All the same at Heart

Two weeks ago now, I was talking to someone about the sort of work I do (when I’m playing at being a scientist) and she mentioned that she knew someone else who studied rat hearts. She said she thought this was very odd, as surely there can’t be much in common between the heart of a rat and a human heart, so what could there be to learn? I was quite pleased with the response I was able to give so I wanted to put it up here too. 

Not so different really. Sarah Palin helps to demonstrate that we're not actually so different from any other animals. (Images from Therealbs2002 and feastoffun.com)

It’s quite a common misconception that the biology of a human is very different from the biology of any other animals. What can we ever hope to learn from them that would be any good to us? The classic example of this comes from Sarah Palin – that fount of well-informed scientific knowledge – who famously commented that ‘[Tax] dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good — things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.’ I was also reminded of this by the recent story about scientists making a ‘jellyfish’ out of rat heart cells. This sounds like a bit of fun but may actually come to revolutionise heart transplant procedures by allowing us to grow operational heart muscle from just a few cells. More on that later.

SOS: Save our Science - Preventing Pandemic

Hey! I've been busy finishing my first project and after some last minute panicking it's all over and I'm moving on from chickens to yeast, but before I do I wanted to share this new story. A breakthrough in preventing the spread of Bird Flu, that has applications in protecting against a wide range of other viruses. This is the sort of story I've been looking forward to writing for a while, I hope you'll see why.


A group of researchers may have found a way to prevent the spread of bird flu through domestic populations, a revolution which could significantly reduce the risk of humans becoming infected. Not only that, but this technique could be easily used to protect against any viral infection in almost any species. It could even eventually be used to protect ourselves. This method requires no vaccinations and provides life-long protection from a broad range of different avian flu strains.