评论
打印
VOICE ONE:
This is SCIENCE IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English. I'm Bob Doughty.
VOICE TWO:
Researchers at Ohio State University studied exercise-induced asthma among top athletes at the school. Ohio State football players practice earlier this year.
And I'm Faith Lapidus. On our program this week, we will tell about the winners of the Nobel Prize in medicine. We will tell about a health problem resulting from physical exercise. We also report on depression in young people and genetic studies of an ancient animal.
(MUSIC)
VOICE ONE:
The two thousand seven Nobel Prize in medicine will go to three men who found a way to learn about the duties of individual genes. They discovered how to inactivate, or knock out, single genes in laboratory animals. The result is known as "knockout mice."
Mario Capecchi holds a laboratory mouse
The Karolinska Institute named the winners earlier this month. They are Martin Evans of Britain and two Americans, Mario Capecchi and . They will receive what is officially called the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine at a ceremony in Sweden on December tenth. They also will share about one million five hundred thousand dollars in prize money.
VOICE TWO:
In the nineteen eighties, Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies both studied cells in mice. They wanted to find how to cause changes in individual genes. But the kinds of cells they independently studied could not be used to create gene-targeted animals.
Martin Evans had the solution. He worked with embryonic stem cells to produce mice that carried new genetic material.
Oliver Smithies
The research greatly expanded knowledge about embryonic development, aging and disease. It also led to a new technology -- gene targeting. This has already produced five hundred mouse models of human conditions. Knockout mice are used for general research and for the development of new treatments.
(MUSIC)
VOICE ONE:
A new study shows the breathing disorder asthma is common among students who take part in college athletic programs. Researchers studied American college athletes for signs of breathing problems. Athletes need skill and strength to compete in a sport. Yet test results suggested that more than one-third of those studied had a condition called exercise-induced asthma. In other words, physical exercise caused their asthma. This was true even among college athletes who had no history of the disorder.
Exercise-induced asthma happens when exercise restricts the flow of air to the lungs. The narrowing and closing of the airway usually begins just after heavy exercise. One sign of exercise-induced asthma is increased amounts of sticky fluid, or mucus, in the airway. Other signs include difficulty breathing and tightness in the chest. Two dangers of the condition are reduced athletic performance and serious breathing problems.
VOICE TWO:
Researchers at Ohio State University Medical Center organized the study. They examined one hundred seven student athletes at the university. The athletes were from Ohio State's top sports teams.
Forty-two of those tested showed signs of exercise-induced asthma. Thirty-six members of that group had no earlier history of the breathing disorder. The researchers say the sex of the athlete and the breathing demands of the sport did not affect the rate of exercise-induced asthma.
Jonathan Parsons was the lead writer of the report. He says college students were tested because many of the reported severe cases of asthma after exercise have involved athletes twenty years of age or younger.
