HM International Blog

Annual Import of Medical Equipment in India
India’s top defence scientist A P J Abdul Kalam deplored the premature junking of nearly Rs 70 billion worth of medical equipment annually imported into the country.

Adressing a conference in New Delhi, Kalam offered the services of the defence laboratories in restoring valuable equipment which was being junked only for want of routine maintenance.

He also suggested the creation of a body of trained personnel whose responsibility it would be to keep medical equipment up to date rather than expend valuable foreign exchange on continued and avoidable imports.

The scientist said there were meeting points between medicine and technology which could be used to benefit ordinary people and hoped that the All-Indian Institute of Medical Science would take a lead in the area.

Medical knowledge combined with technology excellence has provided leverage for finding solutions for complicated health problems, he noted.

Another emerging concept which could be of value for remote populations was tele-surgery where surgery can be conducted by a specialist doctor through remotely controlled micro-robots from a distance.

The Society for Biomedical Technology, an inter-ministerial initiative, was born to utilise research and technology spin-offs from defence laboratories to bring medical care to ordinary people.

TheNoble Prize2009 in Physiology or Medicine goes to three American scientists Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak, who solved a major puzzle in biology; they discovered that chromosomes don’t degrade when they replicate because it’s all to do with how telomerase makes telomeres to protect the ends of the chromosomes. Their discoveries led to a new understanding of how cells work and opened new avenues for researching and treating many diseases. The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, announced on Monday that the three Nobel Laureates won their award for the discovery of “how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase”.

The genes that make up our genome are the blueprint of our biology. They are made of two intertwined strands of DNA written in an alphabet comprising just four base codes, packed into chromosomes with telomere “caps” on their ends. The three Nobel Laureates discovered that telomeres contain a unique sequence of DNA code that stops the chromosomes from degrading as they reproduce. This has opened the door to developing new treatments for diseases.

Cells age as telomeres get shorter, and conversely, they don’t age when telomerase activity is high and protects telomere length. This property is reflected in various diseases. For example, cancer cells are considered to have eternal life because their telomere length is preserved when they replicate, while certain other diseases are characterized by defective telomerase, resulting in damaged cells.