Monday, May 28, 2007

Hens and Bucks?

So I got up this morning and heard something on the radio that made me stop what I was doing. “I’m sorry to say it but most of the lesbians are more aggressive than homosexual men.” My disclaimer is that I couldn’t get the transcript of this interview from the BBC website so I’m quoting from memory and I am not entirely sure if the guy said heterosexual or homosexual men, but either way it made me stop and say WTF. As it turns out a pub in Australia has won the right to exclude patrons based on their sexuality. The claim is that the heterosexual men and lesbians were creating an environment uncomfortable to the gay men by treating them like entertainment or as if they were “zoo animals”. This pub is the only one (out of 2000) in Melbourne geared toward gay men. So the pub owner/manager would like to limit the number of heterosexuals and lesbians to help keep a safe balance. I do sympathize with the notion of creating an establishment where gay men can feel comfortable as apposed to a freak show. However, I don’t see why the owner couldn’t have implemented a policy of asking groups of people to leave when they start making other patrons uncomfortable. It would be as if a group of men hung out in Victoria’s Secret to ogle the women while they picked out thongs. A manager would be perfectly justified in asking the group to leave without getting a court to declare that the store can exclude men. It seems to me that this is how it will have to be enforced anyway. I can’t image the pub prohibiting gay men from bringing straight and lesbian friends, or asking men if they are gay or straight before entering. So why did the owner feel it was necessary to take the matter all the way to The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal? It seems to me that the pub has put itself in a position of favoring discriminatory practices, even if it is with good intentions, as well as set a legal precedent for discrimination in the future. Or, maybe it was necessary to take legal action to effectively protect the rights of a group being discriminated against and harassed. Any thoughts?

Monday, May 21, 2007

science in the blogosphere


Not that I wasn't excited about the Tasmanian Devil cancer, but I'm kind of glad I found something to push that...aesthetic...picture out of the top of the page.

An analysis article in the latest issue of cell discusses scientists in the blogosphere: how there are so few of them, what their impact is, and varying opinions on how to present ideas depending on the audience. If you get a chance, read it and tell me what you think. Think we could make it onto scienceblogs.com? Then maybe we'd have a real public audience!


EDIT: I have decided to make this post longer, as I discovered that the original length was not quite enough to push the DFTD picture out. So please enjoy this random picture of calculus chocolates. Mmmmm.

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Tasmanian devil facial tumor disease


OK, I had to share with everyone one of the coolest things I've come across in a long time. Maybe you've heard about it on NPR, if you're in one of those labs that plays NPR all day (God knows I am).

The Tasmanian devil population has fallen by 90% across large parts of Tasmania. This is due to a recently evolved illness, Tasmanian devil tumor disease (DFTD). And holy cripes people, it looks painful. Just Google "Tasmanian devil cancer" and be horrified. It's a tumor of neuroendocrine origin that causes awful ulcerated lesions on the head and face of Tasmanian devils, usually starting in the mouth. If the tumors don't kill the devils by secreting hormones or impinging on essential organ function, then the devils typically starve to death or suffocate as the tumor mass in the face and throat increases. Once it's visible, it's 100% fatal within 4 months.

But here's the cool part: it's an infectious cancer! Seriously! Devils are really violent, especially when gettin' it on, and when they bite and scratch each other during sex, the cancer is transmitted by inoculation with the cancer cell line itself - basically an allograft. It's not a virus causing the cancer, which is what I totally thought it was gonna be when I heard this on the radio. (One of the articles I read called DFTD a "rogue cell line", which just sounds bad-ass.) The tumors do not have the same genotype as the affected animals - in fact, they all have identical chromosomal defects, indicating that the cancer is clonal throughout the population. It's basically a cancer that's somehow "learned" to be transmitted between immunologically different individuals of a species. As you may know, this is not how cancer usually works. If I got a big nasty facial tumor and made out with Scott, Scott would not get Cressida tumor popping up all over over his face. His immune system would be all like, WTF? And kill that shit. DFTD has found a way around that, which totally blows my mind.

I was really interested in this story, since I'm interested in anything infectious, especially eukaryotes. As it turns out, DFTD is the second example of a cell line that's become infectious, the first being the appetizing transmissible venereal sarcoma, a disease of doggy hoo-haa's and wee-wees. As it turns out, this disease is studied by my favorite evolutionary biologist, Armand Marie Leroi.

So in terms of organisms colonizing other organisms, we have:
  1. proteins (prions)
  2. viruses (HIV)
  3. bacteria (tuberculosis)
  4. traditional eukaryotic parasites (malaria)
  5. helminths (tapeworms)
  6. cell lines (DFTD)
What happens to the Tasmanian devils? From what I've read, biologists aren't too optimistic. The problem is that it's sexually transmitted, which means that even if very few individuals in a population have it, it will still be transmitted effectively (see HIV for an example of how that works). It's not clear yet how infectious it is, although it's thought to be poorly infectious as it's taken DFTD like 10 years to get half-way across Tasmania. If it were highly infectious, it would have moved more quickly, as devils travel great distances on a regular basis. Resistance has been slow coming; I saw one report that said that 3 female devils had been found that were partially resistant, but there are no reports confirming that. And the population's already been so decimated that other factors, like feral species or loss of habitat, become more able to drive devils to extinction. Several "insurance" colonies have been set up off shore, but you all know what that means: no more genetic diversity. This has been a problem in populations like cheetahs and ne ne geese that experienced severe bottlenecks in their evolution, leading to essentially clonal cheetahs. So one good infectious disease, and they're gone.

How can this happen, the evolution of a rogue cell line?? (Makes you look at those HeLa cells with a little more respect, eh?) It's obviously a very rare event, but what's going on immunologically to allow this? Cancer people, what gives?

Some cool resources for DFTD:
Save the Tasmanian Devil
FAQs from Tasmania's DNR equivalent
The Nature paper proving DFTD is a parasitic cancer
NPR story
Tasmanian devil movie

Monday, May 14, 2007

crack is whack

So I couldn't figure out how to embed this video right on the page, so a link will have to do. It's a video a friend of mine sent me about the effects of drugs and alcohol on spiders. Fantastic.

Friday, May 11, 2007

It's Science

As I was searching handy dandy PubMed for sequence based approaches to mapping breakpoints in translocations I found this article. I don't think it'll be useful in my research but I do think it's useful in life.... in general...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=16413181&query_hl=2&itool=pubmed_docsum


Sorry for the ugliness - I can't figure out how to name the link. I'll make it up to you all with this picture:

PS - This is supposed to spark conversation about "worthwhile" research.

And if you say worthwhile a bunch of times it totally loses its meaning...



Sunday, May 6, 2007

Re: What does your data look like?



GFP-positive mES in muscle tissue from a dystrophic mouse.

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

X and Y


I'm always on the lookout for gendered language (maybe you've noticed) and something in today's list of most emailed new york times articles rang the gender bell. The language about the X chromosome's fantastically complicated ability to silence one of its copies (or activate a single copy in some species) is turned into mommy talk. Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the article, listing the requirements for being an X chromosome with mother's day triteness:

"Must be exceptionally stable yet ridiculously responsive to the needs of those around you; must be willing to trail after your loved ones, cleaning up their messes and compensating for their deficiencies and selfishness; must work twice as hard as everybody else; must accept blame for a long list of the world’s illnesses; must have a knack for shaping young minds while in no way neglecting the less glamorous tissues below; must have a high tolerance for babble and repetition; and must agree, when asked, to shut up, fade into the background and pretend you don’t exist."

How would this discussion be different if the manlier chromosomes were involved in chromosomal inactivation? I think it's dangerous to gender chromosomes in this way just because this is something that happens only in human females (the same kind of thing happens in reproductive biology. Are women, and specifically mothers, something that should "fade into the background", defined by their chromosomal situation? I think you know what my answer is.