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Genetic Clues to Cause of Death?
An anonymous reader writes "Nature is reporting that a certain 'telltale genetic fingerprint' may help scientists to more accurately determine a cause of death. From the article: 'Now a team at Nagasaki University has shown that a person's own genes might help to reveal how they met their end. Kazuya Ikematsu and his colleagues anesthetized and then killed two small groups of mice, by either strangulation with a string, or by decapitation. They dissected skin samples from the animals' necks and compared the activity of a broad spectrum of genes inside the skin cells, by looking at the amount of RNA pumped out by those genes. The researchers found four genes that were more active in the strangled animals than those that had died suddenly.'"
Cue the Monty Python references.
"Quoting yourself is stupid." -Me
are the genes active if the mouse is half-strangled? will these genes be passed on?
Sounds almost as useful as this research.
Not even that suprising but I never thought about it. If the oxygen level in the cells decreases that of course has an effect on the creation of rna.
If a creature dies suddenly the total blood flow stops and so the flow of all chemicals instead of just oxygen (and maybe a few others).
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I understand that the researchers are trying to determine if a subject died by "strangulation or other means" , but here's an easy way to tell if a subject died by decapitation or strangulation without having to resort to costly genetic tests. Measure the distance between the head and neck. If d > 0 , the subject was probably decapitated. I guess this test would be useful in determining if the subject was strangulated before decapitated, but how often are the investigators wondering that.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
It would be incredible if we discover that our mind and body records in intricate detail our last moments, and that this information can be obtained / downloaded etc. Perhaps through genetics and/or tapping into the brain in the minutes soon after death? The legal implications would be as controversial as the scientific.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
i take it daddy didn't love you then
they're strangling mice. Little does science recognize, animals ARE AWARE TOO! *goes and smokes pot depressidly at a very strange hour of the day*
My computer frequently send out genetic samples to some researcher somewhere in the world, everytime it dies... no one seems to have a clue yet!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Apart from this being highly unethical there's these points
1) the GENES have nothing to do with it. They're measuring mRNA expression, which is not the same thing. Strangulation does not change your genes dammit.
2) It's a bit bloody obviuous not? Strangulation has known consequences, and we've known for ages that shortage of osygen has an effect on gene expression levels. So in the very specific case thay could have made the distinction. But just observing the body will give you more info in 5 min than the $1000 microarray will give you in two days.
Maybe daddy loved him too much....
"Kazuya Ikematsu and his colleagues anesthetized and then killed two small groups of mice, by either strangulation with a string, or by decapitation."
Well, if his experiments don't work out, I'm sure Mr. Ikematsu could always make a few surgical alterations to himself and find gainful employment as a dominatrix for small rodents.
Only the Japanese can get away with strangling mice "for science"
You know they were filming a porn at while they did the research.
...think of the mice!
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The researchers found four genes that were more active in the strangled animals than those that had died suddenly.
And guess who strangled the animals those death in order to do this research?
Personally I am against the killing of animals in a way that causes pain and/or fear. Even for scientific purposes.
They missed the obvious mistake in this: The "Cause of Death" with these mice is not strangulation or decapitacion, but "bored, cruel scientists with too much time on their hands". Since in both cases the cause of death has been the same, the investigation turned out useless.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=17102
and my personal favorite6 &cid=14246648
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=17102
Well, working on mice is fine but what about the human subjects? These days there's a new group of people arguing that if something works on mice, it needn't necessarily work on humans - like mice developing new brain cells when injected with synthetic cannabinoids. I, for once, would be willing to be a guinea-pig if anyone wants to test the effects of pot on humans. Back to the topic, what still needs to be done is to prove the same theory for humans and let the forensics take over from there.
Such a slaughter does not serve science, and hardly deserves being called science. No matter how 'small' the group might be.
"Science sans conscience n'est que ruine de l'âme" -- Rabelais
(Science without conscience is only ruin of the heart)
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because no CS (grad/advanced undergrad) ever gets the job of killing mice for science. I had a friend who was a chem major and he was getting paid $10/hr to hit rats in the head with a piston then anesthetize them and decapitate them to evaluate their brain. I got to code a program that calculates the number of primes less than a certain number. Who is the winner in that contest....
Monstar L
is that parent is modded +5 Insightful
/. for things like this
I love
Thank you Dave Raggett
What's with all the PETA flame??? Do people really think using mice in this way is unethical?
/.'er: is this a common opinion among people who post on /., or are those posts just PETA red herrings?
Question for the frequent
Really, do we need to debate the use of labratory mice for experiments such as this?
If your answer is 'yes'...don't expect a response from me...other posters on this thread have said it better than I could already
Thank you Dave Raggett
Anyway, I agree that the reults are completely inconclusive. I would be much more surpriseed if they found genetic difference between 2 cloned mice. (Both clones being the product of another mouse' DNA)
clone A: instant death by electrocution.
clone B: instant death by lethal injection.
I won't even talk about the ethics of this as knowone's listening ...and what do I know ???
wow, i have no idea how PETA has not FLIPPED. i have killed a lot of hamsters/mice/rats in my days working in a neuroendocrinology lab and we had to go through hell applying for/making sure our protocols for killing the animals were up to snuff with federal regulation. i wonder how they got permission for the strangulation. plus, it's a rediculous study anyway. what "genes" are they talking about? i assume that they are activated in response to a lack of oxygen because thats what the article stressed. in that case, they could probably just measure lactic acid (lactic acid is the product of an alternative pathway to make ATP when oxygen is not available), degredation products of lactic acid, or ph level in the cytoplasm of the animals cells (ph drops when lactic acid is produced). also, the RNA that they saw an increased transcription of would likeley degrade before any reasonable conclusions could be made. as a last note, if the genes they saw activated were from the pressure of the strangulation, this tells the forensic scientists nothing because the original goal is to determine if "whether someone died by strangulation or suffocation, rather than by some other means," especially in cases where there are no other physical clues. strangulation pressure always leaves a mark.
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Don't let PETA hear about this one . . . even I think it's a bit much. I understand that sometimes research requires killing animals and that its for the greater good and all, but strangling them seems awfully cruel.
Reminds me of this episode of voyager where tom paris was sentenced by some race to re-live the last moments of his victim. He was later proven innocent by Tuvok.
I wonder if some sort of brainscan of a victim can ever deliver this sort of detail in the future.
You gotta love the "Read the rest of this comment..." at the bottom of the post. hmmm, I indeed wonder what he will write next.
"My parents said that my friends at the middle school would never teach me anything useful. Now, I have a thorough misunderstanding of Gnosticism, so there. Oh yeah, and I'm a vampire."
Kazuya Ikematsu and his colleagues anaesthetized and then killed two small groups of mice, by either strangulation with a string, or by decapitation.
This story will be 'ripped from the headlines' on the next episode of 'Law & Order: Small Victims Unit.'
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
They are killing mouse. I feel a small disturbance in the force.
(anyone up for any THHTTG quotes?)
No animals were harmed in the... oh, wait.
Yeesh. This is what happens when you force religion on children.
Shhhh... don't you know that Father Christmas doesn't bring presents to naughty children.
*yawn*
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
What an apposite turn of phrase.
...is science lab.
:>
science is all good, but somewhat this seems slightly sick
Kazuya Ikematsu and his colleagues anesthetized and then killed two small groups of mice, by either strangulation with a string, or by decapitation.
Rich
*place your best RIAA/MPAA joke here*
Stop invalid scientific research. Ask your local scientists to feed their lab rats with a phytoestrogen-free chow.
They should re-do the experiment. This time with big mallots and kittens.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
I'm against what they did too, but it didn't involve pain and/or fear. They anesthetised them before doing the proceedure.
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...the mice strangle the researchers.
See subject.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
strangalation with a string??? now thats just *ucked if i did that they woud not call it science i would be called manson :)
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Not only is this just plain unethical, it says essentially nothing. Obviously killing mice in different ways is going to result in different genes being expressed. What was this, a Freshmen Biology experiment? Any one of us could have told them this, and then they wouldn't have had to anesthitize, strangle or decapitate mice!
Register the editry.
depending on the method of slaughter...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
So it's okay to strangle your Uncle Bob to death... so long as I anaesthetize him first? Not stating a position on the matter, just pointing out the obvious.
The test mice were all sound asleep when they met their ends, unlike this mouse , who went out a la Peter Jackson's Denethor.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
But is it any more cruel than the typical use of mice as snake food where they are fed live to a snake? Also undoubtedly would induce as much fear as strangulation would, if not more so since the snake situation is exacerbated by facing a natural predator. Personally, I couldn't do that, but it is a widespread accepted practice that seems not very different from this experiment.
However, it does seem rather pointless, considering how specific the test is and it doesn't reflect how useful this would be in humans. I would think it easy to collect samples from cadavers with well known causes of death and test those. Maybe they need shortly before to compare against?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I think that the lack of a head would be a dead giveaway as to the cause of death...
So hunny..what did you do at work today?
I posted this in a reply, but I think it's worth the main thread for consideration. If you were a laboratory mouse and knew you were going to die eventually, wouldn't you rather be strangled than given some horrible disease, exposed to radiation or injected with chemicals and then studied for weeks? Strangulation (even if it wasn't under anesthesia) seems much more humane to me than what is done to many animals. Anything that shows measurable progress toward saving human lives is ok with me. However, this study is definitely questionable in that regard.
We should rephrase that as "we accept the null hypothesis that the head was cut off, with x% of confidence".
Proper determination of confidence limits are left as an exercise to the reader....
For example, I think, it could be useful on study of cryogenics or suspended animation of living organism.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Who's the lucky bastard that gets to put job functions like Mouse Strangler/Decapitator on their resume?
Hell, sometimes, worse things than this happen to people when they get caught in the thresher. Don't believe it? I grew up in an 'agricultural community' in rural America. One of my friends is missing a leg, another is missing a finger. Both parts ended up in food stuffs. Sorry, just the way it is. Yeah, they found the big parts, but they aren't going to dump a whole silo of grain just to remove a little 'added protein'. Agricultural workers suffer injuries every day so that you can have an array of goodies on your table at every meal.
/.. Oh! The humanity....
Then again, mine workers die so that you can run cycles on your CPU to post messages on
(hey, the 'scrambled word' is adultery. Am I commiting adultery to post this?
...has determined the cause of death to be either rapid incineration or radiation exposure.
Join Tor today!
Strangling mice? Was this the Marcel Proust school of biology or something?
These two guys get to talking and the one starts expounding upon a sexual experience he had. "It was the craziest thing. I found this woman tied to the railroad tracks one day. I untied her and the sex I had with her was awesome!" "Did she give you head?" "Naw, I never found the head."
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Oh, the mousanity!
*ducks*
I thought all one had to do was look at what time the victim's watch stopped.
This is not the innovation it seems to be. For most causes of death there are precise enzymatic and cytological evidence (apart from the obvious macroscopic evidence). Tissues include some very specific cell lines which contain a series of isoenzymes specific for that cell line. For instance a cardiac infract increases the levels of creatine-kinase MB isoenzyme, whereas an ictus would not to the same extent. Furthermore, isoenzymes have different half-lives giving furhter insight to the timing of the events that caused illness or death (in some cases detectable even after a year). This is all info we have today and use in both clincal and forensic practise. The experiment described in article (IMO quite misleading) goes a step further by determining the changes in transcription/translation (the article does not specificy) of DNA following specific lesions. In the not so far away future, I would expect an integration of the actual, biochemical and cytological techinques with the genetic investigation proposed in the article.
"Strangle these animals so we can figure out how they died"
Control mice were killed by decapitation without undergoing neck compression
Dr Ikematsu. In the lab. With a katana.
The mice can fend for themselves.
I'd suspect memory and other processing and so on are still possible in degrading degrees over time so that if pathways in the brain were electrochemically reactivated then it would probably be 'sensed' in some sense by the person even after clinical death. So brain experimentation after death seems a seriously bad idea to sign up for unless they're only testing pleasure center activation.
A related set of side questions involve what holds control and senses of a body to one 'person' anyway? If, for example, two brains were side by side in an operating room and brain molecules could be swapped between them, or say atoms swapped with sufficient technology. Replacing a carbon atom in a brain is the same as before as long as carbon is the same as any other carbon right? Say half of the brain mass is swapped between the two. If you wake them up then who controls who at the end? If they live and react and talk, does the same person control the same body? Does the half that is removed from one simply turn off from that person's perspective? Does one gain sensory aspect of the second? Can 'you' see from two perspectives at once? Is the nature of 'self' gone, the 'soul' stripped away, or are the combinations entirely different people in both sensation and sense of control?
That way, they could scientifically justify choking the chicken.
It makes sense.
Live forever, or die trying.
something Dr. Kevokian would like. All in the name of science, right?
what would be the genetic activity in the scientists that did this experiment after being strangled or decapitated. Anyone interesting in doing a try?
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
that there is no more need for Oracle
A much better title would have been "Metabolic Clues to Cause of Death". An animal's genome is fixed during its lifetime; it does not change. The RNA activity is part of its metabolism -- the activity of cells and of the organism.
The title is misleading because it leads people to believe that they are "fated" to have certain deaths when they are born, which is superstition.
Do you really need to use genetics to find the cause of death for a decapitation? Is not having the head firmly attached no longer a reliable clue?
I have a long list.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
There are asphyxiations that provide little or no physical evidence on the body. Smothering someone with a pillow, for example. Now we know there is another way to confirm the cause of death, and it may even be useful in criminal investigations. Knowledge is never useless.
Your sentiment however, is. Crying over dead lab mice? You must have very little to do with your time. I hear they sell rat poison in most hardware and department stores. Better get on that, we can't let the murder of these poor non-sentient disease-spreading rodents continue!
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Good question. The way I see it, swapping half-brains between people would be a bit like taking two hard drives, chopping the platters in half, and then swapping those. A slightly inaccurate analogy, I admit, but that's what I think the result would be.
The interesting application is in forensics.
It might be interesting when they find out what the proteins really do that are being transcripted at low oxygen levels (or high anxiety?). Since the energy cycle in the mitochondria is well known, I guess it's just not genes that regulate that?
If the heart stops, the blood flow stops. But you can stop the heart for quite a time and restart it. The cells takes time to die.Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
And they'd none of them be missed, no they'd none of them be missed.
The Highly unethical was just because they killed a few mice! :-)
The GP ought to be a vegetarian, that refuses to weed his garden from the poor vegetables. :-)
Or he might be a pet shop boy and have better uses for mice? :-)
My favorite story about double standards, otherwise, is this:
There was a "peace camp" here in Sweden a few years ago, where the protestors complained about a military development project. The peaceheads had problems with "short haired elements" (skinheads) visiting the camps and starting fights. So they hired a guard company to protect themselves.
The fun part is that they couldn't see the parallel between getting security for their camp (the police doesn't work that well in Sweden) and a country having a military (there is no police between countries).
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
...genes can predict the future? Does this mean that if we study genes in people at any age we'll know how they are going to die? That's freakin' scary! ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Puhleeze. This has nothing to do with forcing religion on children. This is a 12 year old who thinks that he can be cool by writing a blasphemous tirade on Slashdot. His basis for the tirade is Gnosticism, which he obviously doesn't really understand.
When I was 12 -14, I liked doing stuff that would piss my parents off too, but it didn't have anything to do with religion. It had to do with being 12 -14.
Jeez o flip people, read the blasted article. They want to identify pathways involved in pressure sensing, not just to determine cause of death. This has implications in general biology and is hardly mindless killing of rodents. Now I'm not saying that this couldn't have been done without sacrifice of the animal, but I would imagine it would be quite hard to get a good mRNA profile of a cell under transient mechnical pressure. Really, how the hell would you do that?
As for all you broadly anti-animal testing people...I can only say that as an SIV monkey researcher myself, really the best and only truly valuable way to study pathophysiology of mant diseases is with an animal model. Really anything in cell culture is much less useful considering how things change when you scale up into an animal with multiple organ systems. Sad but true. So some monkeys/mice/dogs/cats/guinea pigs/ferrets/flies/sea urchins/etc gotta go. I really want to see more sea urchins on PETA shirts though. That would make my day.
I always find it amazing how when a questionable ethical action is reported people dismiss the data without really thinking about it.
First of all, I suspect people do that because of fear of slippery slope. If we allow this data gained by unethical means, how bad will it seem to do something unethical to get the next set of data?
Secondly, I suspect s/he was outraged over the mouse manipulation, not genetics.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
We can really find out who killed Nicole Brown Simpson.
There are several companies marketing a chip where each square reacts with a gene or a marker part (unique characteristic subsection) of DNA. These dont have have to be too large, since theres only 30K human genes and 120K useful markers. You figure out what subset of genes is present or active by looking a pixel image of this chip, where the intensity patterns become a "fingerprint". These are currently being used to see how various human tissues express genes, and if diseases leave genetic fingerprints. Criminal forensic genetic fingerprints are possible too.
"...many mice died to bring us this information."
Oh man, I love PLIF. I gotta say, though, this one's my favorite.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
If you behead the animal then the sympathetic nervous system has no chance of sending any messages to turn on any of the genes in question. However, if you strangle the animal then the sympathetic nervous system reacts and the genes will turn on...
Imagine a row of mice hung by string with little perfect knots.
/. bug #926803 - Why I can post.
.. these hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings are helping us discover the Ultimate Question of Life, Universe and Everything. No need to invoke the PETA and all that, thank you very much.
Anyone who would strangle or decapitate small furry animals is fucking sick. They need a new hobby.
You know who else does things like this? Serial murderers... they start with animals. Guess a good cover for one would be as a "researcher".
That our fearless leader is trying to come up with something better to say about all the bodies they've been finding which have been dismembered (to hide evidence or something along those lines)?
... These people were not blown to bits by our rockets & bombs, because we have scientific evidence that they were strangled to death by terrorists before our rockets & bombs blew them to bits...
BUSH on CNN:
...a Slashdot reader masturbates.
(Not me personally, I hasten to add. It's still sick.)
Kazuya Ikematsu and his colleagues anesthetized and then killed two small groups of mice, by either strangulation with a string, or by decapitation. Here come the angry "animal rights" protesters... ;P
Plus the original poster seems to have a lot of sex-related issues to deal with. But I guess that's being 12-14 also.
I actually thought that his reference to sexual ritual was Gnostic in nature, but, perhaps he just has sexual issues. I didn't read closely enough to say "oh, he refers to beastiality here."
Though, you're right.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What if... in the distant future the brain of a murder victim could be read by observing it's chemical state to determine all thoughts and state of mind at time of death, including what the victim saw as he/she was being killed. I know, impossible, but I feel a bad Hollywood plot coming on with John Travolta in the starring role...
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
Is it that important to know what a person (or animals) genes are doing at their time of death. I'm not an animal activist but strangling and decapitating mice just to see what their genes are doing is stupid. What's more important, finding out who killed someone or how that person died? I would think finding out who is more important. If determining what a persons genes are doing at their time of death is that important then why not just conduct the test in hospitals on dead people. Oh wait, that's inhumane.