AfterTek

If your hungry try some cloned food. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reportedly ready to approve the sale of milk and meat from cloned animals. The FDA said it has determined such food products pose no risks to consumers. An evaluation said that the food from cloned animals is as safe as the food we eat every day.

Supporters say cloned animals will become a very lucrative market for farmers and will give consumers a level of food consistency and quality that has been impossible to attain from conventional breeding.

American scientists Andrew Fire and Craig Mello won the 2006 Nobel Prize for medicine. Their discovery of how to switch off genes, a potential way to new treatments for diseases from AIDS to blindness and cancer.

Through experiments with worms, the two showed that a double strand of ribonucleic acid, or RNA, the genetic messenger of the cell, can “silence” targeted genes in a process known as RNA interference (RNAi).RNAi has grown quickly into a hot area of research for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, who see it as a promising way of tackling a range of conditions.

Scientists have found a way to trick cancer cells into committing suicide. The novel technique potentially offers an effective method of providing personalized anti-cancer therapy.

Most living cells contain a protein called procaspase-3, which, when activated, changes into the executioner enzyme caspase-3 and initiates programmed cell death, called apoptosis. In cancer cells, however, the signaling pathway to procaspase-3 is broken. As a result, cancer cells escape destruction and grow into tumors.