Advances in Science May Make Us Slimmer, Tougher

After reading a couple of headlines at ScienceDaily.com, it occurred to me that we're closer than ever to a future where scientists can program our bodies to burn more fat, turn off pain and resist heart disease.

Boosting metabolism
At Yale, researchers isolated an enzyme, MKP-1, which appears linked to obesity in mice. When the rodents were bred without MKP-1, they were, "resistant to weight gain despite consuming high fat foods and eating more than control mice," read the ScienceDaily report. Scientists aren't sure exactly how MKP-1 affects the body's metabolism, but when they do, fad diets could be a thing of the past.

Making pain go away
Over at Columbia University, scientists have found "a protein in nerve cells that acts as a switch for chronic pain," reports ScienceDaily. They've applied for a patent for drugs that will turn this switch off. What makes this potential class of drugs different is that they focus on "first order" neurons, which are the neurons at the source of pain (for example, your thigh or fingers). Traditional pain medications focus on heading off pain signals at "second order" neurons, which are in your spinal cord.

Lowering the risk for heart disease
In your blood is a protein (SecA) that "enables bacteria outside the human body to travel through the blood stream and infect organs such as the heart," according to a ScienceDaily column. But what if you could regulate this protein? That's exactly what a team of Rutgers-Newark scientists are working on. One scientist told ScienceDaily, "by identifying the way this motor protein works, at some point we will be able to develop drugs that can block the secretion of these proteins or limit the activity of SecA causing the bacteria to die before it can reach its destination."