Chile: 8 March 2010
Hola I’m Marilena Wilkinson and this page is about me and why I’m taking on this huge challenge. The man in the photo beside me is my support crew and my husband Alan. By participating in the Atacama Desert Ultra Marathon, I will be attempting to cover 250km across some of the most inhospitable terrain in 7 days. A-marathon-a-day is an obvious comparison; but it is much more than that. It has been described as one of the toughest, most gruelling ultra-distance events in the world. Extremes in temperature, climbs to heights in excess of 10,000ft, and long stretches of energy sapping salt-flats might just give you an idea of what I am committing myself to do. The main thing, though, is that I am doing it for a wonderful and most worthy cause, which I do hope you will support. Friedreich's Ataxia (FA) is a cruel disease of which there is no known cure.
ScienceDaily (Mar. 9, 2010) — They are considered to be the most important model organism for research into human biology: mice may look totally different, but they are in many ways similar to Homo sapiens on a fundamental level. For instance, an impressive 99 per cent of the mouse genes are matched by a corresponding sequence in the human genome. That is also why the law in this part of the world only permits scientists to conduct research on human embryo stem cells when they have "clarified in advance" their specific questions by using animal cells as far as possible. However, such tests are often pointless -- and sometimes even misleading, as a recent study by scientists working with Hans Schöler at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster demonstrates.
Mark Henderson / The Times
(Nanowerk News) February 25, 2010 - A team of scientists led by Dr Simon Richardson at the University of Greenwich has got a step closer to one of the holy grails of drug delivery. The goal – to find a vehicle that can carry drugs not just to a specific cell but a specific organ (organelle) inside the cell, and accurately measure how it behaves when it gets there – has proved elusive despite two decades of research, according to the Journal of Controlled Release ("


