Human Chimeras

by philg

Some more interesting stuff from She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer… It turns out that Biology 101 contains a lot of simplifications (lies!).

Wikipedia: “A genetic chimerism or chimera … is a single organism composed of cells with distinct genotypes. In animals, this means an individual derived from two or more zygotes, …

How can this happen to a human and how does that interact with our “science is settled” attitude regarding DNA tests? Zimmer gives some examples:

In 2001, a thirty-year-old woman in Germany discovered she was a chimera while she was trying to get pregnant. For the previous five years, she and her husband had been trying to have a baby. They were fairly certain the problem didn’t lie with her biology, because she had gotten pregnant when she was seventeen and had had regular menstrual cycles ever since. A fertility test revealed that her husband had a low level of viable sperm, and so they made plans for IVF. As a routine check, the woman’s doctors took blood samples from her and her husband. They looked at the chromosomes in the couple’s cells, to make sure neither would-be parent had an abnormality that would torpedo the IVF procedure. The woman’s chromosomes looked normal—if she were a man. In every white blood cell they inspected, they found a Y chromosome. Given that she had given birth, this was a weird result. And a careful exam revealed that all her reproductive organs were normal. To get a broader picture of the woman’s cellular makeup, her doctors took samples of her muscle, ovaries, and skin. Unlike her immune cells, none of the cells from these other tissues had a Y chromosome in them. The researchers then carried out a DNA fingerprinting test on the different tissues, looking at the women’s microsatellites—the repeating sequences that can distinguish people from one another. They found that her immune cells belonged to a different person than her other tissues. It turned out that the woman had had a twin brother who died only four days after birth. Although he was unable to survive on his own, his cells took over his sister’s blood and lived on within her.

In 2003, a woman in Washington State named Lydia Fairchild had to get a DNA test. Fairchild, who was then twenty-seven, was pregnant with her fourth child, unemployed, and single. To get welfare benefits, state law required that she prove that her children were genetically related both to herself and to their father, Jamie. One day, Fairchild got a call from the Department of Social Services to come in immediately. A DNA test had confirmed that Jamie was the father of the three children. But Fairchild was not their mother.

When Fairchild was rushed to a hospital to deliver her fourth child, a court officer was there to witness the birth. The officer also oversaw a blood draw for a DNA test. The results came back two weeks later. Once again, Fairchild’s DNA didn’t match her child’s. Even though the court officer had witnessed the child’s birth, the court still refused to consider any evidence beyond DNA.

In Boston, a woman named Karen Keegan had developed kidney disease and needed a transplant. To see if her husband or three sons were a match, her doctors drew blood from the whole family in order to examine a set of immune-system genes called HLA. A nurse called Keegan with the results. Not only were her sons not suitable as organ donors, but the HLA genes from two of them didn’t match hers at all. It was impossible for them to be her children. The hospital went so far as to raise the possibility she had stolen her two sons as babies. Since Keegan’s children were now grown men, she didn’t have to face the terrifying prospect of losing her children as Fairchild did. But Keegan’s doctors were determined to figure out what was going on. Tests on her husband confirmed he was the father of the boys. Her doctors took blood samples from Keegan’s mother and brothers, and collected samples from Keegan’s other tissues, including hair and skin. Years earlier, Keegan had had a nodule removed from her thyroid gland, and it turned out that the hospital had saved it ever since. Her doctors also got hold of a bladder biopsy. Examining all these tissues, Keegan’s doctors found that she was made up of two distinct groups of cells. They could trace her body’s origins along a pair of pedigrees—not to a single ancestral cell but to a pair. They realized Keegan was a tetragametic chimera, the product of two female fraternal twins. The cells of one twin gave rise to all her blood. They also helped give rise to other tissues, as well as to some of her eggs. One of her sons developed from an egg that belonged to the same cell lineage as her blood. Her other two children developed from eggs belonging to the lineage that arose from the other twin. When Lydia Fairchild’s lawyer heard about the Keegan case, he immediately demanded that his client get the same test. At first, it looked as if things were going to go against Fairchild yet again. The DNA in her skin, hair, and saliva failed to match her children’s. But then researchers looked at a sample taken from a cervical smear she had gotten years before. It matched, proving she was a chimera after all.

More: Read She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

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Why do they allow shirt-pulling in soccer?

by philg

One of the joys of traveling in Europe is being forced to watch what they call “football” (i.e., soccer). Tonight is the UEFA Champions League final. From a high level, it looks to me like a group of adults acting out a scene more familiar from preschool: running around a field grabbing each other’s shirts.

Why is shirt-grabbing allowed in this game? Doesn’t it degrade the quality of the experience for all involved? The skills of a soccer player are supposed to be kicking, passing, seeing openings, etc., not grabbing someone else’s shirt, no?

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Navy pilots see UFOs that commercial airline pilots don’t

by philg

“‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects” (nyt):

The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.

“These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”

Commercial airliners operate in the same general areas and far more hours per year, yet their pilots don’t report similar stuff.

Could it be the curved canopy of the fighter jets?

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Don’t bite tumors off other folks’ faces

by philg

She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer:

Tough as they might be, though, Tasmanian devils were in trouble. A singular epidemic was sweeping across the island, not quite like anything veterinarians had seen before. A devil would develop a fleshy growth in or around its mouth. In a matter of weeks, the growth would balloon, and within a few months, the animal would starve or suffocate. These growths were first observed in 1996 in the northeast corner of Tasmania, and over the next few years they spread over most of the island, killing off tens of thousands of devils. By the early 2000s, the species looked like it might become extinct in a matter of decades, killed by a disease scientists didn’t understand. It would take them years to realize that these devils were chimeras, and that their cancers descended from the cells of a long-dead animal.

The DNA fingerprint from tumor cells didn’t match the healthy cells from the same devil’s body. Instead, they matched cancer cells from devils who died dozens of miles away. It was as if all the sick devils had gotten a cancer transplant from a single tumor.

At some point in the early 1990s, [Elizabeth] Murchison’s research showed, a single Tasmanian devil in the northeast corner of the island got cancer. The mutations may have initially arisen in a Schwann cell. The descendants of that original cancer cell grew into a tumor. During a fight, another devil bit off the tumor. The cancer cells did not end up digested in the attacker’s stomach. Instead, they likely lingered in the devil’s mouth, where they were able to burrow into the cheek lining and work their way metastatically into the other tissues in the devil’s head. The cancer cells continued dividing and mutating, until they broke through the skin of the second devil’s face. At some point, that new victim also got bit, and its own attacker took in the cells from the original cancer. A single carrier could pass the cancer on to several other devils if it was especially aggressive, and thus help accelerate its spread. Passing through host after host, the tumor cells gained about twenty thousand new mutations.


Consider this fair warning!

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Why don’t rock stars have dogs?

by philg

An Irish friend who is unaccountably fond of English music and English cars (haven’t the English in Ireland mostly been unwanted immigrants and/or oppressors/exploiters?) took me to see Rocketman. The subject is portrayed as lovelorn and alone in bed, partly due to others’ disapproval of his heavy use of drugs and alcohol and having had sex with a prodigious number of partners. Who would forgive this behavior? Not Elton John’s parents or friends, we learn.

Similar scenes were included in Bohemian Rhapsody.

Why wouldn’t the managers/handlers for these rock stars have set them up with loyal dogs as soon as their popularity began to soar? A golden retriever wouldn’t complain about a pop star’s need to ingest drugs or indulge in Roman Emperor-style sexual exploits. Perhaps a Bernese Mountain Dog on tour would reduce a pop star’s need to rely on groupies for companionship (or at least reduce the groupie count slightly by taking up space in the bed).

Enya has essentially complete control over her life and has organized it around companion animals, though not dogs (The Sun).

How was the movie? Friend’s review: “It glorified cocaine use. His only worry was if he would still be just as good when he came off it. It also glorified therapy. One trip to rehab and he was cured. That’s bullshit. They were always breaking out in song, like a 1950s movie.” He preferred Bohemian Rhapsody. (Wikipedia suggests that the movie was essentially based on the subject’s own perspective: “Elton John and husband David Furnish had tried to produce a film based on his life for almost two decades.”)

I thought the “have ordinary folks break out in song” elements were creative and interesting. I noticed that the discredited practice of heterosexuality was written out of the lyrics. “I miss my wife” in the “Rocket Man” song turns into “I miss my life” in the movie version. (Doesn’t make sense unless sung by a dead astronaut?) Also, as in Gillette’s toxic masculinity video, wisdom in the film comes primarily from the non-white-males, e.g., some African-American musicians helping Elton John realize his true potential as a flamboyant gay singer and a black therapist who turns him sober through the miracle of talking about his childhood (just as victimhood is being celebrated worldwide, we learn that Elton John was a major victim of emotionally abusive parents, at least according to Elton John (the parents are dead so can’t defend themselves); Elton John now describes himself as a “survivor”).

[Elton John was born in 1947 to parents who were both 22 years old at the time (the father in the movie, though, is given an elderly appearance). The standard of parenting back in the 1950s was much less exacting. The movie shows the father completely indifferent to the son’s spectacular success (a fact check), which does not ring true. Mom is passionate about having sex with a neighbor, reminiscent of the Specsavers Golf Course ad]

The dialog is anachronistic. For example, Elton John admits to the group therapy session that he is a “sex addict.” A pop star drenched in naked groupies was not considered an “addict” back in the 1970s, I don’t think.

Readers: Who has seen Rocketman? What did you think? And should every young rising rock star have a companion dog to keep him or her steady?

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Ubernomics

by philg

A recent Sunday afternoon trip to Boston’s Logan Airport:

There was plenty of time to chat with the Uber driver:

He was a 24-year-old U Mass Lowell graduate with a business degree and he’d figured out that revenue was $20-25 per hour before car expenses. He had a day job. Why also drive Uber?

Everyone my age that I know is living for the weekend. They’re on autopilot Monday through Friday and miserable. Even the computer science graduates who did everything right and are working for Raytheon are living paycheck to paycheck.

He volunteered that most of these folks should not be broke. They were spending on Starbucks and other unnecessary luxuries in his opinion. He subsists primarily on Soylent and says a week’s nutrition costs less than one meal out in a city restaurant. The Uber project was partly insurance against an uncertain W-2 market: “Being a white male in corporate America is career suicide.”

The next opportunity to learn from a young person came at the Intercontinental Hotel at the Minneapolis Airport (to make a long story short, I now know that it takes Americans 2.4 hours to perform a Chinese fire drill from a broken Airbus to a working one and this is incompatible with making one’s connection to San Diego). A ripped tatooed guy at the gym offered the workout tip of immediately switching to progressively lighter weights after doing max reps on heavier. Repeat until down to 5 lbs. dumbbells. He volunteered that he was a former meth head. Why the gym passion? “I’m a loser so I have to look good.”

All but two of the Uber drivers whom I met in San Diego were immigrants, but not from Mexico as one might expect given the proximity of the border. Drivers were from Afghanistan, Brazil, Eritrea, Ethiopia, etc. The native-born drivers believed that their hourly earnings would be approximately double if not for the inexhaustible supply of immigrants.

A San Diego weekday afternoon, described by the driver as featuring lighter-than-usual traffic:

And they can do this with gasoline that costs less than $5 per gallon:

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Titanic Museum, Belfast

by philg

Posted on Facebook under “Heard it might be a Boeing 737 MAX on way back from Ireland so decided to take a ship for safety.”:

Could this be the world’s most lavish museum devoted to engineering failure? The science turned out not to be settled, unfortunately. Folks in Belfast do like to point out “She was alright when she left here.”

The museum does disclose how badly the first voyage turned out for most people on board:

This was despite substantial government regulation:

Also despite the latest in wireless communication technology:

Yet the skill of management, engineers, and workers is celebrated:

Is it a bad thing when a country goes from being a world industrial leader to irrelevant compared to South Korea, China, and Japan? Barack Obama says “No problemo:”

Passengers were arbitrarily divided into only two genders:

Not every movie about the Titanic is an unimaginative derivative:

Then, as now, the migration industry was highly profitable for some…

A reminder to be humble…

… considering that the best humans could do lasted less than two weeks against Nature. From notes typed up by a shipyard office worker:

The building is a beautiful work of engineering in itself and includes a gratuitous Disney-style ride:

More: Visit Titanic Belfast

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On being mistaken for a lawyer

by philg

I was down in Washington, D.C. recently to catch the 88th Joseph Henry lecture run by the Philosophical Society of Washington. There was a dinner beforehand to honor Brian Keating, the speaker, and it was officially black tie. I put on a pinstripe suit and walked through the door of the Cosmos Club, which was apparently hosting some other events that night as well. Here’s the exchange:

  • Cosmos Club hostess: “You’re a lawyer here for the American Bar Association event?”
  • Me: “Now why would you say a thing like that to a person you just met?”

It was the highlight of my evening! (For everyone else, though, it was “The Big Bang and Inflation; Glimpsing the Beginning of Time from the Ends of the Earth” (YouTube))

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Where are migrants released currently?

by philg

There have been a bunch of articles about purported Trump Administration plans to release migrants into sanctuary cities.

Here’s a dumb question: Where are they released currently?

From a recent NYT article:

Entering the country at a rate of more than 5,000 each day, new arrivals from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are departing border towns by the busload. While President Trump has made a point of threatening to send migrants from the border to inland sanctuary cities that oppose his immigration policies, it is an empty threat: Migrants are already traveling by the thousands every day to cities across the country — to Atlanta, Chattanooga, Orlando, Richmond, as well as to sanctuary cities, like New York, Los Angeles and Seattle.

After an initial 72 hours or so at Customs and Border Protection processing centers along the border, the vast majority of those entering the country now are released to nonprofit respite centers, where they are fed and clothed. From there, they are booked on Greyhound buses to destinations where they may have friends, family or the hope of a job. They pay top dollar, often $250 to $300 each, usually advanced by family members in the United States.

So Greyhound is now a refugee/asylum-industry profiteer! The NYT article suggests that all of the profits go to the British owners of Greyhound.

The implication is that nearly all migrants are released into “border towns”. Does “nonprofit respite center” mean taxpayer-funded like most other segments of the immigration industry? If so, maybe border towns should actually be happy about keeping released migrants as a cash source.

Where are there good numbers on the states and towns into which migrants are currently released? It would be interesting to see a data visualization and then add Greyhound tickets sold out of those towns as well.

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