Wired reports:
At the heart of the debate is the question of whether nanobacteria could actually be a new form of life. To this day, critics argue that a particle just 20 to 200 nanometers in diameter can’t possibly harbor the components necessary to sustain life. The particles are also incredibly resistant to heat and other methods that would normally kill bacteria, which makes some scientists wonder if they might be an unusual form of crystal rather than organisms.
In 1998, Kajander tried to prove the skeptics wrong by turning up what he believed to be an example of nanobacteria’s ribosomal RNA, something that only organisms have. But the claim was squashed two years later by a National Institutes of Health study, which found that the RNA was actually a remnant from a bacteria that often contaminates lab equipment.
The debate would have ended there, except for a steadily increasing number of studies linking nanobacteria to serious health problems, including kidney stones, aneurysms and ovarian cancer. The studies show that nanobacteria can infect humans, a find that has helped push nanobacteria back into the limelight. Now the pressure is on to resolve the controversy and expose how nanobacteria works — no matter what it is.
“It’s all pretty exciting stuff,” said David McKay, chief scientist for astrobiology at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “Whether these are bacteria or not — it doesn’t matter at this point. What matters is if we can figure out the association between nanobacteria and kidney stones and develop some kind of countermeasure.”
The link between nanobacteria and human diseases was first noticed by Kajander and microbiologist Neva Ciftcioglu in 1998. The researchers had observed, through an electron microscope, nanobacteria particles building shells of calcium phosphate around themselves. They began to investigate whether such particles played a role in causing kidney stones, which are also made of calcium compounds. Sure enough, at the center of several stones was a nanobacteria particle.
Another breakthrough came in 2003 when a team from the University of Vienna Medical Center discovered nanobacteria in the calcified debris found in tissue samples from ovarian cancer patients. Meanwhile, several other studies revealed nanobacteria in samples of calcified arteries.
Sensing a growing need for tools to detect and study nanobacteria, Kajander and Ciftcioglu formed a company called NanoBac in 1998. The decision was greatly criticized as a conflict of interest and is still brought up whenever either of the two publishes a new paper.
Fortunately for the researchers, a 2004 study by the esteemed Mayo Clinic supported many of their key findings and helped them regain some of their support. The Mayo study found that nanobacteria does indeed self-replicate, as Kajander had noticed, and endorsed the idea that the particles are life forms.
Kajander and Ciftcioglu were further vindicated this February when patients with chronic pelvic pain — thought to be linked to urinary stones and prostate calcification — reported “significant improvement” after using an experimental treatment manufactured by NanoBac. The study was conducted by a team at Cleveland Clinic Florida.
There’s a lot riding on studies like these. Roughly 177,500 patients were discharged from U.S. hospitals with kidney stones and related problems in 2001, according to the NIH. More than 25,000 women in the United States are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year. In the same period, 14,000 Americans die from complications caused by calcified arteries.
“It brings up a lot of questions,” said John Lieske, who led the 2004 Mayo Clinic study. “How many kidney stones are caused by this? Are there other calcification-related diseases that are caused by nanobacteria? Is it infectious?”
In my view, the controversy is reminiscent of the early days when prion research was dismissed and ridiculed. Later on Dr. Stanley Prusiner went on to receive the Nobel Prize, and prions (mad cow disease, etc.) went main stream. Taking bets for the Nobel prize for nanobacteria research?
Read the whole thing…