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• Candidate for the Most Intriguing News Report of  2001!
       The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, dateline: Tallinn, Estonia, Jan.29.  Frank Schirrmacher reports on a project of Estonia’s scholarly President Lenhard Meri.  The tiny Baltic nation is creating a genetic data base for 900,000 of country’s 1.5 million population for use by pharmaceutical researchers. [And to generate income for a national foundation!] The idea apparently grew out of Meri’s fascination with evolutionary biology via the work of sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson.  Check out “In Focus: Decoding Humanity”, FAZ English Edition on www.faz.com.
       Estonia is not the only country developing the use of national databases for research. In December 1998, Iceland launched “The Book of Icelanders” which is being used by Hoffman-LaRoche to research a spectrum of disease, including emphysema and Alzheimer’s.
  
• Study Changes Risk Assessment for Radon  
       The National Academy of Sciences in Washington has published a new laboratory study of the effects of low levels of radon, a colorless radioactive gas found in the basements of millions of homes, predicting an increased cancer risk. [Zhou, H. et al. Radiation Risk to Low Fluences of Alpha Particles May be Greater than We Thought. Proc. NAS, 98, 14410 – 14415, 2001.] The gas comes from the decay of uranium that occurs naturally in soil and granite. Gerhard Randers-Pehrson, Columbia University, is quoted by Nature News Service as saying that the “acceptable level of radon” may be changed “by a factor of two”, which he believes could mean a tenfold increase in the number of homes needing attention. [Klarreich, E. Radiation Zaps Bystanders, NNS, 12/4/2001.]
       Jonathan Samet, Johns Hopkins University, who is chair of an NAS committee on radon, told GEE! that much more data is needed to confirm the assessment of increased risk to humans of radon and radon progeny in homes. The study was done on cultured cells. Nevertheless, he believes that the risk and the problem of remediation in homes may be underestimated. Much of the data used in setting environmental limits for radon exposure come from studies of uranium miners, many of which he is the author. Dr. Samet notes that a former major source of concern, from uranium mine tailings in the American West, “has been largely managed.” (Editor’s note: Tailings in the Ore Mountains of Central Europe - Germany’s uranium mines in Saxony and Thuringia, as well as the mines in the Czech Jachymov region – have been largely cleaned up. Tailings from the mines of the former USSR and in other parts of the world are believed to remain dangerous.)
       Dr. Samet also noted that the findings published by the NAS “apply to alpha particle exposures in general” and that “this type of study shores up the evidence base for concern about what some might dismiss as low level exposures.”
       A good source of information on how to control radon gas in home basements: Environmental Protection Agency’s Citizens’ Guide to Radon [www.epa.gov/iaq/pubs/index.html.]
  
• NIEHS Launches Potentially Fruitful Consortium The National Center for Toxicogenomics, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, NC, sponsored Gene Expression and Proteomics in Environmental Health Research,  December 3-4, 2001, at the NIH campus in Bethesda, MD. The symposium was a showcase for the new consortium of NIEHS investigators and collaborating scientists at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Oregon Health and Science University, Duke, and MIT. The symposium will be summarized on http://www.niehs.nih.gov/nct/.
       The agency has awarded more than $37 million to its consortium partners for a broad array of purposes, including the development of techniques for identifying ”individuals with increased susceptibility to environmental agents and/or drugs.” The techniques used by consortium investigators also can assess changes in gene expression in response to environmental stresses and toxicants. Industry, labor, environmental groups and regulators have an interest in using the database that will result from this initiative for environmental risk assessment.
       An important example of the potential for this kind of research is an NIEHS paper, published online by Nature Genetics, November 19, 2001: Genes required for ionizing radiation resistance in yeast, by C.B. Bennett and others currently or formerly with the agency. Yeast cells have been useful for radiation research in the past because they have chromosomes that often have the same or nearly the same sequence of genes as humans, making the microbe a model organism – an early warning system like the coal miner’s canary of yesteryear - useful for laboratory detection of DNA-damaging agents. The authors believe that they have refined a screening tool for identifying sensitivities to anti-cancer drugs and other agents besides radiation. For more information, contact M.A. Resnick: resnick@niehs.nih.gov.