Февраль 2003 г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• Keeping the cities' secrets
• Hi-Tech Booms in Russia
• Russians say they can make rain
• THERMOGENESIS Continues Expansion of Global Stem Cell Network -- First BioArchive(R) System in Russia
• Intact Mammoth Cells, DNA Reported, Cloning to Begin
• Safe Cells in Frozen Mammoth
• Group Says Getting Up Early Is Bad for You
• Priceless Vavilov Seed Bank Critically Endangered
• Mars Express to be delivered to Baikonur space center in March

VIV Oldfield has enough faith in Russian rainmaking technology to invest $25,000 to bring it to South Australia.

Four scientists will arrive from Moscow in two weeks to start rainmaking trials on Mr Oldfield's Werocata property near Balaklava.
It will provide answers to whether mankind's latest tilt at the age-old quest to produce rain can succeed.
Mr Oldfield's property is experiencing one of the worst droughts on record, with little more than 100mm of rain last year, which is about one-third of its normal rainfall.
The rainmaking trials next month and in April are designed to produce rain on a 25,000ha area centred on Werocata, a cattle-breeding and grain-growing property.
"It sounds like witchcraft and I expect people will be sceptical, but if it works it will be unbelievable, it will change the face of Australia," Mr Oldfield said yesterday.
"March or April would be a good time to get rain, whether we make it or nature makes it. We would need follow-up rain for it to be worthwhile, but if the Russians succeed, we won't be letting them leave."
Mr Oldfield said if the Balaklava site received at least 100mm more rain than a Yorke Peninsula control site that historically receives identical rainfall, the trial would be deemed a success.
He hopes the rainmaking technology will increase the rainfall on his farm and improve its reliability.
"If you can stabilise your rainfall you will obviously be much better off financially," he said.
The South Australian Research and Development Institute has agreed to design the trials and monitor them against agreed scientific criteria.
The institute's chief executive, Rob Lewis, said SARDI was facilitating the trials by drafting a contract for the various partners.
While he understood the theory behind the rainmaking technology, no one would know if it actually worked until the trials prove it one way or the other.
Russian scientist Dr Ildar Utiamyshev said the technology had produced good results in the Moscow and St Petersburg regions, the United Arab Emirates and Germany.
The technology was developed under a Russian arms program and privatised by his team of scientists.
"The basic principle is a radiowave stimulation of air molecules that provoke a reaction in the atmosphere," he said.
Adelaide businessman Roostam Sadri is also backing the trials by investing the equivalent of $25,000 to house the scientists, provide two four-wheel-drives, supply food and various equipment.
"I didn't believe the claims for three months last year, but I've seen newspaper reports raving about its success in Russia," he said.
Mr Sadri said the system worked by drawing moisture from the atmosphere, converting it into clouds and then inducing rain. Mr Oldfield and Mr Sadri plan to invest up to $1 million each in a joint venture to commercialise the technology - if the trials are a success.

RANCHO CORDOVA Calif., Feb 18, 2003 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX/ -- THERMOGENESIS CORP. (Nasdaq: KOOL) announced today that the Company has recently received its first BioArchive order from Russia. The Company's distributor, Delrus Medical, ordered the system on the instructions of the Moscow government for installation in Moscow, which will be the first public cord blood bank in Russia. The BioArchive System will be utilized as a critical enabling technology for our customer's production of therapeutic units of cord blood stem cells for the treatment of leukemias, lymphomas, diverse inherited anemias, such as sickle cell anemia and thalassemia, and other genetic diseases.
Dr. Olga Maiorova of the Russian Medical University Research Institute for Pediatric Haematology is slated to head up the cord blood bank operations. They plan to collect around 700 cords the first year, with plans to collect a total of 10,000 units over the next three years.
Kevin Simpson, President and COO of THERMOGENESIS CORP. commented, "We are excited to have our first sale of the BioArchive System in Russia. Russia represents the 21st country to acquire the system as we continue to see adoption of the BioArchive System as a standard for cord blood banking customers worldwide."
"Recent research suggests that there are stem cells in a unit of cord blood that have the potential to produce other cells outside the hematopoietic system such as neural, liver and bone cells," said Philip Coelho, Chairman and CEO of THERMOGENESIS CORP. "Since there are serious ethical issues with sourcing stem cells from embryos and fetuses, scientists may begin to focus on cord blood as a non-controversial source for these multi-potential stem cells."
BioArchive Systems have previously been deployed throughout North America, Europe, Middle East, and Asia. The Company estimates that more than 70% of the cord blood stem cell transplants performed to date have been supplied by Cord Blood Banks that are now using the BioArchive System to process, cryopreserve, and archive their stem cell units.
The BioArchive System plays a key role in the emerging world standards that are being adopted for the processing and validation of stem cell units. It uses a computer-driven robotic system to archive up to 3,626 units in - 196 degrees C liquid nitrogen. The BioArchive System is used by cord blood banks to freeze, track identification and perform robotic storage and retrieval of each unit. The BioArchive System can freeze, place and retrieve samples within liquid nitrogen without exposing the samples to detrimental transient warming events (TWE), which can reduce cell viability.
Regulatory Status
The BioArchive System is a Class II blood and blood component freezer exempt from the pre-market notification procedures. The BioArchive System has potential applications involving archiving, storing, managing and retrieving other kinds of biological specimens, that may include stem cells, dendritic cells, T-cells, cell lines, sperm cells, eggs, heart valves, corneas, virus samples, biopsy samples and other blood, tissue and saliva samples. The BioArchive System is currently intended for storage of blood and blood components. Additional indications for use would require U.S. FDA clearance or approval.
About Thermogenesis Corp.
THERMOGENESIS CORP. has been a pioneer in designing, manufacturing and marketing micro-manufacturing systems which utilize robotic devices and sterile disposable bag sets to collect, cryopreserve and archive blood products such as hematopoietic stem cells, fibrin sealant and other related blood products from single units of donor blood.
The statements contained in this release which are not historical facts are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, certain delays beyond the company's control with respect to market acceptance of new technologies and products, delays in testing and evaluation of products, and other risks detailed from time to time in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

По сообщению агентства Интерфакс ученые готовы приступить к клонированию мамонта

The Russian news agency Interfacx is reporting that wooly mammoth cells found by a joint Russian-Japanese expedition in Yakutia last summer are suitable for cloning. The expedition was under the auspices of The World Mammoth Museum, which was founded in Yakutsk in late 1991 as the only institution allowed to search for mammoth remains in Yakutia for scientific purposes. Taking part in last summer's expedition were scientists from the Institute of Applied Ecology of the North, the Moscow International Scientific Center, and the Gifu prefecture scientific center of Japan. This expedition found two mammoth legs on the MuKsunuokha River in Yakutia preserved in the permafrost. This find was taken to the Vector State Scientific Virology and Biotechnology in Novosibirsk, which examined the mammoth remains. Discovery of the intact cells and DNA were announced Wednesday in a Vector press release. "The cell material, which came to our scientists, is unique in many respects, because it contains not just intact mammoth DNA, but whole cells, which have been perfectly preserved for 10,000 years". The press release continued, "The older the genetic material, the more difficult it is to work with it", but noted there are enough suitable cells to repeat a cloning attempt many times.
Vektor will not be directly involved in any mammoth cloning. This is a task to be done instead by Japanese scientists, who have been working on reviving the mammoth using biological material found in permafrost since the early 1990s. They first planned to try to impregnate female elephants with mammoth semen, thus obtaining a hybrid. However, scientists failed to find viable spermatozoids in the remains. At the moment, Japanese researchers are working on cloning a mammoth using DNA derived from their remains. The current discovery by the Russian Vector scientists greatly increases the chances of success of this Japanese cloning effort of an extinct prehistoric species.
Efforts to begin establishment of a Siberian hunting preserve to allow any revived mammoth clones to be hunted by paying customers armed with fint-tipped wooden spears were not discussed in the Vector press release.

Russian scientists have found so-called "safe cells" inside frozen mammoth remains. "We consider these cells conditionally alive," says Professor Vladimir Repin of the State Research Center for Virusology and Biotechnology. He says the cells were "fixed in formalin to preserve after extracting them from the mammoth body in the field. However, the inner structure of these cells is undamaged, so we suggest that the rest frozen tissues contain similar cell layers, which could be defrozen." An international research team made the find during an expedition near Yakutsk in Russia. Researchers found two well-preserved mammoth's legs, which were frozen in the soil on the bank of the Maksunokha River. Instead of digging the remains out, they washed them out with a water jet. The animal's legs with muscles and skin, covered with reddish fur, were put into the freezer and transported to the Museum of Mammoth. Scientists discovered the subcutaneous cellular tissue of the animal remains contained living cells with intact nuclei.

Группа исследователей, в которую входят биологи, астрономы и другие специалисты, утверждает, что перевод времени в России на один час вперед по сравнению с естественным часовым поясом зимой и, следовательно, на два часа вперед летом - вреден для здоровья, снижает производительность труда, увеличивает число дорожных происшествий, заставляет некоторых людей пить, употреблять наркотики и даже приводит к самоубийствам. Возврат к прежнему стандарту времени, по словам специалистов, снизит смертность примерно на 10 процентов

As the State Duma prepares for the first reading of a bill to return Russia to its pre-1930 standard time, a St. Petersburg group last week released the results of research that, it claims, demonstrate the positive impacts the proposed change will bring.
The group, which comprises biologists, astronomers and other specialists, argues that the current situation - in which Russia is one hour ahead of its former standard time in winter, and two hours in summer - is damaging to people's health, impairs workplace productivity, increases the number of road accidents, and drives some people to drink, drugs and even suicide. A return to the previous standard, the group says, would reduce Russia's mortality rate by as much as 10 percent.
Russia belongs to a tiny minority of countries whose time is set one hour ahead of their natural time zone in winter and, consequently, two hours ahead during the summer, when the clocks go forward. The others are France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Tanzania, Argentina and Chile.
Prior to 1930, Moscow standard time was set at two hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT, the international standard adopted in 1884 that set time zones - centered on Greenwich, near London, and referenced by 24 standard meridians each 15 degrees of longitude apart - with one hour difference between adjacent zones. Under a 1930 decree, Moscow time moved to three hours ahead of GMT, for economic reasons.
According to an official comment to the draft law from the State Duma's Health and Sports Committee, which backs the proposed changes, Russia saves, on average, 1.8 billion kilowatt hours of electricity per year as a result of being in its current standard time. However, the comment goes on to say, citing the 1997 figures as an example, the saving represents less than 0.5 percent of Russia's total energy production.
The draft law was discussed in the State Duma last fall, but made little progress, with the hearings postponed until March. Science Minister Ilya Klebanov said during last fall's session that the government would not support the bill, as it did not believe that changing standard time is a crucial factor in, for example, Russia's mortality rate.
"The government hasn't received objective information about the negative effect of the existing system on human health. The problem shouldn't be exaggerated," Klebanov said, adding that the government's main reason for withholding support for the bill is financial.
"A return to the old standard time would saddle the government with losses, as people would use more electricity," he said.
But now, says St. Petersburg's Committee for the Restoration of Standard Time in Russia, it is time to think about human, rather than economic, benefits.
The committee, which was founded six years ago, believes that returning to Russia's pre-1930 standard time would synchronize standard time and the natural cycle of day and night, which would be more convenient and less distressing to the body's internal clock. The problems are compounded, says the committee, by moving the clocks forward in spring and back in fall.
Committee chairperson Vyacheslav Aprelyev, a St. Petersburg astronomer, said the problem is that, now, people have difficulty adjusting to summer time, as they begin the working day before their bodies wake up. According to his calculations, labor productivity drops by 10 percent after the clocks are put forward in spring, leading to a decrease in gross national product of 1 to 2 percent.
"Put in figures, this is a loss of 76 billion to 152 billion rubles [$2.4 billion to $4.8 billion] per year," he said.
Aprelyev estimates that 70,000 people die prematurely every year in Russia because of the current time regime - which he calls a "weapon of mass destruction" - while millions get sick. A five-year study published in 1999 by Vyachelav Khasnulin, director of the Healthcare Program in Novosibirsk, Western Siberia, clock changes cause headaches, insomnia, heart defects and minor hormonal disturbances. Khasnulin found the problems were particularly acute after the spring clock change. Fatalities caused by heart attacks jumped by 75 percent in the first five days after the change, while the suicide rate went up by 66 percent.
According to committee member Ida Karmanova, a senior researcher at the laboratory of the evolution of sleep and wakefulness at the Russian Academy of Science's Sechenov Institute of Evolutional Physiology, children suffer most from lack of sleep in the morning.
"There are from four to six phases of human sleep, each of which are equally important and fulfil a particular task, such as, for example, rehabilitating or activating the brain," she said.
Missing morning sleep, Karmanova said, deprives the brain of large chunks of its activation phase, which plays an important role in brain development. In children, she said, this can result in impaired mental development.
Aprelyev, of the Committee for the Resoration of Standard Time in Russia, says he can convince the Duma that the economic argument favors the change.
"I'm working on the possibility of making a short speech in the Duma, which I've done twice before, to tell lawmakers that low productivity due to the discomfort of adapting to time changes surpass the electricity savings by 17 to 34 times," he said.
The Committee for the Restoration of Standard Time in Russia believes pharmaceutical giants operating on Russia will attempt to pressurize the Duma to reject the bill.
"If Russia returns to its old standard time, people will certainly use fewer drugs," said committee member Tatyana Syrchenko, an associate member of the International Academy of Informatization and editor of Anomaliya newspaper. "Look at the aggressive advertising campaigns for various medicines. The media boosts and exaggerates the level of influenza to make people to buy more medicines - just in case"
According to Duma deputy Oksana Dmitriyeva, the whole problem of standard time is "artificial."
"The question is not about standard time, it is about when the working day starts," she said. "In Russia, people usually start at 9 a.m. but, in Western Europe, they start at 8 a.m., or even 7 a.m., so the difference is not that big."
"Maybe getting up that early is something of a problem for some deputies," she said. "But look how seriously the Duma discusses even more absurd issues, such as, for instance, returning the monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky [on Lyubyanskaya Ploshchad in Moscow]."
Health and Sports Committee spokesperson Vladimir Usanov sounded pessimistic when asked about the chances of the new law being passed.
"The hearings were postponed in the hope that the government would change its opinion, but it didn't happen, so the chances for the law to pass are rather modest," he said Thursday. "The Duma rarely votes against the government."

No one person has ever done more to preserve biodiversity on Earth than Russian Nikolai Vavilov. In the early 20th century he had the crucial insight that all the crops we depend on for food originated in only about a dozen regions of the earth comprising only one-fortieth of our world's land area - corn and tomatoes from Mexico, coffee from Ethiopia, wheat in Turkey, potatoes in Peru, soybeans from China, rice from Southeast Asia. These precious areas are now called "Vavilov Centers" and are scoured for wild variants of these key plants to include in agricultural breeding efforts. A brilliant scientist, Valivov traveled to over 65 countries in the 1920s and 1930s to gather over 50,000 seed samples. However, he fell afoul of Stalin and the loony communist science czar Trofim Lysenko; in 1940 he was arrested, and in a morbid scientific irony, died of malnutrition in Saratov prison camp in 1943. In post-Soviet Russia and in the rest of the world where he was never scorned, Valivov is today a true scientific hero.
Valivov's original samples miraculously avoided being eaten by their starving curators during the Siege of Leningrad and became the start of theVavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry in modern-day St. Petersburg. Their current seed collection of 380,000 gene types is by far the largest in the world and a priceless international treasure. However, today this seed collection is under a greater threat today than during World War II. The collapse of Russian economy has left the facility short of qualified staff. Even worse, the Institute has been ordered to evict its current building to make room for government offices and a possible presidential apartment for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In the early 1990s when funding for the Vavilov research centers fell below critical levels, then-U.S. vice president Gore visited the Institute, which was discussed in several pages of his book Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. Gore's later assistance proved invaluable; funds provided later by the U.S. government via the Gore-Primakov Commission were used to buy 165 refrigerating chambers and build six new seed storage facilities. It is impossible to move the latter: They were especially designed to fit the halls on St. Isaac Square and they cannot be disassembled since their thermal plates are permanently welded. If the Institute has to move, the storage facilities will just have to be abandoned. At that point, the seeds within will be at the mercy of the winds of history and human folly.

Европейский космический грузовой корабль Mars Express будет доставлен на космодром Байконур. На его борту будет размещено научное оборудование из Института космических исследований РАН. Запуск планируется на май-июнь 2003 года.

BAIKONUR, Feb 21 (Interfax-Kazakhstan) - The European spacecraft Mars Express will be delivered to the Baikonur launch center on March 19, the European Space Agency's Moscow mission chief Alain Fournier- Sicre told Interfax on Friday.
The launch of Mars Express aboard a Russian Soyuz from Baikonur is planned for May 23.
A source in Baikonur told Interfax that "the launch of Mars Express from Baikonur is planned between May 20 and late June."
In early February, top managers of the Russian-French joint venture Starsem and the Arianespace company, along with representatives from subcontractor organizations, visited Baikonur to examine the preparedness of the space center's infrastructure for the Mars Express program.
Mars Express should reach the Red Planet half a year after launch. The Beagle-2 probe will then land and examine the planet's soil and environment for 180 days, while Mars Express itself surveys the planet from orbit. The spacecraft will bear, in particular, research instruments from the Space Exploration Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Mars Express is the key element in the global Mars exploration program. The satellite will provide radio relay services between Earth and other devices to be delivered to the Martian surface between 2003 and 2007.

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