What a year: From clones to floating frogs

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): They have discovered a technology that doubles the amount of energy a car engine gets out of a liter of petrol. The technique, which uses fuel-cell technology to extract electricity from petrol (gas), was announced by U.S. Energy Secretary Federico Pena in October.

"We have a terrific breakthrough here," said Pena, predicting that non-polluting electric cars powered by these fuel cells could be on the road by 2010.

It's a major engineering development that could slow the greenhouse effect and keep oil prices from going through the roof -- but it's not going to change the world.

Every year sees lots of new technology, new drugs, and new techniques. Much more rarely does a whole new field open up, with the prospect of transforming whole economies and societies. This year, however, we may have seen two such breakthroughs.

One is the advent of practical cloning and genetic modification of animals, with all that implies for reshaping and replicating animals -- and humans too, if we wish to go that way.

In February, scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland revealed the existence of 'Dolly', a sheep grown from a cell taken from her mother's udder.

They all swore blind that they would never clone a human being, of course -- but they did say that it would be technically possible within two years.

In July, Ron James of PPL Therapeutics, the Scottish firm that funded the Roslin research, announced that their next goal was to breed sheep and cows with human DNA who would 'manufacture' key components of human blood in their bodies.

"We know from our work with 'Dolly' that we can create genetically engineered animals from a single cell," he said. "Now we want to use that technology to produce one of the fundamental constituents of the human body."

In the same month, at Juntendo University in Japan, a team led by Yoshinori Kuwabara released pictures of an 'artificial womb' in which they have been bringing premature goat fetuses to term.

"This system should be used on behalf of the mother who cannot keep the fetus in her uterus," said Kuwabara.

"If I have time and money for experiments, maybe within 10 years we will have made the move from animals to humans."

But alert observers noted that the same technique might be used to grow clones from human tissue for use as 'organ banks', without any need for messy wombs and meddlesome mothers.

Frogs

Growing complete human beings, even clones, and then 'harvesting' organs from them would be illegal anywhere on earth. (It's called murder).

But in October Jonathan Slack of Bath University in England announced that he can create headless frog embryos by manipulating certain genes.

The same technique could easily be applied to human beings, he observed -- which might solve the ethical dilemma of growing humans as 'organ banks'.

"It occurred to me that a half-way house could be reached," Slack added. "Instead of growing an intact (human) embryo, you could genetically reprogram the embryo to suppress growth in all the parts of the body except the bits you want, plus a heart and blood circulation."

So when your vital organs start to fail, the doctors may just clone a 'partial embryo' from one of your cells, grow it in a Kuwabara tank, and harvest healthy, rejection-proof new organs from it.

Some people will call it murder, and some won't -- and that's going to be one of the major fault lines of 21st-century politics.

The other big discovery of the year is techniques for canceling, or at least seriously reducing, the pull of gravity.

It began, innocently enough, with a levitating frog. Researchers at the University of Nottingham in England and the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands have discovered that very strong magnetic fields create an opposing magnetic field in organic material.

The two magnetic fields then repel each other -- which caused a frog to float two metres (six feet) in the air.

"It works because it actually distorts the electron orbits in the frog's atoms," explained Peter Main of Nottingham University's physics department.

"That generates a tiny current, which generates a magnetic field in the opposite direction from the main magnet...If the magnetic field pushes the frog away with sufficient force, you overcome gravity and the frog will float."

The magnetic field that lifted the frog -- and grasshoppers, and fish, and plants -- was 16 tesla, a million times more powerful than the earth's natural magnetic field.

But the scientists are already talking of a wider magnet (the field does not need to be stronger) that could lift a human being.

There would be certain uses for such a technology --levitating burn victims, for example -- but for really serious weight- lifting, we need Podkletnov's machine.

Eugene Podkletnov is a Russian physicist who was carrying out tests a few years ago on a rapidly spinning, superconducting ceramic disc enclosed in a low-temperature vessel called a cryostat, when a colleague wandered in smoking a pipe.

The smoke drifted over the cryostat -- and rose vertically to the ceiling.

Einstein

"It was amazing," said Podkletnov. "We couldn't explain it." So they carried out more tests, and found that all objects placed above the spinning disc showed a small drop in weight, as if they were partly shielded from the effects of gravity.

They dropped everything else and went after the new phenomenon, because anti-gravity really would change the world.

Conventional science says that anti-gravity is impossible, but some scientists point to a long-sought side-effect of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, in which spinning objects can distort gravity. It was long assumed, however, that this effect would be far too small to measure in a lab.

With normal materials, the effect is very small, but a Japanese team led by Hideo Hayasaka at Tohoku University has just measured it.

They spun a gyroscope up to 18,000 revolutions per minute, put it in an airtight container, and let it fall through two laser beams about six feet (two meters) apart.

It consistently took about 1/25,000th of a second longer to fall that distance than a non-spinning object. Spinning made it lighter.

That modest effect is not going to lift any spaceships out of the earth's gravity well -- but Ning Li at the University of Alabama suspects that the atoms inside superconductors may magnify the effect enormously.

So does the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which is funding her research. But Podkletnov is still ahead of the pack.

Podkletnov has now moved his research to Tampere University of Technology in Finland, and the latest version of his anti-gravity device produces stunning results.

Objects suspended over it show a 2 percent drop in weight -- and if you hang two of the devices in a vertical line, the weight loss doubles.

And this is not fringe science: Podkletnov's research has been accepted for publication by Britain's Institute of Physics. Podkletnov's anti-gravity generators are 30 centimeters in diameter, and do not consume huge amounts of power.

If two can produce a 4 percent weight loss, what would 50 do? Or 51?

We could be on the brink of a revolution in transport, and above all in space flight: instead of boosting payload into orbit on a hugely expensive and polluting tower of flame, you just remove its weight and float it up.

You could even levitate the clones.