July 16, 2009 –
Karen Allen
Did you know:
• The first international guidelines to address the protection of human research subjects were developed in response to crimes committed by the Nazis during World War II?
• Fractals – geometrical structures whose shape appears the same regardless of the level of magnification used to view them – are nature’s favorite design motif and could provide a model for vastly superior biosensors, batteries and fuel cells?
These and other interesting tidbits were presented to SURF-IT students and guests at this week’s installment of the summer research program’s lunchtime seminar series. Karen Allen (UCI’s Office of Research Administration), addressed human subject research, while engineering professor Marc Madou talked about improving microstructures, and lessons learned from a worm species.
Allen, director of human research protection, addressed the history and principles of protecting research subjects from physical, psychological or social harm. The Nuremberg Code, developed in 1947 in response to Nazi war crimes committed in the name of research, introduced several concepts still used by institutional review boards charged with protecting subjects’ rights and welfare. They include informed consent without coercion and ensuring that risks to participants never outweigh the benefits to research, she said.
Policies rooted in history
Today’s policies of protection also had roots in another historical event. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which began in 1932, was supposed to last six months. It actually lasted 40 years, during which time participants had no way to opt out and were denied treatment that could have cured them.
When those details came to light in the early 1970s, Congress wrote the National Research Act, which passed in 1974. That generated the Belmont Report, which contained three ethical principles now required in all human research – respect for persons, beneficence and justice.
Allen also detailed different levels of review and of informed consent, both of which are based on the risk present in the research. Some informed consent can be verbal, she said, while others can contain 20 pages of information.
She urged student researchers to talk to their faculty advisors and investigate the Office of Research Administration department web site at: http://www.research.uci.edu/ora/hrpp/index.htm for more information.
Marc Madou
Improving Micro-engineering
Madou had already piqued the audience’s curiosity by calling his talk “Fractals in Nature and Technology, and Worms in CDs.” The Chancellor’s Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering first explained why fractals – nature’s design of choice – could improve technology.
Because of their design, he said, fractals maximize surface area and complete their work with a minimum of effort. He cited the human heart and lungs, as well as trees and snowflakes as examples.
If scientists could mimic the design of fractals, they could build biomedical devices smaller than anything available today. But these structures are extremely difficult to build in the lab.
The answer lies in heating polymers to extremely high temperatures without oxygen so that they can be formed into structures. Using photo-resist lithography, polymers are spun onto a substrate, making a metal plate about 100-200 microns thick. Light is shined on the plates through a mask and when it strikes the polymers, Madou said, it hardens the material into structures. Then the polymers are pyrolized (brought to extremely high temperature), which changes them into carbons. Madou said his group is a world leader in manufacturing these tiny carbon structures that can then be assembled into fractals.
Growing Worms in Space
Changing course drastically, he then shared with the group research that led to a paper he published in the Journal of Genetics last year. The work, originally contracted by NASA, involved spinning tiny worms called C. elegans, which are about 2 millimeters long, onto a compact disc. The worms, which were the only creatures to survive the space shuttle Columbia disaster, provide valuable information on aging and other reactions in space, Madou said, and NASA was looking for ways to grow them in orbit.
He formatted a CD with separate chambers in which to grow the worms, feed them and eliminate waste material. Spinning the CD creates centrifugal forces which allow fluids to move from one chamber to another. The worms are fed E. coli and when the disc is spun, the waste is eliminated. The discs have room for several distinct colonies, allowing researchers to vary conditions in their experiments. And because they are self-replicating, one worm can generate 1,000 worms in a matter of days.
An additional experiment involved controlling the revolutions per minute – which on a CD is about 7,000. These revolutions increase the G forces, allowing scientists to study the worms’ genetics and physiology in hyper-gravity. Madou said the worms’ sense of smell, response, appetite, and muscle structure remained intact at 100 Gs. “You can see these are damn strong worms,” he said, displaying his results.
But researchers determined the worms were accumulating fat, leading to the deduction that they were stressed by the hyper-gravity. Prozac, however, reversed the physiological signs of stress, and because the worms share certain physiological processes with humans, they could be used to study new drugs, Madou concluded.
Karen Allen’s audio; presentation
Marc Madou’s audio
