Year: 2016

Twins point to genetic component of cancer risk

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Twin baby boys Ten months old cropped

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

A study of over 200,000 twins followed for a median of 32 years is providing more information about how genetics influences cancer risk.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that cancers of various types run in families. Overall, researchers found that about 33 percent of the population’s variance in cancer risk was due to genetics, but the figure ranged widely for different types of cancer.

Researchers looked at identical and fraternal twins in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, who were part of the Nordic Twin Study of Cancer. They determined whether the twins had cancer from national registries. They found that risk of some cancers— notably skin, prostate, ovary, kidney, breast, and uterine cancer — was measurably influenced by genetics.

These results are based on individuals in Nordic countries, and authors caution that they cannot be generalized to other populations.

Other teams have published recent heritability estimates for breast and prostate cancer. A large twin study in 2000 reported heritability estimates for breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer, but this current study has given those findings greater statistical certainty. All of these studies were conducted on individuals from Nordic countries.

The study’s authors conclude that this information may better inform patients. “This information about hereditary risks of cancers may be helpful in patient education and cancer risk counseling,” they write.

Read full, original post: Study of twins sheds light on how genetics influences cancer risk

Is it time to retire ‘good genes,’ ‘bad genes’ distinction?

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

We tend to think of good genes as the ones that make us thin, calm, cheerful and healthy. This logical assumption may not be completely accurate: Dr. Lee Goldman suggests that even better genes may be the ones that make us fat, anxious and candidates for the services of a cardiologist like himself.

It’s all a matter of perspective, and Dr. Goldman takes the long, long view in “Too Much of a Good Thing,” arguing that many common modern ills result from the surpassingly excellent genes that allowed our species to endure over the millenniums. Only very recently did these survivor genes turn on us, creating the collection of overweight, hypertensive, jumpy and miserable individuals we are today.

For our hunter-gatherer forebears to survive, he reminds us, they had to enthusiastically consume large quantities of food when food was available. They had to scarf up substantial amounts of salt and water as well — the unique human ability to sweat profusely and keep the body cool by evaporation gave hunters the stamina to keep up with their prey.

When it comes to food, we are programmed to ingest more calories than we need. Some triggers are social, but many more are inherent in the body’s workings. Our taste buds prefer calorie-laden items to others. Our intestines efficiently extract those calories from ingested food. Our bodies fight weight loss with an assortment of hormones and appetite-stimulating molecules that are revved up when pounds disappear and may stay elevated for years.

Read full, original post: Review: ‘Too Much of a Good Thing’ Finds a Dilemma in Our DNA

Here’s what 23andMe’s new test can tell you about your health

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

This fall, personal-genetics company 23andMe launched a new direct-to-consumer test that complies with the FDA’s rules on personal-genetics testing.

The new test gives information on everything from how much DNA you share with our Neanderthal ancestors to how much caffeine you likely consume.

It also lets you know if you’re carrying certain genetic variations related to diseases that you could pass on to your kids.

I’ve been interested in what 23andMe is doing ever since I heard they were planning to develop drugs based on genetic information. But I was also curious to see what kind of diseases I might be at risk of passing down to my kids and whether the health concerns that run in my family could be spotted in my spit.

The new test includes more information about customers’ health and wellness. I found out, for example, I’m not predisposed to having “sprinter/power type” muscles because I don’t have two copies of a special muscle protein that’s been connected to Olympic sprinters. But, 23andMe Vice President of Business Development, Life Sciences Emily Drabant Conley said, this result is not intended to be used as a diagnostic test — had I been a good sprinter (I’m not), this would just reinforce why I’m so good.

Read full, original post: I tried 23andMe’s new genetic test — and now I know why the company caused such a stir

Genetic testing reveals previously unknown diseases

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

Simon Kunesh arrives at his physical therapy appointment hanging from his mother’s neck, arms locked, swinging back and forth like a pendulum.

Simon is 14 years old. He has sandy hair, a sprinkling of freckles, a goofy smile, and ears that look like stick-on accessories for a Mr. Potato Head toy. His head is small for his age — the result of brain damage sustained from frequent violent seizures — but it fits his bony frame. Although he’s steadily grown taller year by year (defying the scoliosis that’s slowly twisting his spine into a lopsided S), he hasn’t gained a pound since 2007. He stands four feet and weighs 40 pounds.

With a cognitive capacity roughly equivalent to a toddler’s, Simon displays symptoms of a number of fairly common ailments, including cerebral palsy and autism. After more than a decade of tests, however, his doctors have concluded that his condition appears to be something new — something that hasn’t yet been recorded anywhere else in the world.

Simon’s situation isn’t unique. Thanks to rapid improvements in genetic testing, scientists are identifying more and more diseases every day.

Though these ailments always have existed, because each one affects fewer than 200,000 Americans, the chances that a child like Simon would get a diagnosis 10 years ago hovered at about 3 percent, says David Craig, deputy director of bioinformatics at the Phoenix-based Translational Genomic Research Institute (TGen). While parents of such children shuttled them from specialist to specialist searching for answers, the vast majority were either shoved into a diagnosis that didn’t quite fit or remained medical mysteries.

Read full, original post: Arizona mom discovers her son may be only one in the world with his disease

Global food shortage? How advanced breeding could domesticate 50,000 wild, edible plants

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Apios americana

We’re always talking about improving the crops we have — disease-resistant corn, vitamin-enhanced rices — but what about the plants we can eat but don’t? What about the hundreds of tubers and flowers and grains and beans that people have eaten in some capacity or another since time immemorial but have never been put through the process of domestication?

If we want a second Green Revolution, so often promised by supporters of biotech, we’re going to need to leverage some of these ‘orphan crops’; this is the argument of Hillary Rosner in a fascinating Wired feature, “How We Can Tame Overlooked Wild Plants to Feed the World.” In it, she chronicled a small but inspired sect of scientists who see the future not in staples that were domesticated “when people were just learning to weave clothing,” but in using everything we’ve learned from the several-thousand-year history of domestication to do it again and do it better with an new suite of staples better-suited for a warming world.

Famed physiologist-author Jared Diamond has called plant and animal domestication “the most important development in the past 13,000 years of human history.” Diamond, in a review of the history of domestication, published in Nature in 2002, paints a compelling picture of an accidental process by which the first farmers and ranchers got their start.

“[T]he transition from hunter and gathering to farming eventually resulted in more work, lower adult stature, worse nutritional condition and heavier disease burdens” for those who took the first steps toward domestication, wrote Diamond. He offered an example of how the first “farmers” were likely only semi-aware of what they were doing at best, and how their actions eventually came to dramatically change the biology of the plants they gathered.

For example, wild wheats and barley bear their seeds on top of a stalk that spontaneously shatters, dropping the seeds to the ground where they can germinate (but where they also become difficult for humans to gather). An occasional single-gene mutation that prevents shattering is lethal in the wild (because the seeds fail to drop), but conveniently concentrates the seeds for human gatherers. Once people started harvesting those wild cereal seeds, bringing them back to camp, accidentally spilling some, and eventually planting others, seeds with a non-shattering mutation became unconsciously selected for rather than against.

But a shift in climate at the end of the Pleistocene and end of the last great ice age lead to a drop in the availability of big game and more stable climate conditions for farming — hunters and gathered eventually turned to cultivation to stabilize their food supply. Then the process of domestication began in earnest. It took, by Rosner’s reporting, some two to four thousand years to domesticate wheat, rice and barley. And it was done by necessity, circumstance, and a human hand guiding evolution before humanity even had a concept of evolution. When Mendel famously bred his peas and worked out the concept of the gene, he was only able to observe the outward expression of the plant’s genes.

Today, we can quickly and efficiently examine the genes of a given plant directly; we can read genotypes instead of phenotypes. That means that new domestication efforts could be completed inside of a century instead of taking longer than most of us can even effectively conceptualize. If we start now, your grandkids could have an entirely new suite of staple crops. Some people already have startled. Rosner profiles the efforts of U.S. Department of Agriculture geneticist Steven Cannon to domesticate Apios americana, the potato bean, a North American legume.

“Native Americans gathered them and may even have served them at the first Thanksgiving,” writes Rosner. “European settlers found them living in their cranberry bogs — places with low light, few nutrients, and bad soil. But they didn’t bother domesticating them into an agricultural staple.”

The promise of domesticating more plants is provocative: of 50,000 some-odd edible plants, we rely on less than 150 for most of our nourishment and “just three cereal crops — wheat, rice, and corn — make up two-thirds of the world’s calories.”

The temperature in our world appears to be changing, perhaps like it did at the end of the Pleistocene. Perhaps the only solution isn’t to keep trying to eke new tricks out of old dogs using biotechnology on the same crops we developed before biotech was born; we might also be served by a suite of entirely new breeds. This ties back into an idea I explored some weeks ago, although it was then in the context of farming methodologies. “Can we improve on nature?” I asked, echoing a blog post from Andrew McGuire at BioFortified.

Improving on nature is the central tenet of any domestication effort. In light of the work of scientists like Cannon, the question becomes, simply, “Can we improve on our improvement?” With 13,000 years of accumulated practical, scientific, and technological experience, the answer should be yes.

Kenrick Vezina is writer for the Genetic Literacy Project and an educator and naturalist based in the Greater Boston Area. Follow me on Twitter @Rickken.

Science deniers stay home: Synthetic biology crucial to human missions to Mars

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Do you think that genetic engineering is just for increasing food output productivity around the planet or developing new drugs? Then think again, because genetic modification actually has a multitude of applications, including some that are out of this world.

NASA is on board with genetic technology. That’s evident from the involvement of Lynn Rothschild of the space agency’s Ames Research Center (ARC) in California. She is an evolutionary biologist and a key figure in the field of astrobiology. From Rothschild’s perspective and NASA’s, the main potential of genetic technology in space exploration is in the area of synthetic biology. That means selecting, modifying and optimizing organisms to create a wide range of needed things. In the case of a space mission, the needed things are consumables, especially oxygen and food, but also products like rocket fuel.

When it comes to sending astronauts to Mars, the ability to produce such consumables on site, rather than carrying them from Earth, can make all the difference between a feasible mission and pie in the sky. So GMO-science-deniers beware, if you’re considering responding to NASA’s call for new astronauts applicants. Neither food, nor air, aboard flights to Mars will be GMO-free.

Considering the air and food requirements for astronauts, utilization of microorganisms and plants makes perfect sense for a long-duration human space mission. Unlike carrying massive supplies in tanks, a biologically based life-support system would turn a spacecraft into a tiny extension of planet Earth.

“We’re [already] breathing oxygen that was biologically produced…I’m wearing cotton that was biologically produced,” notes Rothschild, who directs NASA’s synthetic biology program at ARC. “[We must] start looking at biology as technology,” she added, after noting that astronauts can’t take a supply of cattle with them to Mars, but that they could take supplies of plants (or seeds) and of course microorganisms. Of course, to support a life-support system on a spacecraft, the organisms will have to be modified significantly from their naturally occurring state.

Piloted interplanetary missions: Feasibility is about the ratio of payload-to-fuel

In a new paper published outline in the Journal of the Royal Society, University of California, Berkeley aerospace engineer and synthetic biology researcher Amor Menezes, suggests that GMOs, specifically those developed for synthetic biology (production of needed chemicals and building blocks) could help human space exploration — indeed, could make such expeditions orders of magnitude easier than they are today.

A big part of the reason is the need for consumables on long-distance, long duration human space missions. The Apollo lunar program came to a close back in 1972, but today NASA and other space agencies are planning to a new era of human missions beyond low Earth orbit (LEO), which has been center stage for piloted missions for the last 40 years. Within a decade, astronauts will be traveling to the Moon again, to an asteroid or two, and later could be orbiting Mars and eventually landing on the planet and perhaps also on one or both of its tiny moons.

In Project Apollo, life support was based on carrying pretty much everything that astronauts needed from launch to splashdown. That meant all of the food, air, and fuel. Fuel in particular took up most of the mass that was launched. The enormous three-stage Saturn-V rocket was basically a gigantic container for fuel, and even the Apollo spacecraft that the Saturn carried into space was mostly fuel, because fuel was needed also to return from the Moon. If NASA’s new Orion spacecraft takes astronauts back to the Moon, they’ll also use massive amounts of fuel going back and forth; and the same is true if they journey to a near-Earth asteroid. However, once a lunar base is set up, astronauts will be able use microorganisms carried from Earth to process lunar rock into fuel, along with oxygen. The latter is needed not just for breathing, but also in rocket engines where it mixes with the fuel.

Currently, there are microorganisms available naturally that draw energy from rock and in the process release chemical products that can be used as fuel. However, as with agricultural plants like corn and soy, modifying such organisms can potentially make a biologically-based lunar rock processing much more efficient. Synthetic biology refers to engineering organisms to pump out specific products under specific conditions. For spaceflight applications, organisms can be engineered specifically to live on the Moon, or for that matter on an asteroid, or on Mars, and to synthesize the consumables that humans will needed in those environments.

In the case of Mars, a major resource that can be processed by synthetic biology is the atmosphere. While the Martian air is extremely thin, it can be concentrated in a biological reactor. The principal component of the Martian air is carbon dioxide, which can be turned into oxygen, food, and rocket fuel by a variety of organisms that are native to Earth. As with the Moon rocks, however, genetic techniques can make targeted changes to organisms’ capabilities to allow them to do more than simply survive on Mars. They could be made to thrive there.

Whether the destination is Mars, an asteroid, or the Moon, if a human outpost is established with facilities to process local materials into oxygen and fuel, at that point ships leaving from Earth will no longer need to carry enough fuel and oxygen for a round-trip. Consequently, they’ll be able to have a higher ratio of outbound payload mass to fuel mass at liftoff, making for a much more efficient spaceflight.

When it comes to human flight to and from the Moon, we could do it the old fashion way and carry everything, but bioprocessing of lunar materials will allow us to transport more people and non-consumable supplies (such as equipment) back and forth, using less fuel and oxygen. When it comes to piloted Mars missions, synthetic biology researchers like Menezes and Rothschild are now making the case that the old fashion way won’t even be an option. For a mission that distant, requiring months of transit, and with astronauts remaining on the Martian surface for weeks to months, synthetic biology will be mandatory. It will be employed particularly for the consumables, and that means fuel, oxygen, water recycling, and also for production of food.

That will be the situation on early human Mars missions, where synthetic biology will also provide a glimpse of the human future in space, namely the era of human colonization. The latter will entail still more challenges that will be the subject of a subsequent article and will require synthetic biology en masse.

David Warmflash is an astrobiologist, physician, and science writer. Follow @CosmicEvolution to read what he’s saying on Twitter.

‘Anti-science’ skepticism: Why we need to retire term

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

To understand this “anti-science” skepticism, it’s worth reiterating an obvious point: People generally don’t like being told what to think. . . . We might be anti-intellectual, but we’re quite serious when it comes to trusting our own ideas, even when those ideas are woefully misinformed.

Until relatively recently, though, they weren’t woefully misinformed. America’s founding fathers politically codified our individualist philosophy at a moment in history when 98 percent of the country spent its time laboring on a farm. Being boots-on-the-ground agriculturalists, every free citizen (and their slaves and servants) experienced an ongoing interaction with an environment that provided the raw data for self-styled expertise. . .

As so called “book” farmers introduced scientific methods into traditional agrarian practices, and as those practices culminated in higher yields and larger markets, professors gradually edged out plowmen as the source of agricultural expertise. . .

As expertise slowly transitioned from inside the farmer to outside the farmer, tensions inevitably flared. They flared not so much over agricultural science per se as over the farmers’ relationship to those who defined it. What came to matter was not scientific knowledge about farming but trust of those who possessed that knowledge. . . This tension was never been resolved.

One of the more terrifying aspects of living in the modern world is that we lack the most basic understanding of the technologies that structure our lives. As a result, we have no choice but to trust others — those with real expertise — to make scientific choices that design the wheel we spin on. To be skeptical over what we don’t understand is not anti-science. It’s human.

Read full, original post: How the Term ‘Anti-Science’ Distorts America’s Relationship With Technology

Nobel prize winner: U.S. agricultural research being neglected

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

Today, farm production has stopped growing in the United States, and agriculture research is no longer a priority. . .

While private sector research and development in agriculture have grown over the past decade and now exceed what is federally funded, this financing is focused on shorter term benefits. On the other hand, more than 80 percent of federally funded research is designed to provide the building blocks for long-term production increases to address the many problems we face in the decades ahead. These problems have been amplified by climate change and the demands of a growing global population.

Experience has shown that the best way forward is funding research through a competitive process, with projects selected through a peer-review procedure that excludes politics. There is a program in the Agriculture Department that embraces these tenets, the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative, and its research grants show great promise. . .

The potential is great, but the program has never been fully funded. Despite a $25 million increase in the omnibus budget agreement, the budget of the department’s research initiative sits at half of what Congress authorized in 2008 when it created the program. In the 2014 fiscal year, the program’s peer-review process identified approximately $1.1 billion in grants as worthy of funding, but the program could dispense only $270 million. We cannot kindle the next green revolution if we treat roughly three-quarters of a billion dollars in worthwhile scientific ideas as if they were table scraps.

Read full, original post: We Need a New Green Revolution

Banning GMO feed would destroy Polish poultry industry

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

Nowadays, the most important matter in the discussion is the influence of GMOs on health and the environment. In this constant dialogue we can barely hear voices referring to economic issues, yet they are essential. If we took a closer look at animal feeding and production we could observe the enormous social and economic consequences such restrictions would have. Livestock farming is the sector that would suffer most and, among others, Polish society would pay a very high price for these limitations.

Poland is the biggest poultry producer in the entire Europe. The basic ingredients of feeds used in poultry production are protein components, mostly soybean meal produced from the soya seeds. Our national production was not and is not able to handle the current demand; therefore Poland imports about 2 million tons of soybean meal per year, mostly from South America.

About 98 percent of it is made of genetically modified soya, which is 20 – 30 percent cheaper than the “GMO free” soya. The cost of feed alone constitutes about 60 – 70 percent of the entire poultry production cost. At the moment there is no way to replace modified soya and without it Polish poultry production will not be as competitive as it is right now. . . . This will lead to destruction of our important agricultural sector on the one hand and on the other it will not protect consumers from eating food produced with GMOs. This is a vicious circle.

Read full, original post: The economic case in favour of GMOs

Kenya’s decision on growing GMO maize expected soon

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

Kenyans will know whether genetically modified maize will be grown in the country at the end of [January].

This follows an application by a group of scientists at the Kenya Agriculture and Livestock Research Organisation (Kalro) and the African Agricultural Technology Foundation who are pushing for GM maize seeds to be released to farmers ahead of the March planting season.

The National Biosafety Authority (NBA) board failed to reach an agreement on the issue on December 22.

Kenya banned the planting and importation of GMO maize, locking out major exporters including South Africa from the local market which faces frequent grain deficits.

“We are going to make a decision on whether to grant the scientists permission to release the GMO seeds for field trials by the end of January next year,” NBA chief executive Willy Tonui [at the end of December].

Dr. Tonui said the decision to be made [in January] will touch on biotechnology maize while the second ruling in February will be on cotton.

Read full, original post: Kenyan regulator to decide fate of GMO crops this month

Gene drive technique aims to control mosquito, pest populations

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

Biologists in the United States and Europe are developing a revolutionary genetic technique that promises to provide an unprecedented degree of control over insect-borne diseases and crop pests.

The technique involves a mechanism called a gene drive system, which propels a gene of choice throughout a population. No gene drives have yet been tested in the wild, but in laboratory organisms like the fruit fly, they have converted almost the entire population to carry the favored version of a gene.

Gene drives “could potentially prevent the spread of disease, support agriculture by reversing pesticide and herbicide resistance in insects and weeds, and control damaging invasive species,” a group of Harvard biologists wrote in the journal eLIFE.

A much discussed application of gene drives would help rid the world of pest-borne diseases like malaria, dengue fever and Lyme disease.

A gene drive designed to render a population extinct is known as a crash drive. A crash drive being developed for mosquitoes consists of a gene engineered into the Y chromosome that shreds the X chromosome in the cells that make the mosquito’s sperm, thus ensuring that all progeny are male. Unless the drive itself is damaged through mutation, the number of females would be expected to dwindle each generation until the population collapses.

Read full, original post: Gene Drives Offer New Hope Against Diseases and Crop Pests

Is aging a disease we can treat?

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

Aging happens to all of us, and is generally thought of as a natural part of life. It would seem silly to call such a thing a “disease.”

On the other hand, scientists are increasingly learning that aging and biological age are two different things, and that the former is a key risk factor for conditions such as heart disease, cancer, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, and many more. In that light, aging itself might be seen as something treatable, the way you would treat high blood pressure or a vitamin deficiency.

Those two are in the current International Classification of Diseases (ICD), a manual published by the World Heath Organization — but aging is not. The next revision of the manual is due out in 2018.

While there is no formal campaign to add aging to the official list of diseases, new medical discoveries have opened the discussion. For instance, after studies showed that metformin, a common diabetes drug, could extend lifespan in rodents, researchers went to the federal Food and Drug Administration in June and won approval for human trials of the drug’s anti-aging properties.

But there’s no assurance that the FDA would approve an anti-aging drug, even if the clinical trials are positive. The agency has never allowed such a drug on the market, because aging hasn’t been designated as a condition needing treatment.

Read full, original post: Can we ‘cure’ aging? Scientists disagree

U.S. Right to Know rated #1 in junk science for 2015

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

In January, an anti-GMO group called US Right to Know sent out a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request targeting 14 scientists at four universities, seeking to uncover the scientists’ assumed nefarious ties to the agriculture industry. As a result, researchers like the University of Florida’s Kevin Folta were required to turn over their private emails.

This summer, it was revealed that Folta’s university accepted a one-time $25,000 grant from Monsanto, which Folta and others used to pay for travel expenses, snacks, and other minor expenses as they conducted outreach activities about biotechnology.

Purveyors of pseudoscience like Vani Hari, a.k.a. The Food Babe, and Mike Adams, the creator of Natural News, gloated about the revelation as “irrefutable proof” that corporations work with scientists to manipulate the public. The reality, however, is much different.

“Vani Hari and Mike Adams make substantial personal money spreading their anti-science and nonsense. Kevin doesn’t make a dime correcting their misinformation… Anti-GMO activist Vandana Shiva gets personally paid $40,000 per lecture. Kevin gets sandwiches and gas money,” Yale Neurologist Steven Novella wrote.

The Union of Concerned Scientists announced a different name for the Freedom of Information Act in the title of a report they published this year: “Freedom to Bully.”

. . . .

RealClearScience editor Alex Berezow believes the abuse of FOIA requests constitutes an attack on academia, itself. It remains to be seen if the assault will abate.

Read full, original post: THE BIGGEST JUNK SCIENCE OF 2015 #1. Freedom of Information Act Used to Attack Scientists

Nassim Nicholas Taleb now pro-homeopathy as well as anti-GMO

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

Author and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, recently tweeted his support of homeopathy, with a series of statements:

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Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing picked up on the tweets, writing that Taleb (who had previously raised eyebrows with his positions on GMOs) had “crossed a Rubicon” in support of fake science with these statements. . .

Taleb’s position reminds me a little bit of Chris Arnade‘s regrettable 2013 piece on atheism and religion. Yes, belief in this fake thing may be utterly false. Sure, I may know a better way. But maybe those people need a superstition to bide them over; maybe they just can’t handle the truth.

That kind of thinking smacks of a patronizing superiority, combined with a thoroughly defeatist attitude. It suggests that quackery is necessary because the problem of dealing with reality is just too big or difficult for some people.

Read full, original post: Nassim Nicholas Taleb Defends Homeopathy on Twitter

Does biology support existence of human races?

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

One of the touchiest subjects in human evolutionary biology — or human biology in general — is the question of whether there are human races.  Back in the bad old days, it was taken for granted that the answer was not only “yes,” but that there was a ranking of races (invariably done by white biologists), with Caucasians on top, Asians a bit lower, and blacks invariably on the bottom.  The sad history of biologically based racism has been documented in many places, including Steve Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man (yes, I know it’s flawed).

But from that sordid scientific past has come a backlash: the subject of human races, or even the idea that they exist, has become taboo. And this despite the palpable morphological differences between human groups — differences that must be based on genetic differences and would, if seen in other species, lead to their classification as either races or subspecies (the terms are pretty interchangeable in biology). Racial delimitation could, critics say, lead to a resurgence of racism, racial profiling, or even eugenics.

In my own field of evolutionary biology, races of animals (also called “subspecies” or “ecotypes”) are morphologically distinguishable populations that live in allopatry (i.e. are geographically separated). There is no firm criterion on how much morphological difference it takes to delimit a race. Races of mice, for example, are described solely on the basis of difference in coat color, which could involve only one or two genes. By this criterion, the human species can be considered to include various races as well.

Read full, original post: Are there human races?

Caution needed as genetic testing comes to workplace

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

According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, some firms are making it possible for employees to get tested for genetic markers linked to risks of altered metabolism, obesity, and variations in eating behavior. This is a good thing, right? Well, yes and no.

The upside, of course, is that if you know you have an increased risk of obesity, for example, then that knowledge might motivate you to work a little harder to improve your exercise and eating habits.

But is there a downside to this sort of testing? Well, there might be — depending on how the information is handled. Does the employer have access to the employees’ information? Could there be discrimination based on a person’s propensity for obesity, for example? And would the employee have access to assistance in dealing with his or her information? For example, a person who is told that he or she has markers making them more prone to obesity, might become depressed at the knowledge and do little to affect their risk.

Read full, original post: Pros & Cons of Workers Getting Gene Tests

CRISPR technology draws mounting interest from investors

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

In a single year, Rodger Novak’s gene-editing startup raised $89 million in venture funding, got $105 million to enter a partnership with big drugmaker Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. — and, this week, announced a deal with Bayer AG worth $335 million.

Crispr Therapeutics Ltd. won’t start human trials of its therapies until 2017, but the company is at the forefront of one of the hottest technologies in biotech. Investors and drugmakers from Johnson & Johnson to Merck & Co. are flocking to a potent tool called Crispr, saying its precise DNA editing capabilities could yield treatments for conditions as diverse as blood diseases, cancers, auto-immune disorders and genetic eye disorders.

Gene-editing companies have drawn more than $1 billion in venture dollars since 2013, according to Boston Consulting Group, from traditional biotech venture capitalists like Deerfield Management Co. and Polaris Partners, and names better known in in the tech world, such as Bill Gates and Khosla Ventures. Demand to participate in Crispr Therapeutics’ funding round was so strong that the company turned away some blue-chip investors, Novak said in an interview.

Like many promising new technologies that came before it, Crispr has yet to prove it will be effective at creating new medicine. And the idea of editing genes has made some ethicists queasy, though the companies getting funding aren’t making alterations in human sperm, eggs or embryos, which would be controversial.

Read full, original post: The Gene-Editing Tool on Every Drugmaker’s Wish List This Year

Human genetic modification may promise cures for some diseases

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

“Human gene therapy” has been one of the most ambitious goals of biotechnology since the advent of molecular techniques for genetic modification in the 1970’s. There are two distinct approaches to it, and they present different kinds of benefits, risks and controversies.

Somatic cell human gene therapy (SHGT) alters a patient’s genes—either by the editing of existing genes or the insertion of new ones–in order to correct conditions present at birth or acquired later in life. Somatic cells are any cells in the body except eggs or sperm, so modifications in them are not heritable–that is, passed on to offspring.

Since a four-year old with a genetic defect called Severe Combined Immunodeficiency, or “bubble boy disease,” was first successfully treated at the National Institutes of Health in 1990, SHGT has achieved several other successes, including the correction of rare genetic abnormalities that cause recurring pancreatitis and blindness from degeneration of the retina (choroideremia).

Read full, original post: Can The Creation of ‘Human GMOs’ Cure Genetic Diseases?

While attempt to save American chestnut through cross-breeding flagging, GMO seeds expect to be ready in 3-5 years

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

New Hampshire is home to hundreds of American chestnut seedlings growing as part of attempts to produce a blight-resistant chestnut tree through traditional cross-breeding, but in a few years it might also have some trees that were created through a different process: genetic modification.

“We hope to have 10,000 blight-resistant seedlings ready for distribution” in as little as three to five years, said Allen Nichols, president the American Chestnut Foundation’s chapter in New York state. Seedlings will first go to members of the state chapter, which includes some New Hampshire residents who joined partly to get in line, Allen said. . .

Called the American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project, the project is trying to return the majestic chestnut to American forests.

Through the late 1800s, chestnuts made up as much as one-third of hardwood trees in Eastern forests, and were valued for their wood and for the prodigious amount of high-fat, high-protein nuts that they produced. But a fungus carried here on imported Japanese chestnut trees caused a blight that virtually wiped out the species by 1920, killing as many as four billion trees. . .

An alternative attempt to create blight-resistant trees, run by the American Chestnut Foundation, involves crossbreeding American and Chinese chestnut trees. Hundreds of such crossbred trees are being grown on sites across New Hampshire, although it will be at least a decade more before potentially resistant trees are available for planting by the general public. It takes at least six generations of crossbreeding and each generation takes about five years to mature.

Read full, original post: Chestnut trees planting a comeback?

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