Showing posts with label Society. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Society. Show all posts
Monday, February 24, 2014
Friday, February 21, 2014
Saturday, September 22, 2012
'We are speaking about trillions of carats': Russia reveals vast diamond source under 62-MILE-WIDE asteroid crater which could supply world markets for next 3,000 years
- Supply under 35million-year-old impact zone is ten times bigger than global reserves
- Kremlin discovered the site in the 1970s but kept it a secret until now to exploit tightly controlled market
- Diamonds at Popigai Astroblem in Siberia are 'twice as hard' as normal, making them ideal for high-precision scientific instruments and industry
Scientists estimate there are 'trillions of carats' lying beneath a 35million-year-old asteroid crater in Siberia - more than ten times the global stockpile.
The Kremlin has known about the reserves under the 62-mile-wide impact zone since the 1970s.
But it has kept it a secret until now because it was already reaping big profits in what back then was a heavily controlled market.
In the money: An aerial view of the 35-mile-wide Popigai Astroblem crater in eastern
Siberia which contains 'trillions of carats of diamonds'
Siberia which contains 'trillions of carats of diamonds'
The Soviets had also been producing various artificial diamonds for industry which proved a lucrative enterprise.
Government officials finally gave scientists from the nearby Novosibirsk Institute of Geology and Mineralogy permission to lift the lid on the crater's hidden gems in a meeting with journalists over the weekend.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Winners 2012 Skyscraper Competition
Thursday, March 08, 2012
Get rich AND die trying: Ambitious people earn more money - but they die younger and are no happier, says study
Career ladder: The new study found that ambitious people earned more money and had prestigious jobs - but died younger, and were not a great deal happier
Parents who teach their children to value career ambitions over spending time with friends could be setting them up for an early grave, a study has revealed.
It found that go-getters who attend the best universities and secure high-powered jobs suffer poorer health and die younger than those with more modest aspirations.
Over 70 years, the U.S. study tracked 717 high-achievers who attended universities, such as Oxford, Harvard and Yale, as well as those without university degrees, to the end of their lives.
The researchers found that highly ambitious people neglected key areas of their lives that lead to happiness, including building a strong network of friends and maintaining stable relationships.
Professor Timothy Judge, who led the study at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, said: ‘Ambitious kids had higher educational attainment, attended highly esteemed universities, worked in more prestigious occupations, and earned more.
‘So, it would seem that they are poised to "have it all." However, we determined that ambition has a much weaker effect on life satisfaction and actually a slightly negative impact on longevity (how long people lived).
'So, yes, ambitious people do achieve more successful careers, but that doesn't seem to translate into leading happier or healthier lives.’
Judge used a complex formula to judge ambition at every stage of life - and to divide high-ability individuals into 'ambitious' and 'less ambitious' groups.
The study didn’t address the underlying reasons for the higher mortality of ambitious people.
Monday, February 06, 2012
The Zeitgeist Movement: Radio Show - Ben McLeish
3rd in a short series of lectures begun in December 2011. This talk outlines the traditional understandings of social control, reinforcement, coercion and human behavior within present society, and in a society organized around scientific principles and mutuality.
Host: Ben McLeish
Prior talks
Talk 1: What is Corruption: http://bit.ly/WhatIsCorruption
Talk 2: Art in a Resource Based Economy: http://bit.ly/ArtInRBE
About : Started in 2009, TZM Global Radio is a weekly radio show presented by various coordinators/lecturers of The Zeitgeist Movement in a rotational fashion.
Source
Saturday, November 05, 2011
The World in 2100: Ten Billion People, No Oil and Not Enough Food
With global population now at seven billion, it may be time to start planning for what the world will look like in the coming years.
Though most of us won't be around to see it, the United Nations has projected that our incredible population growth will level off at around 10 billion people by the year 2100.
Already, at seven billion, we are experiencing severe poverty, hunger, a shortage of resources, increased urbanization and climate change issues.
Will we be doomed by 2100, or can we make it work? Since we've only got one planet (so far), let's hope for the latter.
Friday, October 28, 2011
7 billion people and you: What's your number?
The world's population is expected to hit seven billion in the next few weeks. After growing very slowly for most of human history, the number of people on Earth has more than doubled in the last 50 years. Where do you fit into this story of human life? Fill in your date of birth below to find out.
Source
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
10 Symptoms He Shouldn't Ignore
Whenever I get sick, I have a conversation with my wife, Rachelle, that goes like this:
Her: “How are you doing?”
Me: “Fine.”
Her: “Are you sure?”
She just doesn’t trust me when I tell her nothing is wrong—a lack of faith she claims dates to an illness early in our marriage. “You wouldn’t take aspirin because you wanted to see how high your temperature could go,” she recalls. “It was the stupidest reason you ever gave me for not taking care of yourself.”
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Ten places you can’t enter
The world is full of secret and exclusive places that we either don’t know about, or simply couldn’t visit if we wanted to. This list takes a look at ten of the most significant places around the world that are closed to the general public or are virtually impossible for the general public to visit.
Mezhgorye is a closed town in Russia which is believed to house people working on the highly secret Mount Yamantaw. The town was founded in 1979. Mount Yamantaw stands at 1,640 metres (5,381 ft) and is the highest mountain in the southern Urals. Along with Kosvinsky Mountain (600 km to the north), it is suspected by the United States of being a large secret nuclear facility and/or bunker. Large excavation projects have been observed by U.S. satellite imagery as recently as the late 1990s, during the time of Boris Yeltsin’s pro-Western government after the fall of the Soviet Union. Two garrisons, Beloretsk-15 and Beloretsk-16, were built on top of the facility. Repeated U.S. questions have yielded several different responses from the Russian government regarding Mount Yamantaw. They have said it is a mining site, a repository for Russian treasures, a food storage area, and a bunker for leaders in case of nuclear war.
10. Mezhgorye
Monday, April 11, 2011
The Sleepless Elite
Why some people can run on little sleep and get so much done
For a small group of people -- perhaps just 1% to 3% of the population -- sleep is a waste of time.
Natural "short sleepers," as they're officially known, are night owls and early birds simultaneously. They typically turn in well after midnight, then get up just a few hours later and barrel through the day without needing to take naps or load up on caffeine.
They are also energetic, outgoing, optimistic and ambitious, according to the few researchers who have studied them. The pattern sometimes starts in childhood and often runs in families.
While it's unclear if all short sleepers are high achievers, they do have more time in the day to do things, and keep finding more interesting things to do than sleep, often doing several things at once.
Nobody knows how many natural short sleepers are out there. "There aren't nearly as many as there are people who think they're short sleepers," says Daniel J. Buysse, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, a professional group.
Out of every 100 people who believe they only need five or six hours of sleep a night, only about five people really do, Dr. Buysse says. The rest end up chronically sleep deprived, part of the one-third of U.S. adults who get less than the recommended seven hours of sleep per night, according to a report last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
To date, only a handful of small studies have looked at short sleepers -- in part because they're hard to find. They rarely go to sleep clinics and don't think they have a disorder.
| Normal Sleeper Most adults have normal sleep needs, functioning best with 7 to 9 hours of sleep, and about two-thirds of Americans regularly get it. Children fare better with 8 to 12 hours, and elderly people may need only 6 to 7. Wannabe Short Sleeper One-third of Americans are sleep-deprived, regularly getting less than 7 hours a night, which puts them at higher risk of diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure and other health problems. Short Sleeper Short sleepers, about 1% to 3% of the population, function well on less than 6 hours of sleep without being tired during the day. They tend to be unusually energetic and outgoing. Geneticists who spotted a gene variation in short sleepers were able to replicate it in mice -- which needed less sleep than usual, too. |
There is currently no way people can teach themselves to be short sleepers. Still, scientists hope that by studying short sleepers, they can better understand how the body regulates sleep and why sleep needs vary so much in humans.
"My long-term goal is to someday learn enough so we can manipulate the sleep pathways without damaging our health," says human geneticist Ying-Hui Fu at the University of California-San Francisco. "Everybody can use more waking hours, even if you just watch movies."
Dr. Fu was part of a research team that discovered a gene variation, hDEC2, in a pair of short sleepers in 2009. They were studying extreme early birds when they noticed that two of their subjects, a mother and daughter, got up naturally about 4 a.m. but also went to bed past midnight.
Genetic analyses spotted one gene variation common to them both. The scientists were able to replicate the gene variation in a strain of mice and found that the mice needed less sleep than usual, too.
News of their finding spurred other people to write the team, saying they were natural short sleepers and volunteering to be studied. The researchers are recruiting more candidates and hope to find more gene variations they have in common.
| That All-Nighter Feels Good -- Temporarily Sleep deprivation makes most people grumpy. It's sometimes used as a form of torture. Oddly enough, it can also bring on temporary euphoria, according to a study in the journal Neuroscience last month. Researchers had 14 healthy young adults stay up all night and all the next day and then compared their reactions with 13 subjects who had slept normally. In one test, sleepless subjects asked to rate a series of images uniformly saw them as more pleasant or positive. "We saw this strange lopsided shift," says lead author Matthew Walker, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California-Berkeley. Brain scans also showed that the subjects who had pulled all-nighters had heightened activity in the mesolimbic pathway, a brain circuit driven by dopamine, a neurotransmitter that typically regulates feelings of pleasure, addiction and cravings. The boost of dopamine after an all-nighter may help explain why sleep deprivation can alleviate major depression in about 60% of patients, although the effect is only temporary. "As soon as they get recovery sleep, all that mood elevation is lost," says Dr. Walker. Could the sleep-deprived brain be somehow compensating for the lack of downtime with a surge of dopamine to keep on going? Scientists don't yet know. Earlier studies have also shown that sleep deprivation amplifies activity in the amygdala, the primitive emotional center of the brain, and reduces it the prefrontal cortex, where higher, more rational thought occurs. It may be that the brain reverts to a more basic mode of operating when it is sleep deprived, Dr. Walker speculates. Alternatively, he says, "we know that different parts of the brain are more sensitive than others to sleep deprivation. It may be that the prefrontal cortex just goes down first." Although the feelings of euphoria sound great, Dr. Walker warns that operating more on emotion than reason can be very risky. "You are all gas pedal and no brake," he says. That can be dangerous, indeed, if you are in a job that requires both long hours and difficult decision making. |
To date, Dr. Jones says he has identified only about 20 true short sleepers, and he says they share some fascinating characteristics. Not only are their circadian rhythms different from most people, so are their moods (very upbeat) and their metabolism (they're thinner than average, even though sleep deprivation usually raises the risk of obesity). They also seem to have a high tolerance for physical pain and psychological setbacks.
"They encounter obstacles, they just pick themselves up and try again," Dr. Jones says.
Some short sleepers say their sleep patterns go back to childhood and some see the same patterns starting in their own kids, such as giving up naps by age 2. As adults, they gravitate to different fields, but whatever they do, they do full bore, Dr. Jones says.
"Typically, at the end of a long, structured phone interview, they will admit that they've been texting and surfing the Internet and doing the crossword puzzle at the same time, all on less than six hours of sleep," says Dr. Jones. "There is some sort of psychological and physiological energy to them that we don't understand."
Drs. Jones and Fu stress that there is no genetic test for short sleeping. Ultimately, they expect to find that many different genes play a role, which may in turn reveal more about the complex systems that regulate sleep in humans.
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Leonardo da Vinci were too busy to sleep much, according to historical accounts. Winston Churchill and Thomas Edison came close but they were also fond of taking naps, which may disqualify them as true short sleepers.
Nowadays, some short sleepers gravitate to fields like blogging, videogame design and social media, where their sleep habits come in handy. "If I could find a way to do it, I'd never sleep," says Dave Hatter, a software developer in Fort Wright, Ky. He typically sleeps just four to five hours a night, up from two to three hours a few years ago.
"It's crazy, but it works for me," says Eleanor Hoffman, an overnight administrator at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York who would rather spend afternoons playing mahjong with friends than sleep anymore than four hours. Sometimes she calls her cousin, Linda Cohen, in Pittsburgh about 4 a.m., since she knows she'll be wide awake as well -- just like they were as kids.
"I come to life about 11 at night," says Mrs. Cohen, who owns a chain of toy stores with her husband and gets up early in the morning with ease. "If I went to bed earlier, I'd feel like half my life was missing."
Are you a short sleeper? For more information on the genetic study, contact Dr. Jones at chris.jones@hsc.utah.edu
Source
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Is Gluten Making Us Fat?
Avoiding gluten has become big business. Sales of gluten-free products grew about 30 percent a year from 2006 to 2010, and will hit $3.9 billion by next year, according to the market research company Packaged Facts. Supermarket shelves are filled with gluten-free breads, soups, and cake mixes—even gluten-free ketchup and soy sauce. According to market research firm Mintel, 10 percent of new foods launched in 2010 featured a "gluten-free" claim, up from only 2 percent 5 years earlier.
NFL quarterback Drew Brees won a Super Bowl while on a gluten-free diet. Cyclist Tom Danielson, a record-breaking member of the Garmin-Transitions team, says his training and racing have improved since he and his teammates went gluten-free over a year ago.
Have most common whole grains been acting as insidious nutritional double agents all these years? Or are they essential components of a healthy diet? Let's separate the wheat from the chaff.
Test your digestive health: Can you pass our gut check?
What is gluten, anyway? How does it affect the body?
Gluten is a protein found in wheat, barley, and rye, as well as in many common food additives. It's what gives dough its elasticity and baked goods their satisfying chewiness. But for people with celiac disease—a type of autoimmune disorder—eating foods that contain gluten can lead to a cascade of nasty reactions, including damage to the small intestine, poor nutrient absorption, diarrhea, abdominal pain, bloating, anemia, and fatigue. Celiac disease is surprisingly common, affecting about one in every 133 people, according to an often-cited 2003 study from the University of Maryland center for celiac research. There is no cure for celiac disease and no drugs that can treat it; you can only manage the condition, by sticking to a gluten-free diet for the rest of your life.
Even if you don't have celiac disease, gluten may still be bad for you, says Lara Field, M.S., R.D., a dietitian at the University of Chicago's celiac disease center. A rising percentage of people in the United States consider themselves "gluten-sensitive." "These people may have a food intolerance or experience many celiac-type symptoms after consuming foods that contain gluten," says Field. Some may have a form of wheat allergy. If you think you may have symptoms of a gluten intolerance, ask your doctor about scheduling a blood test to find out for sure.
The best and healthiest beers for you.
I need to drop pounds. Is a gluten-free diet worth a shot?
A gluten-free diet can work, but dealing with the diet's restrictions can be daunting. "You have to commit to a true lifestyle change, and that can be tough," says Edward Abramson, Ph.D., a professor emeritus at California State University at Chico and the author of Emotional Eating. "Men might be able to follow gluten-free for a short time," he says, "but without a real medical need, they might have a rough time sticking to it."
But the notion of a panacea for excess weight remains seductive, and that may be part of the appeal of the gluten-free movement, says Michael R. Lowe, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Drexel University who specializes in nutritional approaches to weight loss. It sounds simple: If I do this one thing, then I will see the results I'm after. "That's the driving appeal of elimination diets," Lowe says.
Ironically, the boom in gluten-free products isn't necessarily helpful to those looking to lose weight. "You can buy gluten-free versions of practically every type of wheat-based food— pizza, pasta, cookies, you name it," Thompson says. But here's the catch: Healthy-sounding gluten-free items often contain just as many calories as the originals. People might overindulge in gluten-free options because they seem like "safe" foods, says Field. "People see 'gluten- free' and think they can down an entire box of gluten-free cookies with no repercussions."
So even if you stick to a gluten-free diet, it can actually lead to weight gain. A 2006 study in the American Journal of Gastroenterology followed 188 people with celiac disease (half of whom were overweight or obese) on a gluten-free diet for 2 years and discovered that 81 percent of them gained weight.
If you do give up gluten, use your new eating plan as a lens to reexamine your diet—and your life. Cyclist Danielson says, "I don't know if it was directly tied to the food, but I found that by having to pay more attention to my daily diet, I became more focused on my cycling."
Avoiding gluten takes constant monitoring— the same attention to detail you need to excel in your workouts. "I became more dedicated and took a more professional approach to my training when I went gluten-free," Danielson says. "I couldn't get lazy and down whole pizzas and bowls of pasta. I had to focus on putting better food in my body, and this made me realize how much my eating habits off the bike affected my performance on it." Mindful eating is key. After all, "you don't need to go gluten-free to avoid refined processed carbs," says Thompson.
15 Foods that help burn calories.
The New Power Grains
Even if you don't need to avoid gluten, it's a good idea to explore the world of gluten-free grains. All of them are rich in belly-filling fiber, and each offers unique benefits.
Quinoa
Once an energy booster for Inca warriors, this superfood of the Andes provides complete protein, with all nine essential amino acids. It's also low on the glycemic index, so it won't spike your blood sugar.
Try it: Ancient Harvest Quinoa Shells are made from just two ingredients: quinoa and corn. Toss with chicken sausage for even more protein. quinoa.net
Buckwheat
Buckwheat is rich in rutin, a flavonoid that has potent antioxidant properties. It's also rich in heart-healthy magnesium.
Try it: Arrowhead Mills Maple Buckwheat Flakes have a light, crispy texture. Buckwheat also makes a hearty substitute for rice. arrowheadmills.com
Amaranth
A grain the size of a poppy seed, amaranth has more protein than wheat and twice that of white rice. Initial studies in rodents suggest that amaranth's high protein content can help lower cholesterol.
Try it: Health Valley Amaranth Graham Crackers have only 120 calories per serving. Try them with squares of antioxidant-rich dark chocolate. healthvalley.com
Friday, March 18, 2011
The Truth Behind the Moon Landings
Did the Apollo 11 astronauts really land on the moon, or was this an elaborate hoax by NASA to satisfy political demands?
Bill Kaysing the former head of technical publications for Rocketdyne is considered, by many, to be the father of moon conspiracy theorists.
Both he and Ralph René the author of NASA Mooned America set out their stall with all the evidence supporting their theory:
Contradicting shadows in photographs, moon walk was a slow motion film, no stars in night sky, flag fluttering in a breeze, lack of Computing power to land the lunar module, can’t manipulate camera to take photographs, dust below lunar module should have been disturbed, film would be damaged by radiation… etc.
Source
Thursday, December 23, 2010
New Drug Strategy Shows Promise Against HIV
Experimental agent disrupts mechanism virus uses to enter cells, scientists say
WEDNESDAY, Dec. 22 (HealthDay News) -- Scientists are reporting early but promising results from a new drug that blocks HIV as it attempts to invade human cells.
The approach differs from most current antiretroviral therapy, which tries to limit the virus only after it has gained entry to cells.
The medication, called VIR-576 for now, is still in the early phases of development. But researchers say that if it is successful, it might also circumvent the drug resistance that can undermine standard therapy, according to a report published Dec. 22 in Science Translational Medicine.
The new approach is an attractive one for a number of reasons, said Dr. Michael Horberg, director of HIV/AIDS for Kaiser Permanente in Santa Clara, Calif.
"Theoretically it should have fewer side effects [and indeed had minimal adverse events in this study] and there's probably less of a chance of mutation in developing resistance to medication," said Horberg, who was not involved in the study.
Viruses replicate inside cells and scientists have long known that this is when they tend to mutate -- potentially developing new ways to resist drugs. "It's generally accepted that it's harder for a virus to mutate outside cell walls," Horberg explained.
The new drug focuses on HIV at this pre-invasion stage. "VIR-576 targets a part of the virus that is different from that targeted by all other HIV-1 inhibitors," explained study co-author Frank Kirchhoff, a professor at the Institute of Molecular Virology, University Hospital of Ulm in Ulm, Germany, who, along with several other researchers, holds a patent on the new medication.
The target is the gp41 fusion peptide of HIV, the "sticky" end of the virus's outer membrane, which "shoots like a 'harpoon'" into the body's cells, the authors said. The launch of this peptide is a first step in the virus's bid to inhabit host cells.
Although there are two other drugs on the market, maraviroc and T-20, which also prevent the virus from entering cells, they don't target fusion peptides. That makes this trial the first time that scientists have seen that fusion peptides are a worthwhile target in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
And given that fusion peptides also provide a point of entry for many other viruses, from measles to Ebola and hepatitis B and C, scientists theorize that the strategy could be turned against these illnesses as well.
The 18 patients with HIV in this small phase I/II trial took either 0.5, 1.5 or 5 grams of VIR-576 a day for 10 days via injection.
Those taking the highest dose saw a 95 percent reduction in their average viral load, the amount of HIV in the blood, without developing severe adverse effects.
"They were getting results that are similar to maraviroc and T-20 and certainly comparable to what's seen with intracellular drugs," Horberg said.
But the same factors that have limited the use of maraviroc and T-20 are also likely to get in the way here as well, namely the cost and the fact that they must be given by injection (because of the large size of the molecule), he warned.
The needle-vs-pill hurdle is something patients and doctors have to contend with in many settings, not just HIV, Horberg said. For example, "we all know that insulin works great [in diabetic patients] but the hard part is convincing patients to actually take it."
Hoping to get around the problem, the researchers are now searching for a smaller molecule to do the same job.
"The next big step is to use the structure of VIR-576 and its viral target (the fusion peptide) to generate small molecule inhibitors that act by the same mechanism but are orally available," Kirchhoff said. "We will start to test the first compounds next year, but how long it will take such drugs make it to the market is impossible to say."
"The bottom line is, yes, any time that you can find a new mechanism to attack the virus -- and certainly if you can prevent the virus from getting into the host cells -- that's a really good thing. But this isn't near prime-time," Horberg concluded.
Source
Saturday, September 18, 2010
What does one TRILLION dollars look like?
We’ll start with a $100 dollar bill. Currently the largest U.S. denomination in general circulation.
A packet of one hundred $100 bills is less than 1/2” thick and contains $10,000.
$1 million dollars (100 packets of $10,000). You could stuff that into a grocery bag and walk around with it.
While a measly $1 million looked a little unimpressive, $100 million is a little more respectable.
It fits neatly on a standard pallet…
It fits neatly on a standard pallet…
And $1 BILLION dollars… now we’re really getting somewhere…
Ladies and gentlemen… I give you $1 trillion dollars…(And notice those pallets are double stacked.)
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Out in the Silence
Love, hate and a quest for change in small town America.
Source
Friday, May 07, 2010
The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
| Richard Dawkins | |
|---|---|
 Dawkins at a signing for his book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution in 2009. Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941) is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science author. He was formerly Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford and was a fellow of New College, Oxford.[1][2][3][4] Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982, he made a widely cited contribution to evolutionary biology with the concept, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms. Dawkins is well known for his candid criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker. He has since written several popular science books, and makes regular television and radio appearances, predominantly discussing these topics. Dawkins is an atheist,[5][6][7] secular humanist, sceptic, rationalist[8] and supporter of the Brights movement.[9] He has been referred to in the media as "Darwin's Rottweiler",[10][11] by analogy with English biologist T. H. Huxley, who was known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's evolutionary ideas. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that faith qualifies as a delusion − as a fixed false belief.[12] As of November 2007, the English language version had sold more than 2 million copies [13] and had been translated into 31 other languages,[14] making it his most popular book to date. | |
| Born | Clinton Richard Dawkins 26 March 1941 Nairobi, Colony of Kenya |
| Residence | Oxford, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | Ethologist, evolutionary biologist |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley University of Oxford New College, Oxford |
| Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford |
| Doctoral advisor | Nikolaas Tinbergen |
| Doctoral students | Alan Grafen Mark Ridley |
| Known for | Gene-centred view of evolution Introduction of the concept of memes Advocacy of atheism and rationalism Criticism of religion |
| Influences | Charles Darwin, Ronald Fisher, George C. Williams, W. D. Hamilton, Daniel Dennett |
| Notable awards | Zoological Society Silver Medal (1989) Faraday Award (1990) Kistler Prize (2001) |
Source
Sunday, March 14, 2010
The future of medicine has arrived
For the first time, the genetic cause of a disease has been revealed by sequencing the patient's genome. The consequences, says Jeremy Laurance, could be enormous.
Doctors hailed a landmark in the advance of personalised medicine yesterday with the first case in which the sequencing of a patient's complete genome revealed the genetic cause of his disease.
The advance demonstrates for the first time that the technology of gene sequencing, touted as the future of medicine for a decade, is robust enough to yield clinically significant results. Fewer than 10 people in the world have had their personal genomes completed, and most of these were done as an intellectual exercise.
But the technology may herald a new era of medical neurosis rather than a new dawn of better health. Learning in advance of the risk of suffering diseases in the future might help prevent their occurrence, but would also lead to a lifetime spent worrying about them.
The latest advance solves a 20-year puzzle for the patient, James Lupski, who as vice chairman of molecular and human genetics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, also led the research.
Dr Lupski inherited a rare condition which affects the nerves in the hands and feet called Charcot-Marie-Tooth syndrome from his parents. In 1991 he and his team identified the first genetic mutation that gave rise to the disease and 40 more genes have since been implicated by other researchers. But none of them accounted for the disorder that affects Dr Lupski himself and some of his siblings.
To help Dr Lupski in his quest, Richard Gibbs, director of the Human Genome Sequencing Centre, offered to sequence all of his genome. The researchers found two "compelling" mutations in the gene SH3TC2, among those known to be implicated in the syndrome, which caused the condition in him. The results are published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
Dr Lupski said he had known he had a genetic disease for 40 years, but now he knew the gene at fault. "This is the first time we have tried to identify a disease gene in this way. Currently we only know the function of 5 to 10 per cent of the approximately 25,000 genes in our genome that it takes to make a human being. What this paper tells us is that the data are robust enough that we can start to use it to interpret clinical information in the context of the genome sequence," he said.
Unlocking the secrets of the genetic code for individuals to reveal their risk of developing specific diseases has been limited by the high cost. But it is falling dramatically. Decoding the complete genome of Nobel prize winner James Watson, joint discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, in 2008, cost $1 million (£600,000). Dr Lupski's genome was sequenced for $50,000 (£30,000). An editorial in the NEJM says the "spectacular" reductions in cost will continue, as a result of competition and innovation, and will be "at most one tenth of the current cost" within two years. Even today, using a different technique that shrinks the target for sequencing (covering 1 per cent of the genome but which still accounts for 90 per cent of all mutations with large effects), the cost of decoding Dr Lupski's genome could have been achieved for $4,000 (£2,800). "It is increasingly clear that the cost is fast approaching a threshold at which DNA sequencing will become a routine part of the diagnostic armamentarium," the journal says.
However, the new developments raise a host of ethical questions. Among them is how information about genetic risks of disease should be presented to individuals, and what the implications may be for insurance and employment.
Women affected by the genes BRCA1 and 2, which are known to raise the lifetime risk of breast cancer to 80 per cent, can protect themselves by having regular mammograms or by opting for prophylactic surgery to remove the breasts.
But for Huntingdon's disease, an inherited progressive neurodegenerative disorder, there is no cure. Alerting people affected by the gene that causes the disease means they live for longer under its cloud. While some may prefer to know, others may want to live in ignorance, until their symptoms develop. Couples trying for a child may wish to know if the foetus is affected so they can opt for abortion if they choose.
The Association of British Insurers agreed a moratorium on the use of genetic test results in 2001, which has twice been extended and is now due to expire in 2014.
The moratorium allows consumers to obtain insurance for themselves and their families without having to disclose adverse results of predictive genetic tests that might indicate a risk of serious disease in the future.
Single gene mutations that cause more than 2,000 mostly rare diseases have been identified so far. Mutations in multiple genes that increase the risk of common diseases are also being discovered.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
