But screening for cancers themselves don’t seem to be helping patients make smart decisions, according to Melissa Beck at the Wall Street Journal. Expanding screenings seems to be picking up on more and more tiny, slow growing cancers rather than aggressive ones. As in the colon cancer screenings studies, the most virulent cancers still escape the expanded screening profiles. “We’re not finding enough of the really lethal cancers, and we’re finding too many of the slow-moving ones that probably don’t need to be found,” says Laura Esserman, a breast-cancer surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco.
Birds Do It, Bees Do It
But Microbrachius dicki did it first.
Honey, I Finished The Internet
How genetic modification brought us the tomato.
“Organic” Is The Latin Word For “There’s One Born Every Minute”
The World Is Being Run By Crazy People
Cause, you know, that worked out so well for the Hapsburgs and Romanovs.
“Criminal law is not the appropriate means to preserve a social taboo,” the German Ethics Council said in a statement. “The fundamental right of adult siblings to sexual self-determination is to be weighed more heavily than the abstract idea of protection of the family.”
SJW 1, Biology 1. The score is under review and likely to be overturned.
“Organic” Is The Latin Word For “Grown In Pig Shit”
Turns out Gaia is a genetic engineer;
Until recently, it was thought that plant breeding programs selected the superior forms (termed alleles in genetic parlance) of existing genes. Breeders selected for the form or allele of the gene that, for example, encoded a more efficient protein, expressed the gene at a higher (or lower) level, etc. Selection by the breeder was not at the gene level but rather at a level easily observed by the breeder. This could be greater yield, enhanced disease or insect resistance, sweeter fruit, larger berry, earlier maturity, etc. Then it was thought that all members of a particular plant family (corn, soybean, wheat, blue berry, orange, etc.) contained the same genes; they simply differed in the forms of those genes existing in a particular family.
It turns out that this is all wrong.
[…]
…pieces of DNA that naturally move around in the genome and insert at random into the genome- actually pick up pieces of old genes and put these pieces together to make brand new genes. This is not a rare event. For example in corn a particular transposable element termed a Helitron has synthesized (estimated conservatively) ~11,000 new coding regions. Since the total number of genes in corn is around 40,000 the number of coding regions coming from Helitrons is quite significant.
Note that these newly evolved chimeric genes-arising naturally from transposable elements — bear striking similarities to chimeric genes synthesized by scientists and inserted into plant genomes. The major difference is that the chimeric genes arising in nature via transposable elements occur unsuspectingly. We don’t know when they arise or where, we don’t know what the final product is. We don’t spend millions of dollars monitoring them for safety and hence we don’t know whether they might encode an allergenic protein or otherwise be dangerous. But because eating our typical food plants has a long history of being safe we don’t worry about it.
“Organic” Is The Latin Word For “Grown In Pig Shit”
…a seemingly grey area exists when a product is labeled as non-GMO, yet a GMO counterpart does not exist. For example, should an avocado be labeled as non-GMO if GMO avocados don’t exist? What about salt? Crushed tomatoes? A recent article highlighted that some brands of popcorn are advertised as not containing genetically modified corn when there is no genetically modified corn of the popcorn variety on the market.
The Sound Of Settled Science
More than just X and Y: New genetic basis for sex determination
The team found that miRNAs are essential for sex determination even after an animal has grown to adulthood. “They send signals that allow germ cells, i.e., eggs and sperm, to develop, ensuring fertility,” Fagegaltier explains. “Removing one miRNA from mature, adult flies causes infertility.” More than that, these flies begin to produce both male and female sex-determinants. “In a sense, once they have lost this miRNA, the flies become male and female at the same time,” according to Fagegaltier. “It is amazing that the very smallest genes can have such a big effect on sexual identity.”
Some miRNAs examined in the study, such as let-7, have been preserved by evolution because of their utility; humans and many other animals carry versions of them. “This is probably just the tip of the iceberg,” says Fagegaltier. “There are likely many more miRNAs regulating sexual identity at the cellular and tissue level, but we still have a lot to learn about these differences in humans, and how they could contribute to developmental defects and disease.”
“Organic” Is The Latin Word For “Grown In Pig Shit”
Genetic Literacy Project: How your food would look if not genetically modified
“Organic” Is The Latin Word For “Grown In Pig Shit”
The Scientist; (link fixed!)
By 2001, Ug99 began appearing in fields in Kenya; in Ethiopia by 2003; Sudan and Yemen by 2006; and Iran a year later. It now plagues wheat plants in nine African and Middle Eastern countries. Should the pathogen establish a global presence, 90 percent of wheat varieties could succumb, with whole crops flopping over and rotting within weeks or months of infection. The annual global harvest of some 700 million tons of wheat would be decimated.
[…]
One way to hasten the development of a long-lasting stem rust-resistant wheat variety is to engineer plants’ DNA to carry resistance genes, creating what are known as genetically modified (GM) crops. But at many of the facilities that develop wheat varieties–primarily led by academic breeding groups, in contrast to the commercial domination of corn and soybean development–such transgenic approaches are taboo, as public opposition, regulatory expenses, and genetic complexity have kept wheat transgenics off the market. “We could do millions of things [with transgenics],” says Jorge Dubcovsky, a wheat geneticist and breeder at the University of California, Davis, “but we have our hands tied.”
Because people who use the word “denier” believe in something called “Frankenfood”.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Via Science Daily;
“All along, we presumed that the code or vocabulary used by organisms was universal, applying to all branches of the tree of life, with vanishingly few exceptions,” said DOE JGI Director Eddy Rubin, and senior author on the Science paper. “We have now confirmed that this just isn’t so. There is a significant portion of life that uses different vocabularies where the same word means different things in different organisms.”
[…]
Phage infect bacteria, injecting their DNA into the cell and exploiting the translational machinery of the cell to create more of themselves, to the point when the bacterial cell explodes, releasing more progeny phage particles to spread to neighboring bacteria and run amok.
“To make this all happen, the established dogma was that phage needed to employ the exact genetic code that the host cell uses, otherwise, whatever DNA they inject wouldn’t be properly translated,” Rubin said. “But we observed phage with codon vocabularies that did not match any we found in their bacterial hosts. We scratched our heads at this result, because we wondered about what was up with the host. The dogma tells us that the phage to need to share the same code as the host, but we saw no Amber in bacteria. So what were these phage doing?”
The punch line, Rubin said, is that the dogma is wrong.
The “W” Word
Ya got trouble, folks
Right here in Globe City
With a capital ‘T’
Which rhymes with ‘G’
and that stands for ‘RACIST’.
Now I’m off read the head explosions in their comments.
Born That Way
Off to re-education kindergarten: Sommerville did point out that this research does not mean that babies are racist.
The Sound Of Settled Science
A Challenge to the Supremacy of DNA as the Genetic Material
This forces us to the conclusion that causality in cells is exercised downwardly from the phenotype to the genotype (for example, to initiate transcription or even modify the genomic sequence), exactly the reverse of the Genotype to Phenotype (G -> P) concept underpinning population genetics.
Yowza. Intriguing read.
So, About That First Nations Thing…
Despite general resistence, representatives of tribes in the US recently gave their blessing for DNA analysis of the remains of a Stone Age child. Research conducted on the boy’s genes indicate that Native Americans have European roots.
Well, if they didn’t then, they do now.
“Given the known high incidence of tumors in the Sprague-Dawley rat…”
A heavily criticized study of the effects of genetically modified maize and the Roundup herbicide on rats is being retracted — one way or another.
The paper — by Gilles Seralini and colleagues — was published in Food and Chemical Toxicology last year. There have been calls for retraction since then, along with other criticism and a lengthy exchange of letters in the journal. Meanwhile, the paper has been cited 28 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, and the French National Assembly (their lower house of Parliament) held a long hearing on the paper last year, with Seralini and other scientists testifying.
Now, as reported in the French media, the editor of the journal, A. Wallace Hayes, has sent Seralini a letter saying that the paper will be retracted if Seralini does not agree to withdraw it.
Crispr Technique Heralds Genetic Revolution
Independent: ‘Jaw-dropping’ breakthrough hailed as landmark in fight against hereditary diseases
“Organic” Is The Latin Word For “Starving The Poor”
Rice is the major dietary staple for almost half of humanity, but white rice grains lack vitamin A. Research scientists Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer and their teams developed a rice variety whose grains accumulate β-carotene. It took them, in collaboration with IRRI, 25 years to develop and test varieties that express sufficient quantities of the precursor that a few ounces of cooked rice can provide enough β-carotene to eliminate the morbidity and mortality of vitamin A deficiency.‡ It took time, as well, to obtain the right to distribute Golden Rice seeds, which contain patented molecular constructs, free of charge to resource-poor farmers.
The rice has been ready for farmers to use since the turn of the 21st century, yet it is still not available to them. Escalating requirements for testing have stalled its release for more than a decade. IRRI and PhilRice continue to patiently conduct the required field tests with Golden Rice, despite the fact that these tests are driven by fears of “potential” hazards, with no evidence of actual hazards. Introduced into commercial production over 17 years ago, GM crops have had an exemplary safety record. And precisely because they benefit farmers, the environment, and consumers, GM crops have been adopted faster than any other agricultural advance in the history of humanity.
The Sound Of Settled Science
From biology class to “C.S.I.,” we are told again and again that our genome is at the heart of our identity. Read the sequences in the chromosomes of a single cell, and learn everything about a person’s genetic information — or, as 23andme, a prominent genetic testing company, says on its Web site, “The more you know about your DNA, the more you know about yourself.”
But scientists are discovering that — to a surprising degree — we contain genetic multitudes. Not long ago, researchers had thought it was rare for the cells in a single healthy person to differ genetically in a significant way. But scientists are finding that it’s quite common for an individual to have multiple genomes. Some people, for example, have groups of cells with mutations that are not found in the rest of the body. Some have genomes that came from other people.
“There have been whispers in the matrix about this for years, even decades, but only in a very hypothetical sense,” said Alexander Urban, a geneticist at Stanford University. Even three years ago, suggesting that there was widespread genetic variation in a single body would have been met with skepticism, he said. “You would have just run against the wall.”
The Tolerant Left
Earlier this month, 400 protestors destroyed a field trial of genetically modified Golden Rice in the Philippines. Aided by well-meaning but misguided organizations such as Greenpeace, such mobs are potentially destroying the opportunity to avoid 680,000 deaths each year.
It’s the left. That’s their goal.