Aromatherapy may benefit anxiety symptoms, influenza

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

A wildly underrated member of the five senses, your sense of smell has a powerful effect on your brain’s many functions. Any odor you breathe in affects your limbic system, which governs emotional processing, motivation, fear, and pleasure, including your hippocampus and amygdala, all three of which impact learning and memory. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, “Imaging studies in humans help show the effects of smells on the limbic system and its emotional pathways.” That means they can actually see smells affecting people via brain scans.

According to PubMed, “Aromatherapy uses plant materials and aromatic plant oils, including essential oils, and other aromatic compounds for the purpose of altering one’s mood, cognitive, psychological, or physical well-being.” It is currently being studied as a natural treatment for stress, anxiety, and even for symptom management in cancer patients.

During flu season, many essential oils have potent germ-killing benefits; this study found that vapor of bergamot and eucalyptus killed the influenza virus after 10 minutes, while the vapors of cinnamon, lemongrass, lavender, and geranium killed the flu virus after 30 minutes of exposure. Applied as liquids, cinnamon, bergamot, and thyme were also shown to kill the flu virus, even when highly diluted.

Read full, original post: Can You Smell Your Way to a Better Brain? Science Says Yes.

Five common myths about Monsanto

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

As a liberal and a Bernie Sanders supporter, one of the things that annoys me to no end is the ignorance of people on the left when it comes to science. Specifically, this is the continued demonization of biotech companies like Monsanto, and the conspiracy nonsense liberals and privileged progressives buy into.

. . . .

Here are five of the common myths pushed by the anti-Monsanto crowd for the profit of the organic industry:

5. Roundup is a deadly carcinogen: The active ingredient in Roundup is glyphosate which is an herbicide, and harmless to humans and other animals unless ingested in highly concentrated doses.

. . . .

4. Monsanto sues and bankrupts small farmers: This is a common argument against the industry. . .

This litigation is for violations of patent law or contracts (which organic companies also have), not for accidental cross-breeding of crops.

. . . .

3. Monsanto owns Hillary Clinton: The only real connection . . . is that she hired an independent lobbyist that has worked for Monsanto . . .  Yes, Monsanto has donated to her campaign, but would you rather that the LGBT-friendly company put their money behind Ted Cruz . . .?

2. Monsanto has a monopoly on the food market: No, they don’t. Monsanto currently has annual profits close to what Whole Foods does. . .

1. The organic market is a grassroots movement. . . .

. . . .

If you prefer fresh food from farmers you know, that’s great. . . .

However, buying into the fear campaign by the organic/anti-GMO industry will not help you and your family live healthier . . .lives. It is little more than an advertising ploy to convince you to pay more money for products that are not safer or more nutritious.

Read full, original post: Five Things You Didn’t Know About Monsanto

Activists sue FDA, claim agency has no authority to approve genetically modified animals

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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

Environmental groups filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration [March 31], challenging the agency’s authority to approve genetically modified animals used for food.

The lawsuit is seeking to overturn the FDA’s November approval of a modified salmon that grows twice as fast as wild versions, and block its jurisdiction over a range of new biotech animals under development, such as a fast-growing trout and hornless dairy cows.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses the FDA of overstepping its authority in approving the salmon, developed by AquaBounty Technologies Inc.,a unit of Intrexon Corp. The fish was the first genetically modified animal cleared for human consumption.

The groups said the FDA’s regulation of such technology under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act—regulating genetic modification under provisions covering animal drugs—goes beyond the law’s scope.

“Congress never intended that law to cover these novel, man-made, genetically engineered animals,” said George Kimbrell, senior attorney for the Center for Food Safety, which filed the lawsuit along with Friends of the Earth, the Center for Biological Diversity, and other groups.

An FDA spokeswoman said the agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation.

. . . .

Mr. Kimbrell said the groups’ lawsuit is aimed at GMO animals raised for food production, though it could “indirectly affect” the FDA’s jurisdiction over other modified animals.

Wall Street Journal Subscribers can read full, original post here: Lawsuit Challenges FDA’s Right to Approve Genetically Modified Animals

Big Food companies voluntarily labeling GMO products in U.S. will not label them in Canada

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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

Companies planning to voluntarily label products in the U.S. containing genetically modified ingredients aren’t going to follow suit in Canada.

Health Canada does not require labelling on genetically modified food because the items have been assessed for safety and nutritional adequacy. . . .

Food giant General Mills Inc. said earlier this month that it would start nationwide labelling in the U.S. on products that contain genetically modified ingredients to comply with a law that takes effect in Vermont on July 1. . . .

. . . .

But they and several other international food companies have no plans to change their labelling practices in Canada.

Leslie Brams-Baker, corporate affairs manager for Mars Canada, said the company complies with labelling laws in Canada and other countries where its products are sold.

“We firmly believe in the safety of the GMO ingredients. Food developed through biotechnology has been studied extensively and judged safe by a broad range of regulatory agencies, scientists, health professionals, and other experts around the world,” Brams-Baker wrote in an email to The Canadian Press.

. . . .

Spokespeople for Campbell Company of Canada and General Mills Canada echoed the comments while ConAgra Foods Canada did not reply to requests for comment.

Read full, original post: Canada won’t be following U.S. in labelling GMO food products

Nigerian textile industry says approval of GMO cotton will create jobs

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

More than 500,000 Nigerians would be employed in the textile industry when the Genetically Modified cotton is finally released into the market, Nigerian Textile Manufacturers Association has said.

The acting Director General of the group, Hamma Kwajaffa, said in a statement yesterday that the GM cotton would reposition the textile industry and create thousands of jobs in the manufacturing and agricultural sectors.

He said cotton farming in Nigeria over the years had suffered because the opportunity cost of planting cotton had remained high.

“We view the recent submission of an application for the environmental release and placing in market of Genetically Modified insect protected (Bt) Cotton that can play an immense role in restoring attraction to cotton farming as well as reviving and repositioning the textile sector as a welcome development capable of reviving the entire industry,” he said.

Read full, original post: Nigeria: Genetically Modified Cotton to Provide 500,000 Jobs – Textile Manufacturers

Will GMO labeling deprive anti-GMO activists of their best ammunition?

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

It would appear that agri-industry is losing its two-decade-long battle to prevent labels on foods produced from genetically modified crops.

. . . .

Even as the pro-labellers successfully convinced legislators in Vermont to go with mandatory labelling, the industry took its fight to the U.S. government. There it has become mired in the dysfunction that defines U.S. policy-making these days.

In the end, it only took one state and then one company to start a landslide. Vermont passed its law. As federal legislation shutting that down failed to materialize, Campbell Soup decided to go with labelling, quickly followed by General Mills, Kellogg and Mars. The list continues to grow.

. . . .

In a roundabout way, losing this battle could help promoters of this new science win the war over those who don’t like it.

The science is pretty clear that although there are downsides to genetic engineering, food safety is not one of them.

Acknowledging consumers’ right to know how their food is produced removes the biggest weapon the anti-GMO campaign has in its arsenal — the notion that the industry opposes labelling because it has something to hide.

Chances are, once consumers are assured of their right to know, most will shrug and continue to buy the products they’ve always enjoyed.

Read full, original post: Editorial: The upside of losing

How much do genes shape your psychology?

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

Are poor people poor because of inferior genes? This notion is especially popular with members of the ruling elite, who like to think their position is the result of genetic superiority rather than the fact they have privileged backgrounds.

Low intelligence and high rates of mental illness are more common in poor people. Geneticists maintain that genes play a major role in causing both. But if they were right there would be an inexorable logic that suggests inferior DNA caused poor people to sink to the bottom of the gene pool.

In the light of the findings of the human genome project, however, that idea is no longer defensible – as the leading psychologist Ken Richardson recently pointed out in the house magazine of the psychology profession. On the contrary, the implication of the unimportance of genes is that if we changed society in the right ways, we could virtually eradicate not only low academic performance and mental illness but also criminality and problems such as substance abuse.

Since the project published its results 16 years ago, genes have been found that have a significant influence on physical traits like height and weight, so you might have expected the same for psychology by now. But Britain’s leading geneticist – Robert Plomin, of King’s College, London – hasn’t found any specific DNA variants that have a significant effect on differences in our psychology.

Read full, original post: Sorry, but you can’t blame your children’s genes

New brain scanner detects neural magnetic field

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

Measuring the activity of the brain can tell researchers a lot about how a healthy brain functions, as well as when the functioning is disrupted, whether by psychiatric disorders like depression or schizophrenia, or neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. The tools that scientists use to measure and track that brain activity, such as fMRI and EEG, are already quite sophisticated. But more precise tools that take different kinds of measurements could help researchers learn new information about the brain.

Now scientists at Royal Holloway, a research university in the United Kingdom, have developed a sophisticated machine called the HyQuid that can detect the tiny magnetic fields that the brain emits. Now the technology company York Instruments will be developing the research to make these detectors more available to researchers and for lower cost.

HyQuid is a type of magnetoencephalography (MEG) brain scanner. Electrically charged atoms called constantly flow through neurons in the brain, changing from negative to positive after a neuron fires. When several thousand of these neurons fire together, they create a distinct and measurable magnetic field, each with one-billionth of the power of Earth’s magnetic field, according to the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington.

Read full, original post: Scientists have a more precise way to measure your brain

Are genetics blocking some from achieving American dream?

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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

Nearly a century after James Truslow Adams coined the phrase, the “American dream” has become a staple of presidential campaign speeches. Kicking off her 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton told supporters that “we need to do a better job of getting our economy growing again and producing results and renewing the American dream.” Ted Cruz asked his supporters to “imagine a legal immigration system that welcomes and celebrates those who come to achieve the American dream.” Donald Trump claimed that “the American dream is dead” and Bernie Sanders quipped that for many “the American dream has become a nightmare.”

A study published in Psychological Science by psychologists Elliot Tucker-Drob and Timothy Bates reveals that the American dream is in serious trouble. Tucker-Drob and Bates set out to evaluate evidence for the influence of genetic factors on IQ-type measures (aptitude and achievement) that predict success in school, work, and everyday life. Their specific question was how the contribution of genes to these measures would compare at low versus high levels of socioeconomic status (or SES), and whether the results would differ across countries. The results reveal, ironically, that the American dream is more of a reality for other countries than it is for America: genetic influences on IQ were uniform across levels of SES in Western Europe and Australia, but, in the United States, were much higher for the rich than for the poor.

Read full, original post: Genes and the American Gene

UK setting research focus on child cancer

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

UK scientists are beginning work to genetically test tumours from children with cancer.

They hope this will give younger patients access to newer, more personalised medicines and further improve survival rates.

The new test analyses changes in 81 different cancer genes.

Scientists say it should lead to “a more level playing field”, and accelerate children’s access to important new drugs.

The testing is based at the Royal Marsden NHS Hospital in London and will reach 400 children from around the UK over the next two years.

The implementation of the test has been funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR).

Cancer tumours are rare in children so, without a big patient population, there is less of an incentive for pharmaceutical companies to conduct clinical trials.

This means they risk missing out on innovative treatments which target the cancer cells, leaving healthy ones alone.

Prof Louis Chesler, who is leading the genetic testing research, said: “Children often don’t have equal access to the most modern and potentially beneficial cancer drugs.

“The cost of developing these gene-targeted drugs is very high. They tend to go to adults first, where more people are being treated and results can be seen more quickly.

Read full, original post: ‘Exciting’ new genetic test for child cancer patients

Anti-GMO activist’s talk moved from museum after failure to produce supporting data

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

The story was a simple one.  A Houston museum’s credibility was on the line when an employee booked an anti-GMO activist to come speak about “Poison in your food.”  Decades ago Dr. Theirry Vrain used to publish papers on nematology and relationship to DNA restriction-length polymorphisms (good times in the 80’s!), among other work. He’s been out of hard science for some time now.  Since, he uses that credibility to be one of a handful of credentialed scientists that makes the rounds spreading false information about food, farming and associated technologies.

. . . .

. . . [The museum] asked him for real data.  He didn’t produce it, so they asked that the event be moved to another more suitable venue. On his facebook page he claims that this is “Fascism”, and that’s laughable.  A museum asked for evidence to support claims. That’s not fascism, that’s science. Museums are places of evidence, not beliefs, and Vrain’s unsubstantiated claims would grey that line and even harm the museum’s reputation.

. . . thanks to the Houston Museum of Natural Science for standing up for science.  You set a standard and illuminated the need for vigilance in vetting speakers, something that can benefit all places of reputable science.

Read full, original post: Vrain’s Talk Underwhelmed; Claims of “Fascism”

Proposed fetal stem cell research bans would slow progress against Zika

Stem Cells

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

A protein that helps Zika virus infect adult skin cells might also give the virus access to stem cells that make brain cells, suggests a study carried out on donated human fetal tissue.

The result — published in Cell Stem Cell — is part of a growing body of research that seeks to determine how Zika might cause birth defects, but that requires a type of tissue that is increasingly controversial for researchers in the United States.

Recent advances in neuroscience and cell technology have given hints as to why some babies born to Zika-infected mothers have abnormally small heads — a condition called microcephaly — and other problems, such as eye damage. But to fully understand what is happening in the womb, some scientists say that they need to study tissue from fetuses, which can be donated by couples who terminate pregnancies.

Arnold Kriegstein, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco who lead the study, says that the fetal tissue was donated by patients treated at UCSF medical facilities. But such tissue may be harder to come by, as the collection and use of fetal cells is under renewed scrutiny in the United States. Last July, an anti-abortion group called the Center for Medical Progress in Irvine, California, released video of employees from the non-profit health-care provider Planned Parenthood discussing the sale of fetal tissue from abortions for research. Members of the US House of Representatives are now investigating the use of fetal tissue in research.

Read full, original post: Zika highlights role of of controversial fetal-tissue research

You think “eugenics” is a discredited practice? Think again, it’s back.

ameug

It’s a subject doctors, health providers and medical experts are discussing feverishly, but often quietly: Whether parents should undergo genetic tests, either before conception or after, to determine if their unborn child might have a serious genetic disorder. Hanging over the debate is the specter of eugenics—fears that the ability to manipulate the health of our future babies could devalue the sanctity of life.

About three percent of babies in the United States are born with a major structural or genetic birth defect. It’s a bracing occurrence for a family and a multi-billion hit to our already strained medical system. So it’s fair to ask whether preemptive genetic screening makes sense, medically and ethically.

Ronald Bailey at Reason wrote on the birth of a genetic screening company, GenePeeks, which when matched with its sister company Matchright helps women using in vitro services virtually evaluate donor sperm that has been screened for Mendelian defects (diseases caused by single gene mutations).

It’s the brainchild of Princeton geneticist Lee Silver and the Harvard Business School professor Anne Morriss. Morriss was spurred in part by her own experience. She and her wife bought sperm from a reputable sperm bank to father their child. Alec was born with medium chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase (MCAD) deficiency, a rare (1 in 17,000) genetic disorder that blocks him from converting certain fats into energy, leading to seizures and death in many cases. A genetic test later discovered that the donor carried the rare recessive gene that led to the disorder.

Ethical questions

Would the couple have had Alec if they had know that he would be born with a potentially life-crippling defect? That might be the wrong question to ask. If the GenePeeks-Matchright service had been up and running, Morriss and her wife would have chosen a different donor.

The service is a twist on genetic screening tests that have soared in popularity in recent years. The leading company in the budding field, California-based Counsyl, offers prospective parents an opportunity to buy through their doctor or clinic a one-price panel of tests for more than hundred genetic diseases, including cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs, spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), sickle cell disease, and Pompe disease. The screen costs a few hundred dollars and is often provided free through insurance and state health programs, which are poised to save millions of dollars in future medical bills if the tests can prevent children with severe disabilities from being conceived.

That’s where the ethical rub comes in. Although programs offered by Counsyl and presumably by GenePeeks have stirred little opposition among religious groups—indeed one of the advantages is that the potential for a damaging mutation can be identified before conception—the very idea of breeding the ‘perfect baby’ remains highly controversial.

 

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Two prominent, thoughtful people, Lloyd Lewis and Julie Reiskin, officers with the Colorado Cross Disability Coalition (CCDC), have decried the proliferation of inexpensive genetic screening tests that can often determine whether a fetus has a genetic disorder—in other words, after conception. Many couples now choose to have their fetus aborted when a severe disorder is identified and the pregnancy is not far along. Lewis and Reiskin likened the practice to infanticide.

We now have researchers with the scientific know-how working with Wall Street-backed corporations to develop the new weapon in the struggle to rid the world of people with developmental disabilities: a “non-invasive prenatal test (NIPT)” that can detect a “disability” or “genetic disorder” anywhere from the fifth to ninth week of pregnancy without amniocentesis. One of the first “disorders” targeted by NIPT technologies is Down syndrome (DS). Although this test is sometimes promoted for “women at risk” for having children with DS, often the long-term goal of this technology is universal testing. To be blunt, this test will likely result in a rapidly decreasing population of people with DS.

As parents of DS children and as activists in the disability rights movement, their pain is understandable. But that does not make their desire to ban or heavily restrict this technology persuasive or wise. Abortion is a prickly issue, contentious and personal, entangled with legal and moral standards that vary from community to community. Lewis and Reiskin advance a moral argument as a backdoor way to promote changes in the legal landscape, and I believe they do so disingenuously. If successful, their efforts would lead to curtailments in abortion rights and limits on genetic health screens.

Almost all communities in the United States, Europe and most other Western countries allow for the termination of pregnancies when the mother is found to be carrying a fetus with a genetic disease. The raw truth is that prospective parents would prefer having children with no genetic defects. There is already broad national support for screening fetuses to determine whether they contain genetic abnormalities: amniocentesis. It involves inserting a needle through the uterus to withdraw fluid and fetal cells from the amniotic sac.

As the opinion piece noted, 80 to 90 percent of women who receive a positive amniocentesis test for DS choose to terminate their pregnancy. Although controversial in its early days, it’s now a broadly accepted procedure that ultimately results in the termination of tens of thousands of pregnancies every year. But amniocentesis is an invasive test; some women refuse to ask for it for that reason alone.

The CCDC’s opposition to genetic screening is based on its belief that because genetic screening is a non-invasive technique (and now booming in popularity), it will result in even more terminations. “To be blunt, this test will likely result in a rapidly decreasing population of people with DS,” write Lewis and Reiskin. That’s almost certainly accurate.

The CCDC is a responsible organization that promotes the rights of the disabled. Most of the people linked to CCDC have or are associated with children with one form of genetic disability or another, often DS. They have a compelling, deeply personal moral argument that’s not unlike the one promoted by anti-abortion groups—terminating human life in any form and at any stage of development is wrong. The CCDC however takes no position on abortion—which means in effect it voices no concerns about terminating healthy pregnancies, but wants to establish unique moral and legal rights for fetuses with genetic defects.

Lewis, Reiskin and the CCDC have the right to advance any policy position. Their engagement is part of how democratic societies have chosen to work through this moral thicket. But positions should be based on sound science and reasoning, not on appeals to emotion and hyperbole.

Playing the anti-biotechnology hysteria card

My concern is that the CCDC’s framing of the issue undermines support for genetic testing, particularly before conception. Lewis, Reiskin and a slew of commentators regularly deploy the word “eugenics” as if it’s a synonym for genocide. They write:

Adolf Hitler’s embrace of eugenics would discredit the movement, but unfortunately it didn’t disappear… Today, in fact, we see the rise of a new eugenics, made possible by the rapid development of bioscience and biotechnology, especially from the mapping of the human genome. This is obviously technology and philosophy that the American eugenicists in the 1920s would have embraced, along with their counterparts in Nazi Germany.

It’s an all-too-common distortion of the social history of genetics policy in the United States. Eugenics is typically portrayed as morally repugnant by today’s standards. But eugenics (meaning simply “good genes”) has its roots in the progressive era at the turn of the twentieth century, not in Hitler’s twisted Final Solution. The scientists who formulated these ideas were very much mainstream, and their proposition sounded reasonable to an American and European establishment trying to come to terms with waves of ill-educated immigrants from Southeastern Europe.

Scientists offered what they considered to be a progressive solution: “positive eugenics,” which focused on better pre-natal and natal and health care and encouraged society’s healthiest citizens to have more children. The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, along with many major Protestant and Jewish clergy, were eager proponents of positive eugenics.
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The “negative” wing of eugenics, feverishly popular in the teens and twenties, even among some progressives, wanted to legally prevent the mentally ill, poor, immigrants and non-whites from having children. Some Social Darwinists also propagated the belief that progress could only be attained by phasing out “undesirable genes.”

We practice mild versions of this today—that’s what amniocentesis accomplishes. By the 1930s ideologues of the far right twisted eugenics to justify Nazism and genocide. Their exploitation of the practices led to the now widely accepted view that the “eugenics movement” as a whole was intrinsically evil and inhumane, which even today casts a shadow over the modern focus on improving individual and societal genetic health in a non-coercive way.

Nathaniel Comfort, professor at the Institute of the History of Medicine at The Johns Hopkins University, addressed many of the complicated moral and legal issues raised by in the eugenics movement his book The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine, published in 2012. As Comfort argued, the impulse to use genetic screening reflects complex motivations:

The eugenic impulse drives us to eliminate disease, to live longer and healthier, with greater intelligence and a better adjustment to the conditions of society. It arises whenever the humanitarian desire for happiness and social betterment combines with an emphasis on heredity as the essence of human nature. It is the aim of control, the denial of fatalism, the rejection of chance. The dream of engineering ourselves, of reducing suffering now and forever.

New eugenics, old fears

We are in the “second age of eugenics” Discover blogger Razib Khan has written, citing the growth in the number of terminated DS pregnancies. Because of advances in genetic screening, we are in a position to reduce the prevalence of many Mendelian diseases (e.g. sickle-cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, PKU, Huntington’s disease). We are now able to identify mutation carriers before conception so diseased embryos are almost never conceived and abortion is never a question. And yes, that would mean fewer babies born with Down syndrome.

It’s a focus on what Comfort has called “individualized medicine”, which he is cautious about. “Critics point out,” he wrote, “that personalized medicine often seems to concern profit more than health.”

Almost inevitably, altering individual components of the system in isolation will have unforeseeable consequences. Dog breeders, exercising individual choice, produced modern Labrador Retrievers, a breed blessed with qualities of temperament, strength, and beauty, but plagued by eye problems and a tendency to hip dysplasia. Selection at the level of individual genes is likely to increase, not decrease, such problems. Individual choice, then, is subject to pressures of fashion and the profit motive, which are no better guides to evolution than bureaucracy.

The growing influence of the “new eugenics” has put both the far left and right on edge. They share a quasi-religious belief that nature and life should be considered inalterable. Pro-life groups and activist groups on the left that argue for the dignity of people with disabilities often campaign vigorously against aborting fetuses known to carry debilitating diseases.

Their case has been taken up by activist writer Alex Knapp who holds that no one is “eugenically unfit” and society has advanced too far scientifically and morally to allow such practices. He focuses solely on negative eugenics and not the positive impact that family planning and genetic screening have already had on society.

His focus on negative eugenics is rampant on the hard-edged ideological left, promoted most vociferously by the Center for Genetics and Society, which considers itself a progressive advocacy group but is actually the opposite on many genetics issues. It often conflates prenatal testing and gene therapy with negative eugenics, arguing that it is socially and ethically reprehensible to alter the genes that we pass on to our children.

It’s an odd argument given that CGS supports planned parenting—positive eugenics—which attempts to achieve the same goal as preventative screening but with far less precision and more unintended consequences. Their fear stems as much from the tool itself (genetic technology) than its intended consequences.

The Gattaca argument: More “fi” than “sci”?

In the grand scheme, the biggest bugaboo haunting personal genomics is the specter of Gattaca: as more people adopt genetic screening, the choice to use it could become less voluntary—or at least harder to turn down. Science 2.0 founder Hank Campbell argued that once it becomes possible to engineer “superior” qualities in human beings, then a parent’s only moral choice would be to have genetically superior children. That’s the ominous theme behind the Lewis and Reikin’s concerns.

It may sound like a real argument but it’s sci-fi in the extreme. The CCDC, Knapp, CGS and Campbell may believe they are warning against Big Brother but their positions would seem to encourage Big Brother-like restrictions.
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Should we limit personal choice, including the right of prospective parents to terminate their pregnancies? In a post about prenatal sex selection and reproductive rights, science blogger Cameron English struck a sensible balance:

“There’s no doubt that we need to consider the difficult ethical questions that arise as our ability to manipulate nature improves… But making ominous predictions and restricting personal choice shouldn’t be a part of that discussion, at least not without evidence.”

Modern eugenic aspirations are not about the draconian top-down measures promoted by the Nazis and their ilk. Instead of being driven by a desire to “improve” the species, new eugenics is driven by our personal desire to be as healthy, intelligent and fit as possible—and for the opportunity of our children to be so as well. And that’s not something that should be restricted lightly.

Jon Entine, executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy, University of California-Davis and at the Center for Health & Risk Communication, George Mason University. Follow @JonEntine on Twitter

One mouse’s brain provided largest neural network yet mapped

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

Once upon a time, there was a little black mouse. When he was nine months old, he died.

After that, some men and women scooped out his tiny brain and sliced it into slices thinner than a whisker. Over the next few years, the men and women looked at all the slices very, very closely. Some of the parts, they realized, connected to other parts. And the men and women published what they saw in a journal. With pretty pictures.

This is the true story of that brain. It’s part of the drive toward connecting the brain’s structure to its function—a quest for which a lot of mice have died. But this brain—specifically, a 450-by-450-by-150 micrometer chunk of visual cortex—is the subject of what its researchers say is the largest network of neural connections ever mapped. (Yes, that’s what passes for a large brain map right now.)

Clay Reid and his collaborators at Harvard and the Allen Institute of Brain Science have been obsessing over the one’s brain for years. Three dozen people used two very different techniques to trace the paths of 1,278 connected neurons, and connect those traces to the neurons’ spikes when they’re processing visual information. In the long term, putting those two types of data together will help researchers understand how the brain is organized and why.

Read full, original post: The Nameless Mouse Behind The Largest-Ever Neural Network

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