Journalist
In the United States, the battle over genetically modified crops is over. Much of America’s corn, soybean and cotton production is genetically modified. Farmers across the country’s corn belt in the midwest benefit from good harvests. But, they are also making themselves increasingly dependent on the seed producers. One name is sticking out: Monsanto. A report for Deutsche Welle TV.
The German version can be found here.
Einsturzgefährdete Endlager und strahlendes sowjetisches Kriegsgerät: Wie soll man mit den strahlenden Abfällen aus ziviler und militärischer Nutzung umgehen? Wie werden sie entsorgt, und wie kann man sie sicher lagern? Abenteuer Wissen war im russischen Militärhafen Murmansk und bei einem Geologenteam in der Schweiz auf der Suche nach dem idealen Endlager.
A feature on the fate of Soviet nuclear submarines and how to store radioactive waste for ZDF’s Abenteuer Wissen strand.
A special on modern slavery for Deutsche Welle TV. Watch for an interview with book author Benjamin Skinner as well as reports on the Wage Watch programme in New York and human trafficking in Moldova. The German version can be found here.
More information on Benjamin Skinner and his book A crime so monstrous here.
It was a present that could not be refused. When the late dictator of Zaire, General Mobutu, offered two chimpanzees to the Belgian king, the primates were flown to Brussels where they were promptly seized by customs officials and sent to a primate centre in the Netherlands. Or so the story goes. Fact is, that one of the chimpanzees, Noah, still came to fame: though infected with the chimpanzee version of HIV, he never developed AIDS. Noah (and three other naturally infected chimpanzees) made the whole scientific community believe that chimpanzees are actually immune to SIV, the chimp correlate to HIV-1, the most common form of the immunodeficiency virus in humans. Noah is still alive. But a paper in this week’s journal Nature marks Noah as the odd one out by presenting compelling evidence that wild-living chimps do in fact succumb to AIDS.
Beatrice Hahn, a virologist at the University of Alabama is frequently referred to as “the faecal queen.” It’s a title she is rightfully proud of. She and her team developed non-invasive techniques by which SIV infection can be established analysing faecal and urine samples alone. In a series of publications Hahn not only showed that HIV-1 originated in chimpanzees; she also identified the location in south-eastern Cameroon where the original transmission must have taken place some one hundred years ago.
These findings made Hahn direct her attention to the chimpanzees of Gombe, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania. Not only were there wild-living chimps accustomed to human presence. But also the opportunity to follow SIV-positive chimpanzees throughout their lives. What Hahn and her co-workers have found over the last nine years took HIV researchers by surprise: those chimpanzees infected with SIV were 10-16 times more likely to die in any year than those who remained uninfected.
Now chimps die of many causes. They are territorial animals and males frequently get injured or die during inter-group conflict. The Tanzanian Park Service wanted to know which other events might kill a chimp. Together with the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, they decided to set up a health monitoring system. It was a lucky co-incidence. Now the observational data of SIV-positive chimps could be matched with tissue samples.
The results were depressing: infected mothers were less likely to conceive children. Those children in return had a very low chance of survival. The disease weakened adults and one individual died of AIDS-like symptoms. Post-mortem tissue analysis of SIV-positive chimps showed damage to lymph nodes and massive loss of CD4 cells, a vital component of the immune system. These are the telltale signs of AIDS.
Hahn, who admits to having subscribed to the idea that chimps are immune to AIDS, was taken aback. Yet she is keen to point out that the belief was based on two chimps worldwide, Noah being one of them. “There was no way of getting at the data,” Hahn says. “So what are you gonna do? People simply made an assumption, including myself.”
Jonathan Heeney, a virologist at the University of Cambridge, England, thinks it might be premature to extend these finding to all wild-living chimps. Heeney has followed Noah for twenty years. And although there are signs that his CD4 count is going down, Noah still seems to be healthy. In fact his only problem right now is that his cage mates started to ignore him.
But Heeney stresses that the non-invasive methods employed in this study can now be extended to other wild-living chimps accustomed to human presence. Combining the status of infection with longitudinal behavioural data may eventually solve the puzzle.
So what is bad news for chimps, might be a ray of hope for humans. In chimps as in humans each individual reacts differently to the virus. Some are wasted quickly; others seem to be resistant (Noah probably being one of those lucky few). Comparing the genetic markers in disease progression between chimps and humans might lead to insightful new ways in battling the disease.
It may be the biggest mystery in human history: why, after some 160 000 years of pretty dull existence, human culture began to take off? Our tools and weapons became ever more sophisticated, we began to engage in long-distance trade and art.
Was Kubrick right? Or can more earthly factors explain the enigma of the neolithic transition? Additional reporting for the Economist magazine.
