Friday 14 December 2007

A few blips of science (reader discretion warned)

Here are a few oddish blips to ponder (Reader discretion is advised):
  • Recognize the sheep above? Well it is not an ordinary sheep. It is 15% human, having a sheep body and half-human organs. It is the result of £5million and 7 years of research by Professor Esmail Zanjani of the University of Nevada. He created the sheep by injecting cells from human adults into the fetus of sheep. In the future, he hopes to use these sheep for organ transplants. He would inject stem cells from a donor's bone marrow into a sheep fetus, and in two months there would be a transplantable liver, lung and brain. Source
  • Twins are either identical or fraternal, right? Wrong. There is a pair of semi-identical twins. They are identical on their mother's side but only half-identical on their father's side. This means that two sperms fertilized one egg which split. While one of the children is male, the other one is a hermaphrodite, with "both ovarian and testicular tissue." However, genetically, both children have some male and female cells. While their identities are anonymous, they are reported to be healthy and happy toddlers in the US. Source
  • Surgeon Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov, chief of the organ-transplanting laboratory of the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences, ran experiments. In one, he transplanted the head and forelegs of a puppy onto the neck of an adult dog. The puppy "kept its own personality," lapping up milk and yelping. The adult dog first tried to shake the puppy off of its neck, but soon grew reconciled. They both died after 6 days, but other dogs in his series of experiments stayed alive for 2 1/2 months. Here is a movie clip that shows his experiment. Source.
  • The above scientist inspired a US scientist Dr. White who attached the living brain of one dog to the neck of another dog. the brain stayed alive for several days prompting the question: With the brain being alive, what was it experiencing? Mr. White then moved on to head transplants using rhesus monkeys. While the head acted on its own, it was impossible to connect all the nerve threads, so it was paralyzed from the neck down. He predicted that in the future, brain dead patients could donate their bodies for the heads of paraplegics. Source
  • Researching LSD in 1962, the psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West and Chester M Pierce of the University of Oklahoma injected LSD into a male elephant. they believed that LSD would make an elephant go into musth: a condition where elephants "run berserk for a period of about two weeks, during which time {they] may attack or attempt to attack anything in [their] path." They gave a male elephant named Tusko enough LSD for 3,000 people. Sensing Tusko's distress, his mate rushed to his side and tried to support the swaying elephant. 5 minutes later, Tusko collapsed, and approximately 2 hours later he was dead. West and Pierce's take: "It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD - a finding which may prove to be valuable in elephant-control work in Africa." Source
  • In the 1930s, Robert Cornish of the University of California tried to use seesaws to raise the dead. Injecting adrenaline and anti-coagulants into fox terriers he named Lazarus, 6 minutes after their death he would place them on a seesaw. While some did revive, they experienced blindness and brain damage before dying again within a few hours. He moved on to trying to revive 3 men dead for 5-6 hours. He had no luck. Source.

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