Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Mean Genes
HeLa Again
Deep Ancestry
"The Indian and southeast Asian distributions clearly show that the descendants of these early coastal migrants are a minority today." Spencer Wells is able to trace the lineages of pretty much every human being on the planet just by finding the routes that people moved around the continents so many years ago. Because of him we can know where we originated from and what our ancesters did long before we existed.
William Calvin, a neurobiologist, has written on the effects of climate change on early human evolution. He says that the Sahara drew animals from other regions during wetter phases and expelling them when the weather turned drier. "During one of these outward-pumping phases a small group of hominids left Africa and entered the Middle East." According to Calvin the climate changes that humans have experienced throughout their time on this planet, have had a great impact on where humans relocated and settled.
Without these climate changes, where would we be today? With global warming happening today, how does it affect the human race for the future? I mean we have learned that not all climate change is good, but the human race seems to be partly a cause of that.
Monday, June 3, 2013
Ebola virus
He stared at me, " what do you mean by that?"
"I mean a virus that wipes us out"
"Well it could happen. Certainly it hasn't happened yet. Im not worried. More likely it would be a virus that reduces us by some percentage. By thirty percent. By ninety percent."
"Nine out of ten humans killed and you aren't bothered?"
To think that one cant be frightened by the thought of a virus being capable of wiping out over 50 percent of the human population is mind blowing. His response was that a virus like that can do us good, that it could thin us out. Karl Johnson, a virus hunter who lived in the rain forest of Central and South America, helped discover the at the time new virus, and named it Ebola. He and Patricia Webb who helped discover the virus said they were "worms". They saw snakes , pigtails, branchy, forked, things that looked like the letter Y, and they noticed a squiggle like the letter g. A classic shape, the Shepard's crook, is something else they noticed within the virus. The first ever photographed picture of Ebola was on October 13th, 1976 by Fredrick A. Murphy. it was magnified 112,000 times and the lumpy rope-like features in the particle are the mysterious structural proteins that surround a single strand of RNA, which is the virus's genetic code. Johnson questioned whether or not the virus could be spread by droplets in the air, almost like influenza. "If Ebola had spread easily through the air, the world would be a very different place today."
I cant imagine, what it would be like if a virus had wiped us out. Or going through each day knowing that humans are dying and there might not be a way to control or even stop it. There would be complete chaos.
Saturday, June 1, 2013
Unscientific America: Quality Over Quantity
The Greatest Show on Earth- "Unintelligent Design"
When I think about interactions between organisms and each other (waggle dance anyone?) and organisms and the environment, I'm often struck by the beauty of what I see. It may be partly due to the illusion of perfection that it is hard for people to wrap their minds around the idea of evolution. Ecosystems seem so planned out, and everything seems to have its place. And what about the organisms themselves? How does such a complex body plan come about so perfectly without design?
The huge problem is that we're not perfect, and neither is any other organism. Dawkins gives many examples of how the seemingly perfect often isn't so perfect. One of the examples he gives is the eye. (Sorry Jenette...) The quote above by the German scientist Helmholtz is something to think about. In reference to our eyes, Helmholtz also says " If an optician wanted to sell me an instrument with all these defects, I should think myself quite justified in blaming his carelessness in the strongest terms, and giving him back his instrument." If you believe in a god, you're not believing that god is some blundering being who makes tons of mistakes and eventually gets them right by working around past problems. I think it's safe to say that most people who believe in a god believe that that god is perfect. Which is fine except if God was the maker of the earth in six days. Because in that case, Helmholtz would be referring to giving our eyes back to god because he messed up repeatedly. I don't think that that rules out a god at all, it just backs up evolution. I think you can have a strong understanding of science and still be religious to a point. We don't know where everything came from, and no one knows how or why everything happened.
So back to problems with the eye: the photocells that pick up light line the back of the eye (the retina) and face away from the light source. The data from the light has to go back to the retina, be picked up by photocells facing a different direction, and then once they do that, nerves have to bring the data back to the brain through the blind spot. It's extremely inefficient and yet we see so well, considering all that.
Dawkins also talks about the laryngeal nerve. And in us and other mammals, it branches and detours when it has no reason to do so. There is space for it to go directly to its destination, so why doesn't it? Instead, one branch goes straight to the larynx and the other stretches down to one of the arteries coming from the heart, loops around it, and then goes right back to the larynx. This is because this artery is going around something that isn't there anymore, and although I'm a little confused about the details, the difference between this and a similar nerve in fish is that the fish's nerve has to actually go around organs which we don't have, to reach the gills. It's even worse in an animal like a giraffe. In adult giraffes, the laryngeal nerve can stretch up to fifteen feet longer than necessary! So our anatomy is based upon fish anatomy.
These detours wouldn't make any sense without evolution. It's costly energy- wise to take the longest route to a destination. It seems like what we have are variations and changes from an ancestor, because
natural selection doesn't make things perfect, it just allows variation which is neutral or beneficial to be passed on more easily. So it can change what's already there, but it can't construct a whole other nerve going directly to our larynx from scratch.
Friday, May 31, 2013
The New Killer Diseases
The Omivore's Dilemma
"One of every 4 Americans lived on a farm when Naylor's grandfather arrived here...less than a century after, fewer than 2 million Americans still farm- and they don't grow enough to feed the rest of us." (p.34) That is a dramatic decrease in farmers for a short amount of time. We take it forgranted that we don't have to do the hard labor, we can just go and buy the food we want. I wish we all understood how much work is put out by farmers so we can have something to eat. Maybe if we all went back to farming for ourselves we would appreciate what the farmers do. Perhaps we'd also be healthier because this way we'd be getting exercise and since we'd probably produce less we would in return be eating less.
Page 36 states that Naylor doesn't use GMOs in his farm, unlike many of his neighboring farmers. He claims "They are messing with billions of years of evolution." I think that is a good point because we can not revert back to the natural state of an organism once the GMO transition is completed. Obviously Monsanto, a biotechnology company, is pushing GMO seeds for money.
"The Language of Life" Response: When it Comes to Racial Controversy in Medicine, the Solutions Aren't Always Black and White
Unscientific America: Societys Understanding
A quote that stood out to me most while reading was "We need a nation in which science has far more prominence in politics and the media, far more relevance to the life of every American, far more intersections with other walks of life, and ultimately, far more influence where it truly matters.." I thought this was a great quote because it states how more people need to get involved in order to understand science and help their life in general. Science needs to be broadcasted more so individuals have a chance to learn but even when they do have a chance like the New York Times science section they just overlook it.
I feel like over time science hasn't got the fame it deserves. Scientists during the period of World War II got a lot of fame because they made crucial wartime technologies that helped. Now since scientists don't help with coming up with things since they are already made then they don't get the publicity they deserve. People don't understand how science affect there lives everyday. After reading this book, I now understand that science is a big impact on our lives and most people have no idea anything about science unless it relates to them on a personal level. Obviously, science relates to them but if they are affected by it they don't care.
The World Without Us
So if nature is the true owner of "our" property, then what's stopping it from taking it back? The answer is, nothing. Nature is always actively trying to take back its land. This book has made me realize that all the "bad" things that happen to people's homes, such as termites or mold, is just nature taking back what belongs to it. And our expensive efforts of trying to stop these happenings, are only slowing down nature's course, NOT stopping it. Speaking of our EXPENSIVE endeavors, Alan Weisman reflects this costly notion well when he says, "Back when they told you what your house would cost, nobody mentioned what you'd also be paying so that nature wouldn't repossess it long before the bank."
What's even worse about nature reclaiming its territory, is that it's happening whether any of us know it or not. As the book graphically explains, "...awful when you see it, worse when you don't, because it's hidden behind a painted wall, munching paper sandwiches of gypsum board, rotting studs and floor joists." Imagine, as you're reading this post, spores are penetrating through the exterior of your house and exploding, resulting in the molding of your walls and the attraction of more bugs. What if there were mushrooms growing in between your walls? One point for nature and zero for humans! But in reality, there's not a lot we can do about it. As humans, we'll always be innovative and build bigger and better homes, continuing to steal land away from nature. But nature will always try to reclaim its territory, even after we're all dead. So in the battle of good and bad, good is nature and we are the bad ones. And guess who always wins?
Pages 101-200
In this section of the book two big events are touched on. First Bobette, Henrietta's sister-in-law, discovers the scenario with the HeLa cells accidentally. Due to her lack (Yes, I did it again) of education she doesn't really understand. She confusingly calls Day and tells him that part of Henrietta is still alive. They begin searching for her "alive parts". Its difficult to read this part because I can't help but think, "How could anyone be that foolish?" But I try to remember that this is in a time and demographic were education was seldom afforded. They don't understand the meaning of what these HeLa cells are, and its beyond frustrating. I just want them to simply say cells, instead of "alive parts", but that doesn't happen till later when they actually get a full understanding (kind of).
Also in this section of the book the HeLa cell contamination is widely discussed. As discussed in my previous post, HeLa cells grow in faster and in larger quantities than most cells, therefore, they are difficult to control. In many, most, of the laboratories that used HeLa cells they were so out of control that they infested other cultures. Once a cell line is infested by HeLa it is nearly impossible to eliminate the contamination.
This part is so interesting !!!! When a researcher is conducting his experiment on his daughter's cells he identifies an African American marker. Which would not belong to his daughter. He begins looking into the genetic markers on different cell cultures and realizes that HeLa cells are in many that they shouldn't be. Keep in mind through the past more than 20 years scientists have been doing research on many other cell lines for different things. The contamination of these cell lines invalidated thousands of scientist's research, research they had been working on for decades, gone. For this reason many scientists didn't want to believe it. Its like something out of a Science Fiction movie. Its as if the HeLa cells had infested everything. Little parts of Henrietta Lacks, several decades dead, everywhere. A lot of progress made in the field of genetics and cytology was never really progress at all. I can't imagine the frustration. Just think people, how do you feel when you realize you messed up a 40 minute lab and you have to start over? Now thing how would you feel if you realized you messed up at 20 year lab and have to start over? Yikes.
Another thing that I want to discuss, even though it only lightly relates to the book, is race and education. I want to know if there is a rhyme of reason as to why certain races value or utilize education more. Why were the three finalists in the Scripps National Spelling Bee all Indian-American, when they represent only about 1% of the population? I wonder if it is solely due to the way the children are parented, religion, or areas they are raised in? It is strange. Race, or rather simply skin color, is segregating, without there being any actual segregation (legally, some people are unfortunately racist still ).
Thursday, May 30, 2013
The Demon In The Freezer: Should Smallpox Be Destroyed?
There are two "obvious" answers: yes, smallpox should be destroyed because it could seriously hurt us, and no, smallpox should not be destroyed because it could seriously hurt us. Essentially, the two sides of the argument pose different solutions with the same reasoning behind them. People like D.A Henderson, who led the eradication of smallpox, believe that smallpox must be destroyed completely. He says on page 128, "'What we need to do is create a climate where smallpox is considered too morally reprehensible to be used as a weapon. It would make the possession of smallpox in a laboratory a crime against humanity." He believed, as many others do, that destroying the legal stocks of smallpox would convince the world to destroy ALL stocks. He favored the idea of leading by example, and it's easy to see where he is coming from considering his background. He traveled the whole world, saw thousands of people infected with smallpox, even die of smallpox, and worked tirelessly for fourteen years to get rid of it. It's no surprise he wanted the virus sent where it could never hurt anyone again. And yet the question lingered, enough to postpone the destruction of smallpox several times: what could we gain from keeping this disease around? D.A. Henderson would say that "there was no good scientific justification for research into real variola [smallpox]" (page 130). He thought the vaccine used in the eradication was good enough to protect people against the virus, and that other research would just be costly and useless.
But guess what. This disease is unpredictable; sudden changes can occur that can totally redefine the species and our supposed protection against it. In 2000, Australian scientists tried to decrease a population of mice by infecting them with genetically engineered mousepox to make them sterile, discontinuing reproduction. The mousepox virus was altered by inserting a gene from the mice; it was supposed to make them sterile, but instead, it wiped out almost all of the mice population. The scariest part? Even the mice that had been vaccinated against the original mousepox virus died. What does this prove, you ask? It proves that our vaccination isn't good enough. Mousepox is very similar to smallpox. If mousepox can be engineered to infect even vaccinated mice, the same could be done to the smallpox virus. So? So, our enemies could create a strain of smallpox to which we are left with ABSOLUTELY NO PROTECTION AGAINST. Opposers of smallpox destruction say that we need this virus around to be experimented with. We NEED to keep it around to further develop new protection, to understand how the virus works, to test, to explore, to possibly even find a cure one day for this disease.
I couldn't agree more. I know the risks of keeping smallpox around. It's dangerous. But it's even more dangerous to leave ourselves without any hope of retaliation against possible bio-warfare attacks. Once terrorist groups hear that we have gotten rid of our smallpox, that we have no way of testing for new vaccinations or cures to the genetically engineered smallpox they are perfectly capable of producing, what will stop them from dropping the virus on us? The vaccination we have isn't good enough. Not for what today's science is capable of producing. We need to keep this virus around because it's the only hope we have of protecting ourselves against smallpox. And it's not just smallpox; like I said in my last post, other pox viruses are starting to make species jumps. In a few decades, we could be victims of an onset of monkeypox or cowpox. These diseases are similar to smallpox, and we could be able to develop protection against these viruses much faster with the advances we've already made with smallpox. If, 50 years from now, monkeypox is destroying the human race, what are we supposed to do if we've destroyed smallpox? Sit around and wait until we've collected enough information that we could have already had before we don't have to fear these viruses anymore? Besides that, as stated in an argument against destroying smallpox on page 128, isn't it wrong to partake in the purposeful extinction of a species? We're tampering with things we shouldn't be; maybe variola is important to the process of evolution. The human race is growing exponentially- what if smallpox is evolution's way of controlling our increase? We see it all the time in other species; outside forces limit the growth of a species to maintain balance. I know it's in OUR best interest to get rid of our species' worst enemy, but we're messing with the balance.
To sum it up, we need to keep smallpox around. It can help us so much to protect ourselves and make advances in understanding the disease. Even in the name of pure scientific interest, we must keep it around to advance our knowledge. Plus, destroying our smallpox stocks would make us huge targets for terrorist groups, since we could not counter any bio-terrorism attacks with vaccinations. Just because we get rid of our smallpox does not mean by any means that our enemies will; if anything, it will only encourage them to continue to toy with the virus, because they know we would be utterly defenseless. And finally, it just isn't right to destroy a whole species; by doing so, we are playing God (pardon the expression) and upsetting the fine tuned balance of nature. The question is not whether or not smallpox should be destroyed; it is whether or not we as humans even have the right to argue this.
The World Without Us
The Blind Watchmaker
So all this talk about creationism....should we all just toss out the concept of a god? Some people need to see this in person to believe it. Where is this proof of a "designer"? If the concept of god is thrown out of the picture, would there still be a belief in miracles? Dawkins shows that miraculous creation is extremely rare and probably would not occur. I think that miracles aren't as rare as he believes they are, but then again how would I prove that? In the book Dawkins talked about how he designed a computer program to demonstrate how a non-thinking, non-caring evolutionary process works. This program would conjure up random designs and he would select the designs that most resembled some sort of creature. But I noticed something, Dawkins showed evolution with this example, however, how did the computer come to be? It cant design itself, there was obviously a "designer" who created this machine, am I right? Could evolution be a process of creation or design? Is creation and evolution one in the same?
DNA soup
So basically, we all have the same soup base (DNA code), but as we change from region to region we each have different ingredients (genes) which make our soups (DNA sequences and our phenotypes) different.
I like this analogy of soup to show the lineage of genes. Just like the chef and the recipes analogy in DNA replication, this helped me understand what the Y-chromosome markers meant and how they were different.
Collapse
The author describes the history behind Easter Islands, which is strangely interesting and thought-provoking, along with describing theories on how the isolated society collapsed. After much thought, it was concluded that they collapsed largely on part due to overexploiting their own resources. Deforestation and destruction of the bird populations were major factors, which sound similar to what still goes on today. Easter Islands' collapse is thought to be a metaphor for what lies ahead of our world in the future. All the countries on earth depend on eachother, like all the clans on the islands did. If one country falls, it could cause a domino effect in the economy. The Islands were isolated in the ocean, as Earth is in space. They had no where to go after they destroyed their land, and we will have no where to go either. That fact alone is scary to think about. If the environmental destruction continues and if we continue to over-populate, we're stuck here in a mess. We only have one earth, shouldn't we be trying to take care of it as much as possible? You can say we're already ruining the planet, with global warming and deforestation and what not.
"..if mere thousands of Easter Islanders with just stone tools and their own muscle power sufficed to destroy their environment and thereby destroyed their society, how can billions of people with metal tools and machine power now fail to do worse?" Exactly my point. With all the advanced technology now, yes, we've increased the standard of living and expanded our life-span, but we need to understand the consequences of our actions.
After looking at the collapses of several more societies, the author concluded that the causes of the collapses were due largely in part to environmental and population problems leading to increasing warfare and civil strife. After a population peak, politcial and social collapses are usually soon to follow. Can this coincidence be seen again in our future? I think it's definitely possible, considering the frightening growth in population along with the growth of greed in people. The author connected Maya kings, who sought to outdo one another with more impressive temples, with American CEOs. Everything is based upon making money, and that is prioritized over trying to save the environment we live in. I don't think we would be knocking down forests to build a mall if it didn't make profit, right? The more competition in the economy, the more people become careless and strive to make money, no matter what the consequences are. That, I believe, will be a major factor in the collapse of our society.
Hot Zone
But from reading so far, I can say that these three filo viruses that I know of have similar effects on people. The hemoraging of the body seems to be the biggest factor in common. However I also found good news while learning about these viruses and how there were more of them. There are only three strains, and they didn't originate in America, so the chance of me catching the virus is very slim. However if I do somehow encounter one of these viruses.. I probably wont live. The Zaire strain of Ebola kills 90% of all infected, Sudan kills about half of the infected, and Marburg kills about 25% of infected. So all in all, it's still a pretty scary thing.
Immortal Cells
But Carrel wasn't interested in immortality for the masses. He was a eugenicist: organ transplantation and life extension were ways to preserve what he saw as the superior white race, which he believed was being polluted by less intelligent and inferior stock, namely the poor, uneducated, and nonwhite. He dreamed of never-ending life for those he deemed worthy, and death or forced sterilization for everyone else. He'd later praise Hitler for the 'energetic measures' he took in that direction.
The real chicken-heart cells didn't fare so well. In fact, it turned out that the original cells had probably never survived long at all. Years after Carrel died awaiting trial for collaborating with the Nazis, scientist Leonard Hayflick grew suspicious of the chicken heart. No one had ever been able to replicate Carrel's work, and the cells seemed to defy a basic rule of biology: that normal cells can only divide a finite number of times before dying. Hayflick investigated them and concluded that the original chicken-heart cells had actually died soon after Carrel put them in the culture, and that, intentionally or not, Carrel had been putting new cells in the culture dishes each time he 'fed' them using and 'embryo juice' he made from ground tissues. But no one could test the theory, because two years after Carrel's death, his assistant unceremoniously threw the famous chicken-heart cells in the trash."
It's very concerning that masses of people believed a figure such as Carrel. Even though he was considered "a scientific messiah," he also praised Hitler...He was a man who believed in the same kind of "superior race"idea that Hitler believed in, and wanted to use his scientific achievements to accomplish this. He did not want this discovery to help other people, he wanted it to fuel his own sick ideal world.
This passage made me think about how susceptable people are when believing things that they hear. People often either never check their sources, or believe sources that seem to be superior because of their titles. Carrel was believed undoubtably because of his occupation as a scientist. Background research is rarely ever done concerning rumors and ideas.
This could also lead to the discussion of social media. The popularity of social networking sites has exploded recently, starting with MySpace and FaceBook, and gradually evolving into Twitter and Instagram. According to mediabistro.com, there are 250 million active users on Twitter as of 2012. This is not nearly as much as FaceBook's 750 million active users, but the number of users on Twitter is steadily rising over time. I could post a rumor on Twitter right this very moment, and I'm sure I would be recieving text messages shortly after concerning my tweet. The number of users on these social networking sites makes it allarmingly quick for information to travel from one side of the world to another. This has many pros, such as updates on wars overseas, but could also pose many cons, especially if the information is not true. Will the rapid spread of social networking sites help our nation, or destroy it?