Nanobacteria: The Medusa strain
Article Preview
* 20 June 2007
* Bijal Trivedi
* Magazine issue 2609
THEY are minuscule egg-shaped structures mere billionths of a metre across, dwarfed by the tiniest living cell and smaller than many viruses. They have a hard bony shell, replicate like a living organism and are wiped out by antibiotics and radiation, yet seem to lack DNA. Some say they are infectious microbes, possibly even an unknown form of life, able to cause diseases ranging from Alzheimer's to atherosclerosis. Others say they are simply harmless crystals.
Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of nanobacteria. Once described as the "cold fusion of microbiology", the very existence of these microbes has been denied or ridiculed by mainstream opinion for nearly a decade and their proponents branded mavericks. Just like cold fusion, though, nanobacteria have refused to go away and now - under the new guise of "calcifying nanoparticles" - they are making a renewed bid for scientific respectability. The stakes are high. If diseases long thought incurable are actually caused by nanobacteria, they could be prevented with vaccines, or treated with antibiotics.
The story began in the early 1990s when Olavi Kajander, a biochemist at the University of Kuopio in Finland, was carrying out some important, if unexciting, work on cell-culture contaminants. In 1993 he reported finding a hitherto unknown contaminant in cow serum: tiny, self-replicating spheres which he tentatively called "nanobacteria". He and a colleague, Neva Çiftçioglu, went on to find the same particles in the blood of cows and humans, as well as in supposedly sterile blood products. In 1997, the duo claimed to have sequenced a small piece of DNA extracted from the particles which proved they were a new type of bacterium.
In 1998 the rumpus kicked off. The trigger was a paper in which Kajander and Çiftçioglu claimed not only that nanobacteria were alive, but also that they were the cause of kidney stones (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 95, p 8274). The pair had noticed that their nanobacteria often cocooned themselves in thick coats of calcium phosphate - the material in some types of kidney stone. So they examined 30 human ...
The complete article is 2571 words long.
To continue reading this article, subscribe to New Scientist. Get 4 issues of New Scientist magazine and instant access to all online content for only USD $4.95
newscientist.com |
