The Stories That Will Persuade People
GM Shampoo
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There used to be three certainties in life: death, taxes and the slow ripple of grey through your hair.
The technology, which slightly alters the DNA code, could take years off the likes of Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren and George Clooney. Although the first two will haunt mankind for the foreseeable future, we are apparently on the verge of conquering the third.
According to a group of biologists, shampoos will be developed carrying bundles of new biochemical instructions permanently to rewire the colour-factories in the roots of people’s hair.
Artur Cavaco-Paulo, associate professor of health biotechnology at the University of Minho in Portugal, claimed that the GM technique would be mastered in five to ten years, rolling back the tide of grey by editing a few letters of DNA.
The hue of hair is determined by small cells that cluster around hair bulbs, churning out either a very dark brown chemical called eumelanin or a reddish-brown compound called pheomelanin. Scientists believe that grey hairs have a clutch of dormant colour-making cells at the bottom that can be “woken up” and sent back to work with the right nudge to the follicle’s DNA. This can be done either by sending in a tame virus loaded with new software for the hair cells, or by smuggling in strings of molecular assassins called small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) to “silence” the genetic clocks that are driving ageing.
The virus method has already been used to make “punk” mice, whose fur glows green under blue light thanks to jellyfish genes spliced into their skin cells.
It could also be possible to switch the natural shade of someone’s hair with subtle genetic adjustments to their balance of eumelanin and pheomelanin. Tiny changes to DNA can have extraordinary effects.
Last year it emerged that flipping a single letter was all it took to create blond hair.
Writing in the journal Trends in Biotechnology, the scientists predicted that the new technologies would “take hair care to a new level, changing hair colour from inside out”. “We believe that in the near future the molecular basis of the cellular events behind d hair greying will be deciphered,” they wrote. “The identification of molecular targets will allow the development off efficient anti-greying cosmetics.” Dr Cavaco-Paulo pointed to the work of a team of Britishh scientists who successfully used d siRNAs to restore colour to human hairs in a test tube last year. It would be relatively straightforward to turn this into a cosmetic product, he said.
Other experts urged patience. Hopi Hoekstra, a leading geneticist who is based at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the US, said that it would be easier to start by changing younger people’s hair colour than to find a way of kicking the sleeping colour cells in grey hairs back into action. “The former is a good place to start, in that there are many genes known to affect hair pigments, either the type or concentration of f pigment produced,” she said. “Moreover, in many cases either a single mutation in a protein, or a slight tweak in the time, place or amount of gene expression can haveh a visible effect of hair colour.”
Even if GM hair dye turns out to take longer than Dr Cavaco-Paulo thinks, however, there is another reason to be hopeful. Some of Professor Tobin’s colleagues at Bradford are working on a designer chemical that attacks another part of the greying process.
They believe that a new ultraviolet light-activated chemical called PCKUS could break down the hydrogen peroxide that builds up in our hair follicles as we age, stressing the cells until they stop producing colour.
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GM Shampoo
-
There used to be three certainties in life: death, taxes and the slow ripple of grey through your hair.
The technology, which slightly alters the DNA code, could take years off the likes of Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren and George Clooney. Although the first two will haunt mankind for the foreseeable future, we are apparently on the verge of conquering the third.
According to a group of biologists, shampoos will be developed carrying bundles of new biochemical instructions permanently to rewire the colour-factories in the roots of people’s hair.
Artur Cavaco-Paulo, associate professor of health biotechnology at the University of Minho in Portugal, claimed that the GM technique would be mastered in five to ten years, rolling back the tide of grey by editing a few letters of DNA.
The hue of hair is determined by small cells that cluster around hair bulbs, churning out either a very dark brown chemical called eumelanin or a reddish-brown compound called pheomelanin. Scientists believe that grey hairs have a clutch of dormant colour-making cells at the bottom that can be “woken up” and sent back to work with the right nudge to the follicle’s DNA. This can be done either by sending in a tame virus loaded with new software for the hair cells, or by smuggling in strings of molecular assassins called small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) to “silence” the genetic clocks that are driving ageing.
The virus method has already been used to make “punk” mice, whose fur glows green under blue light thanks to jellyfish genes spliced into their skin cells. It could also be possible to switch the natural shade of someone’s hair with subtle genetic adjustments to their balance of eumelanin and pheomelanin. Tiny changes to DNA can have extraordinary effects.
Last year it emerged that flipping a single letter was all it took to create blond hair.
Writing in the journal Trends in Biotechnology, the scientists predicted that the new technologies would “take hair care to a new level, changing hair colour from inside out”. “We believe that in the near future the molecular basis of the cellular events behind d hair greying will be deciphered,” they wrote. “The identification of molecular targets will allow the development off efficient anti-greying cosmetics.” Dr Cavaco-Paulo pointed to the work of a team of Britishh scientists who successfully used d siRNAs to restore colour to human hairs in a test tube last year. It would be relatively straightforward to turn this into a cosmetic product, he said.
Other experts urged patience. Hopi Hoekstra, a leading geneticist who is based at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the US, said that it would be easier to start by changing younger people’s hair colour than to find a way of kicking the sleeping colour cells in grey hairs back into action. “The former is a good place to start, in that there are many genes known to affect hair pigments, either the type or concentration of f pigment produced,” she said. “Moreover, in many cases either a single mutation in a protein, or a slight tweak in the time, place or amount of gene expression can haveh a visible effect of hair colour.”
Even if GM hair dye turns out to take longer than Dr Cavaco-Paulo thinks, however, there is another reason to be hopeful. Some of Professor Tobin’s colleagues at Bradford are working on a designer chemical that attacks another part of the greying process.
They believe that a new ultraviolet light-activated chemical called PCKUS could break down the hydrogen peroxide that builds up in our hair follicles as we age, stressing the cells until they stop producing colour.