Tag: "genetics"

Attack on Big Pharma

Think your body is your own to control and dispose of as you wish? Think again. The U.S. Patent Office has either granted patents, or has them pending, on more than 500,000 genes or DNA sequences controlling the most basic processes of human life. If you undergo surgery in many hospitals you must sign away ownership rights to your excised tissues, even if they turn out to have medical and fiscal value. Life itself is rapidly becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the medical- industrial complex.

This is from a review of Deadly Monopolies by Harriet Washington.

Sep 20, 2011 | 5 comments | by

Small Things

In a recent review, Dr. David A. Relman, a professor of medicine, microbiology and immunology at Stanford, wrote that researchers had published 1,554 complete bacterial genome sequences and were working on 4,800 more. They have sequences of 2,675 virus species, and within those species they have sequences for tens of thousands of strains — 40,000 strains of flu viruses, more than 300,000 strains of H.I.V., for example.

With rapid genome sequencing, “we are able to look at the master blueprint of a microbe,” Dr. Relman said in a telephone interview. It is “like being given the operating manual for your car after you have been trying to trouble-shoot a problem with it for some time.”

Full New York Times article on rapid genome sequencing.

Sep 13, 2011 | 6 comments | by

Acupuncture for Dogs, Criminal Tendencies Somewhat Hereditary, and Other News Items

Animal cruelty: acupuncture for dogs

Are criminal tendencies hereditary? Yes, to some degree.

Straight A students live longer than D students.

Women surf the Web for health information more than men: Is this supposed to be news?

We have no evidence that antioxidants are beneficial in humans.  In fact, the best available data demonstrate that antioxidants are bad for you—so long as you count an increased risk of death as “bad.”

People who live to 95 and older are no more virtuous than the rest of us in terms of their diet, exercise routine or smoking and drinking habits.  As a group, they were more obese, more sedentary and exercised less than other, younger cohorts.

Aug 09, 2011 | 5 comments | by

Why I’m Not Having More Children

A man over 40 is almost six times as likely as a man under 30 to father an autistic child … a man’s chances of fathering offspring with schizophrenia double when he hits 40 and triple at age 50. The incidence of bipolarity, epilepsy, prostate cancer and breast cancer also increases in children born to men approaching 40.

Both dwarfism and Marfan syndrome (a disorder of the connective tissue) have been linked to older fathers, and according to research published in 1996 in the journal Nature Genetics, Apert syndrome (a disorder characterized by malformations of the skull, face, hands and feet) is a mutation caused exclusively by advanced paternal age.

A 2009 study at the University of Queensland, Australia, found a correlation between advanced paternal age and poorer performance by children on intelligence tests (the children of older mothers actually performed better). And when researchers at King’s College, London, bred mice from fathers of differing ages, the offspring of older fathers exhibited significant deficits in social and exploratory behavior.

Full article on late-in-life fathers.

Jul 05, 2011 | 6 comments | by

How Much of Your Past Do You Really Want to Remember?

Imagine a future where everything that happens in public spaces, and perhaps much in private spaces as well, is routinely recorded, saved and searchable. In that future, the man of thirty gets to watch himself at fifteen on his first date, judge how reasonable or otherwise the quarrel that ended a friendship at eighteen was, see how his parents treated him and he them, with perhaps useful lessons for bringing up his own children. At fifty he gets to look back at what he was doing when he was thirty, recognizing faults or errors invisible to him at the time.

More from David Friedman at his blog.

Jan 04, 2011 | 7 comments | by

More User-Friendly Psychotherapy, Genetic Risk Profiling, and the Secret to a Longer Life

Your couch or mine: Telephone therapy is almost as effective as face-to-face consultations for depression.

Birth control for weeds: A new way to use herbicides.

Can your genes predict Alzheimer’s? No.

Robbing the cradle is bad for women’s health: “Marrying an older man shortens a woman’s lifespan, but having a younger husband reduces it even more.”

May 24, 2010 | 5 comments | by

Being Helpful is in Our Genes

Biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind… babies are innately sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be selfish to survive. But the biologists also see in humans a natural willingness to help.

Full story in The New York Times.

Dec 03, 2009 | 2 comments | by

Hits & Misses – 2009/6/17

Meditation: “[It] can ease pain, improve concentration and the immune function, lower blood pressure, curb anxiety and insomnia, and possible even help prevent depression.”

Alan Blinder on why Americans like low taxes: They’ve been brainwashed by TV.

Best predictor of your future health: your family tree: For most common diseases it’s more informative than a genetic profile.

Jun 17, 2009 | 3 comments | by

Yuck: A Bacterial Zoo Thrives in Our Skin

There's a zoo full of critters living on your skin. Consider your underarm a rain forest…… Scientists decoded the genes of 112,000 bacteria [gated, but with abstract] in samples taken from a mere 20 spots on the skin of 10 people. Those numbers translated into roughly 1,000 strains, or species, of bacteria…..hundreds more than ever have been found on skin largely because the project used newer genetic techniques to locate them.

Jun 02, 2009 | 1 comment | by

Hits & Misses #2 – 2009/5/5

Eating choices visualized by sugar cubes. (Hat tip to Tyler Cowen.)

Evidence that religion is probably in the genes.

May 05, 2009 | 4 comments | by
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