It’s billed as the world’s largest biotechnology convention–18,000+ bio professionals are expected to attend April 9 through 12 at Chicago’s Navy Pier. And a dozen state Governors are coming along to show their love for the biotech sector–and the improvements a strong biotech/biomed community usually brings to a state’s economy.

Sending your governor to the conference is one way to gauge the level of passion for courting the bioscience industry. States that are doing so include: Illinois (Rod Blagojevich), Alabama (Bob Riley), Florida (Jeb Bush), Indiana (Mitch Daniels), Massachusetts (Mitt Romney), Michicgan (Jennifer Granholm), Minnesota (Tim Pawlenty), Missouri (Matt Blunt), Ohio (Bob Taft), the self-governing commonwealth of Puerto Rico (Anibal Acevedo-Vila), and Wisconsin (Jim Doyle).

Panel discussions will feature healthcare and regulatory issues such as:

• opportunities and challenges in plant-based pharmaceuticals
• ethics and race-based drug development
• results of a national survey on the relationship of the FDA to the life science industry
• new discoveries in cancer treatment
• business and the metabolic syndrome (how business and funding affects treatments for a cluster of common conditions like diabetes, obesity, and heart disease)

Conference attendees are looking at how scientific discoveries can lead–faster and less expensively–to better treatment options. This is what bioscience is all about. Learn more here.

Promising news comes in this report that German scientists have been able to grow “embryonic” stem cells from some simple cells taken easily from the testes of male mice. Reason says women probably harbor similar capabilities–they just haven’t identified which and where yet in females.

Clearly, we’re going to have to come up with a different word now for these almost infinitely potent stem cells that can grow into virtually any other living tissue. The term “embryonic” has negative connotations related to the controversy over when an embryo-should-be-considered-a-fetus-should-be-considered-a-child. Despite the routine destruction of frozen embryos left over from in vitro fertilization procedures, the use of such discarded (abandoned) embryos to generate stem cells has raised huge debates in the United States, though not in many other countries.

We can only hope that this discovery will quickly lead to developing simple procedures for harvesting human cells that will let us all experience the miraculous benefits of stem cell therapies without compromising anyone’s ethical positions.

And we can sit back again and marvel at the wonders of the universe–that we carry within our bodies the ability to heal ourselves. Hey, if a humble planaria worm can grow a new head, why wouldn’t humans be able to grow new body parts? In just a few years, we’re all going to wonder what took so long.

This is cool. A Ph.D. has invented a mechanism for reading the electromagnetic current that comes from your throat when you’re just thinking about saying words. It’s called subvocal speech recognition and I can see the future: people dictating notes to their computers or talking on their cell phones without disturbing anyone else, even in a crowded meeting room or a bus or airplane.

One guy in Japan is even working on a subvocal cell phone that works by putting sensors on your fingers and thumb against your face. And I just saw on Animal Planet that they’ve inserted a piece into a deaf dog’s skull and attached a hearing device to it–the dog can hear again. I remember joking last year that one day we’d be exchanging thoughts through metal plates in our heads.

Judging by this stuff, that day’s not far off.

Your cells put up a protective barrier when you get stressed–and that’s good. Now scientists have discovered a protein that can speed up the return to normal–which is also an essential part of good health. They managed to clone this protein back in 1999 and have been experimenting with it ever since. Stress causes proteins to unfold within your cells, and this protein (CHIP) helps them fold back up. They found that mice who lacked the CHIP protein were more susceptible to lots of stressors–including fever and heart attacks.

Fascinating that chronic stress can cause the same symptoms (protein unfolding) as serious neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and Huntington’s. I wonder how long it will take us to figure out a better way to manage stress? The HearthMath people have the answer–it’s all in the heart.

But despite their simple methods for calming the heart, it still takes great focus and tremendous commitment–both of which many of us stressed-out people have a hard time summoning.

Accountability is tough in health care–so many variables affect both process and outcome that setting benchmarks is tough. Apparently, the federal government wants to try anyway. They’ve announced a new tool called the State Snapshot Web tool. Here’s what it provides for state policymakers:

* A ranking of 15 representative measures of state health care quality.
* Summary measures of the quality of types of care for each state.
* Comparisons of each state’s summary measures to regional and national performance.
* Performance meters that show a state’s performance relative to the region or nation.
* Data tables for each state’s summary measures that show the NHQR detailed measures and numbers behind the performance meters.

Diabetes is an area of special concern as the percentages of occurrence keep rising across the U.S.–they’re measuring quality of care, differences in treatment by group, and money saved by managing the disease better. They’re also working on a guide to go with the tool.

It’s a good start. Once health care providers must begin meeting standardized performance measures, maybe next we can break the stranglehold insurance companies have on who gets what care.

Studies have shown that social support and friendships are critical to optimal life span and social support helps elderly adapt to stress.

A new study says marital status–read: happily married is good–affects how well flu shots work in older people. Sorry, but my reaction to this is, ‘duh.’ If social support is good for people, it’s a no-brainer that a happy marriage would also be. There’s no better source of social support in the world than a loving spouse.

Now if only we can discover how to help more modern people get and stay happily married, we will undoubtedly save billions in health care costs.

I’m all for the environment–my kids think I’m insane because I try to conserve water, reuse paper, and so on (okay, I was raised by depression-era parents, but it’s really my conservationist leanings that motivate me)–and preserving our animal kingdom. But the U.S. government investing $10 million dollars to help Cornell scientists confirm (or deny) a report that a thought-to-be-extinct species of woodpecker has reemerged seems like a skewed decision in a world where that money could be used for so many other good purposes–too numerous to mention.

Given all the people projects–medical research and other things–in our country that need funds, this report almost makes me think the U.S. government believes it has unlimited money. But that’s just me.

An advisory panel is meeting today to debate whether the FDA should allow drugmakers to begin marketing Tysabri again. Patients have found Tysabri effective in reducing the progression of disability in MS and also the risk of relapse. Despite its roughly 50% improvement in these areas, the drug did cause a severe reaction in a few patients, two of whom died.

Other patients who had found the drug dramatically helpful were devastated when it was taken off the market. Given the serious quality-of-life issues for MS patients, this seems to be a case of let the patient decide whether to take the risk. As with many cancer and other drugs, when it’s their best hope, many will choose to undergo risky treatments.

There are nearly a hundred federally approved clinical trials in process right now testing various aspects of treatments for multiple sclerosis.

It is in no small part through these personal risk/reward decisions that the body of medical knowledge grows.

Great idea in this book. Let’s subject all our proposed healing methods to the same rigorous testing.

You’ve heard how back in 1970 the Nobel prizewinning scientist Linus Pauling touted large doses of vitamin C as a cure/palliative treatment for cancer, right? This author examines the history of that proposal as an example of how standard medicine, by failing to thoroughly test any treatment option that smacks of “alternative,” manages to maintain the status quo. He says the National Academy of Science actually broke its own publication rules when it refused to publish Pauling’s paper.

Looks like a telling account of how selective vision can slow us human beings down.

One of my favorite natural substances, nitric oxide, gets further kudos, this time for helping regain movement for the stiffened, immobilized blood cells that are responsible for a lot of the nasty and life-threatening complications of diabetes. They’ve known for a long time that NO helps relax blood vessels, which can help movement. But it seems this latest discovery indicates nitric oxide actually restores mobility, and it can do so both when administered within the body and when applied to cells while extracted from your body but then returned after treatment.

Good news for the 4.1 million Americans and countless millions of others with this life-changing disease. It’s not easy to drastically change your lifestyle to accommodate this disease, but it’s critical to do so–or suffer severe consequences. The government has recommendations for how to control diabetes here.