Okay, I made that up, but...<g>  Reminds me of the early Prion
discoveries and debates when in college during the late '70's early
'80's.  And we thought the question of whether virus were 'alive' was
interesting.  
--
Keith

Are Nanobacteria Making Us Ill?  By Amit Asaravala
Story location:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,66861,00.html

02:00 AM Mar. 14, 2005 PT

Olavi Kajander didn't mean to discover the mysterious particles that
have been called the most primitive organisms on Earth and that could
be responsible for a series of painful and sometimes fatal illnesses.

He was simply trying to find out why certain cultures of mammalian
cells in his lab would die no matter how carefully he prepared them.

So the Finnish biochemist and his colleagues slipped some of their old
cultures under an electron microscope one day in 1988 and took a
closer look. That's when they saw the particles. Like bacteria but an
astonishing 100 times smaller, they seemed to be thriving inside the
dying cells.

Believing them to be a possible new form of life, Kajander named the
particles "nanobacteria," published a paper outlining his findings and
spurred one of the biggest controversies in modern microbiology.

At the heart of the debate is the question of whether nanobacteria
could actually be a new form of life. To this day, critics argue that
a particle just 20 to 200 nanometers in diameter can't possibly harbor
the components necessary to sustain life. The particles are also
incredibly resistant to heat and other methods that would normally
kill bacteria, which makes some scientists wonder if they might be an
unusual form of crystal rather than organisms.

In 1998, Kajander tried to prove the skeptics wrong by turning up what
he believed to be an example of nanobacteria's ribosomal RNA,
something that only organisms have. But the claim was squashed two
years later by a National Institutes of Health study, which found that
the RNA was actually a remnant from a bacteria that often contaminates
lab equipment.

The debate would have ended there, except for a steadily increasing
number of studies linking nanobacteria to serious health problems,
including kidney stones, aneurysms and ovarian cancer. The studies
show that nanobacteria can infect humans, a find that has helped push
nanobacteria back into the limelight. Now the pressure is on to
resolve the controversy and expose how nanobacteria works -- no matter
what it is.

"It's all pretty exciting stuff," said David McKay, chief scientist
for astrobiology at NASA's Johnson Space Center. "Whether these are
bacteria or not -- it doesn't matter at this point. What matters is if
we can figure out the association between nanobacteria and kidney
stones and develop some kind of countermeasure."

The link between nanobacteria and human diseases was first noticed by
Kajander and microbiologist Neva Çiftçioglu in 1998. The researchers
had observed, through an electron microscope, nanobacteria particles
building shells of calcium phosphate around themselves. They began to
investigate whether such particles played a role in causing kidney
stones, which are also made of calcium compounds. Sure enough, at the
center of several stones was a nanobacteria particle.

Another breakthrough came in 2003 when a team from the University of
Vienna Medical Center discovered nanobacteria in the calcified debris
found in tissue samples from ovarian cancer patients. Meanwhile,
several other studies revealed nanobacteria in samples of calcified
arteries.

Sensing a growing need for tools to detect and study nanobacteria,
Kajander and Çiftçioglu formed a company called NanoBac in 1998. The
decision was greatly criticized as a conflict of interest and is still
brought up whenever either of the two publishes a new paper.

Fortunately for the researchers, a 2004 study by the esteemed Mayo
Clinic supported many of their key findings and helped them regain
some of their support. The Mayo study found that nanobacteria does
indeed self-replicate, as Kajander had noticed, and endorsed the idea
that the particles are life forms.

Kajander and Çiftçioglu were further vindicated this February when
patients with chronic pelvic pain -- thought to be linked to urinary
stones and prostate calcification -- reported "significant
improvement" after using an experimental treatment manufactured by
NanoBac. The study was conducted by a team at Cleveland Clinic
Florida.

There's a lot riding on studies like these. Roughly 177,500 patients
were discharged from U.S. hospitals with kidney stones and related
problems in 2001, according to the NIH. More than 25,000 women in the
United States are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year. In the same
period, 14,000 Americans die from complications caused by calcified
arteries.

"It brings up a lot of questions," said John Lieske, who led the 2004
Mayo Clinic study. "How many kidney stones are caused by this? Are
there other calcification-related diseases that are caused by
nanobacteria? Is it infectious?"

Surprisingly, few groups are actually working on answering these
questions. One would be hard-pressed to find more than a half-dozen
research teams around the globe studying nanobacteria full time.

Lieske suggests it's because the field is still relatively young. But
it's clear that there's an additional culprit: the often heated
controversy over whether nanobacteria particles are, in fact, alive.

"There's a reluctance to get into controversial areas. It's hard to
get proposals funded," said McKay. "Most people are waiting until
there's a little more meat on the bones."

Even John Cisar, who led the 2000 NIH study that contradicted
Kajander's initial findings, agrees that the issue has become muddled.
Though he maintains his stance that nanobacteria are not alive, he
said in a phone interview that he is not against further research.

"I'm not saying there's nothing there," said Cisar. "It's just that we
were looking at it from a microbiologist's perspective. And when we
didn't find any signs of life, we moved on."

Kajander stands by his original assertion that nanobacteria are life
forms. However, he blames himself for getting researchers hung up on
the life question by using the name "nanobacteria."

"Calcifying self-propagating nanoparticles would have been much
better," he wrote in an e-mail to Wired News.

But he added that his regrets about the name don't change the fact
that nanobacteria have "miraculous" properties. Those include a growth
cycle that closely matches typical biological cycles, the ability to
form a shell and the "presence of both mammalian and bacterial
components."

It's these properties -- and the potential to save lives -- that keep
researchers focused on nanobacteria.

In February, NASA's McKay and Nanobac's Çiftçioglu announced that they
had observed nanobacteria growing at five times its normal rate after
they placed it in an incubator that simulates the microgravity
conditions of space. The findings mean astronauts may be at an
elevated risk for kidney stones on long flights -- something NASA is
extremely worried about in light of its new plans to send humans to
Mars.

The findings could also add fuel to nanobacteria research by giving
scientists a way to grow cultures faster.

"The trouble with studying nanobacteria is that trying to get enough
material is very hard," said Lieske. "Trying to culture a lot of it
takes time."

Indeed, nanobacteria particles double about once every three days. In
comparison, typical bacteria doubles about every 20 minutes.

Lieske's group has continued to experiment with nanobacteria since its
2004 paper. Though he said the team is looking for evidence of DNA and
RNA, he is cautious about saying whether he thinks the particles are
alive or just an unknown form of crystal.

As a possibility, he offered a third option: The particles could be a
form of archaea, a relatively new category of tiny organisms whose DNA
is vastly different from that found in typical bacteria. Over the past
two decades, archaea has surprised scientists by turning up in places
where life was least expected, like in sulfurous lakes and
hydrothermal sea vents.

Whatever the case, the Mayo Clinic team may publish a paper outlining
new findings in about six months, according to Lieske.

The world may not be waiting, but a handful of faithful
microbiologists certainly will.

-------------------------------------

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