Ноябрь 2001 г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• Cautious Optimism, But Progress Is Slow
• Europe and United States assess international support of science in Russia and Ukraine
• Taking Scientists Out of Nuclear
• Nature: the international language
• Government Spurns Human Genome Effort
• Science Spending Slips to Third World Level
• New Separating Spies from Scientists
• HIV Rise in Russia May Lead to TB Epidemic - Doctors
• Humans Descended from Cells without Nuclei or Walls
• Warning of smallpox terror risk
• Life and Times of a Soviet Super Bug Designer
• Fossils of Chipmunk-Sized Mammal Found
• Meteor clue to end of Middle East civilizations
• Spacewalkers Wire Up Station Hardware as Culbertson Earns EVA Wings

Российский ученый, директор одного из двух официальных хранилищ образцов вирусов оспы, призвал возобновить вакцинацию, заявив о том, что террористы легко могут склонить низкооплачиваемых научных сотрудников бывшего Советского Союза к созданию бактериологического оружия

THE Russian scientist in charge of one of the last known deposits of the smallpox virus called yesterday for the reintroduction of mass vaccination, saying terrorists could easily lure underpaid former Soviet researchers to turn it into a weapon. "Smallpox is a very dangerous weapon in the hands of terrorists and you don't need some clever way of delivering it", said Dr Lev Sandakhchiyev, director of Russia's Vektor Institute. The Siberian centre holds one of only two official samples of the extinct disease. "All you need is a sick fanatic to get to a populated place. The world health system is completely unprepared for this".
The disease claimed around one billion lives before being declared extinct in 1980. Inoculation has not been routine for decades but, in the light of heightened fears of bioterrorism, worldwide vaccination should be reintroduced, Dr Sandakhchiyev said. In the past few weeks, following the anthrax attacks in the United States, moves by American and British authorities have underlined how smallpox is considered more than a theoretical concern. However, Prof Harry Smith, chairman of the Royal Society working group on biological weapons, said the call for worldwide vaccination was "going over the top". But he added: "On the other hand, I think smallpox vaccine needs to be ready to immunise key people and deal with any outbreak, if it occurs". This week, the United States Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, began a series of training courses on smallpox for some employees and state and local health workers. It also vaccinated 140 doctors and nurses against smallpox over the weekend. They will act as shock troops against any signs of an epidemic. "We are putting together several teams that could be quickly dispatched to the field if we did see a suspected case of smallpox", said its spokesman, Tom Skinner.
At the end of October, the American government asked pharmaceutical companies if they could produce 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine. However, there has been a reluctance to introduce widespread vaccination because of side effects, which, though rare, can be serious, including still births. Interim guidance issued by the Public Health Laboratory Service referred to the "serious threat" from the disease. Unlike anthrax, smallpox can spread from person to person and there is "no specific treatment", it said. Suspected patients must be put in a special isolation facility, with negative air pressure, and filtered ventilation. Vektor is one of only two official repositories for smallpox, the other being the CDC. However, it is possible that other facilities still have the virus, such as plants in Kirov, Yekaterinburg, Sergiev Posad and St Petersburg. There may even be other sources - for example, the corpse of a person killed by smallpox and preserved in the Arctic permafrost. Vektor was a leading centre in the Soviet biological weapons programme which studied the genetic code of the virus, genetic modification of the virus and tested it as a potential bio-weapon as late as 1990. Various initiatives have been made by the West to find peaceful work for former weapons scientists. But Dr Sandakhchiyev said that, like most Russian scientists, those at Vektor earn a pitiful ?75 a month and so could be tempted to sell the virus and work on it by a well-funded terrorist group. "Everything is possible in today's world," he said. "If the question is, 'Do Russian scientists work in Iran or Iraq?' my answer is no. Do Iraqis work at Vektor? The answer is no," he said.
"But only the devil knows with whom they meet. Our scientists sit at international conferences as part of large government delegations with a large team from Vektor". His concerns were echoed by Anatoly Vorobyov, a former general at Moscow's secret bio-weapons programme in the 80s. "In principle, the whole population needs to be vaccinated, not only in the United States, but in Russia and everywhere in the world", he said. As the American authorities stepped up their attempts to hunt down the source of the anthrax, another sample was found yesterday at a small post room in the Pentagon.

Ученые обнаружили первое свидетельство того, что более 4 000 лет назад разрушительное действие метеорита на Ближнем Востоке могло вызвать гибель цивилизации. На снимках южного Ирака, полученных со спутника, обнаружен участок диаметром 2 мили, который, по мнению ученых, напоминает кратер. Если это подтвердится, то можно будет говорить, что на Ближний Восток упал метеорит , действие которого эквивалентно нескольким сотням ядерных бомб.

SCIENTISTS have found the first evidence that a devastating meteor impact in the Middle East might have triggered the mysterious collapse of civilisations more than 4,000 years ago. Studies of satellite images of southern Iraq have revealed a two-mile-wide circular depression which scientists say bears all the hallmarks of an impact crater. If confirmed, it would point to the Middle East being struck by a meteor with the violence equivalent to hundreds of nuclear bombs. Today's crater lies on what would have been shallow sea 4,000 years ago, and any impact would have caused devastating fires and flooding.
The catastrophic effect of these could explain the mystery of why so many early cultures went into sudden decline around 2300 BC. They include the demise of the Akkad culture of central Iraq, with its mysterious semi-mythological emperor Sargon; the end of the fifth dynasty of Egypt's Old Kingdom, following the building of the Great Pyramids and the sudden disappearance of hundreds of early settlements in the Holy Land. Until now, archaeologists have put forward a host of eparate explanations for these events, from local wars to environmental changes. Recently, some astronomers have suggested that meteor impacts could explain such historical mysteries. The crater's faint outline was found by Dr Sharad Master, a geologist at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, on satellite images of the Al 'Amarah region, about 10 miles north-west of the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates and home of the Marsh Arabs. "It was a purely accidental discovery", Dr Master told The Telegraph last week. "I was reading a magazine article about the canal-building projects of Saddam Hussein, and there was a photograph showing lots of formations - one of which was very, very circular." Detailed analysis of other satellite images taken since the mid-1980s showed that for many years the crater contained a small lake.
The draining of the region, as part of Saddam's campaign against the Marsh Arabs, has since caused the lake to recede, revealing a ring-like ridge inside the larger bowl-like depression - a classic feature of meteor impact craters. The crater also appears to be, in geological terms, very recent. Dr Master said: "The sediments in this region are very young, so whatever caused the crater-like structure, it must have happened within the past 6,000 years." Reporting his finding in the latest issue of the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, Dr Master suggests that a recent meteor impact is the most plausible explanation for the structure. A survey of the crater itself could reveal tell-tale melted rock. "If we could find fragments of impact glass, we could date them using radioactive dating techniques," he said. A date of around 2300 BC for the impact may also cast new light on the legend of Gilgamesh, dating from the same period. The legend talks of "the Seven Judges of Hell", who raised their torches, lighting the land with flame, and a storm that turned day into night, "smashed the land like a cup", and flooded the area. The discovery of the crater has sparked great interest among scientists.
Dr Benny Peiser, who lectures on the effects of meteor impacts at John Moores University, Liverpool, said it was one of the most significant discoveries in recent years and would corroborate research he and others have done. He said that craters recently found in Argentina date from around the same period - suggesting that the Earth may have been hit by a shower of large meteors at about the same time.

New fossils of a chipmunk-sized animal that lived about 85 million years ago suggest that placental mammals arose much earlier than is generally believed and thrived for millions of years alongside dinosaurs.
Paleontologists who analyzed about 45 jawbone and skull fragments of a long-snouted mammal called Kulbeckia conclude that it was an early relative of rabbits and rodents.
To date, the oldest fossils widely agreed to be those of placental mammals - which nourish their young in the uterus until they are born fully formed - date to 65 million years ago.
That's the same time that an asteroid impact is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs, clearing the way for mammals' dominance.
If the interpretation of the new Kulbeckia fossils are eventually confirmed and they are indeed related to rabbits and rodents, that would push back the evolutionary split of rabbits and rodents from other placentals by at least 20 million years.
That, in turn, would mean separate placental lineages were well-established even as dinosaurs ruled the Earth. The new work follows previous research that suggested the lineage that gave rise to hoofed placental mammals extended back into Cretaceous, the period ruled by dinosaurs from about 145 million years to 65 million years ago.
Some scientists dispute the American-Russian scientists' findings, saying it is far from clear where Kulbeckia fits in the evolutionary tree of early mammals.
John J. Flynn, a curator at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, said the American-Russian team conducted an incomplete analysis when they compared about 70 different characteristics between the fossils and other early mammals.
He nonetheless called the new fossils "tantalizing".
"These fossils represent new, well-preserved specimens from one of the few windows into a crucial time for understanding the diversification of placental mammals", Flynn said.
Kulbeckia is a member of a little known group of mammals called zalambdalestids whose origins remain murky. The new fossils, which were found between 1998 and 2000 in Uzbekistan, are the oldest zalambdalestid specimens recovered to date.
J. David Archibald, a professor of biology at San Diego State University and the study's lead author, argues that the new Kulbeckia fossils suggest that zalambdalestids are more closely related to the relatives of modern rodents and rabbits than hoofed placentals or extinct nonplacental mammals.
Placental mammals bear their young live after developing in the womb, rather than gestating them in a pouch like marsupials or laying eggs like the echidna or platypus, which belong to a mammal group called monotremes.
Archibald said his team's findings that placental mammals were around at least 85 million years ago support conclusions by molecular biologists who estimate that placentals began to split up and diversify as far back as 100 million years ago.
By studying changes in the DNA of species over time, some molecular biologists conclude that placental mammals began to diversify between 64 million and 112 million years ago. The median point in that range is 84 million years ago, Archibald said.
"They're saying a median value of 84 million years and we're saying 85 to 90 million years, which is very close. The fossils and the molecules rarely agree", Archibald said.
Archibald's findings appear in the Nov. 1 issue of the journal Nature.
Michael J. Novacek, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, disagrees with the findings and questions the molecular-clock conclusions, as does Flynn.
Novacek also said the paper's analysis of the fossils is incomplete.
"These are interesting specimens but a much more comprehensive analysis is necessary to test the important question of placental mammal origins", he said. Zhe-Xi Luo of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History praised the American-Russian team for making significant progress documenting previously unknown anatomical features of Kulbeckia.
He said the new fossils triple the fossil evidence of Kulbeckia, but noted that much of the animals' skull and skeleton remain unknown.
"The anatomical features in these new fossils are certainly persuasive, but it needs to be tested with additional fossils", he said. "This is by no means the last word on this topic".

MOSCOW, (Reuters) -- In some ways, Russian scientist Igor Domaradsky did for the Soviet biobomb what Robert Oppenheimer did for the atomic bomb.
The parallel is not exact, for Domaradsky, a brilliant molecular biologist who became a world-beating specialist in the virulence of bubonic plague, was not a bomb builder.
But for 15 years he was one of the main brains behind the science which helped the Soviet military create a new type of weapon capable of destroying life on a monstrous scale.
Nevertheless, 75-year-old Domaradsky has revealed in an interview some of the same anguish expressed by U.S. nuclear scientist Oppenheimer in 1945 on witnessing the first detonation of the A-bomb in the Nevada Desert.
"I always believed that this program was an adventurist project in the form it took", Domaradsky said of the biological weapons program launched by the Soviet authorities in 1973.
"There were times when the results of my research were taken out of my hands and developed elsewhere, and I cannot help but feel sorry for that", he told Reuters at his Moscow apartment.
A small, intense man who walks with a stick because of ill-health, Domaradsky in some ways shared the fate of the father of the A-bomb.
Oppenheimer's opposition to the hydrogen bomb ultimately cost him his job, and Domaradsky says his attempts to steer his research away from warfare landed him in hot water. He was granted a foreign travel passport only in 1999.
Oppenheimer, the son of a German immigrant, had headed the Los Alamos laboratories which developed the atom bomb.
Bug Buster
Domaradsky's early career was quite different. After completing his studies interrupted by World War Two, he helped battle cholera outbreaks in the mid-1960s and early 1970s. The Rostov Anti-Plague Institute where he worked attracted the top scientists of the day. But Cold War politics was soon to muscle its way into the world of public health.
The Communist Party leadership, alarmed by rapid Western advances in molecular biology and genetics, set up an Inter-Departmental Scientific and Technical Council on Biochemistry and Genetics. Its tedious title masked a more sinister purpose.
"The council was to become the mastermind of a newly created system to create bioweapons", Domaradsky said.
Even as Moscow signed an international agreement banning the production of biological warfare agents, the Soviet Union was about to crank up its output.
The council's task was simple: to create genetically modified killer strains of a range of deadly diseases.
Domaradsky went on to become deputy director of the Obolensk complex, a top secret facility outside Moscow where 2,500 people eventually worked. Their task was to create bacteria totally resistant to antibiotics. Legionnaires' disease, smallpox and bubonic plague all came under the microscope.
However, it was anthrax -- source of the current biowarfare panic in the United States - that provided the most potent, and stable, agent best suited for weaponry.
Divided Loyalties
Domaradsky was a reluctant Cold War warrior. "Many of my family perished during the purges, before and after the war. In fact it is enough to say that I have practically no blood relations left", he said. "Officially I have the status of a victim of political repression".
"On the other hand, I saw plenty of things with my own eyes. I lived through those difficult times and I became part of this adventurist project".
He says his memoirs, provisionally entitled in the forthcoming English translation "Troublemaker: The Story of an Inconvenient Man", were an attempt to square the circle.
"When I was writing this book I was actually trying to provide myself with an answer to the question you asked - why?", he said.
Published privately in 1995, Domaradsky's memoirs recount his vain struggle to redirect his research - some of it ground-breaking - away from military uses.
In 1977 he discovered that the microbes that cause bubonic plague had plasmids, DNA which determines their virulence. A major breakthrough made several years ahead of Western science, it could be key in providing new treatments, but this and other discoveries were cloaked in Soviet secrecy.
"Unfortunately, because the military were in charge of these institutes they did not pay any attention to these things. They considered the creation of weapons their major task."
Over time, he says, he developed the reputation of an "inconvenient person" which led to his demotion on the grounds of "limited administrative ability."
"Unfortunately, I didn't manage to do everything I wanted to do, or what I could have done...I lost about 15 years when I could have worked and achieved significant results, because of my experience."
"Everything else I did later on, though well appreciated, in my personal opinion was not as significant as my work in the 1970s and 1980s."

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Only hearing the king of jazz singing his trademark "What a Wonderful World" could have made a successful five-hour excursion outside the International Space Station more memorable for veteran astronaut Frank Culbertson, who made his rookie debut as a spacewalker Monday. In between strenuous activity to string power cables, inspect a broken solar panel and test a Russian crane, Culbertson and space station Alpha colleague Vladimir Dezhurov enjoyed long rest periods in darkness, allowing quality time to gaze at the stars above or the lights of humanity below.
During one such pass, as the 13-story complex flew 240 miles above the Mediterranean Sea, Culbertson called to his other colleague, Mikhail Turin, who was inside the station helping to direct the construction work taking place just outside.
"Mikhail, where's the music?" Culbertson, the station's current commander, said in Russian. "We need Louie Armstrong. Yes?" The sweet lyrics of the jazz legend, who believed love was the answer for all the world's ills, weren't available to the spacemen. But from the sound of their voices during each trip through orbital night, the Expedition Three crewmembers were able to end a dramatic and violent day on Earth on a peaceful an inspiring note in space. "There are beautiful stars on my right," Culbertson said at one point. "Orion's right above us. I can see it when I look through the right part of my glasses." Another orbit later: "Can you see those lights?" Culbertson said looking down on the planet. "Incredible. Mikhail, where are we? Middle East?" "Yeah Frank, you're right," Turin replied after checking the station's computers. "Looks like it. The Persian Gulf," Culbertson replied.
All tasks complete
The third and last of the planned spacewalks for this station crew began at 4:41 p.m. EST (2141 GMT) with Culbertson and Dezhurov opening the hatch of the Russian Pirs docking compartment. After installing a protective ring around the opening, Culbertson floated outside and, because he has never walked in space before, took several minutes to get acclimated and find his space legs -- prompting Turin, who was watching from inside, to warn to Culbertson to take his time. "Frank, if you could be a little more careful", Turin said as the veteran NASA astronaut's legs swung around, banging into equipment outside the airlock. Within 30 minutes both spacewalkers were moving at full speed and began a pace that shaved nearly a full hour off the pre-planned duration of six hours.
For five hours and four minutes - the official spacewalk duration time - Culbertson and Dezhurov smartly worked through their checklists and completed each task assigned to them, while wearing the Russian-made ORLAN spacesuits. Among the principal items finished: Wired up a radar system that will enable Russian Soyuz crew transport vehicles and Progress cargo carriers to dock automatically with the barrel-shaped Pirs airlock, which doubles as an extra berthing port at the station. The work involved stringing seven electrical cables between the four-ton Pirs compartment and the station's Zvezda module. Inspected, but did not attempt to repair, an electricity-generating solar panel that did not fully unfold after its launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Completed an orbital checkout of the Russian cargo boom that was installed on the exterior of the Pirs module during an early October spacewalk. Dezhurov manually cranked the handle that fully extended and then retracted the 30-foot-long arm while also testing the arm's ability to move around. Russian controllers decided that since the initial tests went so well, another series of checks that would have put Culbertson on the end of the new Strela robot arm during the spacewalk were not needed.
Entering the home stretch
Monday's spacewalk wraps up all assembly work planned during the third expedition to the station, which primarily has been devoted to conducting scientific research on the outpost.
Culbertson and his crewmates now will turn their attention to finishing up 18 U.S. science experiments and a like number of Russian research projects. The U.S. experiments include studies gauged at determining the effects of weightlessness on muscle tone and bone density as well as heart, lung and kidney function -- research deemed crucial to preparing for a human expedition to the moon, Mars or beyond. Other experiments are focused on measuring space radiation and growing three-dimensional clusters of ovarian cancer cells to better model how they behave in the human body. A significant amount of packing also will be carried out before NASA's shuttle Endeavour is launched on a space station crew rotation mission. Now set for liftoff Nov. 29 from pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center, Endeavour and four astronauts will ferry the Expedition Four crew up to the station. Led by veteran cosmonaut Yuri Onufrienko, that crew includes American flight engineers Daniel Bursch and Carl Walz. With Culbertson, Dezhurov and Turin aboard, Endeavour is scheduled to land here on Florida's Space Coast on Dec. 10, capping a 122-day stay in space for Culbertson and his crew.

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