African leaders including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Jay Naidoo of former President Nelson Mandela’s cabinet, and Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, on Wednesday released an ad calling on Canada to step up the battle against global warming, rather than actively promote the use of its tar sands.

The ad comes just days after Canada signaled at climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa that it would likely pull out of Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty aimed at combating global warming. The treaty is scheduled to expire in 2012.

“By walking away from Kyoto, the Canadian government is also damaging our reputation as a country that keeps its word,” said Gillian McEachern of Environmental Defence, one of the groups behind the ad. “The tar sands are not only turning us into a polluting nation, but also into one that will break its commitments in the service of dirty oil.”

Canada has already angered many environmentalists with its efforts to push crude oil from its tar sands in Alberta to oil refineries along the Gulf Coast, a move that NASA scientist and leading climatolog­ist James Hansen has said would be “game over for our climate.”

“We used to boast about how Americans sewed Canadian flags on their backpack when travelling abroad,” said Keith Stewart of Greenpeace Canada in a statement. “Now we try to bully other nations into taking our dirty oil. If we want to be taken seriously in the fight to stop climate change, we have to draw the line at the tar sands.”

The ad, slated to run Wednesday in the Globe and Mail , contrasts Canada as one of the first western countries to impose sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid regime with its failure to pull its weight in the fight against global warming.

The ad text reads:

Canada, you were once considered a leader on global issues like human rights and environmental protection. Today you’re home to polluting tar sands oil, speeding the dangerous effects of climate change. For us in Africa, climate change is a life and death issue. By dramatically increasing Canada’s global warming pollution, tar sands mining and drilling makes the problem worse, and exposes millions of Africans to more devastating drought and famine today and in the years to come. It’s time to draw the line. We call on Canada to change course and be a leader in clean energy and to support international action to reduce global warming pollution.

Africa is one of the places most vulnerable to climate change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with reductions in agricultural yield projected to be as high as 50 percent in some countries by 2020.

via Global Leaders Call On Canada To Fight Climate Change In New Ad.

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Globe and Mail Update

The possibility of using a patient’s genetic information to create personalized therapies to battle cancer is one step closer to reality after Canadian scientists decoded, for the first time, the entire genome of a patient’s metastatic breast cancer.

It’s a landmark achievement that is helping to rewrite old notions about the way cancer develops and provides new insights into which drugs could benefit patients the most.

“I’m excited by the possibilities,” said Samuel Aparicio, the head of the department of breast and molecular oncology at the B.C. Cancer Agency and one of the lead scientists involved with the discovery. “In fact, I never thought I would see in my professional lifetime that it would become possible to routinely sequence genomes in the way that we’re now doing.”

Genomes contain all of the biological information of a living organism, and that information is housed in DNA. There are about three billion “letters” or building blocks in the human genome. When cells divide, all three billion building blocks must be copied. But mistakes in the copying process can sometimes occur, and those mutations can, in some cases, cause cells to grow in an uncontrolled way – which is how cancer develops.

In decoding the metastatic breast-cancer genome, which contains all of the genetic information of a patient’s cancer, scientists were able to identify all of the mutations in the tumour, a feat that has never before been accomplished.

But the breakthrough didn’t stop there. Once all of the tumour mutations of the developed cancer were identified – a total of 32 were found – scientists had the information to look back and see which of those mutations were present in the patient’s original, primary tumour.

They discovered that only 11 of the 32 mutations were present in the original tumour, with only five of those present in all of the original cancer cells, meaning that even in the early stages, cancer cells aren’t uniform. That’s significant because it proves even from the outset, cancer cells contain different mutations which change over time.

While scientists have theorized that cancer cells can differ, even in a single individual, until now it has never been possible to sequence the cancer genome and determine what mutations are present and how they evolve.

“I think we’re getting used to the idea an individual patient’s cancer is itself multiple individual cancers that may behave differently,” said Dr. Aparicio, who holds the Canada research chair in molecular oncology and is the Nan and Lorraine Robertson chair of breast-cancer research at the University of British Columbia.

The findings, discovered by a research team led by Dr. Aparicio and Marco Marra, director of the Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre at the B.C. Cancer Agency, are published Thursday in the journal Nature.

A major portion of the money used to fund the research came from the B.C. Cancer Foundation’s Weekend to End Breast Cancer walk, as well as donations raised across the province during the annual breast-cancer walk over the past six years. Funding also came from other groups, including the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation.

The next major challenge will be interpreting the mutations to understand their significance and determine which mutations are vulnerable to which treatments.

Eventually, scientists hope to decode cancer genomes from a large number of patients to determine if there are any patterns in the genetic mutations or the overall significance of various mutations. Dr. Aparicio said their work could help usher in a new era in which scientists will be able to decode cancer genomes in all patients to help create therapies targeted to the mutations present in their tumours….

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