Order of the National Green Tribunal in the matter of In Re: News Item titled "Nayar river is vanishing - a yatra reveals conservation goes beyond science and policy" appearing in ‘The Down To Earth’ dated 03.06.2025. The original application was registered suo-motu based on the news item titled "Nayar …
SWEDISH doctors have developed a painkilling device that can be implanted into the spine to relieve patients suffering from angina pectoris -- pain in the chest brought on by exertion and caused by inadequate blood supply to the heart. Clas Mannheimer and his team from Gothenburg claim the device enables …
CHITTOOR M Habibullah, principal of Osmania Medical College in Hyderabad, and his team of gastroenterologists have demonstrated, for the first time in India, that liver cells from a human foetus, when injected into a patient suffering from liver failure, can help the liver recover. Seven patients, whose livers had failed …
Judicial history was made in India when a Bangalore sessions judge accepted DNA fingerprinting as evidence to convict the accused in a murder case. This is the first time the results of this technique have been accepted as valid proof of crime in an Indian court. Since 1989, the Karnataka …
IF YOUR heart is in the wrong place, perhaps a gene is responsible for it. Researchers have recently identified a gene that plays a major role in deciding whether the internal organs in mice should be assigned to the right or left of the body and this has initiated the …
A SERIOUS error acknowledged recently by AIDS researchers at USA's prestigious Harvard Medical School is being cited as an example of what can happen when scientists rush into clinical trials pleading that the urgency of their work excuses corner-cutting. In the Harvard incident, field trials were held nationally, based on …
FIVE YEARS ago, 52-year-old Don Nelson could barely walk because Parkinson"s disease had reduced him to a cripple. But today, thanks to the foetal-tissue therapy that he underwent in 1988, he is up and about, takes less medication and can once again indulge his passion for wood-carving. The new world …
THE RIGHT Livelihood Award Foundation has rejected criticism about selecting Bangladesh's Gonoshasthaya Kendra and its founder, Zafrullah Chowdhury, for its 1992 award, by the Bangladesh Medical Association (BMA), which claimed the recipients had been engaged in anti-people activities. In a letter to the BMA, the foundation said that for more …
WANT A healthy heart? Then eat a lot of walnuts. Just 28 grams of walnuts a day would be perfect, recommends a recent study that found the nuts to be an excellent source of heart-friendly fatty acids. And, to boot, walnuts do not contain any cholesterol (The Lancet, Vol 341, …
PRAWNS are considered a delicacy in most parts of the world, but not everyone can enjoy eating them for they can cause severe allergic reactions -- pain in the abdomen, nausea, diarrhoea, hives, choking and even death. But now, P V Subba Rao and his colleagues at the Indian Institute …
PERHAPS one of the worst fears a woman harbours is that of getting breast cancer, a justifiable fear for, in USA alone, 46,000 women die every year of breast cancer -- and, this rate is increasing by 1 per cent annually. Despite the vast amounts of time and money pumped …
Medical researchers seem to have worried unduly that their grants from funding agencies would be affected because a fire at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) on April 27 destroyed their research material. S D Seth, head of the pharmacology department at AIIMS, says, "We have received assurances …
THE EFFICACY of azidothymidine (AZT) in delaying the onset of AIDS symptoms is in serious doubt following a three-year study in Europe, which indicates it makes little difference whether AZT treatment starts early or late. The Anglo-French study, called Concorde, found 29 per cent of the volunteers who took AZT …
ALASKAN Eskimos and American Indians were fed radioactive iodine at the height of the Cold War, but the project leader denies it was to learn how well American soldiers could survive in the Arctic. US Senator Frank H Murkowski has called for a federal investigation, stating, "There was no evidence …
AN INDIAN-born biologist, Prafulla K Bajpai, and his colleagues at the University of Dayton, Ohio, have developed a novel drug delivery system that will bypass the harmful side-effects of AZT -- the primary drug used in AIDS treatment. AZT, which is usually taken orally as pills, causes swollen tongues, bleeding …
THE RESURGENCE of infectious bacterial diseases in the developed world is proof that the battle against them is not over. But there has been no corresponding surge in drug research, because multinationals consider large investments in research to be uneconomical (Science, Vol 257, No 5073). Scientists warn against complacence in …
A MALARIA vaccine made in Colombia by synthesising protein segments from the malaria parasite is proving promising in field trials, but its efficacy is still low. Vaccine developer Manuel Patarroyo of the National University of Colombia in Bogota reports the vaccine offers adults 38.8 per cent protection against malaria, but …
SCIENTISTS at the Cancer Research Institute (CRI) in Bombay say they now have the expertise to culture the AIDS virus in the laboratory. "This is a first for the country," adds Robin Mukhopadhyaya, who set up a state-of-the-art AIDS research laboratory at CRI about two-and-a-half years ago. This is considered …
INCREASING the level of oxygen in blood could cure impotency in humans because it would stimulate production of nitric oxide, which causes penile tissue to relax and better engorge blood from the penile artery. This is important because any restriction of oxygen supply to penile tissue because of excessive smoking, …
SCIENTISTS working to develop new Ayurvedic drugs are concentrating on the treatment of memory disorders. Says Sukh Dev, professor of chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, "Ayurveda prescribes several remedies for improving memory and intelligence. Our experiments are validating many of these claims." Sukh Dev and his …
ALBERT Bruce Sabin, developer of oral polio vaccine, has died of heart failure in Washington. He was 86. A prominent figure since the 1930s in research on virus and viral disease, Sabin developed a sweet, cherryred vaccine after 20 years of research. It came into wide use in the first …
