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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.'"
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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.
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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.
"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.
...think of the mice!
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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.
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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?
Not to mention funny:
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For mice you have to use mdb, since gdb is only the gnu debugger.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That's why the mice where Anaesthetized first.
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Who knows, I mean we have memory, don't we? I wonder how long that memory is 'stored' once a person dies?
People have supposedly reached clinical death for some time and awoken after a short period. Surely these peoples' minds weren't simply "wiped".
It sounds kind of farfetched at first but when you think about it, your idea isn't so unrealistic...
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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I don't think we can fit the entire mouse genome into an Access mbd.
I think its interesting the inferred deferral of responsibility in the response to the snake feeding example.
It's only natural for the snake to eat a mouse, but the point is the human is putting the mouse in the position of being eaten, knowing precisely what the consequence of putting that situation together, but since the final stroke is not done by their hands, they are less responsible, and therefore less cruel. If they had to hypothetically kill the mouse for the snake before feeding it, some may have more problems with doing that.
Similarly, the average person eats meat, but wouldn't kill an animal and eat it because the experience seems horrific. Again, the actual burden of the act of killing is deferred, but the person benefits from and to some extent can be considered responsible for the act.
It's fascinating how for a lot of people is a larger measure of cruelty is how dirty the person's hands directly get in the act versus how responsible they are for the act.
Of course, I'm one of the people who eat meat but wouldn't kill an animal, but at least I recognize my psuedo-hypocrisy for what it is.
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