Thomas Berry writes: I was a young person then, some twelve years old. My family was moving from a more settled part of a Southern town out to the edge of town where the new house was still being built. The house, not yet finished, was situated on a slight incline. Down below was a small creek and there across the creek was a meadow. It was an early afternoon in May when I first looked down over the scene and saw the meadow. The field was covered with lilies rising above the thick grass. A magic moment, this experience gave to my life something, I know not what, that seems to explain my life at a more profound level than almost any other experience I can remember.

It was not only the lilies. It was the singing of the crickets and the woodlands in the distance and the clouds in an otherwise clear sky. It was not something conscious that happened just then. I went on about my life as any young person might do. Perhaps it was not simply this moment that made such a deep impression upon me. Perhaps it was a sensitivity that was developed throughout my childhood. Yet, as the years pass, this moment returns to me, and whenever I think about my basic life attitude and the whole trend of my mind and the causes that I have given my efforts to, I seem to come back to this moment and the impact it has had on my feeling for what is real and worthwhile in life.

This early experience, it seems, has become normative for me throughout the range of my thinking. Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good; what is opposed to this meadow or negates it is not good. My life orientation is that simple. It is also that pervasive. It applies in economics and political orientation as well as in education and religion and whatever.

That is good in economics that fosters the natural processes of this meadow. That is bad in economics that diminishes the capacity of this meadow to renew itself each spring and to provide a setting in which crickets can sing and birds can feed. Such meadows, I would later learn, are themselves in a continuing process of transformation. Yet these evolving biosystems deserve the opportunity to be themselves and to express their own inner qualities. As in economics so in jurisprudence and law and political affairs: That is good which recognizes the rights of this meadow and the creek and the woodlands beyond to exist and flourish in their ever-renewing seasonal expression even while larger processes shape the bioregion in the larger sequence of transformations. (06/02/09)

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BBC Medical Science — Scientists say a natural supplement made from tomatoes, taken daily, can stave off heart disease and strokes. The tomato pill contains an active ingredient from the Mediterranean diet - lycopene - that blocks “bad” LDL cholesterol that can clog the arteries.

Ateronon, made by a biotechnology spin-out company of Cambridge University, is being launched as a dietary supplement and will be sold on the high street. Experts said more trials were needed to see how effective the treatment is.

Preliminary trials involving around 150 people with heart disease indicate that Ateronon can reduce the oxidation of harmful fats in the blood to almost zero within eight weeks, a meeting of the British Cardiovascular Society will be told at Ateronon’s launch on Monday.

Neuroscientist Peter Kirkpatrick, who will lead a further research project at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge on behalf of Cambridge Theranostics Ltd, said the supplement could be much more effective than statin drugs that are currently used by doctors to treat high cholesterol. …

Lycopene is an antioxidant contained in the skin of tomatoes which gives them their red colour. But lycopene ingested in its natural form is poorly absorbed. Ateronon contains a refined, more readily absorbed version of lycopene that was originally developed by Nestle.

Dr Peter Coleman of The Stroke Association said: “We know that diets rich in antioxidants are beneficial in reducing the plaque build up and welcome the findings of this research.” (06/02/09)

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BBC Medical Science — Scientists say they have developed a drug that can treat the most deadly form of skin cancer in its most advanced, incurable stages. Malignant melanoma is the most rapidly increasing cancer in the UK, largely due to sun exposure.

An experimental drug PLX4032 (R7204) could help many patients with incurable disease live longer with the disease in check, early trial results suggest. Roche and Plexxikon presented the work at a renowned US cancer meeting. Experts welcomed the findings and urged people to take care when out in the sun this summer, which is tipped to be hot.

PLX4032 works by seeking out and destroying tumour cells carrying the BRAF mutation implicated in 60% malignant melanomas. This could not only help to shrink the skin cancer, but also delay its spread. Currently, only a small proportion of people - less than 5% - live more than two years if their cancer has spread around the body.

In a phase I study involving 16 patients with BRAF-positive melanoma, over half saw the extent of their cancer reduce by at least 30%. Patients treated with PLX4032 lived for a median of six months without their disease getting worse and more than half experienced significant shrinkage of their tumours. This included patients where the cancer had spread to the liver, lung and bone.

Roche and its partner Plexxikon told delegates at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Florida that they now plan larger trials to further test the drug’s safety and check things like what dose is best. They also hope to make a diagnostic test to easily spot which patients have BRAF-positive melanoma.

In the UK, more than 10,400 people are diagnosed with malignant melanoma each year. (06/02/09)

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BBC Ocean Science — The End of the Line is a film packed with footage of big-scale fishing in oceans around the world. The work is efficient, modern, industrial and, according to the film makers, unsustainable.

Amid doom laden music, the narrator tells us: “Our view of the sea has always been that it is huge, beautiful and inexhaustible. The oceans are the common heritage of all mankind and for billions of years they have been full of life.” But that, according to the film-maker and journalist Charles Clover, is changing. The world’s ocean environment - and the fish in it - is facing catastrophe.

“These huge resources which we once believed to be renewable, that our whole human history has led us up until now to believe are renewable, are not renewable any more because of what we are doing to them. And so our entire philosophical approach has to change. It is not going to be the same in the future as it was in the past.”

The documentary claims to be to the marine environment what An Inconvenient Truth was to global warming. The basic problem, says the film, is the huge over-capacity of the modern fishing industry. There are too many boats chasing too few fish: “The global fishing capacity could catch the world catch four times over. The world’s long-lining industry sets 1.4 billion hooks every year. These are estimated to be set on enough line to encircle the entire globe more than 550 times.”

If we are in any doubt about the sheer power of the modern fish industry, we are told: “The mouth of the largest trawling net is big enough to accommodate 13 747 jets.” So amid claims of insufficient, poorly enforced regulation it is hard to find any good news when it comes to the world’s fisheries. (06/02/09)

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