Should We Prohibit Genetically Engineered Babies? A Debate Between Experts:

Intelligence Squared U.S. sponsored a debate on the following bioethical dilemma:

What if, before your children were born, you could make sure they had the genes to be taller or smarter? Would that tempt you, or would you find it unnerving? What if that genetic engineering would save a child from a rare disease?

The experts in favor are Sheldon Krimsky from Tufts and Robert Winston of Imperial College London. Weighing in for the opposition we have Nita Farahany of Duke and Lee Silver from Princeton. Check out the audio from that debate here. It’s a conversation that we’ll continue to have for years to come. What are your thoughts?

With great scientific power comes great scientific responsibility.

The Revolution in Prenatal Medicine Prenatal medical testing has long been a balance of risk with information. Submit yourself to tests and you can find out about the genetic makeup of your future child, but risk miscarriage and other complications. Omit the tests, and a pregnancy is safer, its outcome uncertain. That’s how it used to be, anyway. Now, genetic tests are becoming so cheap and non-invasive that they could become as routine as an ultrasound. DNA from the fetus is known to float freely in the mother’s blood and can be drawn in seconds, to be later analyzed for things like Down syndrome.  What will this mean for parents who discover birth defects or diseases in their unborn children? It’s impossible to know precisely who a child will become, but a world in which parents are informed of their baby’s genetics just weeks after conception brings with it a lot of ethical dilemmas. Erin Biba analyzes this in one of the most interesting medical articles I’ve read in a long time, at Wired Science.
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The Revolution in Prenatal Medicine

Prenatal medical testing has long been a balance of risk with information. Submit yourself to tests and you can find out about the genetic makeup of your future child, but risk miscarriage and other complications. Omit the tests, and a pregnancy is safer, its outcome uncertain.

That’s how it used to be, anyway. Now, genetic tests are becoming so cheap and non-invasive that they could become as routine as an ultrasound. DNA from the fetus is known to float freely in the mother’s blood and can be drawn in seconds, to be later analyzed for things like Down syndrome. 

What will this mean for parents who discover birth defects or diseases in their unborn children? It’s impossible to know precisely who a child will become, but a world in which parents are informed of their baby’s genetics just weeks after conception brings with it a lot of ethical dilemmas.

Erin Biba analyzes this in one of the most interesting medical articles I’ve read in a long time, at Wired Science.

Source: Wired

Bearing Sons Can Alter Your Mind Sure, they’ll drive you crazy with the punching and the mud and the peeing on everything, but did you know that they actually get inside a mother’s head? Long-time readers of the blog may remember the beautiful story of how mothers and babies share cells throughout pregnancy. In the later trimesters, one out of every thousand cells in the mother’s blood can be from the growing baby, after crossing the placenta and migrating into her bloodstream. Some of those cells remain in her body after delivery, settling and growing and forever making the child a part of the mother. It’s a poetic embrace, a permanent biological link with unknown consequences. Newer research on this phenomenon found that over half of boys’ mothers tested carried DNA from the Y-chromosome in their brains, showing just how extensively the cells had migrated. Who knows if there’s biological significance to those lingering remnants of a mother’s creation (with help from the dad, of course)? More research will have to be done to decipher any harm or benefit. For now, we can remind ourselves of this beautiful tale, and just how deep our parental connections are. (via ScienceNOW)
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Bearing Sons Can Alter Your Mind

Sure, they’ll drive you crazy with the punching and the mud and the peeing on everything, but did you know that they actually get inside a mother’s head?

Long-time readers of the blog may remember the beautiful story of how mothers and babies share cells throughout pregnancy. In the later trimesters, one out of every thousand cells in the mother’s blood can be from the growing baby, after crossing the placenta and migrating into her bloodstream. Some of those cells remain in her body after delivery, settling and growing and forever making the child a part of the mother. It’s a poetic embrace, a permanent biological link with unknown consequences.

Newer research on this phenomenon found that over half of boys’ mothers tested carried DNA from the Y-chromosome in their brains, showing just how extensively the cells had migrated.

Who knows if there’s biological significance to those lingering remnants of a mother’s creation (with help from the dad, of course)? More research will have to be done to decipher any harm or benefit. For now, we can remind ourselves of this beautiful tale, and just how deep our parental connections are.

(via ScienceNOW)

Source: news.sciencemag.org

Hans Rosling: Religions and Babies

Watching Hans Rosling chase data points across a screen with a huge pointer as he gives breathless play-by-play of statsitical changes will never get old.

In a planet that’s getting increasingly full, we must ask a couple of questions: How can we prepare for tomorrow’s population, whatever it will be? How do birth rates relate to lifestyle around the world?

I’ve heard it said before that certain religious beliefs lead to more children per woman. There’s the stereotype extremes of Latin American Catholics and Northern European athiests. Do they hold water?

Hans takes a look at world religions, average income and family planning and how they relate to birth rates and population growth in the way that only Mr. Rosling can.

I’ll let you watch the details, but controlling population is most certainly about providing more opportunity, not less religion. An instant TED favorite.

(via TED)

Source: youtube.com

Our Selves, Other Cells A beautiful journey through the shared body during and after pregnancy. When a mother carries a child, she carries that child forever … quite literally: During pregnancy, cells sneak across the placenta in both directions. The fetus’s cells enter his mother, and the mother’s cells enter the fetus. A baby’s cells are detectable in his mother’s bloodstream as early as four weeks after conception, and a mother’s cells are detectable in her fetus by week 13. In the first trimester, one out of every fifty thousand cells in her body are from her baby-to-be (this is how some noninvasive prenatal tests check for genetic disorders). In the second and third trimesters, the count is up to one out of every thousand maternal cells. At the end of the pregnancy, up to 6 percent of the DNA in a pregnant woman’s blood plasma comes from the fetus. After birth, the mother’s fetal cell count plummets, but some stick around for the long haul. Those lingerers create their own lineages. Imagine colonies in the motherland. (via Boing Boing)
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Our Selves, Other Cells

A beautiful journey through the shared body during and after pregnancy. When a mother carries a child, she carries that child forever … quite literally:

During pregnancy, cells sneak across the placenta in both directions. The fetus’s cells enter his mother, and the mother’s cells enter the fetus. A baby’s cells are detectable in his mother’s bloodstream as early as four weeks after conception, and a mother’s cells are detectable in her fetus by week 13. In the first trimester, one out of every fifty thousand cells in her body are from her baby-to-be (this is how some noninvasive prenatal tests check for genetic disorders). In the second and third trimesters, the count is up to one out of every thousand maternal cells. At the end of the pregnancy, up to 6 percent of the DNA in a pregnant woman’s blood plasma comes from the fetus. After birth, the mother’s fetal cell count plummets, but some stick around for the long haul. Those lingerers create their own lineages. Imagine colonies in the motherland.

(via Boing Boing)

Source: Boing Boing

Q:Has there been any scientific research on why we are so attracted (read: obsessed) with cuteness? I heard that it was because it triggers our parental instincts, and makes us want to protect the cute baby, puppy, etc. But is there anything beyond that? Why do we spend hours looking at videos and pictures of puppies, kitties, owls, otters, etc? Why does my head explode (well, not really) whenever I see a disgustingly cute puppy?

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The science of CUTE?

I feel you. I hereby name this scientific phenomenon “The Corgi Effect”, after the feeling I get when I see their widdle fat bewwies and big smooshy faces …

Sorry, got lost there for a sec. Where were we? Cuteness. The short answer, according to research, is that it’s all about babies. Baby animals, including humans, have a few common characteristics: large eyes, round faces, enormous heads, etc.

When we see them, the pleasure centers of our brain are stimulated. We associate that baby otter with need, harmlessness, vulnerability, and it’s the same brain regions that make you want to take care of a child. That makes sense in an evolutionary perspective, that we’d have a natural inclination to care for the young of our species.

Just so happens that the Today show did a segment on this very subject this morning, about Siku, the cute baby polar bear taking the internet by storm which you can watch here.

92y:

The Strange Boys’ Cover Joe Williams’ “Baby Please Don’t Go.”

Tiny Mix Tapes:

Almost as soon as the golden era of rock ‘n’ roll was coming to a close, people began to pine for the halcyon days when most things were apparently acceptable and free. The Strange Boys continue the tradition, wearing a hefty pair of rose-tinted glasses and yearning for a carefree past with glazed innocence and heartwarming melancholy. This approach isn’t without its pitfalls: there’s always the looming danger of plagiarism, of sounding stale and to be received with the sense that it’s all been done and heard before. But despite their nods to the past, Strange Boys manage to fix themselves in the present with a freshness that stems from the simple fact that garage rock needs a boot up the backside by some fun lovin’ misfits.
The Strange Boys are coming to the Brooklyn waterfront in August, courtesy of Jelly. But you don’t have to wait until then to see them. They will be at 92YTribeca tonight, along with White Fence and Babies.

Listen to more from The Strange Boys on The Hype Machine.

One of Austin’s finest!