sort of. In 2001, Jacques Cohen at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science at Saint Barnabas, in New Jersey, injected mitochondria from a donor egg into 30 eggs of infertile prospective mothers, a procedure known as ooplasmic transfer. The fact that this resulted in a handful of pregnancies is seen as supporting evidence for the Augment technique. "There are published clinical reports from multiple IVF clinics throughout the world which showed that using mitochondria from a younger woman's donor egg significantly improved IVF success," OvaScience told New Scientist. "More than 50 babies were born from this technique, and those children are now in their late teens and early 20s".

In Cohen's case, the research was halted because the babies carried extra mitochondria from the donor, leading to an outcry over them having three parents.

Three-parent babies? That sounds familiar.
Yes. Both ooplasmic transfer and Augment have some parallels with mitochondrial replacement therapy, the controversial new type of IVF recently approved by the UK government. Like ooplasmic transfer, this results in children carrying DNA from three people. It was approved because it prevents parents from passing on untreatable mitochondrial diseases to the child. Because the Augment technique uses mitochondria from the mother's ovarian stem cells rather than a donor, there is no three-parent ethical quagmire to wade through.

Credit to Newscientist.com

As water shortages loom, Arizona prepares for the worst.

Last week, Lake Mead, which sits on the border of Nevada and Arizona, set a new record low—the first time since the construction of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s that the lake’s surface has dipped below 1,080 feet above sea level. The West’s drought is so bad that official plans for water rationing have now begun—with Arizona’s farmers first on the chopping block. Yes, despite the drought’s epicenter in California, it’s Arizona that will bear the brunt of the West’s epic dry spell.

The huge Lake Mead—which used to be the nation’s largest reservoir—serves as the main water storage facility on the Colorado River. Amidone of the worst droughts in millennia, record lows at Lake Mead are becoming an annual event—last year’s low was 7 feet higher than this year’s expected June nadir, 1,073 feet.

If, come Jan. 1, Lake Mead’s level is below 1,075 feet, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the river, will declare an official shortage for the first time ever—setting into motion a series of already agreed-upon mandatory cuts in water outlays, primarily to Arizona. (Nevada and Mexico will also receive smaller cuts.) The latest forecasts give a33 percent chance of this happening. There’s a greater than 75 percent chance of the same scenario on Jan. 1, 2017. Barring a sudden unexpected end to the drought, official shortage conditions are likely for the indefinite future.

Why Arizona? In exchange for agreeing to be the first in line for rationing when a shortage occurs, Arizona was permitted in the 1960s to build the Central Arizona Project, which diverts Colorado River water 336 miles over 3,000 feet of mountain ranges all the way to Tucson. It’s the longest and costliest aqueduct in American history, and Arizona couldn’t exist in its modern state without it. Now that a shortage is imminent, another fundamental change in the status quo is on the way. As in California, the current drought may take a considerable and lasting toll on Arizona, especially for the state’s farmers.

“We need to stop growing alfalfa in the deserts in the summertime.”Robert Glennon, water policy expert at the University of Arizona

“A call on the river will be significant,” Joe Sigg, director of government relations for Arizona Farm Bureau, told the Arizona Daily Star. “It will be a complete change in a farmer’s business model.” A “call” refers to the mandatory cutbacks in water deliveries for certain low-priority users of the Colorado. Arizona law prioritizes cities, industry, and tribal interests above agriculture, so farmers will see the biggest cuts. And those who are lucky enough to keep their water will pay more for it.

According to Robert Glennon, a water policy expert at the University of Arizona, the current situation was inevitable. “It’s really no surprise that this day was coming, for the simple reason that the Colorado River is overallocated,” Glennon told me over the phone last week. Glennon explained that the original Colorado River compact of 1922, which governs how seven states and Mexico use the river, was negotiated during “the wettest 10-year period in the last 1,000 years.” That law portioned out about 25 percent more water than regularly flows, so even in “normal” years, big reservoirs like Lake Mead are in a long-term decline. “We’ve been saved from the disaster because Arizona and these other states were not using all their water,” Glennon said.

They are now. Since around 2000, Arizona has been withdrawing its full allotment from the Colorado River, and it’s impossible to overstate how important the Colorado has become to the state. About 40 percent of Arizona’s water comes from the Colorado, and state officials partially attribute a nearly 20-fold increase in the state’s economy over the last 50 years to increased access to the river.

Credit to Slate.com

CERN: The Modern Tower of Babel?

ECONOMIC COLLAPSE, WWW III, MARTIAL LAW, OR MASS AWAKENING?

By Paul McGuire
NewsWithViews.com

Tomorrow morning you could wake up and see anarchy, riots in the streets, banks closed, and war breaking out between Russia and NATO, or a major conflict in the Middle East. Once the American people see mass lootings of stores, millions of other Americans will succumb to the herd mentality and join the looters in order to get food, medicine, and other items in order to survive.

When the average American fully realizes that the money he deposited in the bank is no longer legally his and that he has been reclassified as a creditor due to new regulations implemented at the recent G20 meeting of the world’s top twenty economies, widespread panic will set in. The new banking laws legally block people who have placed their retirement funds, savings, and pension funds in banks from withdrawing their money. In an economic crisis, the banks would close and hard working Americans would have to wait in line for their money after the giant financial institutions that are first in line get theirs. Obviously, by the time the financial institutions get their money, there will be nothing left for ordinary working people.

Many people falsely believe that their money is insured by the FDIC through the full power of the American government for up to $250,000.00. But if there is a major economic crisis the government will not be able to pay out that kind of money. This is what happened in Greece when the government closed the banks in a process called “bank bail-ins.” The government and the banks blocked people from withdrawing their savings, pensions, and other funds so that the people’s money could be used to pay off the bank debts. The people of Greece were starving and destitute, which resulted in riots and threats of a violent overthrow of the government.

If you connect the dots, then the increase of massive government surveillance on the American people, the widespread use of drones, the eliminations of due process, and martial law exercises like Jade Helm where U.S. soldiers, helicopters and armored vehicles will be sent into states and cities all begin to make sense.

October 17, 2015 is the deadline for agreeing on the federal budget, along with the possibility of the government defaulting on its loans. On the same day two large drills are going to take place: The Great Shake Out Earth Quake Drill and The Quantum Dawn Two Cyber Attack Bank Drill, where simulated Cyber attacks on the banking system may cause people to discover that they can’t log in to their online banking accounts. If this scenario were to become real, it could mean that “bank bail-ins” have been initiated and the kinds of riots and lootings that happened in Greece would happen here.

It appears that we have learned nothing from our last economic disaster. On September 18, 2008, the Treasury pumped $105 billion into the system in an attempt to stem the tide of the financial crisis. There was an electronic run on the banks which therefore decided to close down the money accounts. If they had not done that, their projection was that by 2:00 PM over $6 trillion would have been taken out of the money market system, which would have collapsed the entire U.S. economy, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. The result would have been the end of our economic and political system and the fall of America.

Once the banks close their doors and shut down the ATMs and online banking there will be mass anarchy. Did you ever ask yourself why so many large banks across America have installed large bulletproof see-through plastic barriers in front of the teller windows? Did you think they were put in to just stop bank robberies?

Again, in September of 2008, US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson advised the U.S. government to resort to martial law if Wall Street was not bailed out from the credit collapse. The 2008 crisis was a run not on the conventional banking system, but on what is called the “shadow banking system,” which consists of non-bank financial institutions, financial service institutions, unregulated traditional commercial banks which manage hedge funds, money market funds, credit investment funds, private equity funds, securities broker dealers, and finance companies. Under the new laws investment banks and commercial banks are allowed to conduct a huge part of their business in the “shadow” financial casino, which is gambling on over $290 million in highly risky contracts called derivatives.

At the same time there is a European Crisis unfolding in relationship to Greece. There is the potential of the breakup and radical reorganization of the European Union. This could ignite a global debt implosion that would seriously weaken Eastern Europe, which could cause a conflict between Russia, NATO, the EU, and the United States. There is a reason our military command is moving back under Cheyenne Mountain: World War III could be ignited. In addition, a strong Russia and a weak Europe could cause a Russian/Iranian invasion of Israel which was predicted in Ezekiel Chapter 38.

Clearly we are on the edge of catastrophe! There are two paths set before us. First, an economic crisis in the U.S. which ignites anarchy, riots, lootings, civil war, and martial law. This is the path we are currently set on. The second path is a powerful spiritual awakening with Americans realizing that they are responsible for the demise of our nation because, as Edmund Burke said, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” 

This spiritual awakening is contingent upon our understanding that God, not government and manmade institutions, is our source. The socialist mindset, which believes that there is no God and that only a world socialist government can solve our problems must be rejected and there must be a return to the spiritual, economic, moral, and social ideas prevalent at the founding of America. If this happens in a significant percentage of the American people there may yet be a Mass Awakening that can turn the tide before crisis erupts




Credit to Paul McGuire

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