Listen to the World's Central Bank.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-06-30/listen-to-the-world-s-central-bank

Monetary policy should be tighter. Low inflation can be good because it's a consequence of increased competition. Markets are too hung up on regulatory decisions and too heedless of what's going on in the underlying economy. Whether that sounds like common sense depends on your vantage point. If you're above the fight, it does. If you're a regulator with responsibility for a specific country or bloc, it's heresy.

The man spouting this so soon after the European Central Bank caved in to market pressure and lowered its main lending rate to a record-low 0.15 percent is Jaime Caruana, general manager of the Bank for International Settlements. True, he said similar things a year ago, but perhaps it's time people finally listened to him.

As Caruana presented the BIS annual report, he indicated that the world needs to make a transition to a "less debt-driven growth model." Since 2007, Caruana said, G20 economies have increased the ratio of non-financial sector debt to gross domestic product by more than 20 percent. The debt-GDP ratio is currently 275 percent in advanced economies and 175 percent in emerging ones. Big business, however, has been using the extra liquidity to buy back shares, finance mergers and acquisitions, or increase the duration of its debts, not for new plant and equipment. Meanwhile, labor productivity growth has slowed down.

In other words, the cheap money floating around the economy only stimulates financial activity -- and drives up asset prices -- rather than fostering real growth. "It is hard to see how additional debt-driven demand can help," Caruana said. "It cannot substitute for structural reform. Ever-rising public debt cannot shore up confidence. ... Low rates can certainly increase risk-taking, but it is not evident that this will turn into productive investment."

The common argument for more monetary stimulus, and the one adopted by the ECB, is that it's needed to prevent deflation. Caruana argues that there may be nothing wrong with low inflation and even some price drops: "There are good reasons to believe that downward pressure on inflation reflects positive supply side effects in the global economy, at least in part. Greater competition in markets for goods and, increasingly, also for services reduces the scope for raising prices, and it may even force them downwards."

In the annual report, the BIS argues that prices may be growing more slowly in part because of globalization, which would explain the remarkable synchronicity between individual countries' inflation rates. As they try to drive up inflation, policymakers such as those at the ECB may be operating in a bygone reality.

The only reasonable motive for trying to drive up inflation and keep money supply abundant is that it benefits over-indebted governments, firms and individual borrowers. That's why Bank of England Governor Mark Carney says the "new normal" interest rates will be lower than the "old normal," around 2.5 percent rather than 5 percent: "Things have changed. Households have a lot of debt, the government is still consolidating is financial position, Europe is weak, the pound is strong and the financial system has been fundamentally changed."

Someday soon, national regulators will have to face up to reality and shut off the running faucets. The later they do it, the harsher the awakening for the governments, companies and households that have been unable to deleverage. 

SOURCE: BANK OF INTERNATIONAL SETTLEMENTS

Number of Leukocytes in the Blood.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_blood_cell

The number of leukocytes in the blood is often an indicator of disease. In the U.S. there are normally approximately 7000 white blood cells per microliter of blood.They make up approximately 1% of the total blood volume in a healthy adult.An increase in the number of leukocytes over the upper limits is called leukocytosis, and a decrease below the lower limit is called leukopenia. Physical properties of leukocytes (such as volume, conductivity, and granularity) may change. These changes can be due to activation, the presence of immature cells, or the presence of malignant leukocytes in leukemia.

White Blood Cell.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_blood_cell

White blood cells (WBCs), also called leukocytes or leucocytes, are the cells of the immune system that are involved in defending the body against both infectious disease and foreign invaders. Five different and diverse types of leukocytes exist, and several types (including monocytes and neutrophils) are phagocytic. All leukocytes are produced and derived from a multipotent cell in the bone marrow known as a hematopoietic stem cell. They live for about three to four days in the average human body. Leukocytes are found throughout the body, including the blood and lymphatic system.

A scanning electron microscope image of normal circulating human blood. In addition to the irregularly shaped leukocytes, both red blood cells and many small disc-shaped platelets are visible.

Adverse Effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryonic_stem_cell

The major concern with the possible transplantation of ESC into patients as therapies is their ability to form tumors including teratoma. Safety issues prompted the FDA to place a hold on the first ESC clinical trial (see below), however no tumors were observed.

The main strategy to enhance the safety of ESC for potential clinical use is to differentiate the ESC into specific cell types (e.g. neurons, muscle, liver cells) that have reduced or eliminated ability to cause tumors. Following differentiation, the cells are subjected to sorting by flow cytometry for further purification. ESC are predicted to be inherently safer than IPS cells because they are not genetically modified with genes such as c-Myc that are linked to cancer. Nonetheless, ESC express very high levels of the iPS inducing genes and these genes including Myc are essential for ESC self-renewal and pluripotency,and potential strategies to improve safety by eliminating Myc expression are unlikely to preserve the cells' "stemness".

Repair of DNA Damage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryonic_stem_cell

Differentiated somatic cells and ES cells use different strategies for dealing with DNA damage. For instance, human foreskin fibroblasts, one type of somatic cell, use non-homologous end joining (NHEJ), an error prone DNA repair process, as the primary pathway for repairing double-strand breaks (DSBs) during all cell cycle stages.Because of its error-prone nature, NHEJ tends to produce mutations in a cell’s clonal descendants.

ES cells use a different strategy to deal with DSBs.Because ES cells give rise to all of the cell types of an organism including the cells of the germ line, mutations arising in ES cells due to faulty DNA repair are a more serious problem than in differentiated somatic cells. Consequently robust mechanisms are needed in ES cells to repair DNA damages accurately, and if repair fails, to remove those cells with un-repaired DNA damages. Thus, mouse ES cells predominantly use high fidelity homologous recombinational repair (HRR) to repair DSBs.This type of repair depends on the interaction of the two sister chromosomes formed during S phase and present together during the G2 phase of the cell cycle. HRR can accurately repair DSBs in one sister chromosome by using intact information from the other sister chromosome. Cells in the G1 phase of the cell cycle (i.e. after metaphase/cell division but prior the next round of replication) have only one copy of each chromosome (i.e. sister chromosomes aren’t present). Mouse ES cells lack a G1 checkpoint and do not undergo cell cycle arrest upon acquiring DNA damage.Rather they undergo programmed cell death (apoptosis) in response to DNA damage.Apoptosis can be used as a fail-safe strategy to remove cells with un-repaired DNA damages in order to avoid mutation and progression to cancer.Consistent with this strategy, mouse ES stem cells have a mutation frequency about 100-fold lower than that of isogenic mouse somatic cells.

A new technique for deriving human embryonic Stem Cell.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryonic_stem_cell

Scientists have discovered a new technique for deriving human embryonic stem cell (ESC). Normal ESC lines from different sources of embryonic material including morula and whole blastocysts have been established. These findings allows researchers to construct ESC lines from embryos that acquire different genetic abnormalities; therefore, allowing for recognition of mechanisms in the molecular level that are possibly blocked that could impede the disease progression. The ESC lines originating from embryos with genetic and chromosomal abnormalities provide the data necessary to understand the pathways of genetic defects.

A donor patient acquires one defective gene copy and one normal, and only one of these two copies is used for reproduction. By selecting egg cell derived from embryonic stem cells that have two normal copies, researchers can find variety of treatments for various diseases. To test this theory Dr. McLaughlin and several of his colleagues looked at whether parthenogenetic embryonic stem cells can be used in a mouse model that has thalassemia intermedia. This disease is described as an inherited blood disorder in which there is a lack of hemoglobin leading to anemia. The mouse model used, had one defective gene copy. Embryonic stem cells from an unfertilized egg of the diseased mice were gathered and those stem cells that contained only healthy hemoglobin genes were identified. The healthy embryonic stem cell lines were then converted into cells transplanted into the carrier mice. After five weeks, the test results from the transplant illustrated that these carrier mice now had a normal blood cell count and hemoglobin levels.

Human Embryonic Stem cells as models of Genetic Disorders.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryonic_stem_cell

Several new studies have started to address this issue. This has been done either by genetically manipulating the cells, or more recently by deriving diseased cell lines identified by prenatal genetic diagnosis (PGD). This approach may very well prove invaluable at studying disorders such as Fragile-X syndrome, Cystic fibrosis, and other genetic maladies that have no reliable model system.

Yury Verlinsky, a Russian-American medical researcher who specialized in embryo and cellular genetics (genetic cytology), developed prenatal diagnosis testing methods to determine genetic and chromosomal disorders a month and a half earlier than standard amniocentesis. The techniques are now used by many pregnant women and prospective parents, especially those couples with a history of genetic abnormalities or where the woman is over the age of 35, when the risk of genetically related disorders is higher. In addition, by allowing parents to select an embryo without genetic disorders, they have the potential of saving the lives of siblings that already had similar disorders and diseases using cells from the disease free offspring.