LONDON (Reuters) - Robert Edwards, a British Nobel prize-winning scientist known as the father of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) for pioneering the development of "test tube babies", died on Wednesday aged 87 after a long illness, his university said.
Edwards, who won the Nobel prize for medicine in 2010, started work on fertilization in the 1950s, and the first so-called test tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in 1978 as a result of his research.
Since then, millions of babies have been born around the world as a result of the techniques Edwards developed together with his late colleague, Patrick Steptoe.
Edwards began his work on fertilization in 1955 and by 1968 had been able to achieve fertilization of a human egg in a laboratory. He then started to collaborate with Steptoe.
Together they founded Bourn Hall, the world's first IVF clinic, in Cambridge, eastern England, in 1980.
Mike Macnamee, chief executive of the Bourn Hall IVF clinic that Edwards co-founded, said he was "one of our greatest scientists" whose inspirational work led to a breakthrough that has enhanced the lives of millions of people worldwide.
Peter Braude, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at King's College London, said few biologists had been able to have such a positive and practical impact on humankind.
"Bob's boundless energy, his innovative ideas, and his resilience despite the relentless criticism by naysayers, changed the lives of millions of ordinary people who now rejoice in the gift of their own child," he said.
"He leaves the world a much better place."
(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
How some leaves got fat: It's the veinsPublic release date: 11-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Orenstein david_orenstein@brown.edu 401-863-1862 Brown University
A "garden variety" leaf is a broad, flat structure, but if the garden happens to be somewhere arid, it probably includes succulent plants with plump leaves full of precious water. Fat leaves did not emerge in the plant world easily. A new Brown University study published in Current Biology reports that to sustain efficient photosynthesis, they required the evolution of a fundamental remodeling of leaf vein structure: the addition of a third dimension.
Leaves, after all, are food factories complete with plumbing to transport water and sugar. The farther those veins are from cells performing photosynthesis, the less efficient the process will be. Researchers Erika Edwards, a professor at Brown, and former graduate student Matt Ogburn, wondered how plants managed to evolve fat leaves, given the hydraulic challenges of gaining girth.
Of all plants, Edwards said, maybe succulents could sustain photosynthesis in fat leaves with sparse venation because they store so much water right where it's needed. But she and Ogburn found that even succulents were constrained by 2D veins.
"There must be some kind of a tradeoff in a fat leaf that's really different from most flat leaves," said lead author Ogburn, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at Yale. "There's a benefit to that in storing water in the leaf, but it's going to have a cost to it in terms of the other things the leaf has to do."
To do their study, Ogburn and Edwards looked deep into the catalog of two dry-climate plant groups, Portulacineae and Molluginaceae. They pieced together their evolutionary history, measured the water storage of 83 species, and the vein structure of 42.
Up to a certain level of thickness, leaves retained the planar vein structure of flat leaves. As a consequence, their vein structure was sparser and path lengths were longer but only up to a point. The researchers discovered that after a certain threshold of thickness, vein structure had evolved to become three dimensional, abandoning the single plane layout of flatter leaves for either an oval or circular orientation in cross-section.
That 3D vein structures independently evolved more than 10 times, in two ways, in just this limited sample of two lineages, suggests that the different vein structure is no coincidence, Ogburn and Edwards said. Instead it seems conclusively to be a functional trait that emerged to allow leaves to become thicker.
"If you had just a 2D-veined pile of species and a 3D-veined pile of species and you didn't know how they were related to each other, you might say, maybe 3D venation just evolved once a long time ago, and had absolutely nothing to do with succulence," Edwards said. "But when you can lay them out on a phylogeny and reconstruct how many times this transition happened- the more times you see this repeated correlation between these two traits the more power you have to say that this is actually adaptive."
The researchers wrote that 2D arrangements of veins, because they produce a low density of veins in thicker leaves, likely imposed a hard limit on leaf thickness. Evolution of 3D veins allowed them to burst through those constraints.
"Increased leaf thickness [when veins are planar] negates the hydraulic benefits of dense leaf venation," Edwards and Ogburn wrote in Current Biology. "It also predicts an upper limit to leaf thickness that would be set by the minimal functional vein density However, the repeated evolution of 3D venation allowed for further increases in succulence while maintaining moderate hydraulic path lengths."
In other words, leaves became free to be fat, in an evolutionary vein.
###
The National Science Foundation supported the research with grant DEB-1026611.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
How some leaves got fat: It's the veinsPublic release date: 11-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Orenstein david_orenstein@brown.edu 401-863-1862 Brown University
A "garden variety" leaf is a broad, flat structure, but if the garden happens to be somewhere arid, it probably includes succulent plants with plump leaves full of precious water. Fat leaves did not emerge in the plant world easily. A new Brown University study published in Current Biology reports that to sustain efficient photosynthesis, they required the evolution of a fundamental remodeling of leaf vein structure: the addition of a third dimension.
Leaves, after all, are food factories complete with plumbing to transport water and sugar. The farther those veins are from cells performing photosynthesis, the less efficient the process will be. Researchers Erika Edwards, a professor at Brown, and former graduate student Matt Ogburn, wondered how plants managed to evolve fat leaves, given the hydraulic challenges of gaining girth.
Of all plants, Edwards said, maybe succulents could sustain photosynthesis in fat leaves with sparse venation because they store so much water right where it's needed. But she and Ogburn found that even succulents were constrained by 2D veins.
"There must be some kind of a tradeoff in a fat leaf that's really different from most flat leaves," said lead author Ogburn, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at Yale. "There's a benefit to that in storing water in the leaf, but it's going to have a cost to it in terms of the other things the leaf has to do."
To do their study, Ogburn and Edwards looked deep into the catalog of two dry-climate plant groups, Portulacineae and Molluginaceae. They pieced together their evolutionary history, measured the water storage of 83 species, and the vein structure of 42.
Up to a certain level of thickness, leaves retained the planar vein structure of flat leaves. As a consequence, their vein structure was sparser and path lengths were longer but only up to a point. The researchers discovered that after a certain threshold of thickness, vein structure had evolved to become three dimensional, abandoning the single plane layout of flatter leaves for either an oval or circular orientation in cross-section.
That 3D vein structures independently evolved more than 10 times, in two ways, in just this limited sample of two lineages, suggests that the different vein structure is no coincidence, Ogburn and Edwards said. Instead it seems conclusively to be a functional trait that emerged to allow leaves to become thicker.
"If you had just a 2D-veined pile of species and a 3D-veined pile of species and you didn't know how they were related to each other, you might say, maybe 3D venation just evolved once a long time ago, and had absolutely nothing to do with succulence," Edwards said. "But when you can lay them out on a phylogeny and reconstruct how many times this transition happened- the more times you see this repeated correlation between these two traits the more power you have to say that this is actually adaptive."
The researchers wrote that 2D arrangements of veins, because they produce a low density of veins in thicker leaves, likely imposed a hard limit on leaf thickness. Evolution of 3D veins allowed them to burst through those constraints.
"Increased leaf thickness [when veins are planar] negates the hydraulic benefits of dense leaf venation," Edwards and Ogburn wrote in Current Biology. "It also predicts an upper limit to leaf thickness that would be set by the minimal functional vein density However, the repeated evolution of 3D venation allowed for further increases in succulence while maintaining moderate hydraulic path lengths."
In other words, leaves became free to be fat, in an evolutionary vein.
###
The National Science Foundation supported the research with grant DEB-1026611.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
A Georgia man who held four firefighters hostage on Wednesday died during the rescue effort. One of the firefighters was injured. The man took the hostages in an attempt to have his utility services restored. His home was in foreclosure.?
By David Beasley,?Reuters / April 10, 2013
An EMT works in the back of an ambulance as it leaves an Suwanee, Ga., subdivision after an explosion and gunshots were heard near the scene where a man held four firefighters hostage Wednesday. A police spokesman said the suspect was dead and none of the hostages suffered serious injuries.
AP Photo/John Bazemore
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A gunman who held four Georgia?firefighters hostage on Wednesday, demanding his utilities and cell phone service be restored, was killed after an exchange of gunfire with authorities who moved in to free the captives, police said.
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An officer was wounded and the firefighters, taken hostage after responding to what had appeared to be a medical call, suffered minor injuries during the rescue at a suburban?Atlanta?home,?Gwinnett County police?spokesman?Edwin Ritter?told a news conference.
The man, whom police have not identified, apparently had been in financial troubles and demanded his power, cable television and cell phone service be restored, Ritter said.
"He wanted all those things turned back on," Ritter said. "That's why he was holding them hostage."
The gunman had initially also held a fifth firefighter captive in the home in Suwanee, about 35 miles (56 km) northeast of?Atlanta, but let that person leave to move a fire truck, police and fire department officials said.
Property records show the home is owned by Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, and a Freddie Mac spokesman confirmed to WSB-TV that the property was in foreclosure.
A SWAT unit entered the house after deciding the lives of the firefighters were in imminent danger, Ritter said.
During the rescue effort, the firefighters received superficial wounds from an explosive device used to disorient the suspect, and an officer sustained a non-life-threatening gunshot wound to the arm or hand, Ritter said.
The police spokesman could not immediately say whether the suspect died as a result of gunshots by law enforcement or a self-inflicted wound.
"This is the result of his actions," Ritter said. "We didn't want it this way but he was calling the shots, and this was the end result."
The hostage situation, which lasted several hours, drew dozens of police cars and fire engines on Wednesday afternoon to a well-groomed neighborhood of mostly two-story homes that neighbors described as safe and quiet.
Sounds of an explosion followed by a series of gunshots rattled the community as the stand-off came to an end.
"There was a giant explosion that shook my house. Then there was a second what seemed like a smaller one and then there was several semi-automatic gunfire exchanges. And then it was done," neighbor?Wesley Gossan?told CNN.
"Thirty seconds later I knew everything was OK because the guys walked out. They took the hard hats off and I just assumed everything was OK," he added.
(Additional reporting and writing by Colleen Jenkins in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Editing by Cynthia Johnston, Steve Orlofsky, Paul Simao and Lisa Shumaker)
Google to begin connection Austinites to gigabit services by mid-2014
Good news for residents of Austin, Texas -- your city is next on the list for Google Fiber roll-out. The gigabit cable service, which first launched in Kansas City last year, is set to become available to homes in Austin by mid-2014. Austinites will have the same choice of services open to Google Fiber subscribers elsewhere -- gigabit internet access, gigabit internet plus Google Fiber TV, or free internet access. Pricing, Google says, will be "similar" to that of Kansas City, which offers the internet-only package for $70 per month, or internet-plus-TV for $120. (There's also a free internet deal for $300 up-front or $25 per month for 12 months.)
Announcing the news alongside Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell, Google called the city "a mecca for creativity and entrepreneurialism."
The company says it's focusing its efforts on the Austin city limits for now, and will announce specific neighborhoods and boundaries at a later date.
If you live in Austin, hit the comments and make yourself know.
LONDON (Reuters) - James Crosby, former boss of failed British bank HBOS, offered on Tuesday to give up his knighthood and nearly a third of his pension after being denounced by lawmakers for the "colossal failure" that led to his bank's collapse.
Crosby, whose bank had to be bailed out by taxpayers in 2008, effectively volunteered for the same punishment as that visited on Fred Goodwin, former head of Royal Bank of Scotland, the other large Scottish bank bailed out after the 2008 financial crisis. Goodwin's knighthood was stripped last year and he gave up part of his pension in 2009.
Crosby becomes the first person to voluntarily give up a knighthood for almost a century. He said 30 percent of his 580,000 pound a year pension would either be returned to shareholders or given to charity.
"In view of what has happened subsequently to HBOS, I believe that it is right that I should now ask the appropriate authorities to take the necessary steps for its removal," he said of his knighthood in a statement on Tuesday.
The government was clearly pleased with the decision. A Treasury spokesman said: "This must be a matter for an individual's conscience, but the Government believes it is right that this decision has been reached."
Crosby, 57, was awarded his knighthood shortly after stepping down as HBOS chief executive in 2006.
The bank did not collapse until two years after he left it, but a report on Friday by the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards (PCBS) put the blame squarely on him and two other former bosses for the decisions that wrecked it.
The report said Crosby had so badly run the bank that it would have failed even without the 2008 financial crisis.
John Mann, a Labour lawmaker who has been a critic of Crosby during hearings into the banking crisis, welcomed Crosby's decision to accept blame and suggested it set an example to other failed bankers.
"At last we have a banker who is prepared to say he got it wrong and wishes to make amends," Mann said.
A knighthood is one of the highest honours an individual in Britain can achieve. A committee recommends the honour to the Prime Minister and then to the Queen.
The last person to give up a knighthood voluntarily was Nobel Prize-winning Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore, who renounced his in 1919 in protest against the Amritsar massacre when British troops killed hundreds of civilians. Others to have been stripped of the honours include Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu and former spy Anthony Blunt.
"SET THE COURSE FOR DISASTER"
The PCBS, tasked with finding ways to reform Britain's banks, said Crosby had been the "architect of the strategy that set the course for disaster" at HBOS.
Crosby set the strategy that saw HBOS lose billions of pounds from reckless lending to companies and a disastrous expansion into Ireland and Australia. After its bailout by the state, the bank was acquired by rival Lloyds Banking Group.
Crosby said the report was "very chastening reading" and he was "deeply sorry for what happened at HBOS and the ensuing consequences for former colleagues, shareholders, taxpayers and society in general".
Crosby's pre-emptive action means he effectively volunteers to share the fate of Goodwin, whose knighthood and lavish pension became a focus of public anger and attracted venomous denunciations from politicians after the financial meltdown.
Crosby said he would discuss with the pension scheme's trustees how the reduction in his pension would be implemented and if the amount waived should go to support good causes or benefit shareholders.
Under his proposal, he would still receive 406,000 pounds a year, to add to almost 8 million pounds he was paid during his tenure as HBOS's chief executive.
He said his pension had been built up over his 30 year career, including 12 years at Halifax and HBOS, and was "entirely contractual in nature".
Compass Group, the world's biggest catering company said late Tuesday Crosby decided to step down as non-executive director, with immediate effect.
Crosby resigned as an adviser to private equity firm Bridgepoint on Friday. He remains the chairman of Moneybarn, a small West Sussex company that lends to people with a bad credit history.
Moneybarn declined to comment.
After leaving HBOS, Crosby advised former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and became deputy chairman of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), stepping down from that role in February 2009 after criticism of his role at HBOS.
(Additional reporting by Kate Holton and David Milliken; Editing by Peter Graff, Bernard Orr)
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Public release date: 11-Apr-2013
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