Americans win option on Budvar

PRAGUE - Anheuser-Busch, America's biggest brewing company, will get first chance at buying part of Czech state brewer Budvar NP, makers of the European brand of Budweiser beer, a government official has said.

Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc. and Budvar have been locked in a protracted row over who has the right to use the "Budweiser" trademark, the flagship brand of both brewers.

Anheuser-Busch "has become the first official partner for the discus­sions (on Budvar's privatization). "If we do not reach agreement, then there will be others," said Deputy Privatization Minister Roman Ceska.

European breweries such as Heineken of the Netherlands and Carlsberg of Denmark have frequently been mentioned by analysts as potential suitors for Budvar.

Ceska said Anheuser-Busch would be sole negotiator for a minority stake in the brewery, located in Ceske Budejovice (known as Budweis in German), 140 kilometers south of Prague.

He added there was no exact time framework or deadline for the talks.

Anheuser-Busch has not been able to sell the American Budweiser brand in Europe and Budvar has been prevented from selling the Czech version in North America because of mutually exclusive threats of trademark infringement, which has been put off by an agreed moratorium on legal action.

The Moscow Times

ТЕКСТ 4

HEART DISEASE: AN ALTERNATIVE TO TRANSPLANT

WASHINGTON - For the many people who wait futilely each year for heart transplants, researchers are looking at a new option: an ex­perimental operation that wraps the failing heart with a back muscle that contracts to help boost the heart's ability to pump blood.

Known as cardiomyoplasty, the procedure is undergoing evaluation at five medical centers.

"It is a very interesting new technique that may have some use," said Sidney Levitsky, chief of cardiothoracic surgery at the New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston and a member of the American Heart As­sociation's Council of Cardiovascular Surgery. In certain patients with heart failure, "it may be the solution for the transplant problem," he said.

Now, doctors report that death rates range from 0 to 20 percent within one month of surgery at the different hospitals involved.

Many of the deaths are attributed to a range of problems that reflect other underlying heart conditions not corrected by the surgery, including irregular heartbeats and ventricular problems. Some patients have also died from other illnesses, including pneumonia.

George McGovern, the surgeon who first performed the operation at Allegheny General, said about 50 percent of the patients there have sur­vived for five years after surgery.

In comparison, approximately 80 to 85 percent of hearttransplant patients survive one year after surgery.

The concept of cardiomyoplasty has been discussed by physicians for more than 50 years. But there were two major hurdles to overcome.

The first was how to condition a skeletal muscle not to tire during 24 hours of daily contraction. Wayne State University thoracic surgeon Larry Stephenson developed the technique using electrical current to over­come this obstacle.

The second was how to get a large enough contraction to boost the heart's production. Standard pacemakers produced small contractions, not enough to help the failing heart. But a researcher, Ray C.-J. Chiu, at McGill University in Montreal developed what is called a burst pace­maker to stimulate the back muscle.

One of the patients to benefit from the surgery was 74-year-old Reaugh Bonn, a retired business executive who developed congestive heart failure suddenly in 1988.

Despite extensive treatment, Mr. Bonn continued to deteriorate. His age disqualified him for a heart transplant.

"It was terribly discouraging," he said from his home in Vancouver, Washington. "The only story that I really got out of any doctor was that there was no cure and that I would progressively go downhill until it was all over.

Then Mr. Bonn read an item about cardiomyoplasty in a tabloid newspaper and sought out the operation.

On July II, 1991, Mr. Bonn became the first patient to undergo car­diomyoplasty at St. Vincent Hospital and Medical Center in Portland, Oregon. He spent 11 days recovering in the hospital, two and a half of them in the intensive-care unit, before being discharged. "The day I got out of the hospital I went home, took a nap and then went out to dinner with my wife," he said.

Sally Squires, International Herald Tribune

ТЕКСТ 5

GENETICALLY ENGINEERED PRIZE FISH CAUSE CONCERN

SCIENTISTS are genetically engineering "trophy" fish to make them bigger than ever for competition anglers. But the experiments have be­come caught in a wrangle over the ethics of such manipulation.

Angling authorities are concerned over the ultimate size of artificially produced catches and environmentalists fear the effect on natural eco­systems of the ones that get away.

Scientists say the most serious risk is that genetically engineered fish might be more competitive than natural fish, upsetting balances be­tween predator and prey populations.

So far, results of only a couple of field trials have been published. Research has concentrated on adding genes to enhance growth by lift­ing controls on growth hormones. Similar work on pigs and cows pro­duced unexpected side effects, including rheumatism.

Genetic manipulation in fish is even less predictable, since little is known about their molecular make-up, according to Dr David Penman, a research fellow at Stirling University's Institute of Aquaculture.

"All this work is very much at the basic research, or speculation stage," he said, "but the technology is there, or almost there."

Exploration by the fishing industry includes the possibility of giving Atlantic salmon "anti-freeze" genes from cold-tolerant fish to extend their range into colder waters.

Other scientists are working on fish with delayed breeding seasons that allow them to get farter earlier.

Dr Penman has been commissioned by the Department of the Envi­ronment to produce a report on transgenic fish, due for publication next spring. He said the main brake on commercial interest was consumer acceptability and ethical concerns. "People are not so worried about eating engineered plants, but when it comes to animals that is a bit dif­ferent."

The Independent

ТЕКСТ 6

THE AGE OF GENES

The winsome, sable-haired 4-year-old didn't even know she was making history, or care. By the time of the injection last year, she had been poked and prodded so often that she could not be bothered to take her eyes off the cartoon she was watching on TV.

The injection marked the first human trial of gene therapy, a revolu­tionary means of treating a disease by giving a patient new genes. The girl suffers from an extremely rare, inherited disorder in which faulty genes have crippled her immune system, leaving her vulnerable to the slightest infection or illness. To treat it, her doctors removed immune cells from her blood, fitted them with a new gene, and reinjected them into her body. Today, four months after her last dose of the ground­breaking therapy, the girl's immune system appears to be fending off in­fections normally.

In the nearly 40 years since James Watson and Francis Crick eluci­dated the twisting structure of DNA, scientists have probed deeply the workings of the molecule that governs all living cells. Just in the last month, researchers have announced the discovery of at least four new human genes responsible for ailments ranging from deafness to sterility. And while finding a new gene is only a step toward vanquishing a dis­ease, says Nobel laureate David Baltimore, president of Rockefeller Uni­versity, "every disease we know about is either being attacked with ge­netics or is being illuminated through genetics."

Experiments with gene therapy represent a giant step into the medi­cine of the future.

Yet for all the good molecular medicine will do, the ethical dilemmas are grave. The advances bring closer the day when parents can endow children not only with health but also with genes for height, good balance or lofty intelligence. Of more immediate concern is the possibility that health insurers, employers and the government will gain access to ge­netic information and unfairly discriminate against people on the basis of their genes.

Charlene Grable, U.S. News & World Report

ТЕКСТ 7