AHX        A fascinating medical discovery            14 August 2007

As you may have discovered elsewhere in the set of blogs, I am avid reader of new Scientist.  I have it delivered weekly by mail.  The latest article to take my attention is one on page 38 of Issue 2609 dated the 23rd of June 2007.  I am always behind in my reading, as at my age I spend a lot of time snoozing on the sofa.

The heading of the article is "The Medusa strain".  For those readers who didn't know (and that included me until I looked it up), Medusa was a Greek mortal woman who was transformed by Athena into one of the three Gorgons.  She was so hideous-looking that if you looked directly at her, you were transformed into stone.  If you are interested in Greek Mythology, Collins English Dictionary covers the subject fairly well.  You will see below why Medusa is referred to.

Recently an American research team have found "calcifying nanoparticles".  These particles were involved in causing parts of the body to calcify (turn to stone).  Further examination seemed to show that these particles were, in fact, mini-microbes. At this point two research teams went their separate ways with one of the teams arguing that the particles were so small that there was just not enough room for all the bits and pieces of a cell to be contained in the particle that would enable it to replicate (as germs and viruses do). The other team vehemently argued that they must be alive as they met a long-standing criterion for deciding life from non-life.

According to the New Scientist article, it seems that a new life-form has been discovered.  There is a lot more detail than I have recorded here, but one worker has extracted a small piece of DNA from the particles demonstrating that they truly are mini-microbes.  Further work has shown that they are present in kidney stones and calcified tissue such as occurs in arthritis and some forms of hardened blood-vessels.

Now looking to the future, if these particles truly can be shown to be bacteria, there may be a real treatment for all sorts of calcifying diseases that were previously presumed to be natural aging processes.  If an antibiotic that will kill these little beasts was able to be found, things like calcified arteries could be amenable to treatment.

This story reminds me of a story I read years ago.  An Australian medical worker believed that a certain bug (heliobacter pylori) caused stomach ulcers, whereas most medics believed then that these ulcers were a natural result of over-acidity in the stomach and the bugs were just a benevolent side-issue.  This fellow used himself as a guinea pig by swallowing some of the bugs and proved that  it truly was the bugs that caused the problem as his ulcer went away after the bugs were killed using a bacteriocide.  New forms of life seem to keep cropping up.

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