You can edit someone’s sperm or eggs to make changes. If you do this, then all of the descendants of that child will share those changes. If you change someone’s blood cells to be resistant to cancer (for example), then those changes aren’t passed on [somatic editing]. When you change someone’s germlime (eegs or sperm), that person not only makes decisions for themselves, but for all their potential children, forever. Then if you have multiple people who have these changes, and some of their children meet each other and have kids, you’d start to have interesting combinations of these changes interact.
It gets into pretty scary territory here, where if you’re introducing changes never seen in nature, we have no idea of how those interactions could turn out. Do you start to tell people they can’t have children together because of their parents/grandparent’s decision? Or do you try to reverse those changes in their germlines (and hopefully not introduce other changes/errors) in an attempt to fix this?
There’s an intermediate risk change one can also do, where you copy known changes that are rarely seen (but at least natural in human populations) into many people in germline editing. Some small fraction of people have a deletion of CCR5-delta32, which is thought (when you have a copy from each parent) to make it more difficult for the HIV virus to penetrate your cells. Since this mutation is in a small but appreciable fraction of people already (1-10% of caucasians), we could look at those populations of people that have the mutation and see if there are negative effects that those people share compared to control populations. If the mutation was determined to only have positive effects, then what you’re doing is in effect raising the frequency of the mutation in the population, instead of introducing something completely new.
This option is probably how germline changes will eventually happen, but most of us want to keep learning more about all of these mutations and their effects before we start changing the human species into something new.
Intriguing. So the very broad strokes is when the changes are made? Change things early (sperm/eggs) and it gets passed along just like the “natural” genetics. Change things later and it doesn’t. That basically right as to how the effects play out?
And yeah, this is seriously scary stuff. Eugenics and all that.
…As it happens, it can be quite a big deal. Daylight has been a constant throughout our evolutionary processes, give or take a volcanic summer or two. As a result, changes in the amount of light we get can have big knock-on effects, for both us and most other life forms (especially if they’re photosynthetic). We humans, with our mastery of the environment (or tendency to construct buildings which we can use to keep it out) aren’t believed to be “seasonal”, as such. However, as with most things, there are numerous exceptions.
The most obvious example is Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), the mood-altering condition with the unsubtle acronym. SAD is believed to result from the fact that reduced exposure to sunlight causes a lowering of mood in many people, to the extent where it becomes genuinely debilitating. Some might scoff at this concept, but it’s a real thing. There’s evidence to show that the brain’s levels of serotonin are directly affected by exposure to daylight. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter strongly implicated in maintenance of mood, and the one affected by SSRIs, the most common type of antidepressant at present…
My son who lives in Fairbanks, AK, is definitely affected by SAD this time of year. Like a lot of people up there he uses a light therapy box, which helps a lot.
My manager has one of those on his desk in Washington State. It’s hard for me to imagine staring into a bright box every morning can help your mood, but he does it religiously.
I grew up in Wales, i don’t think i saw the unfiltered sun until my 16th birthday. I could probably handle Finland ok? My mum does suffer from SAD a bit, so her house is very bright and she loves yellow paint!
But in general it is amazing how our hard-wiring can effect our mood so much, we should all probably not work in offices and hang out in the trees more :)
I look forward to the open market heritable modifications that prevent your child (or their children) from having down’s syndrome, autism, midgetism, ginger hair, blindness, deafness and gayness. Okay, the last one will probably be black market. And also, the deaf and blind lobbies will likely protest treatments for their conditions, much in the same way as there is an occasional story about parents with those disabilities wanting to make their children have those disabilities if they are not born with them.
This awesome science will make a much more interesting world.
Twenty-first century genetic engineering will not only eliminate the siamese twins and the alligator-skin people, but you’re gonna be hard-pressed to find a slight overbite, or a not-so-high cheekbone.
Yeah, between Dengue fever, chickenwhatever and now Ziki, plus shitty (literally) water, unfinished transportation, etc. etc., the Rio Olympics are pretty much doomed at this point.
This year, the search for dark matter seems to be dominating the minds of a lot of physicists. It’s quite an intriguing issue. We have a lot of gravitational evidence for dark matter at length scales from single galaxies to galaxy clusters—and even the cosmic microwave background. The variety of evidence is such that it’s difficult to imagine a suitable modification to the laws of gravitation that would satisfy all these constraints.
But actual dark matter remains elusive. I’ll discuss some details in a moment, but my take-home from the dark matter talks is that if it can be detected at all, we should see it relatively soon.
So how do we go about detecting dark matter? Francesca Calore from University of Amsterdam presented results from observations of cosmic and gamma ray production. The idea is that dark matter forms a halo of relatively slowly moving particles around the galaxy where the particles occasionally run into each other. In doing so, they may destroy themselves and generate some high-energy particles of the type that we can detect. Following a number of possible decay paths, we get gamma radiation and/or cosmic rays.
Gamma rays are just a high-energy version of ordinary light, so they travel relatively unimpeded through the galaxy. That means we can turn our detectors to the sky and observe the energy, intensity, and direction of high-energy gamma rays. This data can then be compared to what might be expected from known astronomical sources…
This process is actually a good deal more complicated than you might imagine. First, you need to consider all the other possible gamma ray production processes and subtract those from the signal. Then, you need to create a model of the dark matter distribution and see if any observed excess of signal correlated with expected clumps of dark matter.
Finally, you need to examine the energy spectrum of the gamma rays and see if they have the right energy range and the right intensity at each energy (the shape of the spectrum) to match what might be expected from dark matter destruction.
This all probably sounds a bit strange. We don’t know what dark matter is, so we can’t know what energies the gamma rays should have, right? Well, not quite. For instance, we have a lot of particle physics data and a lot of other observations that have eliminated whole swaths of possible energies. If the excess appears in a region of the spectrum that is known to not originate from dark matter annihilation, we know the signal is spurious.
Taking all of this information into account, there is a signal that looks like dark matter. But—and this is a big but—not all possible background gamma ray production processes have been taken into account yet. It might be possible that there are faint gamma ray producers that just happen to coincide with the observed hot spots. These producers would be astronomical objects like galaxies that have not been cataloged over the course of ordinary observation.
I absolutely would love to see a great deal more Euclidian plane geometry (done the fun way with actual compass & straight edge) in grade school, but from my experience grading college students, I don’t think there’s much benefit to learning calculus rules early.
Most students don’t have the capacity to understand the actual concepts at the much earlier age the rules are introduced in some cultures. It amounts to rote memorization, which almost hinders those students when they get to the age where they can understand what’s going on.
Baking basic algebra into students’ bones, on the other hand, is the equivalent of forcing students to diagram sentences as they learn their native language. There’s no deeper understanding to be had than what children can comprehend. It’s just something you have to know like the back of your hand to be literate in either context.
I expected the link to lead to a “mathematician’s lament”, rather than to an interesting article about math circles and moebius noodles, whatever they are.
Yeah, it made an interesting point about how we tend to focus on “Simple but hard” stuff, assuming that children can handle it better than the “complex but easy” stuff. When in reality, the human brain is awesome at doing all kinds of ridiculously complex things.
Ultimately, with things like integral calculus, we actually naturally do that stuff in our heads constantly as part of our visual processing. Your brain is good at math, if you simply don’t get in its way with silly crap.
