madame scientist's not-so-mad musings

2011-11-27

2011-11-27

2011-11-27

This is the funniest I’ve seen of Neil deGrasse Tyson. Amazing (and perfectly logical) rant about “stupid design”. Wait until you get to the entertainment system in the middle of a sewage plant 😉

Thank you Shah Auckburaully !

Originally shared by Shah Auckburaully

Show me your genome, and I’ll show you mine! Only 10 years ago, the complete sequencing of all 6 billion+base pairs of the human genome was announced. Back then, it would have cost a cool $100 million to have your genome unraveled. Now, the price is expected to crash down to $1,000 per person, hitting that sweet spot to trigger mass sequencing of your genome and mine. About 30,000 people are expected to have their DNA sequenced by this year.

• Will this help diagnose and predict disease better than ever? In the case of syndromic diseases, yes! Rare, genetic disorders caused by a single mutation could be detected and treated as in the heartwarming success story of a 6 yr old Wisconsin boy who became a candidate for an umbilical cord blood transplant after whole genome sequencing discovered the genetic cause of his mysterious and life threatening intestinal disorder. More common, complex illnesses (hypertension, autism) have susceptibility variations all over the genome. We will need an army of biostatisticians and geneticists to make sense of these.

• Genetic exceptionalism? Companies that offer direct-to-consumer genetic tests, like 23andMe , have received warning letters that “the analytical or clinical validity of their tests have not been submitted to FDA for clearance or approval.. Consumers may make medical decisions in reliance on this [genetic] information”. But in the absence of other guidance from the FDA, these companies have been left in limbo, leaving open the possibility that the industry may simply move overseas. Alan Dow, vice president and legal counsel at Complete Genomics, suggests that the foot dragging may be due to old ideas of genetic exceptionalism, that is “genetic information is inherently unique and should be treated differently in law than other forms of personal or medical information”. Yet, legal and medical scholars do not seem to have a problem with this.

• What will you or your doctor or your insurer do with this information? Two thoughtful articles in Slate’s Future Tense section:

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/future_tense/2011/11/whole_genome_sequencing_a_new_liability_tsunami_for_doctors_.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/11/genetic_testing_in_the_united_states_may_be_hurt_by_the_fda_s_confusing_policies_.html

Edit: Recommend this informative and entertaining 10 min TED talk : http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_resnick_welcome_to_the_genomic_revolution.html

Lynn Margulis, brilliant biologist, dies at 73. Dr. Margulis was Professor at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is best known for the endosymbiont theory , that eukaryotic cells (like ours, with nuclei), evolved from symbiotic relationships with bacteria. In fact, cellular organelles like mitochondria and chloroplasts quite clearly link to bacterial origins, including having their own genetic material.

• Her work directly challenged prevailing Darwinian views that evolution was purely the result of random mutations. Rather, Dr. Margulis argued that symbiosis was a more important mechanism: evolution is a function of organisms that are mutually beneficial growing together to become one and reproducing.

• Although these ideas are mainstream now, they were subject to much ridicule: her manuscript was rejected by 15 journals before being published in 1967! Richard Dawkins said of her, “I greatly admire Lynn Margulis’s sheer courage and stamina in sticking by the endosymbiosis theory, and carrying it through from being an unorthodoxy to an orthodoxy. I’m referring to the theory that the eukaryotic cell is a symbiotic union of primitive prokaryotic cells. This is one of the great achievements of twentieth-century evolutionary biology, and I greatly admire her for it.”

• Her work on the Gaia theory (with James Lovelock), that Earth is itself an organism, is more controversial.

• She was once married to Carl Sagan and they have a son, Dorian Sagan, who co-authored books with her.

Read more about her work: http://news.discovery.com/earth/lynn-margulis-pioneer-of-evolutionary-biology-dies-at-73-111124.html

I still love you Freddie Mercury died on this day, twenty years ago. He epitomized the perfect frontman, larger than life, “the consummate channel of communication between a band and an audience”. Sales of his music are higher than ever today, prompting the comment that his death “seemed a mere hiccup in his career”.

A film about Mercury, starring Borat creator Sacha Baron Cohen, is in the pipeline, focusing on the years leading up to Queen’s stellar performance at the Live Aid concert in 1985.

Born Farrokh Bulsara on September 5, 1946 to a Parsi Indian family living on the East African spice island of Zanzibar and educated at an English-style boarding school in India, the shy teenager arrived in London when his family fled the 1964 Zanzibar revolution.

Watch this poignant clip from his last interview, with snatches from In my defence

“I’m just a singer with a song

How can I try to right the wrong

For just a singer with a melody

I’m caught in between, with a fading dream

In my defence what is there to say

We destroy the love, it’s our way

We never listen enough, never face the truth

Then like a passing song, love is here and then it’s gone”

Requiescat in pace, Freddie

http://www.queenonline.com/en/news-archive/queen-still-reigns-20-years-mercurys-death/

DNA Barcoding Imagine if every animal came with an easy-to-read barcode, that could identify to which species it belonged! Envision a simple scanner in the future that can get illegal fish or timber out of global markets, ferret out a new pathogen or monitor the environment..costing a couple of dollars and a few hours to get a barcode read.

Traditionally, taxonomy can be tedious, based on careful analysis of the shape of a beak, color of a wing and tiny differences apparent only to an expert eye..which can hit or miss. But in DNA barcoding, scientists simply read out 650 letters of a single gene, called cytochrome c oxidase I (COI), much smaller than the 3 billion letters of the human genome, for example. The COI gene is so variable, that most species have a single, unique code .

There are 160,000 species of butterflies and moths known..about as many more remain to be described. The butterflies in each of the rows below may look the same, but the are easily distinguished by their barcodes.

http://www.zmescience.com/ecology/new-butterfly-species-identified-in-mexico%E2%80%99s-yucatan-peninsula-3/

First Orbit, an Appreciation . 50 years ago, the first earthling escaped the gravitational pull of our planet. In 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin climbed into the spaceship Vostok I and orbited earth once, taking 108 minutes. He was 26 years old, with a smile that was said to “Light up the Cold War”.

• Of twenty highly trained cosmonauts, Gagarin was selected for first orbit because his short stature (5’ 2”) was an advantage in the tiny cockpit. His evaluation by an Air Force Doctor included this: “handles celestial mechanics and mathematical formulae with ease as well as excels in higher mathematics; does not feel constrained when he has to defend his point of view if he considers himself right; appears that he understands life better than a lot of his friends”.

• Amazingly, Gagarin had no control of the spacecraft since it was not known how he would react to weightlessness. He was ejected 7 km from earth, and both he and the capsule landed separately with parachutes. A farmer and her daughter recoiled in fear when they saw him in his orange suit and helmet, but he said “Don’t be afraid, I am a Soviet like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow”!

• Gagarin died 7 years later when the MiG he was flying crashed. In his own words, I could have gone on flying through space forever .

• If you have 108 minutes of your own to spare, watch the film First Orbit, which combines this new footage with Gagarin’s original mission audio and a new musical score by composer Philip Sheppard: http://www.firstorbit.org/