Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol

Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide ‘renewable petroleum’

Some diesel fuel produced by genetically modified bugs

Chris Ayres

“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”

He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.

Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities such as software and networking and embarked instead on an extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oil (£70) from Saudi Arabia obsolete. “All of us here – everyone in this company and in this industry, are aware of the urgency,” Mr Pal says.

What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to reengineer the global economy – as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0” will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.

LS9 has already convinced one oil industry veteran of its plan: Bob Walsh, 50, who now serves as the firm’s president after a 26-year career at Shell, most recently running European supply operations in London. “How many times in your life do you get the opportunity to grow a multi-billion-dollar company?” he asks. It is a bold statement from a man who works in a glorified cubicle in a San Francisco industrial estate for a company that describes itself as being “prerevenue”.

Inside LS9’s cluttered laboratory – funded by $20 million of start-up capital from investors including Vinod Khosla, the Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Micro-systems – Mr Pal explains that LS9’s bugs are single-cell organisms, each a fraction of a billionth the size of an ant. They start out as industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by custom-de-signing their DNA. “Five to seven years ago, that process would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000.”

Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.

For fermentation to take place you need raw material, or feedstock, as it is known in the biofuels industry. Anything will do as long as it can be broken down into sugars, with the byproduct ideally burnt to produce electricity to run the plant.

The company is not interested in using corn as feedstock, given the much-publicised problems created by using food crops for fuel, such as the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in Mexico City. Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or woodchips in the South.

Using genetically modified bugs for fermentation is essentially the same as using natural bacteria to produce ethanol, although the energy-intensive final process of distillation is virtually eliminated because the bugs excrete a substance that is almost pump-ready.

The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.

However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.

That is the main problem: although LS9 can produce its bug fuel in laboratory beakers, it has no idea whether it will be able produce the same results on a nationwide or even global scale.

“Our plan is to have a demonstration-scale plant operational by 2010 and, in parallel, we’ll be working on the design and construction of a commercial-scale facility to open in 2011,” says Mr Pal, adding that if LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably cost about $50 a barrel.

Are Americans ready to be putting genetically modified bug excretion in their cars? “It’s not the same as with food,” Mr Pal says. “We’re putting these bacteria in a very isolated container: their entire universe is in that tank. When we’re done with them, they’re destroyed.”

Besides, he says, there is greater good being served. “I have two children, and climate change is something that they are going to face. The energy crisis is something that they are going to face. We have a collective responsibility to do this.”

Power points

— Google has set up an initiative to develop electricity from cheap renewable energy sources

— Craig Venter, who mapped the human genome, has created a company to create hydrogen and ethanol from genetically engineered bugs

— The US Energy and Agriculture Departments said in 2005 that there was land available to produce enough biomass (nonedible plant parts) to replace 30 per cent of current liquid transport fuels

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Shocked! How the oil crisis has hit the world

By Andy McSmith, Jerome Taylor and Nigel Morris
Saturday, 31 May 2008

AP

There have been daily protests in Indonesia

British pensioners who cannot afford to heat their homes. European hauliers and fishermen whose livelihoods are under threat. Palestinians forced to fill up their cars with olive oil. Americans asked to go down to a four-day week.

All around the world, in a multitude of ways, the soaring price of oil is hurting rich and poor alike. For the lucky ones, it is simply a matter of changing their lifestyle. But those most vulnerable to the price of oil have been driven on to the streets in angry protests, which raise a fundamental question: what can we do to survive in a world where a barrel of oil costs $127 (£64)?

Great Britain

The rise in the oil price could not come at a worse time for Gordon Brown. After a week that has seen hauliers blocking roads and air passengers facing higher surcharges, yesterday it was the impact on fuel bills that came to the fore. The Prime Minister’s attempt to ease the pain felt by pensioners and low-income families from rising fuel bills was dismissed as a “sticking plaster to hold back a catastrophe”. It consists mainly of advice on coping with the cost of heating rather than extra money.

The number of Britons in “fuel poverty” – 10 per cent of their income goes on energy – is thought to have reached four million. The average annual household bill for heat and light is now more than £1,000. The Government plans to reform data protection laws so that low-income families can be contacted directly by the companies and offered help. The aim is to ensure that the “social tariffs” get to the people that need them most.

Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, said the energy suppliers had agreed to increase “social assistance” from £50m a year to £150m by 2011. The money will be used to switch consumers to lower tariffs and insulate homes.

Kate Jopling, the head of public affairs at the charity Help the Aged, described the measures as a “sticking plaster to hold back a catastrophe”. She said: “While it is welcome news … this initiative does not go nearly far enough to deal with the looming fuel poverty crisis.”

The Government’s announcement came at the end of the week in which Mr Brown saw a rerun of the political crisis he faced in his early years as Chancellor. Lorry drivers blockaded roads into London and in Wales to demand that a planned 2p rise in fuel tax be scrapped and that “essential users” should be granted a rebate. The only time between the 1997 and 2001 elections when the Labour government looked vulnerable was when Mr Brown suspended rises in fuel taxes after a similar blockade.

Separately yesterday, Britain’s Silverjet airline announced it had stopped flights after failing to get a $5m loan from Abu Dhabi-based investors, becoming the third London to New York business class-only carrier to run out of money.

Europe

Luxembourg’s Finance Minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, who chairs the commission of European Union finance ministers, issued a call to all EU governments yesterday to hold their nerve and avoid the temptation to use the tax system to relieve the misery of high oil prices. He reminded them that, when they met in Manchester in 2005, they agreed that such a move would encourage demand and send the wrong message to oil producers.

That is not what France’s President, Nicolas Sarkozy, wanted to hear yesterday, after a week of protests by French truckers and fishermen left several motorways blocked and ports paralysed. M. Sarkozy suggested capping fuel taxes if the oil price rose further.

In the Netherlands, the protests caused less inconvenience, but made more noise when, at 11.45am on Thursday, lorry drivers across the country simultaneously blew their horns in protest at diesel prices. In Bulgaria, lorry and bus drivers launched a joint protest.

The protest spread to the seas yesterday, as fishermen across Europe went on a one-day strike, blocking ports. The biggest demonstrations were in Spain and Portugal where 10,000 protesters converged on Madrid. Some handed out free fish to underline their point that, with the current cost of fuel, they are practically giving their catches away. Passers-by pushed and shoved to get their hands on the free hake.

Meanwhile, the Newcastle to Scandinavia ferry route is being cut by the Danish company DFDS Seaways, who said it was a loss-making service incapable of being turned around. The company blamed “dramatically increasing oil prices, over-capacity in the travel marketplace and the economic slowdown”.

The United States

There are signs that the fuel crisis is persuading Americans to think about leaving the car in the garage. In March this year, the number of miles driven by American motorists was 11 billion fewer than in March 2007, according to the Transportation Department. That is the sharpest drop year on year that the department has ever recorded, and the first fall of any kind recorded in the month of March since 1979.

The US Energy Department projects that this year, domestic gas consumption will drop by 190,000 barrels a day and overall petroleum use by 330,000 barrels a day, the first annual fall since 1991. But those figures look less impressive when expressed as percentages. Eleven billion fewer miles is a drop of 4.3 per cent and 330,000 barrels is less than 1 per cent of the country’s total daily consumption.

Even so, this is good news for the environment, since the US’s greenhouse gas emissions fell by nine million tonnes in the first quarter of 2008. And insurance companies report a sharp drop in road accidents.

An increasing number of employers, anxious to keep their staff, are offering them the option of working longer but fewer days, to cut out journeys to work. There is a plan to offer public employees on New York’s Long Island the opportunity to work four 10-hour days, instead of five eight-hour days – a move which, it is reckoned, would save more than 30 barrels of oil a day. When Kent State University, in Ohio, offered this opportunity to 94 security staff, 78 of them snapped it up.

But the changing travelling habits have created problems for America’s bus and subway systems, which are having to cope with a sudden increase in passengers at the same time that they are paying more for fuel. In Eugene, Oregon, 16 per cent more people took the bus this month than in April, but the town’s main bus company, Lane Transit District, is losing money and cannot afford to expand.

Airlines, which are struggling to break even, are reluctant to raise the price of tickets and are introducing fees for baggage handling instead. American Airlines has slapped a $16 fee on the first piece of baggage checked in by economy-class passengers. Other airlines have followed.

But Southwest Airlines, in California, is laughing, because it took a gamble at the start of the year and bought 70 per cent of the fuel it estimated it would need in a full year for a paltry $51 a barrel – two-fifths of the current price. It is probably the only US airline that will be able to make a profit without increasing charges.

In Northern California, one man thought he had found a way to profit from the crisis. He was spotted rummaging around in the garbage behind a Burger King, with a tube and a storage bin. When police caught up with him, they found that he had 2,500 gallons of used fryer grease stolen from various restaurants. Chip pan fat is worth more than four times what it was a few years ago, making that haul worth more than £3,000.

Outside Seattle, the owner of a pizza restaurant is thinking of installing a CCTV camera over its 50-gallon cooking-oil barrel to keep rustlers away. “Fryer grease has become gold,” its owner, Nick Damianidis, told The New York Times. “And just over a year ago, I had to pay someone to take it away.”

South America

With some of the most prominent oil producers operating outside of the Middle East and a preponderance of left-wing governments insulating their populations from fuel price increases with heavy subsidies, South America has so far managed better than most with the fuel crisis.

In fact soaring oil prices have bulked up budgets to record levels in countries such as Venezuela. Badly scarred by the oil crises of the 1970s, many Latin American nations have since diversified their energy mix by encouraging the use of biofuels. In Brazil, the world’s largest ethanol producer, biofuels account for more than half of transport needs. But while biofuels have kept petrol prices down, food prices – particularly in Central American countries such as Mexico and Haiti – have shot up as vast tracts of arable land are switched from producing food to fuel.

Asia

Daily protests have erupted across Indonesia this week after the government removed subsidies on fuel, leading to an overnight price jump of 30 per cent. Despite being south-east Asia’s largest oil producer, Indonesia has struggled to meet even domestic demand due to aging wells and declining investment. On Wednesday, Jakarta announced it would quit Opec because it was unhappy with the way the international oil cartel was dealing with the crisis. But Indonesia’s poor have been left reeling by the removal of fuel subsidies and have taken to the streets.

Malaysia has told petrol stations to stop selling fuel to Singapore-registered cars. Singaporeans often take advantage of cheaper oil prices in Malaysia by driving over the border and filling up there. At the same time, airlines across the Asia-Pacific region are scrambling to cut flights and increase surcharges to boost their haemorrhaging cashflow.

This week Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific and Taiwan’s China Airlines announced they were considering scaling back some long-haul routes whilst Korean Air said it would temporarily cut flights on 12 international routes over the summer. Much of the regional strain placed on Asia’s oil reserves comes from China’s near-insatiable consumption of energy. But in an indication of how the country is struggling to import enough fuel, at least three major Chinese cities brought in diesel rationing yesterday.

Africa

Africa is at the sharp end of the oil shock and the inter-related surge in food prices. With millions living on the tiny margin between subsistence and starvation, fuel costs can quickly become a matter of life and death. Governments already under pressure from food protests, and in some cases such as Mozambique violent riots, have now to contend with a new problem.

In South Africa, the government announced yesterday that petrol prices for next week alone would rise by 5 per cent. This brings the increase in petrol prices so far this year to 33 per cent, while the price of diesel, used extensively in farming and heavy industry, has leapt 49 per cent.

There are also growing fears that rapidly increasing fuel prices could have a knock-on effect for aid agencies in countries such as Ethiopia, which are struggling to pay for fuel. This week the Red Cross said in its annual report that rising oil and food costs would mean it now needs much more money than last year just to keep the same level of aid distribution. Africa remains the largest area of Red Cross spending, accounting for 45 per cent of the field budget in 2007.

Middle East

Not even the region with the world’s largest oil reserves has escaped the pressures. As major importers beg major producers such as Saudi Arabia to release millions more barrels on to the world markets those Middle Eastern countries unlucky enough not to be sitting on lakes of black gold are facing growing resentment from their own populations over fuel prices.

In Egypt, petrol prices have risen by as much as 40 per cent in a year. Yemen has been rocked by riots in the south, which is home to only a fifth of its 22 million population but produces 80 per cent of the country’s oil. Young men and separatists, angry that very little of the nation’s oil wealth has trickled down to ordinary people in the south, have been protesting since April, raising concerns that Islamic militants could exploit the unrest in the notoriously fractious country.

In Gaza this week, where fuel shortages have long been a major source of seething discontent due to rationing by Israel and Hamas, Palestinians were forced to fill their cars with olive oil instead of diesel.

Iran is acutely vulnerable to rises in fuel prices because, despite being the world’s second largest producer, it is still forced to import about 40 per cent of its petrol because of a lack of refining facilities. Protests last year over fuel prices brought in rationing, which is still in place in Tehran and other major Iranian cities.

Australasia

As Kevin Rudd’s newly elected government tries to stem a wave of discontent over prices at the petrol pumps, the airline Qantas announced this week that it was intending to slash hundreds of jobs, freeze executive pay and shut down some domestic rural routes.

Its low-budget offshoot, Jetstar, announced it would cut the number of routes it flew by 5 per cent angering many of those living in Australia’s vast interior who rely on the low budget airlines. In an indication of just how much pressure the world’s airline operators are under, Qantas estimated that this year’s fuel bill would be £500m more than last year. Petrol prices in Melbourne this week hit an all-time high of 164.9 cents [80p] a litre on Wednesday.

Arctic

With the threat of the world’s oil reserves one day running out, energy-hungry nations are frantically looking towards the more inaccessible areas of the world for new sources. This week, the five main powers bordering the Arctic – Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States – met in Greenland for a two-day summit to discuss their various claims of sovereignty over the Arctic Ocean seabed.

The summit was a bid to stop the Arctic becoming a flashpoint between the nations because of the natural resources it is thought to contain. Oil prospectors believe it could be home to a quarter of the world’s undiscovered hydrocarbon reserves. In August, Russia upped the stakes by planting a flag under the North Pole. The five countries at the summit agreed to let the UN rule on conflicting territorial claims for the region’s seabed.

Environmental campaigners, who were not allowed to attend the summit, are concerned that a new scramble for the Arctic has begun and are worried that future exploration could damage the area’s sensitive ecosystems. They have called for a similar treaty to that which currently regulates the Antarctic, which bans all military activity and mineral exploitation.

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Scientists find ice on Mars

01st June 20008

NASA scientists yesterday said they had found ice on Mars — a step towards finding evidence of life.

Sharp new images received from their Phoenix lander convinced scientists that the spacecraft’s thrusters had uncovered a large patch of ice just below the Martian surface, team members said.

That bodes well for the mission’s main goal of digging for ice that can be tested for evidence of organic compounds that are the chemical building blocks of life.

Ice work: The area underneath the Phoenix lander where the descent engine blew away the soil, revealing what scientists believe to be either rock or ice

Washington University scientist Ray Arvidson said the spacecraft’s thrusters may have blown away dirt covering the ice when the robot landed one week ago.

Scientists said a detailed image taken under the lander shows one of the craft’s three legs sitting on coarse dirt and a large patch of what appears to be ice — possibly 3 feet (0.9 metres) in diameter — that apparently had been covered by a thin layer of dirt.

“We were worried that it may be 30-, 40-, 50-centimeters deep, which would be a lot of work. Now we are fairly certain that we can easily get down to the ice table,” said Peter Smith, a University of Arizona scientist who is the chief project investigator.

The spacecraft is equipped with a shovel-like robotic arm that will be used to dig into the ground and retrieve samples for testing in the lander’s small laboratories.

Searching: The robotic arm with a backhoe that will dig into the surface to retrieve samples of the martian surface for testing

The lander was sent to a spot on Mars’ northern regions in hopes of finding frozen water, but just how deep underground it would be found was unknown.

The robot arm is expected to begin its first digging operations after several more days of testing.

Once the arm starts digging, dirt and ice it scoops up will be deposited in several small ovens to be heated. Measuring devices will test the resulting gases.

The University of Arizona in Tucson is leading and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is managing the three-month scientific mission.

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Spirited away: Meet the psychics with an uncertain future

Tomorrow, the Government brings in new laws cracking down on the activities of professional psychics. Does this spell the end for a secret world of Ouija boards, ‘aura cameras’ and flying ectoplasm? Archie Bland travels to The Other Side in search of answers

Sunday, 25 May 2008

Wild thing: Oephebia says she can read animals’ minds © Jean Goldsmith

Colin Bates puts his fingers to his temples, and frowns. “As I have just been gently sitting down and blending with the spirit world,” he says, “I have a lady coming forward who was a great-grandmother.” One or two people in the audience nod gravely. “She listened while ‘Danny Boy’ was played just now, and I know she would very much sing these old songs while she was still very much here.” Total silence. Who is she? “I do believe this woman would connect around the name of Harry… Harold… Harry.”

The medium pauses, and looks expectantly at his audience. It is Open Week at Arthur Findlay College, “the world’s foremost college for the advancement of spiritualism and psychic sciences”, and the room is full of people who hope to see proof of life after death. But no one moves, apart from the organist, who is trying to get from his stool to a more comfortable spot as stealthily as possible.

“Who can take this connection?” Bates asks. Then, with a business-like sweep back to the podium, he cuts his losses, and points at a fragile-looking pensioner called Audrey. “Do you have a husband in the spirit world?” Yes, she does, and Bates is away, swiftly establishing that the deceased wants to say hello, that he had medical problems shortly before his death, and that his widow looks at old photographs when she feels lonely. References to a local corner shop and watch are off the mark, as is an anniversary date; but the significance of a shared sofa clinches the deal. Bates moves on to an undertaker linked to the name Jones, and 40 minutes later, over a cup of tea and a biscuit in the refreshments tent, Audrey wonders whether her nephew wasn’t called Harry after all.

Audrey is not the only satisfied customer at the college. Emily Bishop has her scoliosis soothed by a Reiki healing session; Kerry Wyatt gains new insight on her work problems. A full day of psychic demonstrations has cost only £15, although private readings are extra. Listening to the punters’ experiences in the gardens of Stansted Hall, the country pile that oil magnate and paranormal investigator Arthur Findlay bequeathed to the Spiritualists’ National Union when he died in 1964, I find it hard to think that spirits could be anything but benevolent, or witches anything but white.

But while the law doesn’t believe in evil apparitions, it has a robust faith in the reality of snake-oil merchants. And although it’s hard to see any of the mediums on show at Stansted Hall as much more harmful than an adolescent experiment with a Ouija board, no one denies that there are some crooks in the realm of the paranormal. Since 1951, such individuals have been mainly dealt with by the Fraudulent Mediums Act, which requires the prosecution to prove the intent to deceive. Since juries are generally unable to read minds, that condition has meant that solid cases are rare; only 19 guilty verdicts have been returned in 57 years.

The list of the convicted seems to demonstrate that, as things stand, only the most startling charlatans can be held to account. In 1988, for instance, a clairvoyant called Jonathan Beale, who doubled as head of a lonely hearts agency, was sentenced to six months for taking £4,600 from a jilted wife and promising to cast spells that would lead to her husband’s return. It worked for a day, the unfortunate woman testified, but her beloved left again in the morning.

It could be said that we are more in need of protection from the likes of Beale than ever. Even as mainstream religiosity collapses, popular belief in the more outlandish elements of a piecemeal spirituality is astonishingly strong. Some 58 per cent of us believe in premonitions; 38 per cent believe in guardian angels; and a hardcore quarter have visited a psychic or medium, which goes some way toward explaining why it’s a £40m-a-year industry, and the baffling popularity of Most Haunted Live. A sceptic might argue that it’s less the Beales we need protecting from than ourselves.

Tomorrow, the Fraudulent Mediums Act will be repealed and replaced by general consumer protection legislation that many say will do just that. The Crown Prosecution Service, which has not traditionally expended a great deal of energy on tarot readers, will cede responsibility for policing the spirit world to the Office of Fair Trading. Anyone taking money for psychic services will be barred from aggressively targeting the vulnerable. And, crucially, complainants will no longer have to demonstrate deliberate malice to have a chance of success. In short, psychics and mediums will be judged on a par with door-to-door salesmen and second-hand car dealers.

As might be expected, the most voluble reaction from the psychic community has been of dismay. The Spiritual Workers Association, an organisation founded specifically to fight the change, gathered 5,000 signatures to a petition which argued that spiritualists were victimised by the change in the law in a way Christians never could be. It had no effect.

“We don’t have any objection to the new regulations in themselves,” says Carole McEntee-Taylor, the organisation’s co-founder. “But by repealing the Fraudulent Mediums Act as well, they’re taking away the statutory recognition of genuine mediumship. People fought for 100 years to get that ‘ law through Parliament.” Worse, since spiritualist churches routinely charge for entry – solely, McEntee-Taylor says, to cover the costs of venue hire and travel – they will be vulnerable to malicious complaints from the aggressively sceptical.

One can hardly blame spiritualists who claim persecution. Their profession has not exactly been immune to ridicule, and it’s not hard to imagine a long line of naysayers with the will to complain. But it’s for precisely this reason that another strain of opinion within the ranks of the clairvoyant insists that the legal change will work in their favour, eliminating the loose cannons who give the industry a bad name. The Spiritualists’ National Union, the best-known umbrella group in a broad field in which its position is roughly analogous to that of Monty Python’s People’s Front of Judea, has come down strongly in favour of the new rules. It argues that no one who works responsibly will have anything to fear.

“We get very few complaints about our mediums,” says Duncan Gascoyne, the organisation’s president. “It’s the others outside in the sticks, who claim to be mediums and aren’t, who cause all the trouble. If [the new rules] help to clean the movement up, they’re in our interest.”

The question, then, is this: what exactly is a bad psychic? To a non-believer, Colin Bates might seem like one who might warrant the occasional grumble, relying as he seems to on cold reading, persuasion and a scatter-gun approach to common human characteristics that seem less like clairvoyance and more like an enormous game of Guess Who. But while this is not exactly endearing, it is not dishonest, either – and instead of consternation, it brings comfort. Certainly no one seemed to be complaining at Stansted Hall, and no harm was done: the hourly rate for entertainment, if that’s your sort of thing, works out very reasonably indeed.

So perhaps the question should be recast to consider responsibility. Like the doctor, the sensible psychic’s first rule is probably to do no harm, and while there may be no such thing as a good medium to the ardent materialist, the contrast between those who have a code and those who don’t – between the tactful and the terrifying, the reasonable and the rip-off – is obvious to anyone. Under that scheme, it may be people such as Warren Caylor who should be worrying.

Like all physical mediums, Caylor performs his “experiments” in the dark, and in an era of infrared cameras and miniature recording devices, he is one of the few to still be plugging away. Caroline Smith and Michelle Skyrne went to see him last year, after hearing from a friend that he might be able to help them contact loved ones on the other side. Caroline’s father had died of cancer, and Michelle’s boyfriend, a soldier, had been killed in Iraq just two months before; £30 each from 80 audience members seemed like a lot of money, but they had heard he had a connection. So they took off all their jewellery and went through the compulsory metal detectors and took their seats, and watched Caylor being strapped into his chair, the better to guarantee he couldn’t move during the séance. Then, to combat the risks of ectoplasm, the lights went off.

Ectoplasm, as any physical medium will tell you, is the crucial thing that distinguishes the gifted few from the rest of us. A kind of ethereal, intestinal goo that can manipulate the restrained visionary’s surroundings, it looks – in Caylor’s pictures, at least – an awful lot like toilet roll. Light is said to force the stuff back into the body at dangerous speed – indeed, the legendary Helen Duncan, queen of the physical mediums and the last woman to be imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act, is said to have died from complications resulting from a sudden ingestion of ectoplasm when the police raided one of her shows with torches.

This is one explanation why Smith and Skyrne found themselves in the pitch black, waiting for a message. Unfortunately for the medium, just as the spirits started to send luminous signs of their presence, enough light from a passing car got in through cracks in the window panels for his audience to see him out of his seat, the bindings removed, waving a pair of what looked suspiciously like glowsticks. This is another explanation.

Caylor, sensibly enough, did not hang around long enough for Skyrne or Smith to demand a refund. They considered going to the police, but decided that their chances of success were too slim for it to be worth bothering with, and they were probably right. With the Office of Fair Trading in charge, cases will be treated in the context of other reports of fraud, rather than in isolation, as they tend to be at present. Given enough complaints, someone such as Caylor might eventually be held to account.

Smith is, not surprisingly, in favour of the change. “I just wanted to speak to my dad,” she says, her anger still fizzing. “I really wanted to believe. But this man made a mockery of the whole thing. It was just laughable, like a ‘Punch and Judy’ show. That’s what was so upsetting.”

The fact that both she and Skyrne continue to believe in the possibility of psychic connection with the dead is, if nothing else, a remarkable testament to the resilience of faith. It is true, as many psychics will tell you, that there isn’t much you can do to convince someone who’s made their mind up that it’s all nonsense; it is worth pointing out that it’s not all that easy to unconvince someone, either. At Stansted Hall, still glowing from her reading, Audrey remains resolute. But what about the watch, I wonder. What about the phantom corner shop? Isn’t it all the same as the glowsticks, in the end? Audrey sighs and tilts her head. “I suppose if I didn’t believe I wouldn’t see the difference,” she says, and her still-unnamed husband’s ghost is plainly close at hand. “But I know what that was. And it certainly wasn’t fraud.” n

The animal translator

Oephebia, 45, south London

‘I’m hoping to refine my parrot communication skills in the future’

This change in the law is a minefield, but for people who are genuine, I don’t think it’s going to be a problem. Some of my colleagues charge an arm and a leg, and they’re rubbish; I’m concerned about that. Some people charge £120 an hour. They give us all a bad name. Of course we have to earn a living, but you have to be reasonable. The people who need your gift are not necessarily the ones with a lot of money.

Working with animals is very different to working with humans. Even if they’re having problems, they tend to be simpler. They don’t get embroiled in love triangles. It’s usually a matter of helping them let go of a trauma from the past.

One dog I worked with used to go ballistic at the oven all the time. It was bizarre. It turned out that when he was young he had been made to fight, and he had been kept in a container outside with a lot of other puppies, and it had a grill in it. So naturally the oven made him anxious. I helped him and he’s still a bit strange, but he doesn’t go ballistic now.

I have an African pygmy hedgehog myself. She’s called Zoe. She’s a little madam, but her thoughts are very basic. It’s food, it’s no bath, and it’s cuddles. She’s an amazing creature. She lives such a simple life, totally in the present. Sometimes I think I could take a leaf out of her book.

I used to have a parrot, too. But he wanted to be free. I didn’t realise at first but I’ve got my suspicions that he was raised in the wild, I got that vibe after I bought him. So now he’s in a sanctuary in Lincolnshire. I visit him sometimes. He’s got a girlfriend and he’s having the time of his life. I’m hoping to refine my parrot communication skills in future.

www.animalscantalk2me.com

The psychic artist

Su Wood, 60, Gwynedd, Wales

‘When my drawings are accurate, people cry – it’s such strong proof’

If I tune into the spirit world, I become aware of faces. On a rainy Monday night in January 1991 I knew I had to draw what I was seeing, and I haven’t stopped since.

I would look into the audience and I would see the spirit standing next to the person they knew. Now they don’t come through so strongly. I just get told the way to draw the face.

It’s understandable that it’s become harder. The spirits were holding my hand, I assume, to encourage me, like when you learn to write at school. But teachers don’t hold your hand forever.

When it’s very accurate, some people cry; it’s such a strong piece of proof. Still, I never promise I can make contact. All I can do is make myself available, and if the spirit chooses to show itself to me, that’s wonderful.

Since 2002 I’ve worked with an aura camera too. It gives you a picture which shows a person’s aura in various colours around their head, then I use my psychic abilities to interpret that. People confirm straight away that the readings are accurate. They come back year after year after year.

It still won’t make me rich, though. It makes me laugh when people say that we do this for money. For an hour session I get paid £6 and provide my own acetate and pens. I used to be a counsellor and now I’d probably earn more at McDonald’s. You don’t do this for the money. You do it because you know it’s going to help people.

The TV star

Colin Fry, 46, Haywards Heath, West Sussex

‘Not everyone who claims to do what I do is so ethical’

Ten years ago if you’d told me I’d be demonstrating to 3,000 people a night, thanks to my shows on UK Living, I wouldn’t have believed you. Now it’s my life.

If you’re in the public eye, you’re going to come in for more criticism, and you just have to accept that. I try to make things as normal as possible, but there are people who say I overplay the spooky element. What I do know is a lot of people find my work inspirational. If half a dozen people get a message that changes their lives, and thousands more have something to think about, I’ve done my job.

I’ve been accused of fraud, and got into situations I probably shouldn’t. But all you can do is say, “I’m not a fake” and work harder. And we’re all human. How many lawyers come away from a case and think, I messed that up? It doesn’t stop them being a lawyer. I can only tell you that I know what I do is genuine, and the fame hasn’t changed the spiritual side of it. The problem is, a lot of people confuse spirituality with piety. I’m not very patient with the “away with the fairies” lot.

Spiritualists tend to feel a bit persecuted, and this new law won’t help. But in any field of life people are governed by laws. It’s important to realise that this isn’t just directed at mediums and psychics. It’s to control bogus traders in all fields. That’s not such a bad thing: not everyone who claims to do what I do is as ethical as I am.

You can’t change everyone’s opinions, but my shows are constantly sold out. I think my public have already formed their opinion.

www.colinfry.com

The hereditary psychic

Rosa Derriviere, 38, west London

‘I could be a gypsy fortune teller, but I’m progressive’

My grandparents were natural healers, from a town called Benevento in Italy. When I was little we visited my grandmother, who was preparing a healing ritual, muttering this mantra. I justconnected with the energy.

I have been doing it professionally now for 20 years, and running a practice for 15. I still give private readings, but now I do work over the telephone too, on Psychic TV, where you can call in and talk to the psychic on screen. A lot of people don’t understand how you can pick it up over the phone. But once you’ve tuned into the vibration and are connected with your spirit guides, it’s the same.

The TV work is a fantastic platform to show what a modern psychic does. The thing about the psychic world is there are so many different styles. There are still gypsy fortune tellers knocking about. I could do that if I wanted, but I’ve chosen to be progressive.

So I don’t think this new law is going to affect me, but you never know. I don’t believe that my private clients are going to vanish, but sometimes the wires get crossed for everyone. So we have to be really careful.

www.rosaderriviere.co.uk

The spirit host

Ron Gilkes, 70, Barnbury, Oxfordshire

‘Mediums have surplus ectoplasm. The friction can burn them terribly’

Séances have to be in the dark because of the ectoplasm. We’ve all got it, but mediums have a surplus that hangs around the pancreas area. They can extract it from the mouth, but if there is even a spark of light, it shoots back at great speed. The friction can burn them terribly.

I run a place called Jenny’s Sanctuary, for my daughter, who committed suicide 14 years ago, and we’ve never had any problems with that. We do things properly here.

I never make any money out of it. I just provide the space. All I’m looking for is proof of what happens after the death of the body, and I’ve had that all right. I have lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had with my daughter. I’ve had her hold both hands, and give me a kiss on my head. And in the room there’s always this tremendous feeling of love.

We’ve had all sorts come to talk to us: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Judy Garland, Winston Churchill. There’s always a reason they come back: nothing is petty or frivolous in the spirit world. Winston signed his name on a picture we’d left on the floor. Princess Di signed too.

That was all with Warren Caylor, a wonderful medium we developed. He could do marvellous things. But then the bloody idiot brought a Dictaphone into a séance. I still don’t know why he did it. I think he wanted to get a recording of something or other. Yellow Feather, a Native American who visited us regularly, told him to keep it in his pocket, and that’s how it all came to light. I know he’s genuine, but in a public séance someone will say it’s fake.

I can understand why people get angry, because it costs £30 each, and if they haven’t had a good night, they get a little bit peeved.

I don’t take anything, which means the medium can get £1,000. I try to explain to anyone who complains that the mediums can’t do this very often; it takes too much out of them.

Anyway, I’m not bitter about it. I don’t care how much they earn, as long as it’s genuine. That’s the only thing that concerns me.

www.jennyssanctuary.org.uk

Don’t have the gift? Don’t worry!

Seven quick steps to contacting the spirit world

Floating is easy with the lights off. Just put your shoes on your hands, and “walk” around. The ability to throw your voice will help: “I can’t get down!” won’t be terribly convincing unless you sound like you’re near the ceiling.

Drawing out your ghostly friends’ love of music is a simple matter of planning. For an accordion, you’ll need a remotely operated air hose to blow across the reeds; for a violin, resin wire to pull across the strings will do the trick.

Producing ectoplasm is easy if you can regurgitate on demand, tough if you can’t. If you have the knack, swallow some muslin and wait for the right moment; if you don’t, blame the chink of light coming in under the door.

If it’s spirits you’re after, have a Dictaphone and dummy available, preferably one light enough for you to move around from your chair. Also required: strong fishing line.

For slate writing, practice holding a piece of chalk with your teeth, so you can write despite your restraints; failing that, a double-backed blackboard will let you bring out one you wrote earlier.

Get good at escapology, and insist on having a stooge in the house.

Don’t get discouraged: remember what the author of Revelations of a Spirit Medium told us in 1891: “The ranks of the ‘medium’ is overflowing with tricksters and humbugs of the first water.” That could be you, too!

‘Human bone’ at centre of Jersey children’s home inquiry is actually a piece of wood or coconut shell

By DAVID ROSE – 18th May 2008

Police chief was told about forensic lab finding six weeks ago but kept it quiet

He is being investigated for “abuse of authority” by detectives from outside his force

Firms of lawyers are planning to claim damages for 27 former residents

The “remains of a child” discovered by police investigating allegations of abuse at a former children’s home on Jersey is really a small piece of wood or broken coconut shell, The Mail on Sunday has learned.

The discovery of the fragment in February prompted police to open an inquiry into a possible murder at the Haut de la Garenne home; and this week detectives are set to announce further evidence which they believe shows that another two dead children were buried in the cellar.

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Vital evidence: Dr Tom Higham found that the fragment was not bone but a piece of wood or coconut shell

But Jersey police were told almost six weeks ago that tests by Britain’s top carbon-dating laboratory showed that the original evidence – supposedly a fragment of a child’s skull – was not bone.

The island’s controversial deputy police chief, Lenny Harper, who is heading the investigation, has consistently failed to mention the vital results in public statements since the tests were completed.

Interviewed in the home last Tuesday, he repeated: “It is a fragment of a human body…we don’t know how, when or where that person died.”

Last night Mr Harper admitted that his team had received emails reporting the test results on April 8, including a message that stated: “This one ain’t bone.”

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Eddie the ’sniffer’ dog who allegedly smelt ‘bone’ through several inches of concrete

But he insisted that had “never seen” a letter setting out the findings in more detail, which was addressed to him personally and dated May 1, until it was emailed to him yesterday.

Mr Harper also conceded that “clothing and other items” which he previously said had been found at the home – fuelling speculation that a child’s grave had been unearthed – amounted to a piece of a button and a leather toggle.

However, he said he remained confident that the fragment was bone, based on the opinion of his forensic anthropologist, Julie Roberts, even though she had not been able to carry out detailed tests.

“As far as I am concerned, it was diagnosed as bone, and bone it remains,” he said.

Scientists from the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit spent weeks investigating the fragment with the world’s most sophisticated equipment, whereas Ms Roberts had to reach her conclusion in a hurry – between the fragment’s discovery at 9.30am on February 24 and Mr Harper’s Press conference that afternoon.

Deputy Police Chief Lenny Harper was told about the forensic lab finding six weeks ago but kept it quiet

Mr Harper said he hoped to announce the results of new tests this week on further bone fragments and milk teeth unearthed more recently from the Haut de la Garenne cellars.

“We believe the bone fragments are human,” he said. “They have been submitted for DNA testing and carbon dating.”

According to Mr Harper, Ms Roberts identified the newly discovered bones as parts of a tibia from a child aged between eight and 11.

She said some of the teeth appeared to have come from a child of the same age, and others from one aged between five and eight.

The length of the roots indicated they had not fallen out naturally before either child died, and both the teeth and bone fragments appeared to have been burnt. They are thought to date from between 1940 and 1980.

However, the disclosure that Mr Harper did not reveal the results of the tests on the first “skull fragment” may cause serious damage to his high-profile investigation, which is by far the largest in Jersey’s history.

Mr Harper has made influential enemies on the island.

Having mounted a campaign against what he claimed were “corrupt officers” in his own force, he is now being investigated himself for alleged abuse of his authority by detectives from Devon and Cornwall, who were called in by his chief officer, Graham Power.

However, Mr Harper said that two of the five complaints against him had already been rejected as ‘malicious’, adding that he was confident he would be cleared of the others.

Mr Harper is also facing criticism for courting media attention in the Haut de la Garenne case. Last week the island’s chief minister, Frank Walker, attacked the “remorseless denigration of Jersey” in the coverage of the inquiry.

“I am not joining the criticisms of the media. In the main, coverage has been very accurate and objective.”

When he first revealed that his team had found part of a child’s body, Mr Harper had already spent many months investigating allegations of physical and sexual abuse at Haut de la Garenne and elsewhere on the island.

But until this discovery, the case had attracted little interest.

When the Oxford scientists told Jersey’s forensic services manager, Vicky Coupland, that the fragment was not bone, she urged them not to mention their conclusion in public, saying the police hoped to avoid a media row, which risked “detracting from the investigation as a whole”.

The scientists, led by the lab’s deputy director, Dr Tom Higham, were so concerned by Mr Harper’s continued insistence that the fragment was human bone that they wrote to him formally on May 1.

They restated their findings and added that they had been endorsed by a second opinion from a leading bone expert, palaeontologist Dr Roger Jacobi.

“We concluded that the sample was not in fact bone but almost certainly a piece of wood,” the letter said.

“Its curvature may have had something to do with it being misidentified. It appears to be more likely a seed casing or a small piece of coconut. Our conclusion is that this sample is a) not bone and b) not human.”

Dr Jacobi said last night: “I share Tom’s conclusions. I believe it is a piece of coconut shell, such as you might come across on a beach.

“I have been handling bones for more than 30 years, ranging from ones a few months old to those dating back several hundred thousand years. In my opinion, this is not a piece of bone.

“It isn’t like any piece of bone I’ve ever seen: it’s light and porous. It certainly has none of the structures you would find in a human skull.”

Inquiries into “historic abuse” cases are notoriously difficult, as witnesses and forensic evidence are often hard to find. The Mail on Sunday has seen documents showing that evidence of abuse in another Jersey home was ignored in the early Nineties and charges against an alleged abuser were dropped.

In historic abuse cases, police tend to rely on “similar fact evidence”, when several people testify about similar abuse by the same person.

“We do rely on similar fact evidence to a huge degree,” Mr Harper said, adding that “almost all” of those now coming forward were prompted to speak out by the publicity surrounding the case. The danger is that some people may make false allegations in the hope of obtaining damages.

Since Mr Harper’s media blitz began, Jersey law firm Ozannes has been taking statements from former residents of Haut de la Garenne and is planning a class action for damages on behalf of 27 of them with the help of Portsmouth solicitors Dyer Burdett.

Allan Collins of Dyer Burdett said: “It’s widely recognised that traumatised victims of abuse may suppress memories of what they went through in order to be able to deal with life. They have only now come forward because they have seen the home featured on TV, and it has brought it all flooding back.”

Mr Harper conceded that “a substantial number” of those who had made statements had long criminal records. But he claimed that made them more credible because they came forward despite previously “hostile” encounters with police.

He remained convinced that almost all of the alleged victims interviewed by detectives – numbering more than 160 – were telling the truth. “There are only three we’ve got some doubts about,” he said.

But none of them has made specific claims about a murder, raising further questions over Mr Harper’s inquiries. Legal sources in Jersey last night said they feared his investigation might jeopardise the chances of genuine abuse victims getting justice.

His murder inquiry began when Eddie, an “enhanced victim recovery dog”, began barking in the cellar of Haut de la Garenne – the sign, according to its handler, that he had detected the scent of human remains.

By coincidence, the dog, from South Yorkshire Police, is the same animal that supposedly picked up “the scent of death” in the apartment where Madeleine McCann was last seen in Praia de Luz in Portugal.

According to Mr Harper, Eddie smelled the decades-old skull fragment through “several inches” of concrete, which police then smashed through. Eddie had the same reaction at another six locations at Haut de la Garenne but nothing was ever found.

“I don’t believe a dog can pick up such a scent through a layer of concrete,” said Mike Swindells, a former Lancashire officer who wrote the standard sniffer dog training manual.

“It’s really very unlikely.”

In his early media briefings, Mr Harper did not make clear that the first “human remains” consisted only of a single fragment the size of a 50p piece. Doubts were cast over the evidence when it first arrived at the Oxford lab early in March.

The first step in dating remains is to treat the bone with chemicals that separate its soft collagen protein from the harder mineral content. Only the collagen can be dated reliably.

However, the pre-treatment did not produce any collagen. The conclusion was unavoidable: the fragment was not bone.

At the time, a police Press statement admitted scientists had been unable to date the fragment because its collagen content was low. But Mr Harper said this was because it had been found in a “lime-rich environment”, to which Ms Coupland added:

“The experts who tested it said that was why the collagen had degraded.”

In fact, the Oxford scientists and Dr Jacobi say the opposite is true. “If it had been kept in a temperate, lime-rich environment and was actually bone, it would have been well preserved,” Dr Jacobi said.

“It would very clearly be bone, which this is not.

“The Oxford scientist who did the pre-treatment has tested thousands of pieces of bone and she felt instinctively from the outset that this was not bone. She was right.”

Last night Mr Harper angrily denied he had ever knowingly misled the media about his investigation. “That’s not how we do things. We are transparent,” he said.

Exposed: How scheming power firms rig prices to con families out of £400 every year

By SEAN POULTER – 17th May 2008

Bills could spiral for families if power companies do not stop ‘fixing bills’

Households are being overcharged by more than £400 a year for gas and electricity because power companies are fixing prices, it is claimed.The official consumer body Energywatch says the power supply industry in Britain and Europe is rigged against consumers.

It also accuses the Government of being docile and complacent while millions struggle to pay their bills.

Householders have already been hit with a 15 per cent increase this year, and the industry is suggesting another 25 per cent rise.

The giant power suppliers claim they are simply passing on increases in the wholesale cost of gas, which has been driven up by a record leap in the price of oil to more than 120 dollars a barrel.

However, Energywatch says this link between the gas price and oil is unjustified, artificial and outdated. The watchdog says the link amounts to a form of price-fixing.

MPs on the House of Commons Business and Enterprise committee have begun an inquiry into the prices.

Energywatch chief executive Alan Asher will tell them that bills could be slashed if the price of gas and electricity was linked to the normal market pattern of supply and demand.

He said: “There is no shortage of gas, yet consumers are being bombarded with dire predictions of huge price rises.

“The prices being charged for gas and electricity bear no proper market relation to the cost of production or the availability of supplies.

“The commodity cost for gas would be about 25p-30p per therm, however the winter price is currently 85p.”

Mr Asher, who is due to give evidence to the MPs’ inquiry, complained: “There is no logic for the link to the price of oil.

“It is a form of price-fixing, although probably not illegal. The way it works is to give the gas producers an external reference point to keep their prices high.

“If the link was broken, consumers could realistically expect that gas prices would fall by half and electricity by about one-third.”

Consumers are paying an average of just over £1,000 a year for gas and electricity. It appears the figure could come down by as much as £400 if the link to oil was broken.

Energywatch believes the Government, the industry regulator Ofgem and the EU have done too little to challenge the price-setting systems used by European energy suppliers such as RWE and E.on of Germany, EDF of France and Iberola, of Spain.

There are also concerns that some of them are using their control over Europe’s pipelines to block exports of cheap gas to the UK from Russia.

Mr Asher said: “The Government should be pushing this as a key issue in the European parliament.

“They should have the competition authorities in Europe jumping up and down about it. Instead they are being docile and complacent.”

Any price-rigging on gas feeds through to higher charges for electricity. This is because around 40 per cent of the UK’s electricity comes from gas-fired power stations.

Energywatch believes that a Competition Commission inquiry is necessary.

Mr Asher believes the commission would take the view that long-term contracts that tie the price of gas to oil are uncompetitive and against the consumer interest.

It would also investigate the fact that supplies in the UK are in the hands of only six major players – British Gas, E.on, nPower, EDF, Scottish & Southern Energy, and Scottish Power.

The companies insist a succession of inquiries have given their industry a clean bill of health.

How Europe fuelled our dearer gas

When Britain was self-sufficient in gas from the North Sea, the price was directly linked to the cost of getting it out of the ground and rules of supply and demand.

This meant the UK enjoyed relatively cheap gas and electricity for decades.

But three years ago Britain became increasingly reliant on gas from Europe, where monopoly companies have been charging high prices for years.

The major European power companies such as RWE and E.on of Germany have historically bought and sold gas on the basis of very long-term contracts linked to the price of oil.

Unlike in the UK, there has been no meaningful competition among them. Consequently-these monopoly companies had no reason to cut prices or scrap the price link to oil.

Now that the UK is reliant on imports from Europe to cover 20 per cent of our need for gas, the high prices on the Continent are being imported to this country.

The European Commission has told member states that they need to break up the monopolies and introduce competition into the system. However, progress has been painfully slow.

As a result, British families and business are being held to ransom by European gas companies who can, for example, use their control of the pipelines to block access to cheap gas from Russia.

Did this man really regrow his finger with magic dust?

By ANDREW MALONE – 16th May 2008

Holding his finger up to the light, Lee Spievack is in no doubt that he is a walking miracle.A Vietnam veteran, the 69-year-old was wounded during hand-to-hand combat on the battlefields of South-east Asia. A bayonet was thrust through his palm as he struggled for life before his enemy was shot dead.

That wound healed naturally. But Spievack is now at the centre of an extraordinary furore over a new “miracle” that he insists could change the future of the human race.

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Finger of suspicion? Lee Spievack shows off his ‘miracle’ middle finger

It holds out the astonishing – and seemingly implausible – prospect that new limbs and organs can be grown with the help of a mysterious substance dubbed “pixie dust,” taken from the bladders of pigs.

Amid derision from scientists and claims that he is just a “snake oil salesman,” Spievack insists that his astonishing recovery from a recent injury sustained during an accident with a model aeroplane is proof that a way has been discovered to make the human body regenerate itself.

Spievack will today be paraded before an international conference to show off the middle finger of his right hand – supposedly severed when it was caught in the propeller of a model he was trying to fix, only to be magically restored.

After a lavish dinner, the self-proclaimed “miracle man” will tell his remarkable story to an audience of world medical experts.

The barest details of what he will say – that his finger grew back after being treated with pixie dust – were leaked two weeks ago, and Spievack has already been inundated with requests from around the world by the sick and the dying.

Desperate for supplies of this supposedly wondrous dust, thousands have been in touch with him in the hope that he can transform their lives.

So what is the truth? Is he a quack? Or can we really believe Spievack’s story of a finger regenerating itself – along with the extraordinary implications for medical science?

Spievack’s finger when it was severed

For an answer, I travelled to Spievack’s home in Cincinnati – and uncovered an astonishing saga.

Far from being a hustler or a fantasist, this decorated former soldier appears to be entirely sincere – yet he’s also the public face of a business involving vast sums of money, and Supreme Court battles, and which has attracted the interest of the U.S. President.

With countless people hoping this “breakthrough” could help them grow new limbs as well as vital organs – replacing diseased livers, kidneys and even hearts – Spievack’s finger has spawned a multi-billion- dollar industry.

This month, the White House agreed to pump in more than $500m (£256m) to research whether pixie dust can help thousands of wounded soldiers grow new limbs, fingers and toes lost during the war in Iraq.

With the use of high-tech laboratories and special facilities built to create the dust, President George W. Bush hopes any breakthrough could ease the political fall-out from the war.

As for Lee Spievack himself, he insists he stands to make nothing from the pixie dust even if it does get proved to work.

In fact, he had never even heard of the research to develop pixie dust until his brother, a doctor, insisted he used it to treat his damaged finger.

“I didn’t plan on cutting off my finger,” he says, showing me where it was chopped off by the propeller of the model plane at his hobby shop.

“The piece of finger flew up into the air. We all looked for it to pack it in ice in the hope it could be sewn back on, but we couldn’t find it. I was prepared to face the rest of my life without it, thinking things could have been much worse.”

With blood spurting from what was left of his finger, Spievack was taken by paramedics to the local hospital, where the wound was bandaged. He was told that all the surgeon could do was to graft skin from his arm or thigh over his finger to seal the stump.

Instead, his brother Alan – a doctor who had researched cell regeneration on account of a childhood obsession with the fact that salamanders and lizards can re-grow severed limbs – told him to cancel the operation.

“I didn’t question my brother. He’s older than me and he’s a doctor, so I just did what he said.”

Alan sent Lee a white, talc-like powder in a small bottle and told him to sprinkle it on the open wound every two days.

Lee did as he was told. The finger, he says, started growing. And growing.

Within four weeks, he says his recovery was complete. His finger was back – to exactly the same length and dimensions as before. Producing pictures he took immediately after the accident, they show his finger to be a bloody pulp, cut off at the point where his nail begins and with bone visible. Beside the pictures, Spievack holds out his new finger for inspection.

Apart from a tiny scar on the tip, it is now impossible to tell that the finger was ever damaged.

I touch the “wound” – it is calloused, like the hard skin on the heels of feet.

“I have not had any problems with it,” says Spievack, who won the Purple Heart for gallantry during combat in Vietnam.

“But I have to cut the nail of that finger three times a week, compared with once a week for my other nails.

“That nail seems to grow at a crazy speed. I just hope my story can help others. I repeat, I have nothing to gain from all this.”

The pixie dust saga began more than 50 years ago. Growing up in Cincinnati, Lee and Alan Spievack raised salamanders in their mother’s pie dishes. Like children around the world, they were fascinated by the animal world around them. Lee’s job was to feed the salamanders with pieces of hamburger held on tweezers.

But Alan, five years older than Lee, took it further. After graduating, he won a Fulbright Scholarship and later a place at Harvard Medical School after producing academic papers on the way that these reptiles could re-grow limbs.

He knew this was true: with the cruelty of childhood, he and his brother used to chop off their pets’ arms and legs, and watch in astonishment as new body parts grew to replace them.

Then, as Lee went off to Vietnam, Alan continued his salamander “studies” as a sideline while working to become one of the top surgeons in America. A chance meeting during a conference 12 years ago made him step up his research.

He listened as Dr Stephen Badylak, a former veterinary surgeon and civil engineer, described how his pet dog, Rocky, was dying from a faulty artery.

Badylak explained how he had removed part of Rocky’s intestine and stitched it in place of the artery.

The inner lining of the intestine regenerates itself every six days. And, astonishingly, he says the intestine he put in Rocky mutated and became indistinguishable from a real artery, changing its own shape and composition naturally.

He tried the same procedure on other dogs, replacing tendons, bladders and ligaments successfully. He realised that the intestine’s cells had been used by the body as a scaffold around which new tissue and organs can grow.

While the exact details of how the new powder works is a closely-guarded secret, some doctors say it appears to trick the human body into thinking that it needs to grow new flesh or organs.

In the same way that cells “tell” a baby in the womb that it has not fully developed, instructing it to grow fingers, organs and eyes, clinical trials appear to show that compounds taken from a pig’s bladder and modified in laboratories trigger a similar process in adults.

There have been numerous cases of children re-growing fingers and toes up to the age of two, though nobody had been able to pinpoint how this happens, or why it stops at that age.

Badylak thinks he now knows the secret. However, despite publishing countless papers about his findings, he was dismissed as a fraud by the medical establishment. But Alan Spievack was transfixed, asking Badylak afterwards why his methods were not being used to save human lives.

“Because nobody believes me,” Badylak replied.

The two formed a partnership and a company called ACell to patent their research. They also set up a special laboratory, with filtered air to keep out disease, to breed donor pigs (the animals have many biological similarities to humans, which Badylak says makes their cells ideal for stimulating regrowth).

More than 1,000 pigs are now killed each day at ACell’s farm, and specific cells from their bladders are harvested before being dried and turned into powder – the white substance Lee Spievack sprinkled on his finger to make it grow. In essence, it is said to stop scar tissue forming so that the organs can grow back.

Already, appeals have been flooding in to Badylak and Spievack.

“I’m a mother from Bologna, Italy, and my daughter was born with a defective hand,” says one letter. “She’s three years old now. She’s being made fun of in school. We’d like her to have a normal life. She’s a beautiful child. We’re willing to travel to the States. What can you do for her?”

Badylak says: “These letters are just just heartbreaking. I got another last week from the family of a little girl who fell off a wagon and into a meat-grinder – it included a picture of her hand all chopped up. I think that in ten years we will be able to help people like that.”

Yet many experts still do not believe that pixie dust works, pointing out that Lee’s injury was relatively minor and his finger could have re-grown anyway. They mock the fact that the “experiment” was not monitored by independent doctors.

“This man lost some skin and flesh from the tip of his finger,” says Ben Goldacre, a doctor and editor of the Bad Science website.

“Fingers grow back very well if that’s all you’ve lost. In particular, skin grows back amazingly well.

“It never ceases to astonish me, when I take a heroic fall on my roller-skates, that a few months later there is no evidence of any foolishness on my palms, knees, or face.”

If Lee’s finger had regrown from below one of the joints, Goldacre would have been more impressed, since this would involve regenerating structures far more complex than just flesh and skin. But this, he says, is not what happened.

However, Alan Spievack is not around to defend his creation: he died in March from bladder cancer – one of the deadly diseases he claimed his pixie dust could cure – after other doctors refused to use it to save him.

“That’s the biggest problem – convincing doctors that it works,’ says Lee, tears welling in his eyes at the memory that his brother did not survive to see his work accepted by the U.S. government.

“I won’t make anything from this, but I hope his family see their stocks soar when people finally realise just how important this dust is.”

The U.S. military establishment is sufficiently interested in Spievack’s dust to test it on two soldiers who lost their fingers in explosions.

The trials start this week at the Fort Sam military hospital in Texas, where Dr Steven Wolf, a burns specialist, will sprinkle the dust on the soldiers.

“We hope that we can grow back these missing parts,” he told me. “It may be that the whole finger can’t be replaced – we don’t know if bone and joints will grow back – but we’re optimistic.

“I think that in a few years we will be saving all sorts of people from horrible disabilities – not just soldiers, but civilians as well.”

Clinical trials are also being carried out into a variety of new procedures that many scientists believe will lead to entire organs being re-grown, using methods similar to those pioneered by Alan Spievack.

One U.S. company has already successfully grown human bladders in laboratories, using cells sprayed onto a scaffold built in the shape of the organ, and has transplanted them back into patients with amazing results during clinical trials. Similar work is under way to make livers and kidneys.

With other pharmaceutical companies claiming their doctors have also been working on pixie dust, legal challenges are being planned to contest patents lodged by the Spievack family’s company about their work. If pixie dust is proven to be effective, the pioneers of this research stand to make billions.

Back at Lee Spievack’s hobby shop, the man with the golden finger snorts at those who claim he is a fraud.

“I know what happened,” he says. “It’s my finger and it grew back.

“People can say what they like. All the great pioneers get mocked. My brother was a genius. One day soon, the world will come to realise that.”

The Big Question: What do Britain’s ‘X Files’ tell us, and why have they been released now?

By Michael Savage

Thursday, 15 May 2008

Independent Graphics

Why are we asking this now?

Do aliens exist? Have we been visited by extra-terrestrials? Has anyone really seen a spaceship? They are questions most of us have asked ourselves at some point, but previously classified reports made public by the Ministry of Defence reveal that a startling number of people in Britain believe they already know the truth. Eight files have been released containing hundreds of alleged sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) between 1978 and 1987. Among the thousands of pages of testimony are close encounters that range from the deranged to the intriguing.

The MoD handed the reports, already dubbed the UK “X Files”, to the National Archives after receiving a barrage of Freedom of Information requests for its documents referring to UFOs.

So, what are the UFO sightings like?

Some of the mysteries are easier to solve than others. It is doubtful that we should be in fear of an alien invasion after punters at a pub in Tunbridge Wells saw a strange flying craft with red and green flashing lights heading towards Gatwick. Nor should we lose any sleep over a craft reported by an observer in Glan Conwy, north Wales, who saw something with a flashing light making a deep throbbing noise “reminiscent of a propeller-driven aircraft” (that would be a propeller-driven plane, then). Another bizarre episode occurred when a driver spotted a craft in the Scottish Highlands. Having presumably travelled at the speed of light or more to reach Earth, an alien craft was clocked doing 30mph above the A839 to Lairg.

But the most outlandish story of all comes from a correspondent in January 1985. Having allegedly been visited by aliens since the age of seven, he later claims to have witnessed a UFO being shot down in the River Mersey. Upon hitting the water, it disappeared. Eventually, his alien friend Algar agreed to meet government representatives, but was unfortunately slain by another alien race at the 11th hour. As the writer says: “That, of course, was that.”

Do the reports prove that aliens exist?

Unfortunately, the MoD does not pursue reports until a positive identification of a UFO is made. The only reason it records them at all is to discover whether or not an “intruding aircraft” has illegally entered British airspace. That means the reports do not reveal any spaceships in hangers, or aliens on operating tables. But, if you are willing to peruse the 450 pages of files, there are some genuinely compelling cases. Many reports come from pilots, air traffic controllers and the police. One report by police officers in Woking, Surrey, describes a white light descending to Earth. There testimony is marked: “Genuine report.” And there are plenty more where that came from. Although eight files have been released now, another 150 are on their way over the next few years, according to the MoD.

Do any recurring details emerge?

Aliens do not seem that fussy about where in Britain they visit. Sightings have come as far and wide as Devon, the Highlands, Wales and London. An interstellar fashion for decorating spacecraft with an array of bright flashing lights does emerge, though. One giant UFO reported in Oxfordshire in 1981 was decked out with red, blue and white lights – seemingly the colours of choice. The crew of another craft spotted three years later in Lanarkshire were a bit more imaginative, opting for orange, white and green. And the spaceships apparently come in variety of shapes and sizes. The classic dome and saucer crops up many times but there are more unusual descriptions, such as one in Plymouth depicted as a “cigar-shaped”, while a Norwich observer described the UFO he saw as a “fat coffin”.

What are the rational explanations?

Many sightings can quickly be put down to pretty normal phenomena. Weather conditions can have a significant effect. Cloudy nights obviously make reports more unreliable but even those made on clear nights can be dubious – in clear conditions, stars, planets or space debris are mistaken for something more sinister. As the MoD said in 1979, “Venus is popular”. Other UFOs can be accounted for as meteorological balloons, optical illusions and even genuine hallucinations.

What is the official MoD view?

According to Nick Pope, who was the MoD’s very own version of the X Files agent Fox Mulder in the early 1990s (he says they couldn’t afford a Scully), some of the most interesting information in the declassified reports comes in documents on government policy towards ufology. MoD notes for a speech to be given in the House of Lords in 1979 did not exactly sit on the fence. “It was a real hatchet job,” Mr Pope said. They reveal that the Government was concerned about a growing “UFO industry” which had been aided, it said, by the success of Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. “There is nothing to indicate that ufology is anything but claptrap,” the MoD wrote. “It seems quite proper for the Government to inject some massive common sense into the business.”

There were some in the corridors of power at the time who believed in aliens, though. Lord Clancarty, who called for a Lords debate on the subject, wrote a book called Mysterious Visitors, in which he attributed UFO involvement to the disappearance of a British regiment during the Gallipoli campaign during the First World War. They were spirited away by a cloud. As for the lack of evidence, blame the CIA. They hid it all, the peer argued.

Does anyone care?

Judging by the public interest in the release of the files, plenty of people will have a look at them. Even the fact that the MoD kept such records has interested many. The US stopped investigating UFO reports in 1969, after a study by the University of Colorado found that 90 per cent of sightings could be related to ordinary phenomena. But the MoD still seems curious about the other 10 per cent. The National Archives expects a lot of interest, too. It has set up a dedicated internet server to host its website featuring the reports, to cope with high levels of traffic.

Will this end all the conspiracy theories?

No amount of fresh official UFO documentation will satisfy some conspiracy theorists, who will believe the papers are merely a decoy to throw them off the scent of alien visits. Within hours of the publication of the reports, Mr Pope, who helped the National Archives pick out some interesting highlights, received emails accusing him of being a state-sponsored dis-information agent.

Similar reports released by France last year were dismissed by many as a smokescreen, arguing the government had kept the good stuff. The truth, it seems, is still out there. But it probably isn’t hovering above the A839.

In light of these reports, should we believe that UFOs have visited us?

Yes…

* Although some of the reports are wacky, others are detailed and come from reliable sources

* Some eyewitness reports come from pilots, aviation experts and police officers, who wouldn’t say these things lightly

* The sheer number of reports indicates that there is something in them – and there are 150 more files yet to be released

No…

* Why is it that the aliens and UFOs – little green men with saucer-shaped spacecraft – always sound like the ones in the movies?

* The vast majority of the reports can be attributed easily to far more rational phenomena

* If aliens could build a light-speed ship and hide expertly for most of the time, would they really leave bright, flashing lights on?

Platypus Looks Strange on the Inside, Too

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Published: May 8, 2008

If it has a bill and webbed feet like a duck, lays eggs like a bird or a reptile but also produces milk and has a coat of fur like a mammal, what could the genetics of the duck-billed platypus possibly be like? Well, just as peculiar: an amalgam of genes reflecting significant branching and transitions in evolution.

Greg Wood/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A platypus baby, or puggle, being held before being transferred back to its burrow at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia.

An international scientific team, which announced the first decoding of the platypus genome on Wednesday, said the findings provided “many clues to the function and evolution of all mammalian genomes,” including that of humans, and should “inspire rapid advances in other investigations of mammalian biology and evolution.”

The research is described in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature by a group of almost 100 scientists led by Wesley C. Warren, a geneticist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The single subject of the study was a female platypus named Glennie, a resident of Glenrock Station in New South Wales, Australia, whose DNA was collected and analyzed.

The platypus, native to Australia, is so odd that when the first specimens were sent to Europe in the 19th century, scientists suspected a hoax. It was classified as a mammal, one of only two monotremes (echidna is the other) living today that are offshoots of the main mammalian lineage. The divergence occurred some 166 million years ago from primitive ancestors combining features of both mammals and reptiles.

“What is unique about the platypus is that it has retained a large overlap between two very different classifications, while later mammals lost the features of reptiles,” Dr. Warren said in an interview.

In their investigation of the platypus genetic blueprint, the scientists found that its genome contains about 18,500 genes, similar to other vertebrates and about two-thirds the size of the human genome. The platypus shares 82 percent of its genes with the human, mouse, dog, opossum and chicken. Some repeated elements in the genome, the scientists noted, hold hints as to the chronology of changes in the platypus.

Of particular interest, the researchers reported, the analysis identified families of genes that link the platypus to reptiles (like those for egg-laying, vision and venom production), as well as to mammals (antibacterial proteins and lactation). The platypus lacks nipples; the young nurse through the abdominal skin.

One surprise was finding genes responsible for sensitive odor receptors. As a primarily aquatic animal, the platypus was already known to rely on electrosensory receptors in its bill to detect faint electric fields emitted by underwater prey. So why the considerable ability to sense odors? The scientists speculate that it may involve sexual communication or the use of water-soluble odorants in navigating and hunting underwater.

Richard K. Wilson, director of the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University, said that the comparison of the platypus genes with those of other mammals was the beginning of an examination of how “genes have been conserved throughout evolution.”

The project, involving scientists from eight countries, was primarily financed by the National Human Genome Research Institute in the United States. Its director, Francis S. Collins, said, “As weird as this animal looks, its genome sequence is priceless for understanding how mammalian biological processes evolved.”

Japanese insects to be released into countryside to kill Britain’s most persistent weed

By BEN CLERKIN -  5th May 2008

An army of Japanese insects is to be released into the countryside to destroy Britain’s most persistent weed.But the controversial plan to eradicate Japanese knotweed has sparked fears among conservation groups that the alien species could damage native plants and wildlife.

Millions of jumping plant lice are to be set loose under a plan to kill off knotweed, a highly invasive plant, which causes millions of pounds of damage every year.

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Plans to destroy Japanese knotweed using jumping plant lice have been criticised because of the potential side-affects the insects can have on other plants and wildlife

It will be the first time a foreign species has been used in Britain to control a plant.

The lice, or psyllids, are sap-sucking insects, are the size of a grain of sand. They lay eggs on the plant and the hatched larvae suck out the sap.

Critics point out, however, that plants and wildlife in Australia and Hawaii have suffered adverse side-effects after introducing different alien species to control invading organisms.

Jumping Japanese plant lice will destroy the weed

But scientists who drew up the plans insist that the psyllid has been thoroughly tested against nearly 100 British plants and crops without any ill effects.

The psyllid is a natural enemy of knotweed in Japan, where the plant grows on rocky, volcanic slopes.

Knotweed is now so widespread in Britain that it would cost about £1.6 billion to control with conventional methods, such as herbicides.

Dick Shaw, of the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux International, said: “Japanese knotweed has been described as having the biodiversity value of concrete – it just smothers the ground in a mass.

“We hope that the psyllid will get the plant under control and limit it to smaller patches around the country.”

But wildlife groups are cautious about introducing new species.

Chris Rostron, of the Wildlife Trusts, said: “Invasive species such as Japanese knotweed pose a serious threat to Britain’s biodiversity, particularly wetland habitats.

“But introducing any non-native species for biological control carries risks and must be thoroughly researched and monitored.”

The plans are expected to be published in a public consultation and the insects could be released into the country by summer next year.

Knotweed first escaped into the wild in the UK in the mid-19th century after being imported from Japan as a garden plant.

Capable of regenerating from tiny fragments, the plant quickly took hold across the country.

Its stems, which resemble bamboo and grow to a height of about 10ft, can push through concrete and can damage buildings.

However critics of the containment policy to release psyllids point to the failure of similar policies abroad, including the release of cane toads in Australia to control the cane beetle.

In the event, the toad spread rapidly itself. In a separate move, predatory snails and flat worms were introduced into Hawaii to control the giant African land snail but ended up attacking native snails, too.