Listening to country music can give you the blues so bad, you may even take your own life. He estimated it would take at least another five years before the scientists would know whether a lectin-based drug was a possibility.. This attachment is the prelude to the attack which eventually wipes out the immune system and causes full-blown Aids, leaving victims prey to infection. A team from Liverpool John Moores University and the nearby Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire has been using X-ray to discover thestructure of various lectins, in the hope that they can learn how they block the HIV virus and why some lectins are more effective than others."The results so far are a breakthrough but we still have a lot of work to do," said Pierre Rizkallah of the Daresbury Laboratory, owned and run by research councils. Bluebells and daffodils contain proteins which could form the basis of new drugs for combating HIV, the virus which can cause Aids, researchers announced at the British Association, writes Nicholas Schoon. The hope is that these proteins, known as lectins, can be developed into compounds which block a crucial phase in the lifecycle of the virus - the point when it recognises and attaches itself to human immune cells. The larvae of the common greenbottle fly, Lucilia sericata, have a bacterium in their guts which secretes chemicals that kill other bacteria that infect wounds.

Doctors have known for decades that they can eat dead tissue in wounds and suppress infection, and their use is gradually increasing. But Dr Hall, a veterinary entomologist, believes that they are underexploited, especially in the Third World where they could help to make up for the lack of antibiotics and surgical facilities.. Already nurses are taking small pots full of the wriggling larvae on home visits to patients ready to insert them into wounds which are slow to heal, Dr Martin Hall of the Natural History Museum told the meeting. Medicinal maggots are moving out of the hospital and into the wider community, where their use in medicine is set to grow. Instead, they seek to develop drugs as therapy, moving towards Huxley's vision.Instead, he said the science needs theories to connect molecular biology - which can now picture and analyse brain activity at the level of nerve cells - with psychology, which analyses social interactions.

"We have the technological tool box, but we lack overarching theories of the brain to put the lot together," Professor Rose said.. He says thisidea is misleading and leads people to believe that such disorders as violence, alcoholism, compulsive shoppingand homelessness cannot be cured by social means. In one case in the US, a depressive who had been taking Prozac ran amok with a gun and killed a number of his colleagues. The effects that ecstasy has on the brain and body are poorly understood, partly because it is not possible to carry out controlled trials because it is illegal.At the start of a three-day session on brains, minds and consciousness, Professor Rose argued that "we are at a point in history where, probably for the first time, neuroscience is confronting public policy."A growing number of scientists suggest that genes determine brain function - leading to what Professor Rose calls "neurogenetics". But when you take a drug - whether prescription or otherwise - it marinates the brain in that chemical. Your brain is not then working as normal."Prozac, a prescription drug, has been implicated in unusual behaviour.