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Scientists Stack Up New Genes For Height
An anonymous reader writes "An international team of researchers, including a number from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill schools of medicine and public health, have discovered hundreds of genes that influence human height. Their findings confirm that the combination of a large number of genes in any given individual, rather than a simple 'tall' gene or 'short' gene, helps to determine a person's stature. It also points the way to future studies exploring how these genes combine into biological pathways to impact human growth."
"The consortium, aptly named GIANT for Genetic Investigation of ANthropometric Traits."
-_-
I'll bet the first use of this information will be for herbal v14gr4 advertisements.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I should really be worried about Gattacaish stuff instead of looking forward to gene therapies to cure us 5'6"ers of our affliction; women in clubs and bars don't look for a sense scientific morality though.
Is there any evidence of epigenetic factors, like mother's or father's diet before or during gestation, that influence height? Can you eat different for taller children?
--
make install -not war
What you change for height could cause adverse effects elsewhere... I am a little scared of the possibilities of screwing with genes
yes, it would be complete nonsense to make made to order 'people', so that's what we'll do next? iron out the 'imperfections'; individuality, morality/conscience, dissidence, etc.... get ready to meet jahbulon, or at least its' hired goons..
the search continues;
google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=weather+manipulation
google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=bush+cheney+wolfowitz+rumsfeld+wmd+freemason+oil+blair+obama+weather+authors
meanwhile (as it may take a while longer to finish wrecking this place); the corepirate nazi illuminati (who claim that we came from monkeys, & they DIDN'T?) is always hunting that patch of red on almost everyones' neck. if they cannot find yours (greed, fear ego etc...) then you can go starve. that's their (slippery/slimy) 'platform' now. see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder
never a better time to consult with/trust in our creators. the lights are coming up rapidly all over now. see you there?
greed, fear & ego (in any order) are unprecedented evile's primary weapons. those, along with deception & coercion, helps most of us remain (unwittingly?) dependent on its' life0cidal hired goons' agenda. most of our dwindling resources are being squandered on the 'wars', & continuation of the billionerrors stock markup FraUD/pyramid schemes. nobody ever mentions the real long term costs of those debacles in both life & any notion of prosperity for us, or our children. not to mention the abuse of the consciences of those of us who still have one, & the terminal damage to our atmosphere (see also: manufactured 'weather', hot etc...). see you on the other side of it? the lights are coming up all over now. the fairytail is winding down now. let your conscience be your guide. you can be more helpful than you might have imagined. we now have some choices. meanwhile; don't forget to get a little more oxygen on your brain, & look up in the sky from time to time, starting early in the day. there's lots going on up there.
"The current rate of extinction is around 10 to 100 times the usual background level, and has been elevated above the background level since the Pleistocene. The current extinction rate is more rapid than in any other extinction event in earth history, and 50% of species could be extinct by the end of this century. While the role of humans is unclear in the longer-term extinction pattern, it is clear that factors such as deforestation, habitat destruction, hunting, the introduction of non-native species, pollution and climate change have reduced biodiversity profoundly.' (wiki)
"I think the bottom line is, what kind of a world do you want to leave for your children," Andrew Smith, a professor in the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, said in a telephone interview. "How impoverished we would be if we lost 25 percent of the world's mammals," said Smith, one of more than 100 co-authors of the report. "Within our lifetime hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions, a frightening sign of what is happening to the ecosystems where they live," added Julia Marton-Lefevre, IUCN director general. "We must now set clear targets for the future to reverse this trend to ensure that our enduring legacy is not to wipe out many of our closest relatives."--
"The wealth of the universe is for me. Every thing is explicable and practical for me .... I am defeated all the time; yet to victory I am born." --emerson
no need to confuse 'religion' with being a spiritual being. our soul purpose here is to care for one another. failing that, we're simply passing through (excess baggage) being distracted/consumed by the guaranteed to fail illusionary trappings of man'kind'. & recently (about 10,000 years ago) it was determined that hoarding & excess by a few, resulted in negative consequences for all.
consult with/trust in your creators. providing more than enough of everything for everyone (without any distracting/spiritd
I don't see the GATTACA connection here, other than a knee-jerk response to any DNA discoveries. There are easier ways to determine (with high confidence, though not certainty) whether someone has genes encoding for being tall. A measuring tape, for instance.
Considering that a human's height is derived primarily from there bone dimensions (at least, I think that's the case), this would make sense. Frankly I would have been more surprised to find out that there was one master 'bone gene' that proportionally scaled all bone structures in the body.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
..."genes to control human flight" and get really excited for a second?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
so.. howcome you didn't sue Lucas for using your image in those godawful prequels? :)
You were pretty cool when Elmore drew you, but why'd you let Lucas turn you into an idiot with a jamaican accent?
Took me a bit of time to find, but here's the link to the actual research paper (requires nature subscription):
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature09410.html
From the abstract:
Our data explain approximately 10% of the phenotypic variation in height, and we estimate that unidentified common variants of similar effect sizes would increase this figure to approximately 16% of phenotypic variation (approximately 20% of heritable variation)
The introduction of the paper states that "80% of the variation [for height] within a given population is estimated to be attributable to additive genetic factors, but over 40 previously published variants explain less than 5% of the variance." While this paper pushes that to 16%, it's nowhere near the limit of what can be detected.
I find it interesting that they've got a sample size of around 100,000 individuals for this study (actually a meta-analysis of summary statistics from 46 GWAS of 133,653 individuals), but still claim a need for more individuals. I suspect that'll still be said when a study is done on 10 million individuals, or a billion.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
chroni3 abuse of Here, please do consider that righ7 trouble. It
While I have no doubt it's true that a large number of genes contribute to height, it's very likely there are a handful of genes that have a significantly larger effect than the rest. It's a simple matter of statistics. If you have 100 genes that all have, more or less, the same small contribution, then there would be exceedingly few people who were over 6' and the distribution of heights would be most people very close to the same height and only a handful of outliers. You also wouldn't have unusual heights being very heritable (which they are). There must be just a few genes that have a much more significant effect than others.
As far as I know, there are no single genes for general traits like height, intelligence, race, etc. Claiming that one exists is a new form of logical fallacy, named after one of the most egregious abusers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewontin's_Fallacy
Now if we can just train our media to stop talking about "the height gene" or "the nine inch penis gene" we'll have it made.
Futurist Traditionalism
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/63859/title/A_thousand_points_of_height
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
It's good to know that science can definitively prove why I'm a freak. Father - 6'0", Mother - 6'0", Me - 6'10"...
Then there's the utility meter reader or (in Yank parlance) the cable guy.
Actually one thing I did notice at high school was that it seemed virtually all the tall kids were gluttonous milk drinkers.
All very interesting, but will it help tackle height discrimination? There is now plenty of evidence that people are treated differently on the grounds of stature, and in many different and often profound ways.
Obviously people are of different heights, but what matters is that we live in a society where it simply doesn't affect the way you're treated.
The reason that people are paying attention to hight is, in part, that it's a simply measured complex trait. Every study of human genetics under the sun collects basic anthropometrics, and so it's relatively easy to lump everyone together in an effort to increase the power to detect genetic variation that influences height. I think the real interesting part here is that even after collecting a hundred thousand data points, the obvious data analysis methods can account for a relatively low proportion of the total variance in height. That has consequences for studies of other disease traits with complex genetic architecture like diabetes or schizophrenia, which have often have study sizes one or two orders of magnitude lower than this one. In the not so recent past, influential members of the scientific community have suggested that big studies of complex traits in humans might have a profound impact on bedside medical decisions. It's going to take a bit longer than they anticipated. To our collective dismay, biology is still complicated.