Gaia: Universal Science Forum, Gaia

Re: Vaccines, autism, and natural selection.

http://seekeralpha.gaia.com — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:05:40 GMT

Based on the discussions I have had so far, my conclusion is that vaccines are overused, that the only ones that are really necessary are for those diseases that KILL or cripple children. We have been trying too hard to protect our children from even mild illnesses that only cause children to be kept out of school for a week or two, for the convinence of parents and school administrators. That needs to stop. There's nothing wrong with keeping a child out of school for a period of time when he gets ill. We need to force schools to be as flexible as possible to take childhood illnesses into account, not engage in the futility of stamping out such illnesses completely. The risks that are known of vaccines, not counting autism, means we should not rely on them excessively as an answer to the problem of childhood illnesses.

Question for holonomics

http://seekeralpha.gaia.com — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:23:54 GMT

So how would you make vaccines safer? What is the reasoning behind the toxins and other chemicals put in vaccines?

Children are NOT constantly exposed to those toxins; they are given as one dose for a brief period of time. It is possible that the same chemicals that would be deadly under constant and prolonged exposure may be harmless in the form given with vaccines. And there are many other chemicals children would be exposed to that do not come from vaccines, but would be around much more often and for much longer, such as household cleaners, pesticides, automobile exhaust, food additives, etc.

Re: Vaccines, autism, and natural selection.

http://holonomics.gaia.com — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 12:49:23 GMT

Here's another video that affected me greatly for you have the actual founders and the developers of the vaccines speaking for themselves. The reference isn't specifically to Autism, but Aids, Alzheimer's, etc. Nonetheless, I'm still trying to prove my point.

Vaccines aren't safe!

Heavy metals and toxins have profound negative effects on the health and wellbeing of life tissues, especially neurological tissues. Imagine what this does to a growing child whose neuronal growth is exponentially higher than an adult's.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDxZ7PX8YGI&feature=related

Re: Vaccines, autism, and natural selection.

http://singerseeker.gaia.com — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 09:52:25 GMT

Kala, welcome to the group!

Your insights will be very helpful to us.

Love,

Nicole

Re: Vaccines, autism, and natural selection.

http://seekeralpha.gaia.com — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 08:45:51 GMT

Holonomics, assuming you are correct, what would you do to make vaccinations safer and thus minimize their risks?

Re: Vaccines, autism, and natural selection.

http://holonomics.gaia.com — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 08:06:55 GMT

I remember having done lots of research on this a while ago and since I have lost track of all the great resources I had used to come to my own conclusions. I'm going to look for them again throughout the week and will come back occasionally to post them. Here's one to begin with. It's a video on youtube of a conference which is based on quite a bit of referenced information (I'm only interested in references and not empty speech).

Re: Vaccines, autism, and natural selection.

http://holonomics.gaia.com — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 07:59:54 GMT

Wow! I'm quite surprised at the amount of support Gaia has for vaccination. Though Torch is absolutely right about one of the issues being whether or not we should be forced to undergo treatment, the main issue is the fact that the contents of vaccines are unknown to most!

If vaccines were 100% safe, natural and free of negative side-effects, we wouldn't have to worry so much about the legal impositions for vaccines since we wouldn't have anything to fear from them. The reason vaccine requirements are such an issue is because people are worried about the possible consequences of vaccines.

So let's deal with those consequences....

Whether or not Autism is correlated is a statement I cannot made for I do not have unquestionable proof either way. I have hunches....but we don't launch rocket ships on hunches....

Rather, what I do have as concrete proof is a list of all the ingredients of some of the more well-known vaccines on the market. http://www.novaccine.com/vaccine-ingredients/

This is only one of many resources of the kind but any one of these lists will clearly demonstrate that
A) there are HIGHLY toxic elements included
B) most of those elements have no medical purpose
C) many known health risks and dysfunctions have been known to be side-effects of ingestion of these elements
D) the mere inclusion of such contaminants make the vaccines unsafe

One of the theories behind the "vaccination conspiracy" is that the chemical cocktail which includes bacteria, viruses and diseases (active and inactive) are used to trigger certain genetic tendencies either immediately (such as in the case of autism, cerebral palsy, retardation, etc) or later in life along with other triggers (such as schizophrenia, dementia, depression, etc). If a natural increase in certain conditions may be associated to population increases or advanced diagnostic abilities, I'd need someone to come up with a very good reason for why the stats on autism (for instance...there are many other conditions we could be discussing here) has increased 200% http://www.fightingautism.org/idea/autism.php.

Re: Vaccines, autism, and natural selection.

http://seekeralpha.gaia.com — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 05:15:54 GMT

Torch, you may be right, but what about if parents who beleive in faith healing refuse medical treatment for their children and instead let them be treated by some preacher to claims to have the power to heal, and the kids die anyway and the preacher blames the parents' and/or children's lack of faith? Where are the rights of the child there? Vaccinations do not operate by faith, but by chemistry.
since vaccinators typically deny responsibility for the outcome of vaccinations, and because medicine typically puts the bulk of its responsibility upon the patient.
Really? Well, that's why we allow malpractice lawsuits.

Re: Vaccines, autism, and natural selection.

http://torchholder.gaia.com — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 05:01:13 GMT

It was an issue with wakefield, but it has turned into a wrestling match over being forced to be vaccinated or not being vaccinated, which, in my opinion, should not be forced upon humans, since vaccinators typically deny responsibility for the outcome of vaccinations, and because medicine typically puts the bulk of its responsibility upon the patient.

the risks and benefits should be decided solely upon the patient, and if the patient is underage, by the parents or guardians, and not forced upon humans.
we are not livestock, whose rights should be taken away, by the government.
there arguments for and against vaccination, in each case by case basis.

to take a general position for or against vaccination, per se, is irresponsible, and blindsided.

each person should be responsible for the rights to their own body.

Re: Vaccines, autism, and natural selection.

http://seekeralpha.gaia.com — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 04:54:54 GMT

is it only one person - Andrew Wakefield - who has spoken of this connection?
Wakefield is the one who started the controversy, AFAIK. And it does take only one crackpot to start a popular movement. Especially with the power of the internet to spread his message.
And if he's been discredited, what has caused this topic to persist?
Fear and mistrust of "established" authorities. It's a form of prejudice, really. Not all authority figures are patholigical liars and scammers, but that's the impression denialists of one type or another give when they attack their opponents. All claims must be tested on their own merit, without blindly held assumptions, but denialists tend to take claims made that they happen to favor as absolute truth. That's not scientific, of course. They try to take something extremely complicated and reduce it to something simple they can understand, even if the simplification is not really the truth.

Re: Vaccines, autism, and natural selection.

http://Meenakshi.gaia.com — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 04:31:58 GMT

Dale, I'd be interested in knowing more, before I can form an opinion. I have read up on this from time to time; but I'm wondering - is it only one person - Andrew Wakefield - who has spoken of this connection? And if he's been discredited, what has caused this topic to persist?

Your name is Kala?

http://seekeralpha.gaia.com — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 03:47:31 GMT

Would you be the same Kala who just wiped out her Gaia account?

Re: Vaccines, autism, and natural selection.

http://multiverse.gaia.com — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 03:04:42 GMT

Dale, Earlier this afternoon I came across an article on the right hand column bar about a project called something like the Absolute Integrated Science and Mind book project. What I read interested me; unfortunately when I clicked on a link the page vanished and I cannot relocate the article. Please excuse that my reply is not directly related to your present discussion. I teach in cosmology and science, have an environmental science masters and am studying bioethics at present, so will join in. Thanks, Kala

Vaccines, autism, and natural selection.

http://seekeralpha.gaia.com — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 02:20:14 GMT

Please look at this topic discussion in the Universal Science Forum of Care2:
http://www.care2.com/c2c/groups/disc.html?gpp=18924&pst=1377476
Members of Gaia may add their own comments here.

Re: Light and dark

http://torchholder.gaia.com — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 12:16:34 GMT

absolutely essential stuff, here dale husband.! wonderful !!

Re: Breaking it Down

http://torchholder.gaia.com — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 11:20:22 GMT

fascinating, dale husband..!! nature is so much better at constructing, than we are.!! this kind of stuff is the future better life, for mankind. many thanks, for posting this.!!

Breaking it Down

http://seekeralpha.gaia.com — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 06:45:24 GMT

LINK
Studies of how things fall apart may lead to materials that don’t
By Lisa Grossman
February 13th, 2010; Vol.177 #4 (p. 18)

Suppose there was a fourth little pig. This one was a physicist. Unlike his brother the engineer, who built a house out of tried-and-true bricks, the physicist pig chose a building material by doing calculations based on fundamental principles. He settled on a substance made from silicon and oxygen, an abundant material with high bond strength and the aesthetic bonus of transparency. It was safe from huffing and puffing. But then the wolf learned to throw stones.
Physicists have had a tough time explaining why it’s a bad idea to build glass houses. While engineers from the Bronze Age to the Space Age have relied on trial and error to decide which materials work best, physicists seek deeper, scientific explanations.
“Can you predict from first principles what kinds of material will be very strong, and what will be brittle?” says Jay Fineberg, a physicist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “It’s kind of strange, but we don’t know.”
Trying to find out has occupied the materials scientists who investigate how what begins as a rift between a few atoms spreads far enough to take down buildings and bridges. The goal is to engineer failure-free materials by understanding why materials fail in the first place.
“You can learn an enormous amount about materials by pushing them to their limits,” says materials scientist Markus Buehler of MIT.
In the process, scientists are exposing the cracks in existing theories. By shattering breakable Jell-O to model glass fracture in slo-mo, Fineberg and his colleagues have found that established equations of crack movement don’t apply near the tip of a fissure. In supercomputer simulations of billions of atoms stretching, Buehler and his colleagues discovered that the shuffling of a few atoms just ahead of the tip holds the reins on a crack’s speed.
And after centuries of making materials that can break too easily, scientists are deconstructing nature to uncover new ways of building stronger, more efficient materials. Efforts at biomimicry have already led to designs inspired by sponges made of glass and to tough ceramics based on mollusk shells. Together, these studies could usher in a golden age of atoms-up design.
Cracking theory up
A quick tour through the history of engineering underscores why finding failure-free materials is so important. A molasses tank in Boston burst in 1919, flooding the streets with sweet goo and killing 21 people. The S.S. Schenectady cracked almost in half in 1943 while sitting calmly in a harbor outside Portland, Ore. In 1988, the roof of Aloha Airlines Flight 243 tore off during flight, killing a flight attendant and injuring several passengers. A Missouri Air National Guard F-15C broke in two during flight in 2007, and the entire U.S. Air Force fleet of F-15s was grounded for weeks.
These disasters share an important feature: They all probably started with an imperceptible crack. So studying how a small crack propagates might help prevent such disasters in the future.
Way back in the late 1910s, English engineer Alan Griffith noticed that the stress theoretically required to break atomic bonds is 1,000 times larger than the stress actually needed to break those same bonds in a material.
“I could take a millimeter-thick strand of glass, and I could lift a grand piano with it,” Fineberg says. “A strand of glass can reach these strengths; it’s not science fiction. But the minute you have a flaw, it shatters.”
Griffith realized that existing ideas about how materials fracture were too simple. He reasoned that there must be some critical point (now known as the Griffith point) at which a crack gets so long that the strain pulling the material apart overwhelms the threshold energy required to form a new surface. His insight led to the current fundamental theory of fracture, which suggests that, because of the physical limits of energy transport through a material, a crack can’t travel faster than the speed of sound on the material’s surface.
But recent work reveals that even this theory, called linear elastic fracture mechanics, is too simple. Some cracks can travel faster than sound’s surface speed. In 1999, geophysicists observed an earthquake in Kocaeli, Turkey, that split rock at speeds exceeding several kilometers per second, faster than the speed of sound on the rock’s surface. The same phenomenon was observed in earthquake simulations three years later. And in 2004, physicists Michael Marder of the University of Texas at Austin, Robert Deegan, now of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and colleagues found that rubber balloons also show unexpectedly fast fissures when popped with a pin.
“You can do this experiment in the comfort of your own home — preferably aided by children,” Marder says.
Knowing that something is still wrong with existing theory, scientists are at it again —ripping down old ideas to make room for new ones.
Breaking the mold
Crack movement is difficult to study in the lab because of the extreme speeds involved. But Fineberg’s team has a new way to slow things down.
“Instead of breaking glass or steel or brittle ceramics,” he says, “what we break is Jell-O.”
In this case, the gelatin is actually squares of polyacrylamide gel, a watery polymer used in DNA studies. “These are slippery little buggers,” he says. “They slipped and fell and looked like they shattered like plates of glass.”
In a series of studies published in 2005, Fineberg and two students showed that the way cracks move through the gel is identical to the way cracks move through glass, with one important difference: Cracks that would run through glass at 3,000 meters per second crawl through gels at just 5 m/s.
“You have a lot more time to see what’s going on,” Fineberg says.
Armed with a fast camera, Fineberg and colleagues have found a major flaw in linear elastic fracture mechanics. The theory assumes that the stress placed on a material is proportional to the strain it feels. But in a paper still in preparation, Fineberg and theorist Eran Bouchbinder, also of Hebrew University, show that this is true only far away from the crack’s tip. As measurements of cracks slogging through gelatin get closer to the point where the material splits completely, more and more terms need to be added to the equation of motion to describe how energy fuels the crack — and therefore how the crack propagates.
Fineberg says the gelatin method could also help explain how and why a crack changes direction, the way rippled edges form in popped balloons, for example. Aside from tip activity, cracks moving in straight lines seem to agree with the predictions of linear elastic fracture mechanics. But if those cracks deviate, the equations governing their motions are unknown. And fast, crooked cracks can emit small daughter cracks, or split completely into multiple fractures.
“The fundamental question is why cracks become unstable,” he says. “I believe that with these gels we can start to unravel this, just because we can slow things down.”
Assemblies of atoms
Though the camera that captures Jell-O cracks has speed on its side, for a truly fundamental theory of fracture, scientists would like a camera that also zooms to the atomic scale.
Buehler uses the next best thing: a supercomputer that models billions of atoms. His lab at MIT investigates fracture in materials ranging from nickel and silicon to bone and protein. “We can simulate atoms and get an equation of state or density or melting point of a material,” he says. “It’s really exciting.”
The simulations calculate each atom’s trajectory based on Newton’s laws of motion and the quantum mechanical interactions between that atom and those around it. To introduce a crack, Buehler simply removes a few atoms. To make the crack spread, he adds some stretch.
“The beauty of this approach and why I get really excited about this, it really is very simple,” he says. “Atomistic simulation doesn’t need much input. All it is, is chemistry.”
Buehler’s work offers an explanation for why cracks, under some conditions, move in a punctuated rather than a gradual way. In modeling a few-nanometers–long crack in silicon, Buehler noticed that some of the silicon atoms, which usually link up to form hexagons, had rearranged themselves. At the very tip of the crack, two six-atom rings had transformed into a five-atom ring and a seven-atom ring sitting side by side. The crack didn’t push forward until another bond, this one shared between the seven-atom ring and a six-atom ring ahead of it, broke — at which point the crack split through the subsequent six-atom rings like a zipper.
The transformation from six-atom rings to five- and seven-atom rings is the material’s response to extreme pressure, Buehler explains. In the same way that solids melt when heated, silicon shifts its atoms around under stress. This shift could help keep the crack from spreading, up to a point, by dissipating the constant energy applied to the material. Simulations in more substances may reveal how such changes in the atomic structure of materials could contribute to a new fundamental theory of fissure.
But atomistic simulations are slow and intensive — a recent model of a small piece of a protein network in a cell took weeks to render, Buehler says. And even the best supercomputers are years away from being able to handle the numbers of atoms that make up life-size objects.
Buehler sidesteps this problem by breaking materials into chunks. He’ll simulate a large ensemble of atoms, and draw a black box around it. The next level of simulations zooms out to the scale where the black box is a particle, and so on.
“We start at the fundamental scale and build up,” he says.
Conveniently, scientists have found, biological materials are actually organized in this hierarchical structure. Buehler’s fondest dream is to use multi-scale modeling to help build new substances inspired by life.
Nature builds it up
Some materials scientists are already creating new materials based on how natural substances fail, or fail to fail. Robert Ritchie and Tony Tomsia of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and colleagues, for example, made a material based on seashells in late 2008.
“Ceramics are wonderful: They’re lightweight, they’re very strong,” Ritchie says. “They’re ideal, bar one thing — they’re brittle as hell.”
Seashells, on the other hand, can take an impressive beating. Research has shown that it takes 3,000 times more energy to break nacre, the material that gives mollusk shells their mother-of-pearl sheen, than nacre’s chief component, aragonite, a brittle calcium carbonate mineral. In a seashell, the aragonite is sandwiched between microscopic layers of soft organics that provide cushioning.
“Its final properties in terms of resistance to fracture are so much better than either of the constituents,” Ritchie says. “That’s what we’re trying to emulate.”
Ritchie, Tomsia and their colleagues mixed alumina, a simple ceramic, with water, and then froze the mixture to create a lattice of ice. When the ice melted and left behind a ceramic scaffold, the scientists filled the spaces between the alumina layers with a common polymer, polymethyl methacrylate.
The team tested the resulting ceramic’s fracture resistance by introducing a small crack and forcing it to spread. The material was 300 times tougher than its constituents, the researchers reported in Science in 2008. The toughness comes from the polymer, which acts as a lubricant, allowing layers of ceramic to slide over each other rather than sever.
“This little thin layer of polymer allows the material to give a little bit, and reduces the stresses,” Ritchie says. “Nature does the exact same thing. This is not our idea, it’s nature’s.”
Ritchie and colleagues have made only a few cubic inches of the substance so far, but considering that most other biomimetic materials have been made on the nanoscale, that’s a lot. “As far as we know, no one has ever made a bulk material like this,” Ritchie says.
Bringing down the house
By studying another life-form, scientists have found that nature succeeds where the fourth little pig failed: It can make a glass house that’s immune to stones.
The amount of effort it took to break a deep-sea sponge surprised Joanna Aizenberg of Harvard University when she first tried to crush it. The species, Euplectella aspergillum, is made entirely of glass. She found one in a curiosity shop in San Francisco and brought it back to her lab.
“I jumped on it,” she admits. Though it’s made from the same stuff as windows, its primary structure held up under Aizenberg’s feet.
“You could hear the shattered glass,” she says. “You break some of the fibers and some of the connections, but the integrity is preserved.”
Aizenberg deconstructed the sponge’s structure using visible light and scanning electron microscopy, reporting the details in a paper in Science in 2005. She found that, as with the mollusk shells, levels of complexity contribute to the sponge’s strength (SN: 3/25/06, p. 184).
Each glass fiber consists of concentric layers of silica and protein, which help stop cracks from spreading — even if one layer succumbs to stress, its neighbors can back it up. But the way the fibers are arranged also contributes to the sponge’s resilience. The glass fibers form a cylindrical lattice of square windows crossed by diagonal bars, a common feature in architecture that keeps windows from tilting sideways. And the whole structure has spiral ridges running from top to bottom to prevent it from collapsing like an empty soda can when squeezed.
“It’s pretty much the most stable and mechanically strong glass structure that exists,” Aizenberg says.
Since describing the sponge in Science, Aizenberg has started designing models of the sponge architecture that lack certain structural features — the spiral ridges, say, or the diagonal bars — and building them out of polymers with a 3-D printer. She has been subjecting the models to a battery of tests, bending, stretching and squeezing to see what they can take. “This is where fracture appears,” she says.
Materials scientists like Aizenberg, Fineberg and Buehler hope such efforts will lead scientists away from traditional materials and toward ones that perform better. A more fundamental, and accurate, theory of material failure may be built up from clues gleaned as scientists break things down.
“Understanding failure,” says Buehler, “is the key to success.”

My Two Cents about the new Gaia policies

http://seekeralpha.gaia.com — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 03:39:52 GMT

I read this post and totally agree with it.

http://groups.gaia.com/gaia/discussions/view/528535

In another web community, when a troublesome member's account was terminated, some of the other members would band together and launch a campaign or protest to try to get the banned member reinstated. I found such efforts embarrassing to watch. If such things crop up on Gaia, I'll have to stay away for a while.

People tend to forget that membership in a web community (as well as member in this group) is a PRIVLEDGE, not a right, and as such it is the right and duty of its admin (and moderators) to define rules and enforce them as they see fit. Nothing is more disrespectful to other people than to challenge those rules and their enforcement because one or two people couldn't live up to them. NO ONE DESERVES SPECIAL TREATMENT, BECAUSE THEN JUSTICE IS NOT BEING DONE!!!

Some Morbidly Obese People Are Missing Genes, Shows New Research

http://seekeralpha.gaia.com — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:43:15 GMT

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100203131401.htm
ScienceDaily (Feb. 4, 2010) — A small but significant proportion of morbidly obese people are missing a section of their DNA, according to research published February 3 in Nature. The authors of the study, from Imperial College London and ten other European Centres, say that missing DNA such as that identified in this research may be having a dramatic effect on some people's weight.
According to the new findings, around seven in every thousand morbidly obese people are missing a part of their DNA, containing approximately 30 genes. The researchers did not find this kind of genetic variation in any normal weight people.
There are an estimated 700,000 morbidly obese people in England, with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of over 40. Researchers believe that the weight problems of around one in twenty morbidly obese people are due to known genetic variations, including mutations and missing DNA. Many more similar obesity-causing mutations, such as the one in this study, remain to be found, says the team
Previous research had identified several genetic variations that contribute to obesity, most of which are single mutations in a person's DNA that change the function of a gene. This new research is the first to clearly demonstrate that obesity in otherwise physically healthy individuals can be caused by a rare genetic variation in which a section of a person's DNA is missing. The researchers do not yet know the function of the missing genes, but previous research has suggested that some of them may be associated with delayed development, autism and schizophrenia.
People inherit two copies of their DNA, one from their mother and one from their father. Sometimes, missing one copy of one or several genes -- as in the individuals identified in this latest study -- can have a drastic effect on the body.
The researchers believe there may be other genetic deletions, in addition to those just identified, that increase a person's risk of becoming obese. They hope that by identifying genetic variations causing people to be extremely obese, they can develop genetic tests to help determine the best course of treatment for these individuals.
Professor Philippe Froguel, lead author of the study from the School of Public Health at Imperial College London, said: "Although the recent rise in obesity in the developed world is down to an unhealthy environment, with an abundance of unhealthy food and many people taking very little exercise, the difference in the way people respond to this environment is often genetic. It is becoming increasingly clear that for some morbidly obese people, their weight gain has an underlying genetic cause. If we can identify these individuals through genetic testing, we can then offer them appropriate support and medical interventions, such as the option of weight loss surgery, to improve their long-term health."
The Imperial team first identified the missing genes in teenagers and adults who had learning difficulties or delayed development. They found 31 people who had nearly identical 'deletions' in one copy of their DNA. All of the adults with this genetic change had a BMI of over 30, which means they were obese.
The researchers then went on to study the genomes of 16,053 people who were either obese or normal weight, (with a BMI between 18.5 and 25), from eight European cohorts. They identified 19 more people with the same genetic deletion, all of whom were severely obese, but did not find the deletion in any healthy normal weight people. This means the genetic deletion was found in seven in every 1,000 morbidly obese people, making it the second most frequent known genetic cause of obesity.
People with the deletion tended to be normal weight toddlers, becoming overweight during childhood and then severely obese as adults. The researchers also looked at the genomes of their parents, and found that 11 people inherited the deletion from their mother and four from their father, with ten of the deletions occurring by chance. All the parents with the deletion were also obese.
The next step in this research will be to determine the function of the missing genes. Previous studies have suggested that some of the genes may be associated with delayed development, autism and schizophrenia, so the researchers also plan to investigate the possible links between these conditions and obesity.
According to first author Dr Robin Walters, from the School of Public Health at Imperial College London, there are likely to be many more variations like the deletion identified in this study that remain to be found. He said: "Although individually rare, the combined effect of several variations of this type could explain much of the genetic risk for severe obesity, which is known to run in families. Previously identified genetic influences on weight gain have a much less drastic effect -- increasing weight by just one or two pounds, for example. By looking at groups of people with severe obesity, we may be more likely to find these rare genetic variations."
Professor Froguel added: "The method used in the study could also help find novel genetic variations that affect the risk of other conditions. We identified this variant by first studying very obese individuals, and then homing in on the region of interest in larger, less severely affected groups. This powerful approach could be used to identify genetic influences on other diseases that are poorly understood at present, such as Type 2 diabetes."
Journal Reference:

Walters et al. A new highly penetrant form of obesity due to deletions on chromosome 16p11.2. Nature, 2010; 463 (7281): 671 DOI: 10.1038/nature08727

Re: Light and dark

http://Meenakshi.gaia.com — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:57:13 GMT

Following this, in fascination.