Slashdot Mirror

The only correlations that I can find between birth defects and malnutrition in Medline have to do with folic acid, a deficiency in which causes predominently neural tube malformations. The kinds of birth defects which the Basrah residents and US/UK veterans have been experiencing have not been reported as including neural tube defects; instead consisting mostly of other malformations such as tricuspid valve insufficiency, aortic valve stenosis, and renal agenesis or hypoplasia. Ref.: Prevalence of birth defects among infants of Gulf War veterans in Arkansas, Arizona, California, Georgia, Hawaii, and Iowa, 1989-1993. Birth Defects Res Part A Clin Mol Teratol. 2003 Apr;67(4):246-60.

"Scientists could customize the system to target any protein on the surface of a cell" Target the protiens on a group of humans, Kurdish, Jewish, Korean, whatever. Many groups of humans have some genes that are particular to their genetic heritage. Target those geenes to make something worse, instant selective genocide.

Yeah, there is one small problem with that though - There is more genetic diversity within racial/ethnic groups than between racial/ethnic groups. (see articles here, or here). So developing a weapon to target racial/ethnic groups (which are probably better conceived of as social constructs; doesn't make them any less "real" though) based on genetics would be very difficult.

23. Gene - genome search
Yes, including the sex chromosomes!! (whew, almost forgot it was /.)
Seriously, I wonder how google would compare with BLAST, the standard tool of gene hunters.

Here you go!

Tell that to my wife (a victim of heart desease for the past four years) who suffered her fate due to myocarditis brought on by a normal case of the flu... and not a poor diet or lack of excercise. Except for her failing heart (now pumping at a whopping 30%) she's the picture of perfect health. Her doctors keep wanting to use her as a poster-child to inform otherwise healthy women of their risks.

Sorry, that's not a "paper" and there is no evidence, just random, lunatic assertions. (Did I just state the obvious?)

The Evidence That HIV Causes AIDS (National Institute of Health):
http://www.niaid.nih.gov/factsheets/evidhiv.htm/

Most people do not read the peer-reviewed scientific literature, so they remain blissfully unaware that this 'epidemic' is taking place.

The literature is now filled with papers that are paid for by special interest groups, corporations and plain old loonies and which contain not a whit of scientific integrity or merit. The popular press has not twigged to this because of widespread 'dumbing-down' - in evidence I offer Scientific American and MIT's Review of Technology.

And you are wrong about me; regardless of the support for it in the scientific community, I would still dismiss this particular foolishness as 'pseudoscientific bullshit'. I am just as unpopular in the scientific community as I am on Slashdot.

While it is difficult to choose from the wealth of references available, here is a link to a particularly egregious example of the kind of paper that constitutes this 'epidemic': Seizure Alert Dogs

If you want to find your own examples, I offer this simple formula: Search the headlines in the popular press for references to the peer-reviewed literature. The ones printed in the biggest fonts, most prominently displayed, most widely circulated and occupying the most column inches are almost invariably the best examples of what I call 'psudoscientific bullshit'.

The scientific community increasingly depends upon mindless popular support for funding, as does the news media. The result? Uncritical reportage of results designed to capture the largest cheque. I think 'epidemic' is a fair term.

Sorry about not explaining 16S, you become quite insular during a PhD.

16S rRNA is widely used in bacterial taxonomy, and has been for a very long time, even before sequencing was available (as restriction patterns - fingerprints). Wiki on non-coding RNA

The homologue in human cells is 18S rRNA, however the rRNA in mitochondria in our cells is 16S, as mitochondria and bacteria share a common ancestor.

Side note: I am so used to Wikipedia I started linking like [[this]].

I agree with you next point, maybe I could secure more funding by linking into an international project such as this.

Reference for 16S HGT

Clearly GenBank must have rigorously aligned this sequence CO792603 against the know data, and, you know what they got a match!!

Never beleve data/clones/cultures has been checked, check it your self, I've know too many people who, after 6 months hard slog, find there working on the wrong sequence/clone

http://barcodinglife.com/, The official site.
Or for the geeky, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/, GenBank, search for cox1, it's the second most sequenced gene on the planet,
you'll find it's sequence and other info you can play with 'bioinformatically'.

If anyone is interested Cytochrome C Oxidase is the final protein in your electron transport chain.
It is the enzyme that reduces oxygen in your body (try breathing in!), and is found in 'nearly' all life that lives in oxygen.

It's not a habbit, but an addiction!

If you are truly discusted, don't support us idiots in our attempt to justify stupid behaviour!

Allmost all the DMS produced in the oceans originally came from DMSP produced by algae (some corals have symbiotic algae). Some DMSP is broken down to DMS by the algae themselves, but bacteria seem to have a major role in breaking down DMSP to DMS, as well as to another compound, methanethiol, that is not released into the atmosphere in large amounts. Interestingly, the genome of a bacterium that carries out both pathways of DMSP degradation is sequenced. Hopefully this will soon allow us to find more about these two competing fates of DMSP. If you really want more information on this bacteria, you could read the discription paper.

bugbox

No one can be hurt from a fork.

Wrong.

im sorry but im dsylexic and have Dysgraphia http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/dysgraphia/dysg raphia.htm

Eh?

I suspect that there might be some rather important things going on in some other agencies. Just a thought. I suppose it depends how one chooses to define 'important' and 'beneficial'.

What a fine example of not reading the article!!!

First off, the original article states that the guy cannot use a trackpad, the original poster believes it is tied to an extreme case of Raynaud's Phenomenon, there was no mention of being offended (how in the world did you get this idea???) by his trackpad. *sigh*

Yes, of course. When I was a child, my parents kept a few hens for eggs.

I also read on the web things that made me think that the vaccine is made from eggs that do contain a fetus. For example, "beginning with the supply of embryonated eggs, in which the flu viruses are cultivated".

Really? So if ethylmercury is so safe then why did the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) release a jointed statement concerning questions over the safety of it in children?
http://www.cdc.gov/nip/vacsafe/concerns/thimerosal /thimerosal-AAP&PHS.htm

Here are some interesting tidbits:

* Vaccines are injected straight into the bloodstream, bypassing much of the body's natural defenses in the digestive, respiratory and skin systems.

* Polio is cited as an example of the success of vaccines, yet.. "In June of 1959...all non-paralytic cases of poliomyelitis were to be henceforth recorded as 'meningitis, viral or aseptic,' a disease which itself only became reportable in 1952 (Canada)." - Catherine Diodati MA (Immunization History, Ethics, Law and Health p116)

* Beddow Bayly, author of the book "The Case Against Vaccination" said: "After vaccination was introduced, cases of aseptic meningitis were more often reported as a separate disease from polio, but such cases were counted as polio before the vaccine was introduced. The Ministry of Health admitted that the vaccine status of the individual is a guiding factor in diagnosis. If a person who is vaccinated contracts the disease, the disease is simply recorded under a different name."

* Formaldehyde is classified as a carcenogen by the FDA (http://cis.nci.nih.gov/fact/3_8.htm) so why do you want to inject it straight into my baby's bloodstream?

* My baby's doctor once told us that one injection gave about the same amount of mercury as you would have eating fish once per week for a year. Lets do the math. My baby is about 1/8th my weight, so the dose-per-weight increases eight-fold, and is supposed to receive a large number of thesebefore he's two years old. Then there's also the fact that again it goes straight into the bloodstream rather than the digestive system, therefore it would have a stronger effect on my baby's body.

* Economics... if vaccines were so good for us, then why aren't they free for everyone? Why are these pharmacutical companies making fortunes selling them? How many schools do you that are making money hand-over-fist, yet those are also for the public good?

* The disease life cycle is changing. Before vaccines you got certain diseases as a child (when your body was able for them) and built up life-long resistances to them; this resistance was then passed on to children via the mother's milk for the first few years until the child's own body was able to fight disease sufficiently, and onwards, continuing the cycle. Compare that today when children are given vaccinations against normal childhood diseases, the vaccine wears off by the time they reach adulthood, they come in contact with the disease (often from someone who was just given the vaccine) and contract it, developing more serious symptoms than if it had been contracted as a child. As a result of this many "booster" vaccines are promoted to help you through adulthood. I think breastmilk is a better way to go with it, actually.

* The whole US medical establishment blows off the side effects of vaccines. My niece developed what the CDC labelled as serious side effects from one vaccine - labored breathing, diziness, etc, etc. When the parents brought this to the attention of their doctor it was blown off saying "ah sure she's fine now" and "well that kind of thing can happen". I'm sorry, if you develop what the CDC says are "serious side effects" then there's something wrong. Another niece developed seisures twice, both within a few days of receiving vaccinations, but again this was blamed on something else, in this case an ear infection (?!?).

Damien

Go here, search on "antibiotic resistance" or similar phrases, and start reading. I don't want to sound like a prick, but I really don't have either the time or the interest to summarize the thousands of papers that have been published on this subject any further than I already have, in my original post. Nothing I said was particularly controversial, or would come as any surprise to anyone well-versed in the subject; the only reason I made the post at all was because the post to which I was replying displayed near-total ignorance.

I thought it was a good primer for the educated masses. I'm sorry it doesn't meet your lofty standards. I'm sure you know where to go for that cutting edge research.

*cough* http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=P ubMed/ *cough*

Intracellular signaling pathways might be a little complicated for the general SciAm reader. But everyone has seen some genetics, I guess it was on the cover of TIME not to long ago.

Now, the type of stem-cell reseach being debated uses discarded eggs from In-Vitro Fertilization.

Incorrect again. That is not the only source of embryonic stem cells, but it is the only source for which federal funding is allowed.

Check the FAQ.

Using private money to do embryonic stemcell work does not affect your other research in any way.

In 2005 the time of Bush's announcement, mouse cell substrates was the most reliable method of growing stem cells. New non-mouse methods are now known.

I dont think any serious researcher is using the ancient methods any more. They've moved to localites that fund stem cell research.

Abortions are one thing; stem cells are another. Stemcells do not come from abortion; nor do they have anything to do with them. Stem cells are infact harvested when a couple undergoes IVF(in vitro fertilization).

It goes like this:

A couple goes to IVF(in vitro fertilization) clinic; an operation is performed to extract oocytes(unfertilized embryos). These oocytes are all fertilized and then frozen. The (now)embryos are thawed one at a time and incubated. When they have passed a critical point (the stage at which a genetic disease would develop for instance); the embryo is surgically implanted in the female.

The embryos that are unused are very much THROWN AWAY. So all of those activists out there that are attempting to convince you (including the president who said that stem cells crossed a "fundamental moral line by providing taxpayer funding that would sanction or encourage further destruction of human embryos that have at least the potential for life.")

I'm sorry jgardn, but that line gets crossed every time an embryo from an IFV clinic gets thrown away. So your problem is not with stem cells but actially with in vitro fertilization.

Here's a good primer:
http://stemcells.nih.gov/info/basics/basics3.asp

parent is (99%) correct:

http://stemcells.nih.gov/info/basics/basics3.asp

A couple goes to IVF(in vitro fertilization) clinic; an operation is performed to extract oocytes(unfertilized embryos). These oocytes are all fertilized and then frozen. The (now)embryos are thawed one at a time and incubated. When they have passed a critical point (the stage at which a genetic disease would develop for instance); the embryo is surgically implanted in the female.

The embryos that are unused are very much THROWN AWAY. So all of those activists out there that are attempting to convince you (including the president who said that stem cells crossed a "fundamental moral line by providing taxpayer funding that would sanction or encourage further destruction of human embryos that have at least the potential for life.")

I'm sorry Mr. president, but that line gets crossed every time an embryo from an IFV clinic gets thrown away.

Q: I am an investigator who receives NIH funding, and I am planning to derive new human embryonic stem cell lines. Can I conduct the derivations in my laboratory, or do I need to find a non-university-funded laboratory to do this work?

A: You may do the derivation in your university laboratory as long as: 1) you carefully and consistently charge all direct costs of doing the derivation to a non-federal funding source and 2) your university or research center has in place a method of allocating the costs of supporting your laboratory so that this activity's appropriate facilities and administrative (F&A) costs are charged to non-federal accounts.

Q: I am an investigator who receives NIH funding, and I am planning to derive new human embryonic stem cell lines. Can I conduct the derivations in my laboratory, or do I need to find a non-university-funded laboratory to do this work?

A: You may do the derivation in your university laboratory as long as: 1) you carefully and consistently charge all direct costs of doing the derivation to a non-federal funding source and 2) your university or research center has in place a method of allocating the costs of supporting your laboratory so that this activity's appropriate facilities and administrative (F&A) costs are charged to non-federal accounts.

NIMH? National Institutes of Mental Health funds stem cell research? Umm, do you mean NIH? National Institutes of Health.

Here is the NIH stem cell policy page for anyone interested.

http://www.ninds.nih.gov/funding/research/stem_cel l/

No, you're wrong, and a quick look at the NIH stem cell funding FAQ confirms it.

Mousing is the main aggravator and cause of carpal tunnel syndrome; swapping your keys around is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

visions of the body reconstructed by that machine...

The images used for the cross-sections of the human body were derived from the Visible Human Male data set of the National Institute of Health's Visible Human Project. It was a guy. Not that there's anything wrong with it :P

I have in fact read some of his papers. You can, too: go to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=P ubMed and query for "de Grey AD." The majority of these articles are in obscure theoretical journals far from the mainstream of science. I'm not certain that they're even peer-reviewed. Note that he is the single author of most of those publications, which typically indicates a lack of experimental data (experiments are usually performed by junior colleagues such as students and postdocs, but nobody in their right mind would work with this guy). All of his recent articles are simply commentaries and hypotheses, rather than experimental reports. Many take the form of polemic against other aging researchers and/or the biomedical establishment. Anyone with an academic position such as De Grey can publish this sort of thing and call it science, but I'm not aware of a single meaningful theoretical or experimental contribution to aging research made by De Grey. In our laboratory, he is a laughing stock, a byword for "crazy nutjob on an academic soapbox." De Grey's ideas are so bizarre that their patent absurdity is evident to anyone with even a basic background in molecular biology. Read his papers and see for yourself.

Almost all humans have (potentially) functional breasts; those of the male are generally underdeveloped, but apparently ARE capable of lactation under certain (generally, but perhaps not exclusively pathological,) circumstances http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_lactation.

Though it is not common, men can also get breast cancer http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/malebreastcance r.html

On what evidence do you base your conclusion that this is an absurd question?

Considering that sex hormones affect neural growth in humans and other higher-order animals - link1 link2 link3 link4 link5 - your insistence that examining male/female neural differences is "arbitrary" is ill-informed at best, and deceptive at worst.

The brains of men and women are - in general - different; that much is (to the best of current knowledge) simple fact. What is not known is what cognitive differences those structural differences create, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

What is also not known is the level of sheer stupidity that would drive someone to over-ride information about an individual with information about a population. If 90% of women are better at math than 90% of men, that's only useful information if I'm I'm hiring someone at random. If I have aptitude scores for each candidate in front of me, it doesn't really matter whether the man is in the 98th percentile of all men but only the 91st percentile of all people; if he's the best candidate, he gets the job.

That is why "but I know lots of women who are good at math!" anecdotes are completely useless; each person is an individual, and population-level statistics like "men are better at math" do no more than tell you about the distribution of those individuals. When you've actually got one of those individuals in hand, distributional information is meaningless.

There are population-level differences; that's not the point. The point is that population-level differences are meaningless when talking about a single person; that, I believe, is where you'll get the most effective combatting of sexism. Think of someone as an individual and suddenly they're not a stereotype anymore, regardless of what the stereotype in question was; cut the problem off at the root.

Proof of such diversity would be the transversal from one species to something completely different without any in-betweens. Why no in-between micro-changes? Because there's no evidence -for- such changes in the fossil records, at all. There is absolutely no "evidence" for the biological diversity on Earth when using the Evolutionary method.

Right!

Except, there is.

We can see species gradating one into the other with varying degrees of granularity in the natural world. Bacteria don't get terribly picky about who has what genes, and as you say, even plants can hybridize across our intuitive notion of species. Other people have pointed out the phenomenon of ring species, where Great Britain maintains two species of gulls, incapable or disinterested in mating one with the other, but which turn out to be gradually related if you follow the range of one species to the west. One species of gull in Great Britain is capable of mating with a close relative to the west, which is capable of mating with a close relative a bit further west, and so forth, until the ring stretches back around the planet and we find the end of the ring of inter-compatibility is that second species. Micro-changes in space, rather than time.

Even if we did not have the spectacular example of ring species to point to, it is very clear that animals differ in many cases by region, and the wider the separation, the wider the difference among species. This was, in fact, one of Charles Darwin's main points of argumentation when he wrote his books.

What skeptics of the fossil record seem not to realize is just how rare it is that a fossil forms. I have read (but cannot at the moment find) a statement that perhaps one species in a thousand has fossilized so that we may find an instance of it in the geologic record. If we are missing 99.9% of all species in the geologic record, it is not at all surprising that we might not see a *perfectly* smooth continuum of change looking at the rocks.

Yet, given the resolution of the rocks, we do after all see a very smooth pattern, enough so that we can form a picture of the story of life over time that is consistently corroborated with a variety of technical dating methods, from radiological processes to magnetic field variations to depth of rock to the evidences of tectonic uplift and subduction.

Everything we know about evolution coheres strongly with the natural world as it is observed. So much so that evolution through natural selection is the only theory of the history of life on our planet that anyone without a religious motivation takes seriously.

I applaud you for being skeptical upon being told something that you find incredible, but rather than jumping to the ignorant assumption that the evidence for it doesn't exist, why not study the matter for yourself?

Thanks for the compliment about the web site.

Everything I've written here is just my present opinion, and not well-researched and edited enough to be more than a Slashdot comment.

I study these kinds of things a lot, and my opinion is that the kind of lying that Dr. Lai did in the paper you mentioned originally is typical for someone exhibiting one of the worst elements of the Chinese culture, and very unscientific.

Here is a more honest, but still dishonest, paper of the same genre as the two by Dr. Lai you have mentioned: A 3 milliTesla 60 Hz magnetic field is neither mutagenic nor co-mutagenic....

The first sentence is, "The mechanisms by which an electromagnetic field (EMF) influences biological material are poorly understood." That's somewhat honest. A truly honest sentence would read, "The mechanisms by which an electromagnetic field (EMF) influences chemical reactions are poorly understood", because there is nothing specific about the reaction of the processes of biological chemistry to electromagnetic fields. The same effects occur in non-biological reactions.

Apparently none of the papers like this one propose anything that they claim is specific to the chemistry of biological processes. The papers allow and encourage readers to believe that there is a special connection between biology and electromagnetic fields only to make the work seem more important.

The next sentence of the abstract is, "One potentially important model suggests that a magnetic field can stabilize free radicals in such a way as to permit their dispersement rather than their return to the ground state (Okazaki et al., 1988; Scaiano, 1995)." I don't have access to either of those papers, but my guess from a quick Google search is that Okazaki's paper might be entirely reasonable science. The problem is that there is no honest relationship between this paper and the one by Okazaki being cited. The paper to which I've linked is what is commonly known as "junk science".

That paper, which I picked at random from a quick Google search on the term "milliTesla", goes on to say, "We have tested this hypothesis by examining.... They are certainly not testing any such hypothesis, or they are testing it in a very, very weak way.

The reason these papers study a "60 Hz sinusoidal field" is because that's what you get when you plug the power that comes out of the wall into a coil of wire. The most noticeable effect is not that an alternating magnetic field is generated, but that the coil gets hot. Maybe the genetic breakage is caused the scaring the rat. Maybe he thinks he is being cooked.

Few of the people who work in scientific fields are actually scientists. More than 50%, and many true scientists say more than 90%, are just lab tinkerers.

This is the distinction: Good science is theory-guided. Junk science is not theory-guided, but just tries something in hopes that it will reveal something else. Any "theories" junk scientists have typically hang disconnected like a fly trapped in Jello. True science builds further knowledge on a strong foundation of what is already verified.

The problem with Henry Lai's paper "Magnetic-Field-Induced DNA Strand Breaks in Brain Cells of the Rat" is that, while it is interesting to know that magnetic fields have effects on chemical compounds, the paper takes advantage of an opportunity for social fraud. Many of the grant-givers don't have much scientific knowledge. The grant-givers give grants based on their perception of the importance of the work, and this paper takes advantage of their ignorance by allowing the grant-givers to believe something that is false.

The falsehood is that magnetic fields affect genetic material in some special way that only can be studied in genetic mat

Thanks for the compliment about the web site.

Everything I've written here is just my present opinion, and not well-researched and edited enough to be more than a Slashdot comment.

I study these kinds of things a lot, and my opinion is that the kind of lying that Dr. Lai did in the paper you mentioned originally is typical for someone exhibiting one of the worst elements of the Chinese culture, and very unscientific.

Here is a more honest, but still dishonest, paper of the same genre as the two by Dr. Lai you have mentioned: A 3 milliTesla 60 Hz magnetic field is neither mutagenic nor co-mutagenic....

The first sentence is, "The mechanisms by which an electromagnetic field (EMF) influences biological material are poorly understood." That's somewhat honest. A truly honest sentence would read, "The mechanisms by which an electromagnetic field (EMF) influences chemical reactions are poorly understood", because there is nothing specific about the reaction of the processes of biological chemistry to electromagnetic fields. The same effects occur in non-biological reactions.

Apparently none of the papers like this one propose anything that they claim is specific to the chemistry of biological processes. The papers allow and encourage readers to believe that there is a special connection between biology and electromagnetic fields only to make the work seem more important.

The next sentence of the abstract is, "One potentially important model suggests that a magnetic field can stabilize free radicals in such a way as to permit their dispersement rather than their return to the ground state (Okazaki et al., 1988; Scaiano, 1995)." I don't have access to either of those papers, but my guess from a quick Google search is that Okazaki's paper might be entirely reasonable science. The problem is that there is no honest relationship between this paper and the one by Okazaki being cited. The paper to which I've linked is what is commonly known as "junk science".

That paper, which I picked at random from a quick Google search on the term "milliTesla", goes on to say, "We have tested this hypothesis by examining.... They are certainly not testing any such hypothesis, or they are testing it in a very, very weak way.

The reason these papers study a "60 Hz sinusoidal field" is because that's what you get when you plug the power that comes out of the wall into a coil of wire. The most noticeable effect is not that an alternating magnetic field is generated, but that the coil gets hot. Maybe the genetic breakage is caused the scaring the rat. Maybe he thinks he is being cooked.

Few of the people who work in scientific fields are actually scientists. More than 50%, and many true scientists say more than 90%, are just lab tinkerers.

This is the distinction: Good science is theory-guided. Junk science is not theory-guided, but just tries something in hopes that it will reveal something else. Any "theories" junk scientists have typically hang disconnected like a fly trapped in Jello. True science builds further knowledge on a strong foundation of what is already verified.

The problem with Henry Lai's paper "Magnetic-Field-Induced DNA Strand Breaks in Brain Cells of the Rat" is that, while it is interesting to know that magnetic fields have effects on chemical compounds, the paper takes advantage of an opportunity for social fraud. Many of the grant-givers don't have much scientific knowledge. The grant-givers give grants based on their perception of the importance of the work, and this paper takes advantage of their ignorance by allowing the grant-givers to believe something that is false.

The falsehood is that magnetic fields affect genetic material in some special way that only can be studied in genetic mat

Very easy to say someone is lying. Are the other five research labs that found DNA damage lying too? Are you saying that Dr Lai is lying because he couldn't possibly be correct? Well I think it is possible that he could be correct.

I suggest you look at one of Henry Lai's recent papers at http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/members/2004/6355/6355.pd f entitled "Magnetic Field-Induced DNA Strand Breaks in Brain Cells of the Rat"

It has his email address and phone number on it and I'm sure he would only be too happy to discuss his research with you.

By the way, I like your Futurepower website.

A way to express the issue is this. Well-understood calculations of the physics of low-power radio waves show that the power that reaches the brain is less than the power in the same frequency range that is there due to the energy of room-temperature heat.

Anyone who can show that biological processes interact with such low-power electromagnetic waves will have found a new kind of interaction between matter and energy, and can confidently expect to win a Nobel Prize.

Since there are a lot of people who would like to win a Nobel Prize, and since such people have not shown such interaction, we can assume that the issue is not taken seriously by real scientists.

The same issue has been raised several times in regards to possible dangers sitting in front of a CRT computer monitor, and in regards to living underneath power lines.

Statistics shows that statistically improbable things happen frequently, because there are millions of possible statistically improbable possibilities. People who don't know that get worried about "cancer clusters".

work in drosphila has shown a number of genes interact to determine sexual orientation and mating preference of the insect. Link

Why is this only obvious to me? Why can't I buy a honda civic with a diesel?

Because you don't realise but some state governments do that diesel exhaust causes lung cancer?

long term retrospective study

It's the microparticulates that are the problem. Figure out a way to filter them cost effectively, then OK.

Double-blind studies can find no correlation between MSG consumption and physical reactions. But I doubt you'll believe it. One such study:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=8282275&dopt=Abstract

For large sets of data take a look at DTP Molecular target data. Lots of characterizations of 60 human tumnor cell lines, including 2 large microarray sets. There is also growth inhibition data for ~44K compounds in those cell lines and ~250K chemical structures

urban legend folks http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1111526 6

Which of course leads us to the problem outlined in "Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly"

Thats exactly why I'm waiting for the dust to settle on this whole "Anesthetic" thing. They don't even know how the hell it works.

Haven't you heard? - it works by forcing your soul to leave your body. No soul, no pain.

... chemically, DNA is almost heroically unchanging. It is among the most unreactive, inert molecules in the biological world. That means data integrity, a Good Thing.

Good point.

When DNA does go bad, typically what happens is that the telomeres wear out, leading to cell death.

-kgj

Use PubMed as your medical information source. It's where the scientists and docs publish their research and is considering a "real" datasource (as opposed to citing "the internet". Your doctors will know the name Pubmed when you mention it. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi My daughter has a heart condition and we found the doctors weren't interested in really discussing anything until we started using the "right" terminology. The terminology I picked up after reading a number of PubMed publications about my daugher's condition. I highly suggest that anyone researching any condition (but especially something exotic like Patrick) hit PubMed. Make it your source you cite when talking to your docs. Make it your primary source of information. All the other websites you read are just summing up the papers published here.

Prohibition on Federal Funding for Cloning of Human Beings

In case your interested.

Why should debugging Indian programmers be any different than the standard methods for any programmer?