Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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).
200GB/2TB $7.95 Coupon: SAVE90DOLLAR
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.
...think of the mice!
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
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?
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.
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.
Well, duh. But you're still an idiot. That will tell you if the subject was decapitated, but it won't tell you if decpitation was the cause of death.
And you're still an idiot.
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
I said above that while I don't care much for mice in general, I don't care much for people who carve them up for incredibly little reason, either. It's something you would have to be a bit sick to do, IMO. And the scientific knowledge gained by this experiment is practically worthless.
(That comment was rated troll, btw)
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
No longer will there be any doubt over whether the murder victim was strangled or beheaded, which has in the past been a cause of great difficulty in investigations due to the lack of any very obvious physical feature that might distinguish a decapitation victim from someone who has been hanged.
Funny, but to be fair, just because somebody's head is cut off doesn't necessarily mean it was the cause of death. They could have been shot or stabbed (or strangled) or anything else before hand and the head cut off later.
So says you, and you're an expert in the field because....?
Just read the OP. It explains why there is value in killing these animals, however gruesome it might sound. Criminal forensics will benefit from having another tool at its disposal for determining cause of death, and such improved forensics may result in killers being convicted of their crimes rather than being allowed to kill again. Hence, the sacrifice of these mice may save human lives.
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.
strangulation pressure always leaves a mark.
If you're lucky enough to recover the part of the body that was marked. There's a small but significant difference between theory and practice.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.