Can a Chemotherapy Drug 'Turn Back the Clock' in Women's Ovaries

It's generally thought that women are born with a finite number of egg cells, and cannot grow new ones. But in a new study, researchers got a surprise when they found that women undergoing a particular chemotherapy had a much greater number of eggs in their ovaries than expected.

The reason for the finding isn't clear, but it suggests that the chemotherapy may spur the development of new eggs, the researchers say.

If confirmed, it would be the first time that scientists have seen new egg cells formed in adult women. And understanding exactly how this happens could aid in the development of fertility treatments that allow women to produce more eggs, the researchers said.

However, the researchers caution that the study was small, and the findings do not prove that the chemotherapy treatment caused the production of new eggs. In addition, it's not clear whether the greater number of eggs seen in these women after the chemotherapy treatment would help with their fertility. In fact, another part of the study found that the eggs from these women didn't grow as well in a lab dish, compared to eggs from healthy women. [Conception Misconceptions: 7 Fertility Myths Debunked]

"This study involves only a few patients, but its findings were consistent and its outcome may be significant and far-reaching," study researcher Evelyn Telfer, a professor at the University of Edinburgh's School of Biological Sciences, said in a statement. "We need to know more about how this drug combination acts on the ovaries, and the implications of this."

New eggs?

Women are born with all of the eggs they will use in their lifetimes, but the eggs need to mature inside structures called follicles. Typically, one follicle matures each month, and releases an egg. As women age, the number of follicles in their ovaries declines, which reduces their chances of pregnancy.

Some cancer treatments accelerate the loss of follicles, and thus hurt a women's fertility. But other cancer treatments don't seem to have an effect on fertility.

In the new study, the researchers originally set out to examine why a common chemotherapy treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma (a cancer of white blood cells) doesn't appear to affect fertility. The treatment is a combination of four chemotherapy drugs — adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine and dacarbazine — or ABVD for short.

The researchers analyzed samples of ovarian tissue donated by 8 women who had undergone ABVD, 3 women who had undergone a different type of chemotherapy and 12 healthy women around the same age.

Women who received the ABVD treatment had a much greater number of immature follicles in their ovaries —up to 10 times higher in some cases — than healthy women and those who'd received the other chemotherapy, the study found. Women who'd received ABVD also had a much greater number of follicles than would be expected based on their age.

The follicles in ABVD group also appeared younger — similar to those seen in girls before they go through puberty.

When the researchers tried to grow the follicle in a lab dish, those from the ABVD group didn't grow as well as those from the other two groups - only about 20 percent of follicles from the ABVD group showed growth, compared to 42 to 46 percent in the other two groups, the study found. This limited follicle development is also comparable to what's seen in prepubescent girls, the researchers said.

Future research

The researchers speculate that the ABVD treatment may active stem cells within the ovary to produce new eggs.

"It could be that the harshness of the treatment triggers some kind of shock effect or perturbation which stimulates the stem cells into producing new eggs," Telfer told the Telegraph.

But there could be other explanations, including that the egg follicles were damaged during treatment and split into two or more parts, David Albertini, laboratory director at the Center for Human Reproduction in New York, told the Guardian.

Future studies will examine the effect of each of the four chemotherapy drugs separately, to better understand the mechanism that may be leading to an increased number of follicles, the researchers said.

The study was published online Dec. 5 in the journal Human Reproduction.

California's Long Drought Has Killed 100 Million Trees

The lingering drought in California has killed more than 100 million trees, according to the U.S. Forest Service's latest aerial survey.

The recent death count found that 62 million trees have died just this year in California, bringing the six-year total to more than 102 million. More than five years of drought are to blame for the tree deaths, scientists said, adding that tree "fatalities" increased by 100 percent in 2016. While die-off is expected under drought conditions, the rate of the forests' death is faster than scientists expected, according to U.S. Forest Service (USFS) officials.

The agency said that millions of additional trees are expected to die in the coming months and years. California's drought has affected 7.7 million acres of forests, putting the region's whole ecology at risk, the scientists said.

"These dead and dying trees continue to elevate the risk of wildfire, complicate our efforts to respond safely and effectively to fires when they do occur, and pose a host of threats to life and property across California," U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said in a statement.

With more dead trees in forests, wildfires have a "fuel buildup" that could lead to large, unpredictable fires, Vilsack said. California has experienced longer, hotter fire seasons in recent years, and USFS scientists said that they expect tree mortality to continue at elevated levels in 2017.

The fight against wildfires and the need for other safety measures have also taken a toll on the USFS budget. In the 2016 fiscal year, California redirected $43 million to drought and wildfire restoration, and 56 percent of the USFS' total budget last year was used for fire management, the agency said. The USFS anticipates a rise to 67 percent by 2025, officials added.  

Limited budget resources and a changing climate have hampered the USFS' ability to address tree mortality, according to Forest Service officials. "We must fund wildfire suppression like other natural disasters in the country," Vilsack said.

A majority of the 102 million dead trees are located in just 10 counties in California, in the southern and central Sierra Nevada region. However, tree mortality is increasing in northern areas as well, the agency said.

The drought conditions, along with a rise in bark beetle infestations and warmer temperatures, led to such historic levels of tree die-off that California Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in October 2015. The unprecedented tree die-off also resulted in the formation of a Tree Mortality Task Force, which is focused on the safe removal of dead and dying trees.

"California is facing the worst epidemic of tree mortality in its modern history," Brown said in a letter to Vilsack in 2015. "A crisis of this magnitude demands action on all fronts."

Secret Spies, Sunken Ships: 9 Pearl Harbor Mysteries Explained

Pearl Harbor science

Although 75 years have passed since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, many details of the event remain shrouded in mystery and debate. Even so, historical researchers and scientists have been able to shed light on at least some of the many lingering questions. Here are nine stories of secrets and science from the "date which will live in infamy."

Will Artificial Intelligence Be the Next Einstein

SAN FRANCISCO – Forget the Terminator. The next robot on the horizon may be wearing a lab coat.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already helping scientists form testable hypotheses that enable experts to run real experiments, and the technology may soon be poised to help businesses make decisions, one scientist says.

However, that doesn't mean the machines will be taking over from humans entirely. Instead, humans and machines have complementary skillsets, so AI could help researchers with the work they already do, Laura Haas, a computer scientist and director of the IBM Research Accelerated Discovery Lab in San Jose, California, said here Wednesday (Dec. 7) at the Future Technologies Conference.

"The machine will come to be a strong partner to humans," akin to the android Data on the TV series "Star Trek: The Next Generation," Haas said.

Big Data

Though many people fear a future where our robot overlords surpass humans in almost every capacity, in reality, machines have long outpaced mere mortals at many tasks, such as doing incredibly fast mathematical computations. But this dominance is nowhere clearer than in the realm of Big Data.

"Global scientific output doubles every nine years; 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone; 2.5 exabytes of data are created every day," Haas said. (An exabyte is equivalent to 1 billion gigabytes.)

In the competition between man and machine, computers are the undisputed winners at processing and assimilating all this information, Haas said.

Angel of death

After IBM's Watson trounced Ken Jennings in "Jeopardy!", Dr. Olivier Lichtarge, a molecular biologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, contacted Haas' group to see if similar technology could help him in his research.

Lichtarge was looking at a specific gene, called p53, which is dubbed the cell's "angel of death," Haas said. The gene helps direct the cell through its life cycle and kills aging or damaged cells. In about 50 percent of cancer cases, there is some problem with how p53 is functioning, Haas added. What's more, research had revealed that certain molecules, called kinases, played a key role in the functioning of p53.

But, there were more than 70,000 scientific papers written about this gene, and 5,000 new studies are cropping up each year. A lab assistant could never read all the literature to identify good kinase candidates, so Lichtarge asked the group to build a program that could read through the existing literature and then identify molecules that might act as kinases to p53.

The AI assistant scanned through hordes of medical abstracts from studies published before 2004, and identified nine different kinase molecules that were potentially affecting the activity of p53.

In the ensuing decade, other researchers had identified seven of those molecules as kinases. Two, however, were never mentioned in all of the literature.

"They went off and tried to do some experimentation in the lab," Haas said. "About a year later, we had proof both in vivo and in vitro experimentation that these two were kinases."

Of course, Watson isn't yet up to the level of a brilliant and trained research scientist. In this instance, AI was used to tackle a narrow, straightforward problem that was very well posed, and it also benefited from a wealth of scientific data, Haas said.

What Is a 'Self'? Here Are All the Possibilities

Robert Lawrence Kuhn is the creator, writer and host of "Closer to Truth," a public television series and online resource that features the world's leading thinkers exploring humanity's deepest questions. This essay, the final of a four-part series on the Self, is based on "Closer to Truth" episodes and videos, produced and directed by Peter Getzels and streamed at closertotruth.com. Kuhn contributed it to Live Science's Expert Voices.

Below is Part IV of a four-part series on the self. Part I: Is Your 'Self' Just an Illusion?;  Part II: Can Your 'Self' Survive Death?; and Part III: Does Your 'Self' Have a Soul?

After speaking with multiple philosophers about the realm of possibilities that could explicate, enhance or eliminate the "self," I am able to sum up this broad, yet well-sculpted landscape with 10 possible explanations.

At one extreme, the self is just a made-up construct that arises from our complex brains interacting with its environment.

At the other extreme, you have or are a "self," and though science may not be able to prove it, something strange — perhaps something nonphysical or supernatural — is going on that points to the existence of a "thing" — let's call it a spirit or a soul — that goes beyond the physical realm and could even survive the death of your fleshy body. [10 Phenomena That Science Can't Explain]

I confessed to British philosopher Colin McGinn that the more I try to explain the self, the more I'm pushed to opposite extremes.

McGinn agreed. "We seem to be driven toward the supernatural, irreducibility view to avoid the eliminative view where there isn't any such thing as the self. You can oscillate from one to the other," he recognized, then reminded me, "They can't both be true, of course. The reason you feel that you have the irreducible ego, the transcendent thing that can survive death, or you eliminate the self altogether, is because you just don't know what the self is."  

[All quotes are derived from "Closer to Truth."]

Philosopher John Searle of the University of California, Berkeley, asked, "How is it possible to explain behavior without giving causally sufficient conditions?"

He continued, "I can tell whom I voted for in the last election and give my reasons. But they don't determine my vote. I could have had those reasons and still have voted for the other guy. It was up to me. But how is that intelligible? I think you can make sense of that only if you suppose that there is a self that makes a reason effective by deciding to act on it. Now, that's not a 'substantive self' because there is no experience of the self. But, in order to make sense of rational conscious behavior you have to postulate a point from which that behavior comes."

The "Self Landscape"

I am intrigued by the radical diversity of views of the self, and I am eager to organize them into a kind of taxonomy, which I call "The Self Landscape." This taxonomy type of thinking helps me to understand complex concepts: First, I lay out a spectrum of possibilities, then I categorize them, and then see how they articulate, or connect to each other. My objective here is not so bold as to try to answer the deep question of your "self," but rather to try to give confidence that whatever that answer may be, it is included somewhere in The Self Landscape. Such inclusion is not trivial; one must work to embed all (rational) possibilities. [The 10 Biggest Mysteries of the Mind]

My claim, which should be uncontroversial, is that there is a direct relationship between the nature of self and the cause of consciousness — because the self, in essence, is a kind of higher-order consciousness.

In this "landscape," I have come up with 10 categories of possible explanations for your "self":

1. Illusion: The self is not real; it is an artificial construct of competing neural systems seeking to make sense of myriad streams of inner information — a trick of the brain.

2. Phenomenal subjectivity:The self is real in that the subject has authentic felt experiences that compose a coherent whole, but the self remains the product of brain neurophysiology and neurochemistry functioning much as we know it (with nothing else needed, certainly nothing exotic).

3. Patterns of information:The self is a highly complex, highly particular array of properties and relationships that can be expressed in some kind of formalized manner (perhaps featuring causal connections and perhaps reproducible beyond biological brains in artificial brains — meaning the self could be uploaded into a nonbiological substrate).

4. Weak emergence:The self is the product of interacting brain mechanisms, both at the microscopic neuronal level and at the macroscopic brain systems level. Given future neuroscience, eventually the self will be predictable from the brain alone; in other words, brain activity alone could still explain the self entirely.

5. Strong emergence:The self is a profoundly new thing that comes into existence as a product of underlying brain activities alone, but no matter how advanced neuroscience becomes, the self can never be predicted from these underlying brain activities, not even in principle.

6. Existential unity: The self is an existentially unified whole in that its parts are incapable of separate existence, and that successive mental states of the same self are inextricably bound through some kind of deep coherence (perhaps quantum-based, perhaps something else — but still of a kind that could count as "physical").

7. Special assembly of new force or structure:The self is a particular organization of a new force or structure in nature that generates or enables consciousness in an enhanced physical world; for example, "panpsychism," where consciousness is a nonreducible feature of every particle (each having inherent proto-consciousness), or "integrated information theory," where consciousness is an independent, nonreducible organization of reality (perhaps a different dimension of reality).

8. Nonphysical local consciousness:The self, in part, is independent of the physical world/body/brain and requires some kind of nonphysical essence — perhaps a new nonphysical feature of reality and perhaps accessible via parapsychology/ESP.

9. Nonphysical god-created consciousness:The self is what the creator designed to be the essence of human beings (and perhaps of other beings as well) by using a kind of nonphysical substance — a "soul" or "spirit" (whose properties remain in interminable dispute). This soul/spirit can be either a required component of consciousness that complements the brain or an independent nonphysical, concrete existing thing that is inherently conscious and uses or manipulates the brain.

10. Nonphysical cosmic consciousness:The self, as a whole, is independent of the physical world/body/brain and derived from an all-pervading cosmic consciousness, which is ultimate reality, the fundamental progenitor of all physical existence.

While Nos. 8 and 9 both require nonphysical components to generate a self, each could work in two distinct ways. In the more modest explanation, this nonphysical component would combine with a brain so that the resulting entity actualizes a self. The second, more radical process would require that the nonphysical component is itself a self, the brain being a mere mechanism or vehicle — the analogy being "self/brain = driver/car" (or pejoratively, "the ghost in the machine"). (In Category 10, everything is derived from consciousness anyway, so it hardly matters.)

Some philosophers speak of "the embodied mind" (where a body is essential for the inner, reflective dimension of human experience) or "the extended mind" (where parts of the environment outside the body — such as your smartphone — become an integral part of your mind in an "active externalism"). But either concept, even if necessary for a robust sense of self, would not be sufficient for the self and would still require one of the categories to become a full theory of "self."

Ideally, the 10 categories should be both universally exhaustive, meaning including every (reasonable or rational) possibility, and mutually exclusive, meaning that only one of the categories is ultimately correct and none of the categories overlap.

I've tried to be universally exhaustive, but cannot manage to be mutually exclusive. Some categories can overlap. For example — hypothetically — any of the "nonphysical consciousness" categories (Nos. 8,9,10) can work via "patterns of information" (3) or "strong emergence" (5). Moreover, a "nonphysical consciousness," if such exists, could provide a required "existential unity" (6) by linking their parts at every moment in time and their successive states through time.

Which category do I like? I hesitate to offer a personal opinion for two reasons: My objective is to describe "The Self Landscape," not push a preference; and frankly, I have limited confidence in my own surmising. I guess I'd hope that either "nonphysical local or god-created consciousness" (8 or 9) takes the prize. (Why not? It'd be the only chance to avoid self-extinction.)

There were times I thought that some kind of nonphysical component was necessary to transform the human brain into the human mind, probably via some kind of patterns-of-information scheme. (I've wavered on this and still I'm bothered.) But I've never felt comfortable with "immortal souls" (shouldn't there be more than what's claimed as evidence?); and I'm too much of an old neuroscientist-realist to accept the only-mind-exists idealism of cosmic consciousness. Moreover, the eternal dilution of my precious drop of personal identity into an endless ocean of infinite cosmic consciousness has scant appeal.

For a moment, arraying "The Self Landscape" boosts my confidence that I've gotten my conceptual arms around all the fuzzy, fighting ways that the self can conceivably be. The happy moment does not last. Almost immediately, I recall the obvious limitations and distortions of human perception and reference frame. After all, we can never leave the "self" to examine the "self."

I have a final question. Is the self accidental or inevitability — accidental in that replay the epic of evolution and the self is unlikely to appear again or inevitable in that there is some deep universal trophism such that all roads lead to self?

Reflections

You may remember my 100-year-old mom from Part I ("Is the Self Just an Illusion?"). I am sitting with her. We are drumming our hands on a child's desk, copying each other's rhythms, alternating with shaking our fists in each other's faces in playful, syncopated communication. She is viscerally irritated at her diminished capacity to convert ideas in her mind into words in her mouth.

We had been quite unsure whether she'd make her centennial, long her insisted goal. Numerous falls and emergency room visits, exacerbated by harrowing periods of little food or drink, kept us on edge. Twice, assuming the end, I was called home from overseas.

The other day, after watching her consume two large chocolate cookies, her compassionate hospice team informed me, with some consternation, that Medicare rules might require my mom to "graduate" out of hospice. Not for very long, of course, but to be now a source of concern for hospice remuneration made her smile.

Mom, I sense, is more a trapped self than an impaired self, annoyed by the ravages of age, fighting for every moment of sentient existence. For sure, a self.