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Communities of Mutants Form as DNA Testing Grows
GeneRegulator writes "The NY Times is running a story on communities that are forming around kids with rare genetic mutations. New technology that can scan chromosomes for small errors is being applied first to children with autism and other 'unexplained developmental delays.' It turns out that many of them have small deletions or duplications of DNA. Meanwhile, hundreds of little groups are forming around the banner of their children's shared mutations. As new research shows that many of us have small deletions and duplications of DNA that separate us from our parents, and that many of these "copy number variants" contribute to skills and senses, the families described in the story may presage the formation of all sorts of 'communities of the genetically rare' in the general population, not just amongst the developmentally delayed."
Finally I'll be able to find others with an abnormally small penis!
Prior to this I had been hanging around sports car dealerships.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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I've often heard left-handedness attributed to development conditions in the womb, but is it suspected to be one of these random DNA mutations, or to some higher-level effect on the brain?
OW! OW! Stop it! OW! OW! OW! I mean it! OW! OW!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Finally X-Men are real. There, I said the first X-Men comment!!!
the families described in the story may presage the formation of all sorts of 'communities of the genetically rare' in the general population
... I pick a different year every time so I will be right.) In any post-Apocalyptic environment, everyone knows that those who are "different" are invariably put to death, unless they have some supra-normal power(s) that they can use to defend themselves and rule over the remaining survivors.
They may not fare so well in the Great Collapse of 2017 (mark my words
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Parents are forming communities around their disabled children, and there is no scientific evidence linking the causes of disabilities cited in the article to anything beneficial to life in human society.
I won't help these parents foster an aura of chicness around useless and/or harmful mutations. It's selfish and fundamentally wrong, and the next step - as forwarded by these selfsame groups - is "designer disabled" babies.
I don't support creating children with blindness or autism any more than I support creating children with cancer or polio. Political correctness is fine to an extent when used diplomatically in politics, but the idea of "differently-abled" conditions being attractive is abhorrent.
save the world
Support groups for families and children with rare diseases have been around for decades. Whether someone in your family has Rett sydnrome, Glanzmann's thrombasthenia, or Schwachman Diamond Syndrome, you can find other people who are in a similar situation. There interesting thing here is that doctors are identifying new chromosomal abnormalities and sub-classifying people whose diseases were previously under an umbrella of ambiguous terms such as "autism." This is a good thing, because these diseases are most certainly heterogeneous at the molecular level and probably manifest themselves in subtlety different ways that aren't obvious when there are only four or five cases ever described. Unfortunately, the treatments for them rarely takes into account the underlying genetic cause, and advocacy and support groups such as these can better inform doctors and researchers about these rare diseases.
Developmentally delayed? Genetically rare? Are they talking about retards, or mutants?
If anyone thinks these are the "next stage" of human evolution, or indigo children, the answer is no. Nor are down's syndrome people "prototypes" for the next stage.
Look, in this modern world a woman has a right to kill a fetus. So it has no rights before it is an infant.
People can make a hue and cry about deaf couples breaking their babies' hearing intentionally until the cows come home, but in the end, messing with a zygote to give it three eyes or a saucer-shaped head is not worse than not allowing it to live at all.
Anyone that stands on the principle behind the right to kill fetuses in the womb cannot oppose designer-deaf kids or any other similar organic kludges.
Another name for these microdeletions is copy number variation, a normal form of variation in the human genome. There is also a fundamental concept in population genetics called genetic load which are recessive lethal alleles present in any population as a result of new mutations and limited selection against rare recessive alleles. Just be glad we are not all the same because then a single bad virus like the 1918 influenza could wipe us all out. Besides life would be so boring.
Statesman
. . . runs out of school for exceptional children on Long Island. Place, as I recall, is called Xavier's Academy. . . .
So if "the genetically rare" for their own communities they will inevitably forge their own traditions and standards. ie: a different standard of beauty "There was no missing the similarities: the flat bridge of their noses, the thin lips, the fold near the corner of their eyes" or different etiquette "If one of his siblings is sitting at his place at the breakfast table, Jackson screams. If a schoolmate gets too close to him, Jackson screams. If someone interrupts him while he is speaking, Jackson screams." So this community is well on it's way to being a separate culture. That's fine, perhaps even wonderful. I'm curious about the long term. This new culture, being originally based around genetic differences, will carry these differences from generation to generation. People want children who carry on their traits and culture, if that includes a standard of beauty that is inline with the facial structure and body size of Primordial Dwarfism, then it would make sense that they would want their children to be Primordial Dwarves. I'm wondering at what point of maintaining a consistent genetic difference would that culture become a parallel species in the way that Homo Erectus and Homo Ergaster lived side by side.
I hope that no one takes offense at my ponderings. I do not mean to suggest that anyone born with a genetic difference is less than human. I am simply wondering if and when those differences will become self sustaining and a primary characteristic within a newly forming culture and if that would require a new scientific classification. Humanity is more than just genetics.
We are all just people.
I used to hate being asked if I was right or left handed as a child. I'm not. I use both hands, you weird adults.
Of course, I was taught to use only the right hand to write, so I'm right handed, but I often get "oh, you're left handed?" comments from people who see me use my left hand for mundane tasks (grabbing a folder on a desk at work, or holding a fork).
You can't take the sky from me...
There are ideas that sexual reproduction arose as a response to disease. Every individual having a different genetic combination slows down the effectiveness of any given strain. That's a good defense as a virus can mutate a lot quicker than larger organisms can.
These people are fools, but it will be amusing to see how their experiments work out.
Blar.
See More than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
Just another way for people to divide themselves, adding to the list of race, religion etc. Does seem a bit wacky, like tall/short people only hanging around with each other, or picking friends based on hair/eye color.
We all carry lethal alleles? Speak for yourself buddy, I have none of those. Btw, no matter where I look on the interwebs, I simply cannot find a community for my kind. Wont someone please think of the zombies?
I am NOT a creationist; just wondering...
I would call these new sequences of DNA, but, what about insertions? Should "new" nucleotides have been found as well?
(I already posted this, but I F-ed up the post title...)
I am NOT a creationist; just wondering...
I would call these new sequences of DNA, but, what about insertions? Shouldn't "new" nucleotides occasionally have been found as well?
So where's the Howard family's web site?
The movie Gattaca deals with the issue of profiling based on DNA. If you haven't seen it I highly recommend it. Does anyone else know of other movies that deal with DNA profiling?
whose fault it may be?
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Often, genetic anomalies are used by the simply mean to carry out their worst crimes. For example: blonde hair and blues eyes, which I have because of my Norwegian ancestory - I'm SO white - is a recessive gene similar to the recessive gene that makes seal point Siamese cats look the way they do. For some inexplicable reason a bunch of mostly dark haired and brown eyed people who called themselves NAZI wanted to be like me. WTF? They wanted it so bad they killed millions and did the most horrible things to my family. When Quisling gave up Norway to them the NAZI decided to make their dream of perfect blue eyed blondeness come true. They did it by going around to all of the villages and picked out the most perfectly blonde girls between 12 and 16. The girls were taken to a camp and "bred" with the NAZI elite to create an "Arayan Super Race". When the Allies retook Norway the NAZI decided to hide their crime by "liquidating" the remaining girls. Of the 82 girls taken from my families village none came home including 2 of my aunties. When someone starts talking about "genetic communities" watch like a hawk and never-ever trust them. My family learned that the hard way.
...then the answer is probably no. An exception to this is a type of mutation called a "point insertion". It is a type of mistake that can happen during DNA replication where one (very VERY rarely more than one) extra nucleotide gets shuffled into a sequence as it is being constructed from a parent template. This has an effect called a "frame shift". The way it normally works, the genetic code consists of 3-letter "words" that describe how to string together a bunch of amino acids to form the protein building block of life. A "frame shift" corrupts the "sentence" those "words" form. Whee nhuman srea d ama-lforme dsentenc, we can usually figure out the correct meaning, but the molecular processes happening in our cells can't always handle it correctly and this sometimes causes problems.Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
There's a very successful series of TV and print advertisements running in the Australian state of New South Wales. The premise is that everyone else realises that a speeding and reckless young male driver (aka: hoon or yobbo) just does not understand how silly and "inadequate" they make themselves look. These others share among themselves the wiggling of the 'pinkie' ('little') finger when they see such behaviour. The real pay-off is when one of the male passengers in a recklessly driven car wiggles the pinkie to a fellow passenger, and his mate -- the driver -- sees it happen in the mirror, and is shamed.
See an article about the ads in the Sydney Morning Herald of 25 June 2007. Here's a link to the ads at the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority web site.
There is also an accompanying 15-second "viral" internet ad that offers "speedsters" an "xtra xtra small" condom.
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
BWS is a rare overgrowth disorder that our son was diagnosed with at birth.
The yahoo group, web sites and free DVD were extremely valuable in helping us as parents to understand and deal with the condition.
Being a geek, I wanted to understand and be able to communicate in all of the relevant medical-technical terms:
The diagnosis symptoms were hemihypertophy (right), neo-natal hypoglycemia and macrosomia (95+ percentile).
A genetic study that determined that my son has paternal UPD of 11p15 with mosaicism.
Our son is on a quarterly screening protocol of AFP and abdominal ultrasound for hepatoblastoma and wilms tumors.
for years to get doctors to recognize my telekinesis as a real medical condition in need of treatment, but they all just mumble something about "ingrates" and "gifts" and send me away.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Another way to look at it might be that sexual reproduction is currently outperforming disease - on earth, at least. Not sure what metric to use for "performance" tho
What I'm getting at is the idea that - in keeping with the principles of natural selection - many (the majority? Or the majority by mass, if not head count? I Am Not A Biologist
If you think about it, sexual reproduction is a good strategy for surviving a wide range of natural disasters (in fact, reproduction is a good way of surviving natural disasters: if there is only one of you, the chance of you surviving from, say 2 billion years ago until today is pretty small
Since sexual reproduction is at worst a power-of-two less efficient than asexual reproduction (gestation times, multiplcity of offspring, etc., neglected), in the long run (i.e. the lifetime of planet earth and all obstacles that life has overcome here) we can probably expect a lot of sex
And high UID. Mod down and go on your way. Plus, the dent is marginal compared to an old-school (pah) GNAA crapflood.
Witness the downside to evolution. First radiation and the occasional error scoured the dynamic "gradient descent space" of the environment. Then sexual reproduction found out it could scour it much faster. Magnitudes faster, as features were slightly rescrambled with each child of each generation.
But this means trying new possibilities, and guess what? Many are slightly harmful, which is to say, not useful in this environment.
Fortunately, the human mind will learn to repair the harm of these variations, or even the genetics themselves, long before the "average" gene collapses into a blob living on a table, cared for by a few lucky individuals and their robots.
Some alive reading this may live long enough to see children born with "Einstein's" brain genetics, or even Newton's, given his body is still entombed in Westminster Abbey.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Lets put forward a few truths...
#1 The US is probably the most litigious society in history. People rely on the law and courts rather than tradition to solve disputes.
#2 As a species we have one of the highest miscarrige rates on the planet greater than 50% of conceptions although most of the time the mother doesn't realize it.
#3 We can now but over the counter tests for pregnancy that can detect the hormonal shift at 5 days.
Now you have a young couple who find they are pregnant. Mom accidentally walks through smoke and later miscarries. Mom and Dad breakup...Dad has the mom arriseted for manslaughter etc.
The reason the bible is pro-choice is because God knows that as a species we aren't stable until after birth and even then it was a tossup till about age 2 until very recently.