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.'"

Comments

Whoa!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds almost as useful as this research.

Re:an argument for lamarckianism

[maxwell demon]

It's not that those genes are created during stranglement. They are part of the genetic code anyway.

To put it in computer terms, the genome is the executable, but what they do is to look at the core dump in order to see what code was actually executed. Of course that code which was executed will be in any copy of the executable, but that doesn't mean that you'll be able to use a copy of the executable to find out how it was used on a previous execution, even if you copied the executable while it was executed.

Re:Killing that way should not be allowed

[Rothron the Wise]

That's why the mice where Anaesthetized first.

Anesthesia's nice, but it's WAY less dramatic.

[ScentCone]

The test mice were all sound asleep when they met their ends, unlike this mouse , who went out a la Peter Jackson's Denethor.