the queer gene... just a myth?

Born gay or made gay? That’s the question which divides society since the late 80’s, when homosexuality was removed from Mental Disease List, being considered as sexual option by many scientist, so it has no place in medicine field. Almost 20 years later, DNA studies started to demonstrate that the gay gene is real, so being gay seems to be not just an option (but it is definitely not a disease!). 

Gay people—and Lady Gaga—claim that they were born that way, implying that sexual orientation is an innate condition, biologically determined by genes in our DNA, and social or familiar influences have little or no impact in who you fall in love. Anthony Bogaert, a psychologist at Brock University in Canada postulates that the more older brothers a man has, more likely that that man would be gay. It’s explained because mother’s womb tends to reject male fetus, so   her organism “feminize” the future baby adding female hormones to avoid abortion.  Another important fact that might prove that being gay is something genetic is that if one identical twin is gay, the other one has more than 50% of possibilities of being also gay.

As you could see, the saying “gay from the crib” is not mistaken at all, and in the following two videos the previous ideas are going to explain in deep.

After having watched both videos, do you believe that some people were born gay or they made gay? If you could remove “the gay gene” from your future child, do you do it? If being gay is not an option, is correct to deny gay people basic rights as marriage or adoption?

Please see full article in : http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/jun/28/borngayormadegay

That child is only mine.

      “Everybody has a father and a mother…” that’s a truth universally acknowledged; however, how would you react if I said that in a close future there could be children with just one parent?

This is going to be possible thank to the magic of stem cells. Researchers at Tokyo University in Japan have developed sperm and egg cells from stem cell in mice, fertilizing them to create healthy offspring. The leader of the team sustains that stem cells can morph into any cell, including the reproductive ones, so babies might de conceived using those cells from one parent (man or woman).

 Hank Greely, a bioethicist at Stanford University claims that it is a big step in reproductive medicine, considering all the gay and lesbian couples who would be capable of having their own children, who will be genetically their own. Women who have passed their childbearing years or who are infertile for medical reasons could be also beneficiated by this discovery.

The next step in the research is to perform the experiment using human stem cell, but due to the similarity between humans and mice, there are highly chances of duplicate the results successfully.

As any other genetic experiment, there are a lot of moral questions to solve. Is morally acceptable to create children using this method? Would this newborn be a clone from its parent? Is this the beginning of an even more individual society?

In response to the first question, Daniel Sulmasy, a professor of medicine and ethics at the University of Chicago said:  “Whatever we’ve done in humankind — whether it’s discovering fire or creating the wheel — you can use these things to do lots of good and you can use them immoral ways.”

(For further information please visit:  http://www.advocate.com/health/health-news/2012/10/05/fertility-research-opens-possibilities-gay-and-lesbian-couples and http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/10/03/science.1226889.full)

I need a Charming Prince. Now!

          “I wish I could sleep two weeks in a row…”  I bet everybody has said this in more than one occasion, but for people who suffer the extremely rare Kleine-Levin syndrome, as known as “the sleeping beauty syndrome”, their wish is the opposite.

          The Klene-Levine syndrome is a neurological disorder  which affects the sleeping habits, making sick people sleep over 20 hours per day—being awake just few hours to eating  or going to the bathroom—in   every crisis. Each episode lasts almost two weeks, with a frequency which ranges among weeks, months or even years, depending on each case.  This syndrome affects mostly male adolescents (relation 3:1) who had their first episodes between 10 to 20 years old. About 90% of the patients experienced their first attack as a result of a cold or other type of infection, but it’s also associated with stress, long sleep deprivation periods, excessive use of alcohol, marijuana and other drugs, accident and head traumas. Other scientists sustain that it might be a hereditary genetic predisposition, or it may be the result of an autoimmune disorder. Recent studies also argue that the deficiency of dopamine and striatum could be link to it.

          Due to the lack of other symptoms—apart from the long hours of sleeping—this disease is hard to diagnose, making doctors eliminate others which can present similar symptoms, and there is no definite treatment or cure for it. Patients are treated with stimulants—as amphetamine and methylphenidate—for the sleepiness.  Experiences with lithium and carbamazepine are shown highly results, but it is still in testing process.

          For awaking definitely his princess, the charming prince will be to get off his horse and start to investigate in a lab!

          Finally I left the following questions: Have you heard about this syndrome before? Do you know other rare diseases? 

(http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2012/10/08/sleeping-beauty-syndrome.html)

Medicine for your eyelashes

Lumigan is an ophthalmic solution commonly used by people with open-angle glaucoma, to regulate high eye pressure. Human body produces a fluid called prostamides which, in the eyes, have the function of regulating the pressure by opening drainage canals. Lumigan plays the role of prostamides in people who have eyesight problems.

However, this solution has been recently used with esthetic purposes. Lumigan turned to have side effects such as increasing the amount of brown pigment in the iris. Even though this is not a dangerous process as it is not related to cancer, the side effects are not normal whatsoever. In addition to that, the medicament darks not only the eyelid skin, but also the eyelashes.

As many of you might know, eyelashes have been the subject of esthetic industry for long time, to solve women´s attractiveness problem. Lumigan has been reported to make eyelashes grow longer, darker, and thicker. Putting these two facts together, we have as a result the use of Lumigan to make eyelashes grow. In other words, women are using medicine to solve beauty issues. Won’t it be hazardous?  Despite the fact that studies don´t related to cancer, they don’t show what it can cause in the long term. Would you use it in order to look prettier?

Look this photos with the "before and after Lumigan application"

A pain in your stomach

Getting diagnosed with stomach ache or gastroenteritis is always expensive and really annoying. Can you imagine have to past through this several times in your life without knowing the reason? Or that your doctor can’t see what the real problem is? Could you even think of being allergic to certain food?

Something that is really unknown for us is the diseases produced by a malfunction of our own body.

Celiacs are the ones who can’t stand gluten in their diet. Nowadays, medicine has worked on trying to figure out earlier if you were born with this painful disease. As Lactose intolerance, everything starts with uncontrollable abdominal pain, plus indigestion and dehydration that can turns to anemia in mostly all the cases. The body just can’t get the nutrients from the food that you eat and it stays in your intestine causing problems, in the case of dairy intolerance this happens because you don’t produce an enzyme that breaks the lactase structure (lactase is the type of sugar that the milk has) which makes everything that contains milk hurts you from the inside.

The consequences of not taking care of your diet if you are celiac or lactose intolerant can be mortal, because your body keeps too much sugar inside without being processed which can turns out to cause cancer.

Here in Chile, about four years ago, a research showed that 50% of the population has lactose intolerance and probably 90% of the humanity will experiment it.

Will you ask your doctor if you are allergic to food?

(chilean source: http://www.emol.com/noticias/nacional/2006/11/30/237681/intolerancia-a-lactosa-se-asocia-al-colon-irritable.html)

The Broken Link Between Science and Humanity

“Since when did people start expecting science to be humane? To study the body, you cut it open. To study the mind, you isolate it by crushing the heart. Historically, that’s how science has advanced.”

The previous quote was taken from a videogame I recently played, and it shows clearly how science has advanced thus far. In order to get all the advances in technology, scientists have been isolating their humanity and their morals to discover new aspects of the human body or to find the cure to diseases; and most of the times, they forget that humans are not mere objects of study.

J. Marion Sims is commonly known as the “father of gynecology,” and he found a solution to a childbirth problem in the 19^th century. However, the process of finding the cure was quite polemic because he mainly used black women, and he did not use anesthesia on all the patients. There are cases of women who were tested more than one time—some of them underwent the procedure 30 times, and it is believed that he bought and rented most of his “guinea pigs.” That is not all, he refused to apply anesthesia on all the patients even though it was already available at the time.

This specific example helps me to prove what varied forms of arts have been saying for a long time: science has lost his humanity. It has never been shown clearly, for most of the times is hidden from us; but it is happening, and people will eventually know.

No Eyes, But I still see

   BenUnderwood suffered reticular cancer when he was just three years because of that his eyes were removed and he lost his vision. As his visual system wasn’t fully developed, his brain started use the auditory system to guide him through the outside world. Time went by and he finally could develop a system to map the things around him; just by “Clicking” a noise with his tongue he uses the returned sound to create visual images, this system is called Echolocation.

 

   There are several animals such as, bats, dolphins and Amolops, than are capable to perceive the wave sounds projected from their selves, then this sounds are processed generating images from the surroundings; submarines also use the echolocation system to map the see bottom or scan for nearby objects. The principle of echolocation and several cases of people that have successfully achieved it, have leaded Scientifics to conceive the sonar implant, which is a device very similar to the cochlear implant (that replaces a damaged cochlea in the ear) this device is surgically implant into the brain cortex to send electrical signs with information; through this way the brain creates mental images using the variation between sounds reflected from different objects. 

 

   This new medical – technological advance would be the solution to deaf people, and to everyone that has visual problems, but do you think this invent will be applied for medical purposes in first place, or it will be so expensive that military industry will use it to increase its power?            

Designing our babies

Could you imagine how life changing would be to get to know how our babies are growing up before they are even born? Or to cure some of the diseases or disorders that our babies could bring?

 Human genetic engineering provides the opportunity to modify babies' genotype before birth. If the baby has any disease, genetic disorders or genetic disease, this technology will definitely help the future parents to give birth to a healthy child, and they will not have to worry that their child could bring any of the diseases that both parents could have. This could be the beginning of something big, and better for our future: healthier humans, with more probabilities of success and better life.

Human genetic engineering can increase the longevity and also enhance some of the genes that the parents would like to improve. Gene modification, also known as Germline Modification, in which genes can be modifies when the baby is still an early embryo, reduces exponentially the fact that the child can develop certain heart diseases, even diabetes, hypertension, or cancer. This technology gives the big opportunity to look forward to a healthy child without complication that could end his/her life since this type of modification is permanent.

Researchers keep on trying to find the cure for genetic diseases, and the human genetic engineering is getting close to that goal. This is the result of science; science that is always trying to find the bright side of the human life, and of course, evolution. 

So, would you like to get yourself into gene therapy so your children would not have to struggle with those diseases? Would you rather choose technology than  having to live with your children's diseases and can't do anything about it?