Elizabeth Kolbert writes this morning about the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch marked by the dominance of our species. It may be hard to precisely mark its beginning, but here’s why I think it will be easy for geologists 10 million years in the future to pinpoint layers of Anthropocene rocks.
Oh, how I loves me an alt-med smackdown: at a meeting of the British Medical Association’s junior doctors, Dr. Tom Dolphin, deputy chairman, said:
Homeopathy is witchcraft. It is a disgrace that nestling between the National Hospital for Neurology and Great Ormond Street [in London] there is a National Hospital for Homeopathy which is paid for by the NHS [National Health Service].
Ha! I couldn’t have said it better myself. Despite what homeopaths say, homeopathy has been shown beyond any reasonable doubt to have no effect above that of a placebo. That won’t stop homeopaths from still claiming it works; they’ll use anecdotes, they’ll use evidence distorted and twisted into a Möbius strip, or they’ll simply make stuff up.
At best, belief in provably false things like homeopathy is a colossal waste of money, and at worst belief in homeopathy can kill you. That’s why skeptics are fighting the practice of homeopathy all over the world, from the UK to Australia.
And before you say, “Well, it’s just water so it does no harm, right?” I’ll remind you that people are then drinking plain old water instead of taking real medicine. That’s the real danger of homeopathy (and other alt-med nonsense). So unless the health problem you’re having is dehydration, taking homeopathic “remedies” does in fact do quite a bit of harm.
And that’s why I’m so happy that doctors and the government in the UK are being vocal about this nonsense. Sure, caveat emptor and all that, but when people — especially people with the veneer of a medical imprimatur — are pushing something we know doesn’t work to people who are sick or worried over a sick loved one, then it’s time to step in and do something.
Tip o’ the vial of plain old water to Digg.
Waterglass image from albertopveiga’s Flickr photostream, used under the Creative Commons license.
I saw this large beetle scurrying around the ruins of the roman city of Jerash in Jordan. It was the first live sighting after seeing several of its squashed peers.
This is a guest post from Melissa Lott, a dual-degree graduate student in Mechanical Engineering and Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work includes a unique pairing of engineering and public policy in the field of energy systems research. Melissa has worked for YarCom Inc. as an engineer and consultant in energy systems and systems design. She has previously worked for the Department of Energy and the White House Council on Environmental Quality for the Obama Administration. She is a graduate of the University of California at Davis, receiving a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Biological Systems Engineering. Melissa is also the author of the blog Global Energy Matters: Energy and Environment in Our Lives. As the nation moves toward a green energy future, it has found a leader in Texas. While Washington debates federal clean energy policies, the Lone Star State has taken up the reigns in the renewable energy sphere. Should we be surprised that this iconic leader in our nation’s energy history is now uniquely positioned to lead us into our energy future? As a University of Texas at Austin graduate student and a woman with deep hill country roots I’m well acquainted with the …
David writes, “My tattoos each mark–although in rather oblique and coded ways–life events, or at least transitions that are important to me (several are a rebus for my 1999 dissertation in post-structuralist political philosophy). This 10th tattoo, of Hemoglobin A, perhaps requires less decoding than many. Over the last couple years, I have had the opportunity to work with some amazing people, on the computer science side of things, who have built the world’s fastest supercomputer–called Anton, after so-called ‘father of microbiology’ Antonie van Leeuwenhoek–which is highly specialized for computing molecular dynamics. As a gesture to this opportunity, I commemorate it with a molecular rendering (of the PDB chemical 2W6V, using VMD and the NewCartoon rendering style) of the sort that the chemist who do the actual MD often look at. Of course, Hemoglobin is a well-known molecule to laypersons, and it is one that is easy enough to give a metaphorical or mimetic sense to; the molecule is inscribed above my heart, whose function is largely to pump around oxygen-carrying Hemoglobin (hence giving my body life, vitality, energy, etc).”
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Imagine a day in the future when you can charge your cell phone using your sneakers, or charge a touch-screen device merely by rolling up the flexible screen. New devices that take advantage of the piezoelectric effect–the tendency of some materials to generate an electrical potential when they’re mechanically stressed–are taking us one step closer to that reality.
Ville Kaajakari of the Louisiana Tech University harnessed this effect by developing a tiny generator that can be embedded in a shoe sole. The tiny smart device is part of “MEMS” or “micro electro mechanical systems,” which combine computer chips with micro-components to generate electricity [EarthTechling]. Each time the sneaker-wearer goes for a stroll, the compression action would power up the circuits in the generator and produce tiny bits of usable voltage. “This technology could benefit, for example, hikers that need emergency location devices or beacons,” said Kaajakari. “For more general use, you can use it to power portable devices without wasteful batteries” [Clean Technica].
For now, the amount of energy produced is very small, but the generator could theoretically be used to power sensors, GPS units or portable devices that don’t require a large amount of energy [Clean Technica]. The scientist hopes that the technology can be developed further to charge common devices like mobile phones.
Meanwhile, Samsung and a research team from Korea have figured out a way to harvest energy from touch-screens.
In a paper published this month in the journal Advanced Materials, the researchers describe how they combined flexible, transparent electrodes with an energy-scavenging material to produce a thin film. Their experimental device sandwiches piezoelectric nanorods between highly conductive graphene electrodes on top of flexible plastic sheets [Technology Review]. This film can be used in touch screens of common mobile devices, wherein pressing the screen would generate about 20 nanowatts per square centimeter–that is, enough power to help run part of the device. On the flexible touch-screen the researchers developed, you could help charge the batteries just by rolling up the screen.
Scientists hope that the power produced by the touch-screen should one day be enough to toss our batteries into the bin. Study coauthor Sang-Woo Kim added: “The flexibility and rollability of the nano-generators gives us unique application areas such as wireless power sources for future foldable, stretchable, and wearable electronics systems” [Technology Review].
Related Content:
80beats: New “Nanogenerator” Could Power Your iPod With Your Own Movements
80beats: The World’s Smallest Motor Could Propel a Medical “Microbot” Through Arteries
80beats: Rubbery Computer Screens Can Be Bent, Folded, and Even Crumpled
80beats: Nanotubes Could Provide the Key to Flexible Electronics
Discoblog: Can Chatting on Your Cell Phone Cause It to Recharge? Researcher Says Yes
Image: LTU
Who ever thought that couples could bond over nasal spray? But new research shows that a nasal spray containing the “love hormone” oxytocin helped make regular guys more empathetic and less gruff. Oxytocin is the hormone that strengthens the bond between nursing moms and their babies, and it’s also involved in pair bonding, love, and sex. The spray was tested on a group of 48 healthy males–half received a spritz of the nose spray at the start of the experiment and the other half received a placebo. The researchers then showed their test subjects emotion-inducing photos like a bawling child, a girl hugging her cat, and a grieving man. Finally, they asked the guys to express how they felt. The placebo group men reacted normally to the soppy pictures; which is to say they were either mildly uncomfortable or stoic. Whereas the group that had used the nasal spray were markedly more empathetic. The Register reports:
“The males under test achieved levels [of emotion] which would normally only be expected in women,” says a statement from Bonn University, indicating that they had cooed or even blubbed at the sight of the affecting images.
The study’s findings, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, suggest one …
Below I stated:
…until the late 20th century the majority of the ancestry of the white population of the republic descended from those who were counted in the 1790 census.
A commenter questioned the assertion. The commenter was right to question it. My source was a 1992 paper that estimated that only in 1990 did the proportion of American ancestry which derived from those who arrived after the 1790 census exceeding 50%. In other words, if you ran the ancestors of all Americans back to 1790, a majority of that set would have been counted in the 1790 census (so people of mixed ancestry would contribute to the two components are weighted by their ancestry).
The major issue here is that there is a difference between whites, and non-whites, especially before mass Asian and Latin American immigration post-1965, when white vs. non-white ~ white vs. black. Almost all the ancestors of black Americans who were black were already resident in the United States in 1790. A few years ago I read up on the history of American slavery and was surprised how genuinely indigenous the black American, slave and free, population was by the late 18th century (English speaking and Christian). There was an obvious reason why Southern slave-holders went along with the ban on importation of slaves which was due to kick in in the early decades of the republic: American blacks, unlike slave populations elsewhere in the New World, had endogenous natural increase. This explains part of the relative paucity of African aspects in their culture in relation to the blacks of Haiti or Brazil, where African-born individuals were still very substantial numerically at emancipation because of high attrition rates (it is sometimes asserted that the majority of blacks liberated during the Haitian Revolution were born in Africa. Likely a hyperbole, but it gets across the strength of connection).
In any case, to estimate the white proportion attributable to 1790, I have to correct for the black proportion within the total. As an approximation I think it’s acceptable to simply attribute blacks as a whole to the proportion which had ancestors here in 1790 in full. I suspect a greater proportion of the black ancestry which post-dates 1790 would come from the white component of their heritage which simply isn’t of notice in American society for various reasons in any case (Henry Louis Gates Jr. is more white than he is black in terms of ancestry, but he’s the doyen of Africana Studies). So, assuming that blacks contribute to the 1790 and before component in full, I estimate that between 1910 and 1920 the majority of the ancestry of the white population shifted from 1790 and before, to after. Specifically, in 1910 51% of the ancestry could be traced to 1790 and before among whites, and in 1920 49%. In 1950 it was 47% 1790 and before. So I should have said early 20th century, not late. I wouldn’t be surprised though if the balance has started to shift in recent years, as many “white ethnic” groups (Jews, Italians, Irish, etc.) are more heavily concentrated in urban areas, while the most fertile white community in the United States, the Mormons of Utah, are also the most Old Stock Yankee in ancestry (I am aware that many Mormons are descended from European immigrants who converted in Europe and made the journey after conversion, but Mormons are still far more Old Stock Yankee than any group outside of interior New England).
Two hundred thousand gallons per day of Gulf crude are leaking from a hole 5000 feet under the water’s surface in the wake of the still mysterious destruction of British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform last week . How and when it will be stopped is entirely unknown. The mayonnaise-like oil is being blown ashore into the nursery for shrimp for the whole region and the home of hundreds of the other species. Welcome to what may turn out to be the worst single human-caused environmental disaster ever. (Unless you regard global warming in general as a single event. Semantics.)
This thing is going to need a name. The Exxon Valdez incident was a spill – there was a finite amount of oil aboard the ship. A lot of oil: 11 million gallons (40 million liters). The new one in the Gulf of Mexico could blow past that, depending on whether present efforts to close the valve or drill a relief well work.
The fact that we called it the “Exxon Valdez” incident clearly indicates the responsible (if not guilty) party involved. So, though I like the moniker “Spill, Baby, Spill” from a political point of view, it doesn’t lay any blame and this thing is not a spill. It’s a leak, and BP leased the rig from Transocean LTD, the world’s largest offshore drilling contractor. I think the responsibility has yet to be determined. If you rent a car, and wipe out a family in an accident because the steering was faulty, is it your fault or the car manufacturer’s? It may take some time, or even never be known, what happened a week ago to cause this tragedy.
The name of the rig was the Deepwater Horizon, but that doesn’t convey ownership or responsibility. Will this become known as the “BP Deepwater Horizon Spill”? The “Transocean/BP Leak”? The media seem to be stuck on “spill” and so I bet that will be in the name long term…and it will take a very long time to assess responsibility here.
My heart goes out to the families of the 11 lost on the rig, and to the thousands of fishermen and others whose livelihoods are in peril.
We’ve suspended new offshore drilling until we have understood this incident better. And no doubt a new debate about offshore drilling will ensue. This has certainly put the lie to those who claim that new modern drilling rigs are far safer than in the past, something even President Obama was saying as recently as April 2. Sigh.
In the Very Cool Department…
My friend Mark Gray from SpaceCraftFilms narrates this film, showing the Apollo 11 Saturn V liftoff using a high-speed camera. I’ve seen this clip about eight bazillion times over the years, but Mark gives the details of what’s happening, providing insight I wasn’t aware of.
The cool thing about this, to me, is the fact that it’s so familiar, but there’s still so much to know about it! And it goes to show you: sending rockets into space is, well, rocket science.
Yesterday the Food and Drug Administration gave its OK to Provenge, a new treatment for prostate cancer. It’s not a “vaccine” in the old-fashioned sense, but it could be a way to make the immune system wake up and take notice to the presence of cancer.
In a standard vaccination, a person receives an attenuated or dead version of a microorganism to spur them to produce antibodies (against, for example, the virus that causes smallpox). Provenge is not that—it doesn’t prevent prostate cancer—but it is a variation on the theme. To oversimplify quite a bit: with Provenge vaccination begins with a blood draw. Blood is then sent to the lab, where technicians extract immune cells known as antigen presenting cells (APCs) from the sample. From here, Dendreon combines the immune cells with proteins that are prevalent on the surface of prostate cancer cells. An immune boosting substance is also added into the mix [TIME]. That awakens the APCs, which doctors then inject back into the bloodstream. And once there, the APCs put white blood cells on high alert against cancer.
Seattle biotech firm Dendreon developed the treatment aimed at lowering the number of men in the United States killed by prostate cancer each year, which presently stands at 27,000. But Provenge was a long time coming even by medical standards. Dendreon’s low point came in 2007. Expecting FDA approval, the company was instead sent back to the drawing board. Angry prostate-cancer patients and advocates rallied outside FDA headquarters. The setback added another three years to the 15 Dendreon already had spent on Provenge. The amount of money plowed into the project is now close to $750 million [Seattle Times].
In the most recent tests, Provenge increased survival from a quarter of patients to a third, and boosted survival by four months compared to the placebo control group. However, the Seattle Times concludes, these kinds of immune treatments might prove most useful in patients who’ve already received cancer treatment and need protection from relapse.
Approval has finally come for Provenge, though still with caution: With clearance yesterday, Dendreon said the FDA will require it to monitor 1,500 patients given Provenge for increased risk of strokes seen in studies [BusinessWeek]. And it will take many years to study the long-term effects.
Related Content:
DISCOVER: How We Got the Controversial HPV Vaccine
80beats: “Sound Bullets” Could Target Tumors, Scan the Body, and… Create Weapons?
80beats: Researchers Find the Genetic Fingerprint of Cancer, 1 Patient at a Time
80beats: The Mutations That Kill: 1st Cancer Genomes Sequenced
Image: iStockphoto
Gorilla conservationists in Nigeria have a new ally–snails. The critically endangered Cross River gorilla is under constant threat from poachers in this poor nation, as poachers kill the animals for their bushmeat or sell them illegally to traffickers in the exotic pet trade. With just 300 Cross River gorillas left, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) hopes to offer locals an alternate source of both food and revenue so they’ll leave the poor apes alone. Enter the snail. For this conservation project, the WCS picked eight former gorilla poachers and got them to start farming African giant snails, a local delicacy. The WCS helped the poachers construct snail pens and stocked each pen with 230 giant snails, writes Scientific American. As the snails breed quickly, farmers can expect a harvest of 3,000 snails per year. Scientific American adds:
According to WCS, this should end up being a fairly profitable enterprise for local farmers. Annual costs are estimated at just $87 per farmer, with profits around $413 per year. The meat of one gorilla, says the WCS, would net a poacher around $70.
Related Content:
80beats: Bushmeat Debate: How Can We Save Gorillas Without Starving People?
80beats: New Threat to Primates Worldwide: Being “Eaten Into Extinction”
DISCOVER: Extinction–It’s What’s …
I am currently reading Peter Heather’s Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe. This is a substantially more hefty volume in terms of density than The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians . It is also somewhat of a page turner. One aspect of Heather’s argument so far is his attempt to navigate a path between the historically tinged fantasy of what its critics label the “Grand Narrative” of mass migration of barbarian tribes such as the Goths, Vandals and Saxons during the 4th to 6th centuries, dominant before World War II, and its post-World World II counterpoint. As a reaction against this idea archaeologists have taken to a model of pots-not-people, whereby cultural forms flow between populations, and identities are fluid and often created de novo. This model would suggest that only a tiny core cadre of “German” “barbarians” (and yes, often in this area of scholarship the most banal terms are problematized and placed in quotations!) entered the Roman Empire, and the development of a Frankish ruling class in the former Gaul, for example, was a process whereby Romans assimilated to the Germanic identity (with the shift from togas to trousers being the most widespread obvious illustration of Germanization of norms). I believe that liberally applied this model is fantasy as well. Being a weblog where genetics is important, my skepticism of both extreme scenarios is rooted in new scientific data.
There are cases, such as the Etruscans, where the migration is clear from the genetics, both human and their domesticates. The peopling of Europe after the last Ice Age is now very much an open question. The likelihood that the present population of India is the product of an ancient hybridization event between an European-like population and an indigenous group with more affinity with eastern, than western, Eurasian groups, is now a rather peculiar prehistoric conundrum. It also seems likely that the spread of rice farming in Japan was concomitant with the expansion of a Korea-derived group, the Yayoi, at the expense of the ancient Jomon people. And yet there are plenty of inverse cases. The spread of Latinate languages and Romanitas did not seem to perturb the basic patterns of genetic relationship among the peoples of Europe. The emergence of the Magyar nation on the plains of Roman Pannonia seems to have involved mostly the Magyarization of the local population. In contrast, the Bulgars were totally absorbed by their Slavic subjects culturally, leaving only their name. The spread of the Arabic language and culture was predominantly one of memes, not genes (clearly evident in the current dynamic of Arabization in parts of the Maghreb).
And yet you will note that there is a slight difference between the few examples I’ve cited: population replacement seems to have occurred in the more antique cases, rather than the more recent ones. This would naturally bias the perspectives of historians, who have much more data on more recent events (no offense, but archaeologists seem to be able to say whatever they want!). The Etruscan language itself is known only from fragments, while the happenings in prehistoric Europe and India can only be inferred very indirectly. I now offer a modest hypothesis for the distinction, why in some cases is it just the “pots” which move (Arabs), and in other cases it is the people who move (the Japanese). In cases of population replacement there is often a shift in mode of production. In cases where there is the diffusion of culture it is often a system or set of ideas which rent-seeking elites can exploit to maintain their position, or perpetuate it, flow across space. Islam was not only a potent ideology which bound the tribes of Arabia together so that they could engage in collective action, local elites across the new Muslim-dominated world found it a congenial international system whereby they could integrate themselves into a civilization of elite peers, as well as justify their god-given position at the apex of the status hierarchy (granted, many had this in the form of Christianity or Zoroastrianism, but once the old top dogs were overthrown the benefit of these systems was considerably less). The spread of Yayoi culture in Japan involved a shift from more extensive, toward more intensive, forms of agriculture. Their population base was greater, and the domains of the Jomon were left “underexploited” from the perspective of the more productive mode of agriculture which the Yayoi were engaged in. It need not be an issue of mass slaughter or extermination, a high endogenous rate of natural increase as well as disease, combined with assimilation and co-option of local elites, could result in the swallowing up of a population engaged in a less intensive mode of production. This sort of hybrid aspect of cultural and genetic expansion, whereby the local substrate is assimilated and synthesized with the expanding ethnic group, seems to be a good fit to the pattern that we see among the Han of China.
But shifts from modes of production exhibit some level of discontinuity, insofar as there are diminishing returns once all the land appropriate for that mode of production has been taken over. Farmers who are expanding into land held by hunter-gatherers or those practicing less intensive forms of agriculture can have enormous rates of natural increase because they’re not bound by Malthusian constraints. This is evident in the United States, until the late 20th century the majority of the ancestry of the white population of the republic descended from those who were counted in the 1790 census. The reason had to do with the extremely high birthrates among white Americans. When regions such as New England were “filled up,” they pushed out to the “frontier,” to northern Ohio, then to the Upper Midwest, and finally the Pacific Northwest. And in the process there was a radical change in the genetic variation of North America, as the indigenous populations died from disease, were numerically overwhelmed, or genetically absorbed. This is an extreme case scenario, but I think it illustrates what occurs when modes of production collide, so to speak. The pattern in Latin America was somewhat different, though an amalgamated Mestizo population did emerge over time, there was not the wholesale demographic replacement in many regions. And I believe that the reason is that the Iberians did not bring a superior mode of production, rather, the large local population base engaged in agriculture presented an opportunity for rent-seekers to place themselves atop the status hierarchy. Sometimes this involved intermarriage with local elites, as was the case in Peru where the nobility of the Inca intermarried with the Spanish conquistadors for the first few generations (the whiteness of the Peruvian elite despite the fact that the old families have Inca ancestry is simply due to dilution as successive generations of lower Spanish nobility set off to the New World and married into Creole families).
By the Roman period I believe that much of the core Old World was “filled up” in terms of intensive agricultural production. So most, though not all, of the changes in ethnicity or identity are biased toward elite emulation and novel identity formation. The Turks did not bring an innovative new economic system whereby they replaced the Greek and Armenian peasantry in Anatolia, rather, on the contrary peculiarities in the Turkish Ottoman system of rule produced a situation where the old families were usually replaced in positions of power by converts from the Christian groups who assimilated to a Turkish identity. When the economic arrangements reach stasis and the population is at Malthusian equilibrium change is a matter of shifting identities and affinities of the rent-seekers. When radically new economic systems emerge, opportunities for disparate population growth present themselves. Ergo, England went from being demographically dwarfed by France in the 17th century, to surpassing it in population in the 19th. England was of course the first nation to break into a new mode of production since the agricultural revolution.
Credit: Thanks to Michael Vassar for triggering this line of reasoning after a conversation we had about the Neolithic revolution.
[In a weird coincidence, I wrote this post up mere hours before this news story on the same topic came out at JPL.]
With all the stunning images and animations coming from the Cassini probe, it’s easy to forget that some pretty cool stuff can be seen from Earth, too. Amateur astronomer Emil Kraaikamp sent me this animation he made of Saturn taken with his 25 cm (10″) telescope in The Netherlands. Keep your eyes on the upper half of Saturn, above the rings.
See the white spot? That’s actually a huge storm… and by “huge”, I mean about the same size as the Earth! I usually think of Jupiter as the stormy planet, but Saturn has its share as well. A lot of the time, these storms are discovered here on Earth by amateur astronomers, who spend more time looking at planets globally, as opposed to professional astronomers who aren’t always observing every planet all the time. Last year, a “storm” seen on Jupiter by an amateur turned out to be the impact cloud from a collision by an asteroid or comet!
Here’s one of the images Emil used in his animation:
You can see two moons, the rings (and the dark Cassini Division, a gap in the rings), banding on the planet itself, and of course the storm. Note that when he took these shots, Saturn was 1.3 billion km (almost 800 million miles) away! Astronomy is one of the very few sciences where amateurs — and by that, I mean people who aren’t paid to do it as a career — still make an incredibly important, and even critical contribution. With observations like Emil’s, you can see why.
After entertaining the entire planet with the movie Avatar, director James Cameron is now taking his expertise to space–specifically to Mars. He’s helping NASA build a 3D camera for its next rover, Curiosity.
The space agency announced that Cameron is working with Malin Space Science Systems Inc. of San Diego to develop the camera, which will be the rover’s “science-imaging workhorse.” The rover, which was previously known as the Mars Science Laboratory, is scheduled for launch in 2011.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had recently scaled back plans to mount a 3D camera on the rover, as the project was consistently over-budget and behind schedule. But Cameron lobbied NASA administrator Charles Bolden for inclusion of the 3-D camera during a January meeting, saying a rover with a better set of eyes will help the public connect with the mission [Associated Press]. Cameron, whose 3D spectacle Avatar earned more than $2 billion at box offices worldwide, had developed a special 3D digital camera system for the film, and felt the space agency could benefit from his expertise.
Malin has already delivered two standard cameras to be installed on the rover’s main mast. These cameras, which are set up for high-definition color video, are designed to take images of the Martian surface surrounding Curiosity, as well as of distant objects [Computer World]. But these cameras cannot provide a wide field of view, and they also don’t have a zoom; the cameras Cameron is developing will include these features, and will allow researchers to take cinematic video sequences in 3D on the surface of the Mars. However, the 3D cameras aren’t guaranteed to be included in the mission. To make it on the new rover, the cameras will have to be designed, assembled and tested before NASA begins its final testing of the rover early next year [Computer World].
The SUV-sized rover won’t only be toting cameras. Curiosity will also carry instruments, environmental sensors, and radiation monitors to investigate the Red Planet’s surface. NASA hopes to find out if life ever existed on Mars and if the planet can support human life in the future. “It’s a very ambitious mission. It’s a very exciting mission,” Cameron said. “(The scientists are) going to answer a lot of really important questions about the previous and potential future habitability of Mars” [AFP].
Related Content:
80beats: Photo Gallery: The Best Views From Spirit’s 6 Years of Mars Roving
80beats: Dis-Spirit-ed: NASA Concedes Defeat Over Stuck Mars Rover
80beats: Next Mars Rover Won’t Take Off Towards Mars Until 2011
80beats: 3-D TV Will Kick Off With World Cup Match This Summer
Discoblog: Just Like Avatar: Scenes from India, Canada, China, and Hawaii
The Intersection: The Science of Avatar
Image: NASA
The moment conservationists have been dreading since the Gulf of Mexico oil spill started—that oil making landfall—appears to be upon us. This morning the Coast Guard is flying over the Gulf Coast to check out reports the crude washed ashore overnight, and more reports of oil drifting ashore are coming out of Louisiana. Crews in boats were patrolling coastal marshes early Friday looking for areas where the oil has flowed in, the Coast Guard said. Storms loomed that could push tide waters higher than normal through the weekend, the National Weather Service warned [AP].
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano set up a second base of operations to deal with potential impacts on the Gulf Coast states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida. Meanwhile, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has declared a state of emergency, and said: “Based on current projections, we expect the oil to reach land today at the Pass-A-Loutre Wildlife Management Area. By tomorrow, we expect oil to have reached the Chandeleur Islands and by Saturday, it is expected to reach the Breton Sound. These are important wildlife areas and these next few days are critical” [Nature]. The city of New Orleans already reeks of a”pungent fuel smell” believed to come from the oil spill, as the Times-Picayune newspaper puts it.
With this news, along with yesterday’s announcement that the spill could be five times worse than first believed, the Deepwater Horizon disaster is close to becoming historically bad. The oil slick could become the worst U.S. environmental disaster in decades, threatening to eclipse even the Exxon Valdez in scope. It imperils hundreds of species of fish, birds and other wildlife along the Gulf Coast, one of the world’s richest seafood grounds, teeming with shrimp, oysters and other marine life [CBS News]. To make matters worse, experts say that marshlands are far more difficult to clean than sandy beaches. Says David Kennedy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “It is of grave concern. I am frightened. This is a very, very big thing. And the efforts that are going to be required to do anything about it, especially if it continues on, are just mind-boggling” [AP].
Responders keep trying to stem the flow, but all the Coast Guard’s containment boom and controlled fires, and all of BP’s undersea robots, haven’t been able to stop the oil leak deep undersea. Underscoring how acute the situation has become, BP is soliciting ideas and techniques from four other major oil companies — Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell and Anadarko [The New York Times]. The military is trying to help BP, who’d leased the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, reach it emergency shutoff valves. “To be frank, the offer of help from all quarters is welcome,” said David Nicholas, a BP spokesman [The New York Times].
Facing a far-reaching catastrophe, today President Obama’s administration announced that the plan announced a month ago to expand offshore drilling is going on hiatus, at least until people figure out what went wrong in the Gulf. Meanwhile, the Interior Department says it will commence an immediate safety review of all the rigs and drilling platforms in the area.
Our previous posts on the Gulf Oil Spill:
80beats: Uh-Oh: Gulf Oil Spill May Be 5 Times Worse Than Previously Thought
80beats: Coast Guard’s New Plan To Contain Gulf Oil Spill: Light It on Fire
80beats: Sunken Oil Rig Now Leaking Crude; Robots Head to the Rescue
80beats: Ships Race To Contain the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill
Image: NOAA
Aphids, those sap-sucking foes of gardeners, come in a variety of colours. We usually think of them as green, but pea aphids sometimes wear a fetching red ensemble. That may not strike you as anything special; after all, lots of animals are red. But the aphid’s colour is unique in a couple of extraordinary ways.
The colour comes from pigments called carotenoids. Animals use them for all sorts of purposes; they act as antioxidants, and they contribute to red, orange and yellow colours. But the pea aphid is one of only a few known species (all aphids) that manufacture their own carotenoids; everyone else gets theirs from their food. But it’s the source of the pea aphid’s ability that’s truly remarkable – it stole the skill from fungi. By integrating fungal genes into its own genomes, it gained a superpower that almost all other animals lack.
These sorts of “horizontal gene transfers” go on all the time in bacteria, but they’re supposedly a rarity among more complex creatures like animals and plants. And yet, scientists have recently documented several examples of such transfers. Rotifers smuggle genes from fungi, bacteria and plants. “Space Invader” genes have jumped across animals as diverse as lizards and bushbabies. One bacterium, Wolbachia, has even inserted its entire genome into that of a fruit fly. And parasites can transfer their genes to humans.
In most of these cases, it’s unclear whether the imported genes are actually doing anything useful. But the story of the pea aphid, told by Nancy Moran and Tyler Jarvik, is very different. The colour of a pea aphid determines the predators that target it. Ladybirds (one of their major enemies) prefer to attack red aphids on green plants but parasitic wasps are more likely to lay their eggs in green aphids, to fatal effect. Colour clearly matters to an aphid, so here is a clear example of a transferred gene shaping an obvious trait in its new host and in doing so, shaping its evolution.
Moran and Jarvik knew that both red and green pea aphids have carotenoids, but their source was a mystery. These pigments dissolve easily in fat but not water, and they’re unlikely to be found in the plant sap that the aphids suck. Aphids carry beneficial bacteria but none of their genomes carry any traces of the genes required for creating carotenoids. And aphids that are cured of their hitchhikers don’t lose their colour. So where do the carotenoids come from?
Fortunately, Moran and Jarvik knew what to look for, since all organisms that make carotenoids, including plants, fungi and bacteria, do so with a common set of genes and enzymes. They also knew where to look, for the genome of the pea aphid had been recently sequenced. Their search yielded seven genes that are clearly involved in producing carotenoids. But to their surprise, none of this septet matched any gene in any other animal genome. Instead, their closest relatives are found in fungi.
Moran and Jarvik think that the original donor was a species of fungus that either infected the ancestors of today’s pea aphids, or formed an alliance with them. Either way, we know that this mystery donor transferred at least two genes to the insects, which have since duplicated into the current seven. And we know that the relocation happened before the pea aphid diverged from the related peach-potato aphid, which has the same genes.
Today, the genes explain the two hues of the pea aphid. The green aphids have carotenoids that are yellow in colour. The red ones do too, but their palette is bolstered by two bright red carotenoids that the green aphids lack. The greens can’t make these extra pigments because one of their seven fungal genes is missing a small sizeable chunk. This broken gene means that the green aphids can’t complete a chemical reaction that converts one of the yellow carotenoids into the two red ones.
The pea aphid’s story tells us that genetic swaps between complex species like fungi and animals are possible, although probably still rare. Before now, scientists did actually try to search the pea aphid genome before for genes transferred from other species. But they only looked for genes of bacterial origin; no one considered that the donors might be fungi, so the carotenoid-making genes were never found.
When Moran and Jarvik searched for other fungal genes, they didn’t find any, demonstrating that such swaps are the exception rather than the rule. But what fascinating exceptions – and the growing number of full animal genomes will surely help us to discover more.
Reference: Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1187113
Image: by Charles Hedgcock
More on aphids:
More on horizontal gene transfer:
Last week, NASA presented the first images and videos from its latest and greatest eye on the Sun: the Solar Dynamics Observatory.
SDO has been in the works for a long, long time, and I’ve been anxiously awaiting data from it for years… so of course I was away from my computer when the images were released. Still, it was worth a few extra days to see something as back-of-the-neck-hair-raising as this:
Holy Haleakala! Click to emprominate.
As if on cue, just days after SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) was switched on, the Sun threw an epic fit, blasting out an arcing prominence perfectly positioned for us to see. A prominence is a loop of gas that erupts from the surface of the Sun. This gas follows the Sun’s magnetic field lines; complicated interplay between the energy stored in the field lines versus their tension causes them to leap up from the Sun, anchored in two spots that represent where the north and south poles of the lines punch through the Sun’s surface. A prominence might have as much as a hundred billion tons of matter in it, and can be hundreds of thousands of kilometers across.
To give you an idea of this, here’s a video made from images from AIA:
Kaboom! Interestingly, the gas isn’t as hot as you might think, and can be cooler than the surface of the Sun. When we see a prominence edge-on, silhouetted against the surface of the Sun, it actually appears dark! When that happens, we call it a filament.
I’ve been a big fan of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) for a long time, and SDO is like the Son of SOHO. It has technology that is more current, and has very high resolution cameras. SDO can take spectra of the Sun to look in detail at its composition, temperature, motion, and magnetic strength. It can also measure the seismology of the surface of the Sun, the way waves travel across it and make it pulse; this tells us about the interior of the Sun that is otherwise totally invisible. Combining all this data together yields a vast amount of knowledge waiting to be learned about our nearest star.
It also produces stunning full-Sun imagery:
This image is amazing; it shows very hot helium and iron ranging in temperature from 60,000 Kelvin (100,000+° F) to well over a million Kelvins (1.8 million degrees F)! You can see the big prominence to the left, as well as several others around the disk. All the twisting and writhing on the surface is due to the bubbling convection of hot material from the Sun’s interior rising to the surface coupled with the fiercely complex solar magnetic field. The physics involved is incredibly complex, but with SDO’s help scientists will soon have a much firmer grasp on what’s going on.
Of course, they’ll also have a pile of new mysteries to ponder as well. The Sun is the closest star to the Earth, and closer than most planets. We know a lot about it, but there’s so much left to understand: what’s the root cause of the 5.5 year long solar magnetic cycle? How is that tied to Earth’s climate? What effect do sunspots have on the Sun and Earth? How exactly does the Sun influence space weather; the flood of subatomic particles streaming from the solar surface and interacting with our own magnetic field, affecting satellites and even our power grid?
Science is like a tapestry with no edge, and with holes located here and there in the fabric. We can fill those holes ever more, and explore the edges, pushing them back with each new discovery. Along with many other observatories like it, SDO is our loom that helps us create and follow that weave.
Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA, NASA/GSFC/SDO/AIA
A few months ago I blogged a paper in PLoS Biology which suggested that a common Y chromosomal haplogroup, in fact the most common in Europe and at modal frequency along the Atlantic fringe, is not pre-Neolithic. Rather their analysis of the data implied that the European variants were derived from an Anatolian variant. The implication was that a haplogroup which had previously been diagnostic of “Paleolithicness,” so to speak, of a particular population may in fact be an indication of the proportion of Neolithic Middle Eastern ancestry. The most interesting case were the Basques, who have a high frequency of this haplogroup, and are often conceived of as “ur-Europeans,” Paleolithic descendants of the Cro-Magnons in the most romantic tellings. I was somewhat primed to accept this finding because of confusing results from ancient DNA extraction which implies a lot of turnover in maternal lineages, the mtDNA. My logic being that if the mtDNA exhibited rupture, then the Y lineages should too, as demographic revolutions are more likely to occur among men.
But perhaps not. A new paper in PLoS ONE takes full aim at the paper I blogged above. It is in short a purported refutation of the main finding of the previous paper, and a reinstatement of what had been the orthodoxy (note the citations to previous papers). A Comparison of Y-Chromosome Variation in Sardinia and Anatolia Is More Consistent with Cultural Rather than Demic Diffusion of Agriculture:
Two alternative models have been proposed to explain the spread of agriculture in Europe during the Neolithic period. The demic diffusion model postulates the spreading of farmers from the Middle East along a Southeast to Northeast axis. Conversely, the cultural diffusion model assumes transmission of agricultural techniques without substantial movements of people. Support for the demic model derives largely from the observation of frequency gradients among some genetic variants, in particular haplogroups defined by single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the Y-chromosome. A recent network analysis of the R-M269 Y chromosome lineage has purportedly corroborated Neolithic expansion from Anatolia, the site of diffusion of agriculture. However, the data are still controversial and the analyses so far performed are prone to a number of biases. In the present study we show that the addition of a single marker, DYSA7.2, dramatically changes the shape of the R-M269 network into a topology showing a clear Western-Eastern dichotomy not consistent with a radial diffusion of people from the Middle East. We have also assessed other Y-chromosome haplogroups proposed to be markers of the Neolithic diffusion of farmers and compared their intra-lineage variation—defined by short tandem repeats (STRs)—in Anatolia and in Sardinia, the only Western population where these lineages are present at appreciable frequencies and where there is substantial archaeological and genetic evidence of pre-Neolithic human occupation. The data indicate that Sardinia does not contain a subset of the variability present in Anatolia and that the shared variability between these populations is best explained by an earlier, pre-Neolithic dispersal of haplogroups from a common ancestral gene pool. Overall, these results are consistent with the cultural diffusion and do not support the demic model of agriculture diffusion.
Their main trump cards seem to be that they used a denser set of markers, and, they claim they have a more accurate molecular clock. Ergo, in the latter case they produce a better time to the last common ancestor, which is twice as deep as the paper they’re attempting to refute. Someone like Dienekes or Polish Genetics can tackle the controversies in scientific genealogy here (I know Dienekes has a lot of interest in mutational rates which go into the molecular clock for these coalescence times). Rather, I would suggest that usage of Sardinians concerns me for an obvious reason: they’re genetic outliers in Europe. A lot of this has to do with being an island. Islands build up uniqueness because they don’t engage in the normal low level gene flow between adjacent populations because they’re…well, islands. You would know about Sardinia’s position because they’re one of the populations in L. L. Cavalli-Sforza’s HGDP sample and they show up in History & Geography of Human Genes as on the margins of the PCA plots. But here’s a figure from a more recent paper using a much denser market set, constrained to Southern European populations. I labelled some of the main ones so you’d get a sense of why I say Sardinians are outliers:
Over the two largest independent dimensions of genetic variation you can see a distribution from the southeast Mediterranean all the way to the northwest (in fact, the Basques are an Atlantic group). The Sardinians are out of the primary axis, and that’s why I say they’re an outlier. A few other European groups, like the Icelanders and Sami exhibit this tendency. As I suggested above I think the fact that the Sardinians are on an isolated island relatively far from the European and Africa mainland means that they’ll “random walk” in genetic variation space toward an outlier status naturally, just as the Icelanders have since the year 1000. So though I grant the authors their rationale for using the Sardinians as a reference against the Anatolian source population, the fact that we know that they’re peculiar in their variation in total genome content makes me wary of drawing too many inferences from their relationships to other groups where they are seen as representative of a larger set.
Citation: Morelli L, Contu D, Santoni F, Whalen MB, & Francalacci P (2010). A Comparison of Y-Chromosome Variation in Sardinia and Anatolia Is More Consistent with Cultural Rather than Demic Diffusion of Agriculture PLoS ONE : 10.1371/journal.pone.0010419
What will the world be like when your genome sequence costs less than a cell phone? A couple days ago I went to Cambridge, Mass. to find out.
The occasion was a meeting called “Genome, Environments, and Traits,” or GET for short. The history of the meeting is in the upper ranks of my list of meetings with strange histories. In 2006, the Harvard geneticist George Church (arguably the smartest, most influential biologist you never heard of) decided to launch a new kind of human genome project. At the time, scientists had only published the sequence of a single human genome, at a cost of $3 billion. And for all that money, the genome was actually a gap-riddled patchwork from several individuals, and only included the DNA from one copy of each pair of chromosomes. Church declared that he would gather the sequenced genomes of 100,000 individuals, along with information about their health, and make all that information available for scientists to study in order to learn more about human biology. Church issued a manifesto of sorts in Scientific American, called “Genomes for All,” which you can read here (pdf) and also talked to Emily Singer of Technology Review here.
To kick off his Personal Genome Project, Church sequenced his own DNA, put it online, and promptly got a message from a doctor on the other side of the country, informing him that he should adjust his cholersterol medication. Church also persuaded nine other people to volunteer to have their genomes sequenced and laid out online for all to see. One of those first ten, the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, helped spread the word with this article that in the New York Times Magazine in 2009.
Those early sequencees got together from time to time to talk about the project and their own experiences contending with having a genome available for all to see. This genomic club was an intimate one at first, but its membership is now exploding. With each passing month, the cost of genome sequencing is crashing, companies are gearing up to sequence genomes on a commerical scale, and scientists are starting to think seriously about looking at complete genomes as a regular part of clinical practice. For this year’s meeting, Church decided to try to get as many people with sequenced genomes as possible altogether in one room. It would probably be the last time such an exercise would be possible.
I got pulled into the fun when my phone rang a couple months ago. On the line was Robert Krulwich. Krulwich is the co-host of the show Radiolab, covers science for NPR and ABC News, and is also the go-to guy for live–and lively–interviews with towering figures of science. (Observe him handle both E.O. Wilson and James Watson at once–a bit like juggling torches while riding a unicycle. He doesn’t break a sweat.)
Church had asked Krulwich to come to the meeting and moderate a discussion of a dozen or so sequencees that would take up the first three hours of the meeting. Krulwich decided this was a two-person operation. Wise move. This was heavy lifting.
It would be absurd to have everyone one the stage the whole time, so we came up with a scheme to move people quickly from the front row of the audience to the stage, playing a genomic game of musical chairs. Making it even more challenging was the fact that we had such big subjects to talk about, from the development of next-generation sequencing to the application of genomics to genealogy to the issues of privacy that genome sequencing raises.
And then there was the matter of the line-up. Any one of the speakers could have held the stage on his or her own for an hour. It felt very strange whisking Henry Louis Gates onto the stage and then whisking him off. This, after all, is a guy who can hold an entire TV series together. At the meeting, he talked about getting his father’s genome sequenced as well as his own–becoming the first father-son team to do so. A comparison of the two genomes allowed him to see fifty percent of the genome of his deceased mother–an experience that felt like seeing her come back to life. Gates talked about the experience of seeing so much European DNA in his genome. If you look at my lab results, he said, I’m a white man.
–Well, we’d love to hear all about it, Professor Gates, but we’ve got to move on! A round of applause everyone, and let’s move those chairs!
Krulwich and I also struggled with the challenge of talking about genomics with people who are so uniformly gung-ho about it that they’ve had their genomes sequenced–and of talking to those sequencees in front of an audience made up of genome scientists, people from the biotech sector, venture capital folks, and other assorted people who are, shall we say, already in the genomic tank. Neither Krulwich or I received a fee for our involvement in the meeting, and we were not about to join the ranks those miserable fake journalists you see on infomercials late at night, pitching pre-scripted softballs like, “So tell me again how your company is going to become a raging success in the personal genome business.”
Krulwich and I therefore tried, politely, to nudge the sequencees out of their comfort zone. How on Earth, I wondered, could the sophisticated analysis of genomes become a regular part of everyday medicine when most doctors have office full of old paper records? Was it fair to children to get their genomes sequences when there was nothing immediately wrong with them? What good is getting your genome sequenced if all you get is a laundry list of genetic variations that have obscure relationships to all sorts of diseases that you may or may not get? How can there be a business in genomes if, as Church predicts, the cost of genome sequencing will be dropping to, essentially, free?
In many cases, questioners and answerers ended up talking past each other. Krulwich asked James Watson what he thought about the ethical concerns about genome sequencing. His answer: “Crap.” The other sequencees were more polite when we asked questions that seemed irrelevant to them. When Krulwich asked sequencee Esther Dyson about the potential risks of getting her genome sequenced, Novocell CEO John West pointed out that she was preparing to go to the Space Station. Why were we obsessing about the risks of Dyson’s genome, with no apparent concern that she was about to have herself shot into space on the tip of a rocket?
I think the best answers were deconstructions. Consider this: Widespread genome sequencing will make it possible to test babies for genes associated with intelligence. Isn’t that a horrible thing?
At the meeting, Church pointed out that we already test for intelligence genes, and nobody gets outraged at all. Babies are routinely tested for a genetic disorder known as PKU, in which children are born unable to break down an amino acid called phenylalanine. Phenylalanine builds up to toxic levels in the body, leading to mental retardation. But the mutation that causes PKU does not necessarily cause PKU. Genes are not destiny. If children keep a diet low in phenylaline, they end up with normal intelligence. Knowledge of our genome is not sinister in this case. Ignoring the facts of PKU would be the sinister thing to do.
Church is right, but the story of PKU only carries you so far into the future of genomic medicine. PKU is a rare disorder, affecting an estimated 1 child out of every 13,500 to 19,000 births. It’s also unusual in that it’s caused by the failure of a single enzyme. A single mutation to a single gene is enough to cause it. And the fact that it can be so readily treated is also unusual. Cystic fibrosis, for example, is another single-gene disease. Despite the discovery of its genetic basis 20 years ago, doctors have no cure to offer CF patients.
The genetic roots of common disorders, like high blood pressure and Alzheimer’s disease, have proven to be a lot more complex. It’s possible that the risk for some common diseases may be the result of variations on hundreds of genes, with each variation contributing a tiny fraction of the risk, and different combinations able to cause just as much of the disease. It’s also possible that the risk for some diseases is due to very rare mutations, each of which has very strong effects. There may be a lot of these rare mutations in the world’s population, making it hard to find them all and figure out what they do.
The sequencees at GET didn’t avoid this messy reality. In fact, one of them embodied it. James Lupski, a Baylor University geneticist, suffers from a hereditary disease called Charcot Marie Tooth Disease, in which the coating of the long nerves in the limbs starts to fray. He has had to have operation after operation on his feet to treat the symptoms. Lupski studies the cause of the disease, and recently he had his genome sequenced to find its source. He turned out to have some mutations that have been linked to Charcot Marie Tooth Disease before, but he and his colleagues also found a new gene, with a different mutation in his mother’s and father’s copy. The discovery did not point immediately to a cure; instead, it added to the complexity of the disease. Lupski explained his own disease and his difficult research on it in unsentimental detail. Science is hard, Lupski said, and anybody who thinks it isn’t is fooling themselves.
It was too bad that the meeting didn’t take place next week instead of this week. Today, the Lancet published a genome paper that included among its co-authors two of the sequencees we spoke with: George Church and Steven Quake of Stanford. At the meeting, Quake explained how he and his colleagues had sequenced his genome last year in a matter of days. That was the easy part, he said. The hard part was analyzing it and interpreting what it meant for Quake’s health. He was referring obliquely to the new paper.
In the paper, Quake, Church, and their colleagues made a close study of Quake’s family (who have suffered from various sorts of heart disease), and then scoured the scientific literature for every mention of the variants they found in Quake’s genome. They considered the risks these variants posed to Quake for various conditions, but they also took into consideration other sorts of complexity. For example, diseases don’t happen in isolation from each other. If you get obese, for example, you increase your risk of type 2 diabetes. The scientists published a marvelous diagram of the diseases they studied in Quake, with the size of each name corresponding to the size of his risk for each.
The geneticist Daniel Macarthur wrote tonight about this new paper on his blog Genetic Future:
…there are the variants that simply can’t be interpreted. This includes virtually everything seen outside protein-coding regions, and the majority of even those variants found inside coding regions. We simply don’t understand the biology of most genes well enough yet to be able to predict with confidence whether a novel variant will have a major impact on how that gene operates; and we have an even less complete picture of how genes work together to affect the risk of disease.
Like Lupski said, science is hard.
I was wiped out by the end of the morning session. I thought we did a pretty good job, although I still felt ambivalent. I scarfed some lunch and then happily settled into the audience for the afternoon. Most of the talks I heard dealt not with humans but with microbes. The genome of a microbe like E. coli is about a thousandth the size of a human genome. As a result, microbiologists can sequence genomes like mad without busting their budgets. Ian Lipkin of Columbia has hunted for the causes of new outbreaks, such as colony collapse disorder in bees, by fishing out new kinds of microbial DNA from sick hosts. Boom, boom, boom, one slide after another documented the discovery of yet another pathogen. The benefits of DNA sequencing were blindingly obvious in Lipkin’s talk.
But even microbes turn out to have fantastic genomic complexity. There may not be a lot of genes in each microbe, but together they can hold a staggering amount of genetic diversity. Rob Knight of the University of Colorado spoke about the surveys he and his colleagues have made of the human microbiome. He described some of the work I’ve blogged about here on the Loom, along with other results. He described, for example, how children become coated with the bacteria that live in their mother’s birth canal as they are born. Women who have a caesarian section give their children the bacteria living on their own skin. Knight is investigating whether the birth canal germs provide any special protection to children. Different people develop different menageries of microbes as they get older, and their experiences–from gaining weight to taking antibiotics–can shift the ecosystem inside their bodies. There’s much left to discover about the thousands of species that share our bodies with us, but Knight raised the prospect of a different kind of personalized medicine: using genomics to survey the microbes in our bodies and then manipulating them for our own benefit.
Then again, maybe you shouldn’t trust me on this score. Everyone knows I’m in the microbial tank.
The day ended with a talk by Anne West, the 17-year-old daughter of John West. The Times of London recently broke the story of how the Wests became the first healthy family to get their genome sequenced. I expected warm and fuzzy blather about what her genome meant to her, but instead, she delivered a hard-core talk that would have fit right into a genetics conference. She analyzed one of her genes involved in blood clotting and determined that she had a few harmless mutations from her mother and one harmful one from her father. Facing an audience full of past and future Nobel-prize winners, biotech barons, and other intimidating grown-ups, she remained impressively poised and calm.
The audience was rightly impressed. One scientist joked that she should drop out of 11th grade and get a job–finishing school would be a waste of her time. But I also had to remind myself of the hothouse atmosphere in which she had done this work, and in which she was delivering her results. Her father had spent upwards of $200,000 on the family’s genomes, according to the Times. This was not your standard science fair project. And as West spoke, I thought about the kids from a local public high school who had come for the morning session. When Krulwich and I asked the audience for questions, a girl stood up and asked how she could get her mother to have their family’s genomes sequenced, when her mother wasn’t even sure what a gene is. Two girls: two very different experiences with genomes. It’s not all about the DNA.
[PS–Thanks to all the Twitterers who acted as a note-taking collective. Their assembled chronicle is here.]
