LDICN

A Woman’s Undying Gift to Science

ldicn — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:22:30 +0000

A thorny and provocative book about cancer, racism, scientific ethics and crippling poverty, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” also floods over you like a narrative dam break, as if someone had managed to distill and purify the more addictive qualities of “Erin Brockovich,” “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and “The Andromeda Strain.” More than 10 years in the making, it feels like the book Ms. Skloot was born to write. It signals the arrival of a raw but quite real talent. The woman who provides this book its title, Henrietta Lacks, was a poor and largely illiterate Virginia tobacco farmer, the great-great-granddaughter of slaves. Born in 1920, she died from an aggressive cervical cancer at 31, leaving behind five children. No obituaries of Mrs. Lacks appeared in newspapers. She was buried in an unmarked grave. To scientists, however, Henrietta Lacks almost immediately became known simply as HeLa (pronounced hee-lah), from the first two letters of her first and last names. Cells from Mrs. Lacks’s cancerous cervix, taken without her knowledge, were the first to grow in culture, becoming “immortal” and changing the face of modern medicine. There are, Ms. Skloot writes, “trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.” Laid end to end, the world’s HeLa cells would today wrap around the earth three times. Because HeLa cells reproduced with what the author calls a “mythological intensity,” they could be used in test after test. “They helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization,” Ms. Skloot writes. HeLa cells were used to learn how nuclear bombs affect humans, and to study herpes, leukemia, Parkinson’s disease and AIDS. They were sent up in the first space missions, to see what becomes of human cells in zero gravity. Bought and sold and shipped around the world for decades, HeLa cells are famous to science students everywhere. But little has been known, until now, about the unwitting donor of these cells. Mrs. Lacks’s own family did not know that her cells had become famous (and that people had grown wealthy from marketing them) until more than two decades after her death, after scientists had begun to take blood from her surviving family members, without their informed consent, in order to better study HeLa.

Beware of bogus online ‘help’ for Haiti

ldicn — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:48:26 +0000

The urge to help — and to give money — is powerful following a devastating event like Haiti’s earthquake, and one of the easiest ways to do it is online. It’s also one of the easiest ways to get scammed if you’re not sure what you’re doing or who you’re dealing with. The FBI, Better Business Bureau and software security companies Wednesday all warned Internet users to exercise caution before opening their wallets to organizations claiming to be charities that will send financial assistance to Haiti. “Apply a critical eye,” said the FBI in a statement, and do “due diligence before responding to those requests.”

Microsoft investigates new Internet Explorer flaw

ldicn — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:18:15 +0000

Microsoft said on Wednesday that it is investigating another flaw in Internet Explorer, this time a vulnerability that could result in an unauthorized disclosure of information for users running its browser on older operating systems. The software maker said in a security advisory that, although it knows of no attacks based on the flaw, the vulnerability could lead to a Web-based attack from either a Web site designed to take advantage of the flaw or from a site that becomes compromised via user-generated text or a malicious ad. Either way, a user would have to actively go to the compromised Web site. The flaw is separate from the one used to attack Google and other companies, which Microsoft addressed with an “out-of-band” security update last month. The latest flaw could affect those running Windows XP and Internet Explorer on Windows XP. The software maker said those running the browser on a machine running Windows Vista or Windows 7 aren’t vulnerable because the browser runs in a “protected mode” by default. McAfee spokesman Joris Evers said that, although the latest issue doesn’t allow the attacker to gain full control of a system, it nonetheless represents “a serious vulnerability that can expose personal information or system information that may be used in a follow up attack.” “Internet Explorer users should ensure they are protected against exploitation of this flaw and apply the patch when Microsoft releases it,” Evers said. Microsoft said it may take additional action when it finishes its inquiry, such as releasing an update as part of its monthly “Patch Tuesday” or as part of a special, out-of-band update. In the mean time, the software maker offered an automated “Fix It” that can turn on the protected mode for those running IE 6.

Cnet News

NHS Trusts urged to upgrade Internet Explorer

ldicn — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:12:04 +0000

The Department of Health has instructed NHS Trusts to ditch version 6.0 of Internet Explorer several weeks after Microsoft admitted that Chinese hackers exploited a critical flaw in the browser to infiltrate Google’s corporate systems.

The vulnerability is present in multiple versions of IE and can be exploited to run unauthorised and malicious code on numerous versions of the Windows operating system should users inadvertently visit a compromised web site, according to the bulletin from the DoH’s informatics directorate.

Such code enables attackers to download and install further malware or spyware on to affected computers, to add user accounts and to steal locally- or centrally-held potentially sensitive information. An infected machine could also be used as a zombie to stage attacks against third parties, which would be damaging to Trusts’ reputations.

But targeted attacks using the flaw have so far been aimed at a number of large organisations using only the IE 6 browser running on Windows 2000 and Windows XP. As a result, the DoH is advising Trusts to either patch their systems when Microsoft makes a security update available or if it is not possible to do so, to migrate to Internet Explorer 7.

“Internet Explorer 7 has been warranted to work correctly with SPINE applications such as CSA and provides additional security features over Internet Explorer 6,” the bulletin said. Similar recommendations have not been made for a move to the latest version of Microsoft’s browser, IE 8, however.

IE6 is currently widely used with the UK public sector and the Cabinet Office has already issued an advisory notice to central government departments on how to deal with the issue. Governments in France and Germany have gone further, however, advising all citizens to move to an alternative vendor.

But Home Office minister Lord West said in a parliamentary written answer to Lord Avebury on 28 January that he believed there was no evidence that a fully-patched version of IE8 was any less secure than any other browser. He had been asked whether the UK public sector should dump IE entirely.

PublicTechnology.Net

About Partnership Board

admin — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:12:21 +0000

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