Archive for the ‘Male Genetics’ Category

Feb. 19, 2020

A Michigan State University scientist is determined to increase the number of women and girls going into STEM fields. Kayla Conner is a doctoral candidate in theDepartment of Microbiology and Molecular Geneticswho says she wouldnt be the student she is today if it werent for her high school chemistry teacher, Ms. Hardin.

Conner is part of MSUsBroadening Experiences in Scientific Training, an experimental program dedicated to empowering graduate student trainees to develop professional skills and experiences. Recently, reporters with WKAR News sat down with some of the BEST students to learn more about their inspiring life stories. Listen to the audio clip to hear Conners story in her own words and those of Hardin.

Conner is currently studying what happens to the placenta when a woman gets an infection during pregnancy and what that could mean for the fetus. Shes researching possible ways to stop some of the negative consequences that happen because of infection.

If a woman gets infected with any sort of ailment during pregnancy, whether it be the cold or the flu, it causes inflammation in the mother, says Conner. And that can lead to downstream effects, whether that is stillbirth, preterm labor, birth defects or even ailments later in life.

Conner was raised in Maynardville, Tennessee, and attended a small high school where she found the atmosphere to be less than encouraging and lacking resources for students who wanted to pursue higher education.

A lot of people have the mentality, Im from here so, therefore, I cant, and its really sad, she says. I really dont want people to have that mentality because even though you are from there you can do wonderful things. I dont think I would have had that drive without Ms. Hardin.

Conner looked up to her chemistry teacher and found encouragement to continue her studies.

She told me how well I was doing even when I felt like I wasnt, says Conner. I thought, Man, you know if she thinks I can do it, then maybe I can.

Hardin says that Conner gives her too much credit.

She has a scientific mind and shes curious, says Hardin. It was obvious to me. She had a natural talent for it. As a teacher, I encourage all my students, especially girls, to not look at science and math as something that boys do. You work at it. You keep plugging away and you can do it too.

For Conner, having women who have helped support her has been extremely important. Ive had women who told me that I can and who have helped me in every way they possibly can, she says. I think its important to give back and be that person for someone else. I go to the Girl Scout troops. I have a little outreach program where I do some hands-on activities and I give a talk. Its a fun time.

Only about 24 percent of the STEM workforce is made up of women. There have been studies that have shown that girls in lower education elementary and middle school show the same interest in STEM courses and enroll in courses at the same rates as their male student counterparts, but once it reaches the level of higher education, women do not seek out STEM courses as frequently as men do.

Conner recognizes the disconnect that is happening and strives to inspire talented women to pursue STEM careers.

Its not a mans game, Conner says. It is absolutely a womans game as well. We can be awesome scientists and be awesome mothers, friends and daughters and be whatever we want to be.

MSU BEST seeks to enhance trainees abilities to develop the confidence and competencies useful in navigating and choosing from diverse career opportunities.Learn more about becoming part of the BEST community.

Photos and video by Alec Gerstenberger.

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Shaping the future: Microbiologist's career inspired by influential teacher - MSUToday

Genetics testing conducted by Colorado Parks and Wildlife adds to the growing evidence that a wolf pack has formed in Moffat County.

In a press release, CPW officials said four scat samples collected near a scavenged elk carcass in early January came from wolves, according to lab results. The DNA indicated three females and one male, according to CPW, and that the wolves were likely siblings. This is the first official documentation of a pack of wolves in the state since the 1940s.

The DNA doesnt tell us the age, CPW Species Conservation Program Manager Eric Odell said in a release. We dont know where or when they were born. We cant say. But that there are closely related wolves is a pretty significant finding.

Wolves are a federally endangered species and fall under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. According to officials with the agency, killing a wolf can result in federal charges, including a $100,000 fine and a year in prison, per offense.

Anyone who sees or hears wolves, or finds evidence of any wolf activity is urged to contact CPW. A Wolf Sighting Form can be found on the CPW website.

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Genetics tests confirm wolf presence in Colorado - The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel

Feb. 19, 2020 13:12 UTC

BOTHELL, Wash. & TOKYO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Seattle Genetics, Inc. (Nasdaq:SGEN) and Astellas Pharma Inc. (TSE: 4503, President and CEO: Kenji Yasukawa, Ph.D., Astellas) today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Breakthrough Therapy designation for PADCEV (enfortumab vedotin-ejfv) in combination with Mercks (known as MSD outside the United States and Canada) anti-PD-1 therapy KEYTRUDA (pembrolizumab) for the treatment of patients with unresectable locally advanced or metastatic urothelial cancer who are unable to receive cisplatin-based chemotherapy in the first-line setting.

The FDAs Breakthrough Therapy process is designed to expedite the development and review of drugs that are intended to treat a serious or life-threatening condition. Designation is based upon preliminary clinical evidence indicating that the drug may demonstrate substantial improvement over available therapies on one or more clinically significant endpoints.

This is an important step in our investigation of PADCEV in combination with pembrolizumab as a first-line therapy for patients with advanced urothelial cancer who are unable to receive cisplatin-based chemotherapy, said Roger Dansey, M.D., Chief Medical Officer, Seattle Genetics. Based on encouraging early clinical activity, we recently initiated a phase 3 trial of this platinum-free combination and look forward to potentially addressing an unmet need for patients.

The FDAs Breakthrough Therapy designation reflects the encouraging preliminary evidence for the combination of PADCEV and pembrolizumab in previously untreated advanced urothelial cancer to benefit patients who are in need of effective treatment options, said Andrew Krivoshik, M.D., Ph.D., Senior Vice President and Oncology Therapeutic Area Head, Astellas. We look forward to continuing our work with the FDA as we progress our clinical development program as quickly as possible.

The Breakthrough Therapy designation was granted based on results from the dose-escalation cohort and expansion cohort A of the phase 1b/2 trial EV-103 (NCT03288545), evaluating patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial cancer who are unable to receive cisplatin-based chemotherapy treated in the first-line setting with PADCEV in combination with pembrolizumab. Initial results from the trial were presented at the European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2019 Congress, and updated findings at the 2020 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium. EV-103 is an ongoing, multi-cohort, open-label, multicenter phase 1b/2 trial of PADCEV alone or in combination, evaluating safety, tolerability and efficacy in muscle invasive, locally advanced and first- and second-line metastatic urothelial cancer.

About Bladder and Urothelial Cancer

It is estimated that approximately 81,000 people in the U.S. will be diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2020.1 Urothelial cancer accounts for 90 percent of all bladder cancers and can also be found in the renal pelvis, ureter and urethra.2

Globally, approximately 549,000 people were diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2018, and there were approximately 200,000 deaths worldwide.3

The recommended first-line treatment for patients with advanced urothelial cancer is a cisplatin-based chemotherapy. For patients who are unable to receive cisplatin, such as people with kidney impairment, a carboplatin-based regimen is recommended. However, fewer than half of patients respond to carboplatin-based regimens and outcomes are typically poorer compared to cisplatin-based regimens.4

About PADCEV

PADCEV (enfortumab vedotin-ejfv) was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December 2019 and is indicated for the treatment of adult patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial cancer who have previously received a programmed death receptor-1 (PD-1) or programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) inhibitor and a platinum-containing chemotherapy before (neoadjuvant) or after (adjuvant) surgery or in a locally advanced or metastatic setting. PADCEV was approved under the FDAs Accelerated Approval Program based on tumor response rate. Continued approval for this indication may be contingent upon verification and description of clinical benefit in confirmatory trials.5

PADCEV is a first-in-class antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) that is directed against Nectin-4, a protein located on the surface of cells and highly expressed in bladder cancer.5,6 Nonclinical data suggest the anticancer activity of PADCEV is due to its binding to Nectin-4 expressing cells followed by the internalization and release of the anti-tumor agent monomethyl auristatin E (MMAE) into the cell, which result in the cell not reproducing (cell cycle arrest) and in programmed cell death (apoptosis).5 PADCEV is co-developed by Astellas and Seattle Genetics.

Important Safety Information

Warnings and Precautions

Adverse Reactions

Serious adverse reactions occurred in 46% of patients treated with PADCEV. The most common serious adverse reactions (3%) were urinary tract infection (6%), cellulitis (5%), febrile neutropenia (4%), diarrhea (4%), sepsis (3%), acute kidney injury (3%), dyspnea (3%), and rash (3%). Fatal adverse reactions occurred in 3.2% of patients, including acute respiratory failure, aspiration pneumonia, cardiac disorder, and sepsis (each 0.8%).

Adverse reactions leading to discontinuation occurred in 16% of patients; the most common adverse reaction leading to discontinuation was peripheral neuropathy (6%). Adverse reactions leading to dose interruption occurred in 64% of patients; the most common adverse reactions leading to dose interruption were peripheral neuropathy (18%), rash (9%) and fatigue (6%). Adverse reactions leading to dose reduction occurred in 34% of patients; the most common adverse reactions leading to dose reduction were peripheral neuropathy (12%), rash (6%) and fatigue (4%).

The most common adverse reactions (20%) were fatigue (56%), peripheral neuropathy (56%), decreased appetite (52%), rash (52%), alopecia (50%), nausea (45%), dysgeusia (42%), diarrhea (42%), dry eye (40%), pruritus (26%) and dry skin (26%). The most common Grade 3 adverse reactions (5%) were rash (13%), diarrhea (6%) and fatigue (6%).

Lab Abnormalities

In one clinical trial, Grade 3-4 laboratory abnormalities reported in 5% were: lymphocytes decreased, hemoglobin decreased, phosphate decreased, lipase increased, sodium decreased, glucose increased, urate increased, neutrophils decreased.

Drug Interactions

Specific Populations

For more information, please see the full Prescribing Information for PADCEV here.

About Seattle Genetics

Seattle Genetics, Inc. is a global biotechnology company that discovers, develops and commercializes transformative medicines targeting cancer to make a meaningful difference in peoples lives. The company is headquartered in Bothell, Washington, and has offices in California, Switzerland and the European Union. For more information on our robust pipeline, visit http://www.seattlegenetics.com and follow @SeattleGenetics on Twitter.

About Astellas

Astellas Pharma Inc., based in Tokyo, Japan, is a company dedicated to improving the health of people around the world through the provision of innovative and reliable pharmaceutical products. For more information, please visit our website at https://www.astellas.com/en.

About the Seattle Genetics and Astellas Collaboration

Seattle Genetics and Astellas are co-developing PADCEV (enfortumab vedotin-ejfv) under a collaboration that was entered into in 2007 and expanded in 2009. Under the collaboration, the companies are sharing costs and profits on a 50:50 basis worldwide.

About the Seattle Genetics, Astellas and Merck Collaboration

Seattle Genetics and Astellas entered a clinical collaboration agreement with Merck to evaluate the combination of Seattle Genetics and Astellas PADCEV (enfortumab vedotin-ejfv) and Mercks KEYTRUDA (pembrolizumab), in patients with previously untreated metastatic urothelial cancer. KEYTRUDA is a registered trademark of Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp., a subsidiary of Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ, USA.

Seattle Genetics Forward Looking Statements

Certain statements made in this press release are forward looking, such as those, among others, relating to the development of PADCEV in combination with pembrolizumab as a first-line therapy for patients with advanced urothelial cancer who are unable to receive cisplatin-based chemotherapy, and the therapeutic potential of PADCEV including its efficacy, safety and therapeutic uses. Actual results or developments may differ materially from those projected or implied in these forward-looking statements. Factors that may cause such a difference include the possibility that ongoing and subsequent clinical trials may fail to establish sufficient efficacy, that adverse events or safety signals may occur and that adverse regulatory actions may occur. More information about the risks and uncertainties faced by Seattle Genetics is contained under the caption Risk Factors included in the companys Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Seattle Genetics disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

Astellas Cautionary Notes

In this press release, statements made with respect to current plans, estimates, strategies and beliefs and other statements that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements about the future performance of Astellas. These statements are based on managements current assumptions and beliefs in light of the information currently available to it and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties. A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to: (i) changes in general economic conditions and in laws and regulations, relating to pharmaceutical markets, (ii) currency exchange rate fluctuations, (iii) delays in new product launches, (iv) the inability of Astellas to market existing and new products effectively, (v) the inability of Astellas to continue to effectively research and develop products accepted by customers in highly competitive markets, and (vi) infringements of Astellas intellectual property rights by third parties.

Information about pharmaceutical products (including products currently in development), which is included in this press release is not intended to constitute an advertisement or medical advice.

____________________________1 American Cancer Society. Cancer Facts & Figures 2020. https://www.cancer.org/content/dam/cancer-org/research/cancer-facts-and-statistics/annual-cancer-facts-and-figures/2020/cancer-facts-and-figures-2020.pdf. Accessed 01-23-2020.2 American Society of Clinical Oncology. Bladder cancer: introduction (10-2017). https://www.cancer.net/cancer-types/bladder-cancer/introduction. Accessed 05-09-2019.3 International Agency for Research on Cancer. Cancer Tomorrow: Bladder. http://gco.iarc.fr/tomorrow 4 National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN). NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology: Bladder Cancer. Version 4; July 10, 2019. https://www.nccn.org/professionals/physician_gls/pdf/bladder.pdf.5 PADCEV [package insert]. Northbrook, IL: Astellas, Inc.6 Challita-Eid P, Satpayev D, Yang P, et al. Enfortumab Vedotin Antibody-Drug Conjugate Targeting Nectin-4 Is a Highly Potent Therapeutic Agent in Multiple Preclinical Cancer Models. Cancer Res 2016;76(10):3003-13.

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Seattle Genetics and Astellas Receive FDA Breakthrough Therapy Designation for PADCEV (enfortumab vedotin-ejfv) in Combination with Pembrolizumab in...

Ever since Charles Darwin began investigating the early evolution of humans, scientists have worked to understand just how far back our species goes, where man first lived, and how his DNA traveled out of Africa and into the world at large.

Ancient humanoids have been found in large portions of Africa, which led to scientific understandings of how man both on and off that continent evolved. What was less understood until recently is how man evolved in areas of Eurasia, and who ancient species bred with to create what researchers are calling a ghost species.

Modern Eurasian species have been easier for scientists to investigate because cold temperatures preserved DNA samples so much better than those in Africa, where hot temperatures caused DNA to deteriorate. That made learning about how man evolved within Africa a challenge to scientists.

Broken Hill Skull from Kabwe, Zambia of Homo rhodesiensis, renamed as Homo erectus, also sometimes named Homo heidelbergensis or archaic Homo sapiens. Photo by Gerbil CC by 3.0

But a study done in 2017 by more than a dozen scholars and published in Cell, an online scientific journal, shed new light on these matters that had challenged researchers for years. In the study, sample genomes were examined from people who lived in southern Africa 10,000 years ago. This revealed that the history of these populations is far more complicated than researchers once believed.

RESTORATION BY A. FORESTIER OF THE RHODESIAN MAN WHOSE SKULL WAS DISCOVERED IN 1921

The samples were taken from Cameroon, which has the earliest and best preserved archaeological site in Africa. Now, a new study confirms the theories put forth in the 2017 paper, and asserts that, in fact, humanoids from Africa left the continent, bred with Neanderthals, and returned to Africa at some point, thereby creating a whole new ghost species, as the new study refers to it.

Anatomical comparison of skulls of Homo sapiens (left) and Homo neanderthalensis (right)

The study, entitled Identifying and Interpreting Apparent Neanderthal Ancestry In African Individuals, was also published in the journal Cell. In the study, 16 sample genomes were examined from people who lived in South Africa during the past 10,000 years. This examination revealed that the history of these populations is far more complicated than once believed. When these folks left Africa about 100,000 years ago, there wasnt, in fact, just one kind of humanoid there.

Model of the head and shoulders of an adult male Homo heidelbergensis [H. rhodesiensis] on display in the Hall of Human Origins in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Photo by Tim Evanson CC by 2.0

The study goes on to examine gene flow into the ancient ancestors of modern South Africans, and concludes that there may be links between archaic hominims and present day Africans. In fact, research suggests as many as seven percent of present day Africans may have genomes from a population that scientists have yet to identify right now, it has no known genome, hence the term ghost population. Scientists theorize this group lived somewhere between 360,000 years ago and more than one million years ago, long before the gene flow started in West Africa, about 43,000 years ago.

The new research postulates that this ghost species of early humans resembled Neanderthals, and was in Africa about 100,000 years ago. Or, scientists suggest, the archaic species was present somewhere outside of Africa, but co-mingled by interbreeding, and then returned to Africa. This theory contravenes prior scientific research, that believed that there was simply one expansion out of Africa, and man developed and evolved from there.

The scientists behind the study, five authors, have stated conclusively that they believe more research needs to be done into the genetics of early humans, both within Africa and those species from outside the continent.

Related Article: Missing Link Skeletons Finally Deciphered Show New Path of Human Evolution

They assert that the DNA of modern and early humans must be studied further if we are to finally develop a full understanding of who we are, how we evolved, and our ancestors who once travelled both inside and outside Africa. Both studies are available for viewing online at: (https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext).

The rest is here:
Study Finds Early Humans Bred with Mysterious Extinct Species in Africa - The Vintage News

Sometimes I think there is this perception that you have to be really tough in order to be successful. I have worked with some women, that appeared to think that in order to compete with male counterparts, they have to have a hard exterior. I dont think thats true. I think you can still be yourself, even in a male-dominated field, and succeed in the industry.

I had the pleasure to interview Lesa Nelson. Lesa has worked in the field of human genetic research for the past 27 years, with the last 20+ years being in senior management positions. She directs all operational activities ofPredictive Laboratoriesand serves as the laboratory technical supervisor.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

Iwas a biology major, and as an undergraduate student, I started working in a molecular genetics lab where I worked on projects with physicians who wanted to look at the genetics of human disease. By doing this, I gained a desire to work in applied human genetics. I was interested in doing the research, but was also interested in how it applied to actual patients. I began working with Dr. Kenneth Ward, M.D., who is currently the laboratory director atPredictive Laboratories, and we established a clinical molecular genetics laboratory at the University of Utah. We conducted research and clinical testing for patients, and together we became more entrepreneurial, which led me to move away from the university and to start working in the private sector.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company?

The most interesting thing that Ive experienced since my start at Predictive Laboratories was having the opportunity to launch genetic tests aimed to help women with infertility and endometriosis. I have been working on this research for years, so seeing it all come to fruition with the official launch of our productsARTguideandFertilityDX, this past October, has been incredibly rewarding. ARTguide identifies genetic causes of female infertility, including the risk for endometriosis and FertilityDx will provide guidance to couples struggling with infertility by identifying genetics risks to conception, pregnancy and the newborn. It has been fascinating to work on a product that can be a full solution, by leveraging everything possible in todays genetic world, across the disciplines of reproductive endocrinology and even pediatrics. Overall, its just an exciting service we are able to offer those in need!

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

One of the funniest mistakes that I first made in my career actually had to do with the weather! I was supposed to meet someone on a Saturday at the laboratory, and we started a job on Friday that needed to be done by Sunday. There was a 20-inch snowstorm in Salt Lake City that Saturday and I was the only one who could walk to the lab. I had to complete the job, despite never doing the procedure before, on my own while receiving guidance from another technician over the phone, while also trying to learn at the same time. Looking back, I laugh at how you can plan for everything on paper, but the weather has a mind of its own.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

I think what makes Predictive Laboratories stand out is our belief in identifying a problem and applying what we know in terms of genetic diagnosis to then develop a solution with technology. I have been lucky enough to work on projects where there is an actual discovery, and we try to find ways to turn it into something that is practical and usable. I myself was an infertility patient and I know what its like to go through that process, so I am extremely empathetic with the patients that were trying to reach and help through our diagnostic tests.

There was a recent case where a couple was going through infertility problems, a niece of theirs had developmental delay and other issues, and naturally, they wanted to know if their prospective children would be at risk and the childs parents wanted to find out what was going on. We call these situations diagnostic odysseys. The child turned 1-year-old and still no one knew what was wrong. We checked the entire coding region of the childs genome and were able to identify the mutation that ultimately caused the symptoms. It turns out it was a rare disease that only 30 people in the world had ever been diagnosed with. While there is no treatment for the disease, we were able to tell the parents the reason why this was happening. This means a lot to families.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Right now, Im excited about our focus on FertilityDX and the service it will provide to help couples navigate everything from conception to the delivery of a healthy baby. Through this service, were also able to train physicians in using genetics, so we can teach them to have a more personal approach to helping each of their patients.

Were also in the middle of an exciting time where were able to leverage all of the genetic technology out there. I would really like to see us facilitating the transfer of that genetic knowledge to different specialists and making it comprehensive. We have the ability for personalized medicine, so we need to stop thinking about a population statistic and start thinking how we can leverage technology to diagnose each individual based on their genetics.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Lets now shift to the main focus of our interview. Are you currently satisfied with the status quo regarding women in STEM? What specific changes do you think are needed to change the status quo?

There are a lot of women in the STEM field, but you still see it kind of segregated by role. Ive noticed in my experience that most of the laboratory technicians end up being women, because the men wind up leaving for higher positions. I think it is almost historical, but I hope its changing.

A while ago, my colleagues and I interviewed third graders about what they wanted to be when they grew up. The boys who responded shared a wide variety of aspirations, while the girls mainly responded that they wanted to be teachers, actresses, nurses and moms, which are all admirable roles, but the responses did not range among the girls like they did with the boys.

I think that there is a lack of exposure to science at a young age, which is why I was involved in a local elementary school where we introduced a program to offer students the chance to do science experiments. I hope there are more and more programs that are introduced like this because I believe this is what will change the status quo. The University of Utah, for example, offers a program that takes high achieving college freshmen girls in science and provides them with a two year mentorship where they are placed in a laboratory. These women have the opportunity to spend their entire summer, prior to the start of their freshman year, exploring science with different people. I think things like this can also help get women in STEM leadership areas.

In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by women in STEM or Tech that arent typically faced by their male counterparts? What would you suggest to address this?

I think we are still in a society where one of the biggest challenges that women are facing is managing work and family life. It can be challenging to work and still have a family. I think there is more pressure on women to do both and do both well. I always felt lucky because even though I worked really hard, I still had the flexibility to make time for family. Flexibility in the workplace helps and it is much easier to work remotely in the modern day, thanks to technology. Hopefully this will eventually resolve some of those issues for women who are trying to balance both.

What are the myths that you would like to dispel about being a woman in STEM or Tech. Can you explain what you mean?

Sometimes I think there is this perception that you have to be really tough in order to be successful. I have worked with some women, that appeared to think that in order to compete with male counterparts, they have to have a hard exterior. I dont think thats true. I think you can still be yourself, even in a male-dominated field, and succeed in the industry.

What are your 5 Leadership Lessons I Learned From My Experience as a Woman in STEM or Tech and why. (Please share a story or example for each.)

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I am most grateful for the guidance by Dr. Ken Ward, who had worked with me almost from the start of my career in molecular genetics, as mentioned earlier. We first met when he was doing a fellowship and we immediately hit it off and worked well together.

Despite not having a doctorate of philosophy (Ph.D) like most of the other professionals in my industry, Ken was always willing to work with me. He always saw what I was capable of and there were never any limitations of what I could do in the laboratory.

I have been working with Ken for nearly 30 years, and I came from a laboratory where as a technician, you werent going to scientific conferences or rarely were an author on a paper. At a laboratory, I worked very hard on a project and my name wasnt on the paper because I did not have my Ph.D. Since working with Ken, not having a Ph.D has never held me back, and that is super important to me. He has let me do what I wanted to on both the research and clinical side. He was always super supportive of me becoming exactly what I wanted to be. I think we are on the same wavelength and it has made me feel confident in my career and role at Predictive Laboratories. Like Ken, I too just want people to succeed. I like hearing about peoples aspirations, and I try to pass that forward as well.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

It is mostly what I said earlier, but were bringing goodness to the world and to patients by taking our research and applying it to something that affects individuals. I do not care what it is you do in the laboratory, you can always be learning from it. The ability to take something and then apply it to change someones life has been the most satisfying part of my job. What makes my heart beat the fastest is when we figure something out or help somebody with genetic testing.

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

I would really love to see the healthcare system be able to provide more without being governed by cost. For example, rare diseases do not get looked at because they dont generate enough revenue and Medicare doesnt want to pay for something that would cost too much. I think we could offer so much more without financial barriers. I dont mean that companies and providers of services should not have a profit, but I feel like a lot of healthcare gets caught up in the dollars. Much of it isnt driven from a patient centric point, but from a monetary one.

Can you please give us your favorite Life Lesson Quote? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

I have two that I think sum up my approach to life.

One of them is that high achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation, which was said by Charles F. Kettering, and the other is from Steve Jobs when he said, technology is nothing, what is important is that you have faith in people, that they are basically good and smart, and if you give them the tools, they will do wonderful things.

These sentiments are applicable to everything whether that be STEM or life.

Read more:
It is a myth that you have to be really tough in order to be successful with Penny Bauder & Lesa Nelson - Thrive Global

In order to contain a virus, its important to know exactly what youre dealing with and the COVID-19 coronavirus is no different.

One of the key tools to try to contain or limit transmission of infectious diseases is case identification, saysSamira Mubareka, a virologist in the University of Torontos Faculty of Medicine and at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.

If you identify cases, then you can contain them. If you miss them, then you dont.

Mubareka and her colleagueRobert Kozak, both in U of Ts department of laboratory medicine and pathobiology, are part of a local working group of scientists who are researching the novel coronavirus outbreak and are developing a suite of tools to control it.

One of their current projects involves using the latest in whole-genome sequencing technology to help hospitals characterize the virus more quickly. Their work may help to track the viruss evolution and trace its spread.

If the viruss genome was a book, were going to figure out its entire story, Kozak says.

Mubareka and Kozak collected specimens of the coronavirus from the first confirmed case in Canada, an adult male who was treated and eventually discharged from Sunnybrook after returning from Wuhan, China the epicentre of the outbreak. Two more cases in Ontario have since been confirmed: the original patients wife, who accompanied him to China, and a woman in her 20s in London, Ont. who had also traveled to Wuhan.

Worldwide, there are more than 73,300 confirmed cases ofCOVID-19 as of Feb. 18. More than 1,800 have died.

Robert Kozak, pictured here in the lab, andSamira Mubareka say their teams work will enable front-line hospital staff to run a test on-site, helping to identify and triage patients more efficiently (photo by Nick Iwanyshyn)

In Canada, where there are so far seven confirmed cases, health authorities say the risk remains low. But Mubareka and Kozak are preparing for any possible scenario.

You put a smoke alarm in your house even if you hope theres no fire, says Kozak, who previously worked at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg on Ebola and Zika.

Part of the teams work involves developing a test that will speed up the characterization of the virus. Currently, patient samples in Ontario are sent from local hospitals by courier to the Public Health Ontario lab in downtown Toronto for testing, and to the national lab in Winnipeg for confirmation.

The process can take a few days, depending on the hospitals distance from the labs and test volumes.

Mubareka and Kozak say their teams work in collaboration with McMaster University and infectious disease expert Allison McGeer of U of Ts Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine and Mount Sinai Hospital will enable front-line hospital staff to run a test on-site, helping to identify and triage patients more efficiently. The test involves using swabs from a patients nose and throat to do genomic testing to sequence the virus.

If theyre negative, you can take them [the patients] out of precautions and maybe even send them home, Kozak says. If theyre positive, then you can again take the appropriate precautions to isolate them and do everything else that needs to be done.

The researchers hope they can adapt the approach for mini-sequencers the size of a cell phone, so it can be used more widely.

Vivek Goel,U of Ts vice-president, research and innovation, and strategic initiatives,says the university worked quickly to mobilize support for the project.

With its cross-disciplinary expertise and close relationships with area hospitals, the university recognizes that its uniquely positioned to play a leadership role when it comes to these sorts of global health issues, Goel says.

We also have the benefit of having experienced the SARS outbreak in Toronto in 2003, so we know first-hand how important this sort of research can be.

The genomic testing being performed by the U of T-led group could also help researchers get a fuller picture of the mysterious illness.

Although genomic sequences of the virus were published and shared in public databases, many were deposited soon after the first cases were identified in Chinas Hubei province, according to Mubareka.

The problem is that was early on before it started going from person to person-to-person, she says, noting that viruses mutate.

There are only about 50 sequenced genomes of the virus, adds Kozak for about 48,000 confirmed cases.

Youre not getting a great snapshot, he says. Its tough to really understand a lot about the virus.

Among the nagging questions about COVID-19 that U of T and Sunnybrook researchers hope to answer are how long patients remain contagious and if the amount of the virus present in respiratory secretions is proportional to its severity.

Their work may help others understand how the virus spreads from point A to point B, and if its changing in ways that make it more dangerous.

The research team includes U of T students likeNatalie Bell, a second-year masters student in laboratory medicine and pathobiology who is also working with Mubareka on a project related to influenza from swine.

Its really interesting to see science happen in real time, especially being part of Sams lab [and] to see her involvement and the movement from lab to policy work, and how it impacts public health, Bell says.

Mubareka and Kozak plan to upload the sequencing data to public servers and share it with the world to help with epidemiological studies and vaccine design.

We will build global capacity any way that we can, Kozak says.

Mubareka and Kozak say their work was made possible thanks in part to the McLaughlin Centre, which provided emergency funding for the project. We have no shortage of ideas of things we can do to hopefully make a difference, Kozak says, but you always need someone to provide the resources to do it.

Stephen Scherer, the director of the McLaughlin Centre at U of T and a University Professor in the department of molecular genetics, says the centre wanted to make sure the researchers had the necessary funds to do their work in time.

Nobody is busier right now than this group, so we wanted to make the process as easy as possible for them, Scherer says. We also wanted these researchers to know the rest of us value their efforts to keep us safe.

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U of T and Sunnybrook virologists work on tools to combat coronavirus outbreak - News@UofT

"I would take them to the clean lab and at my work station I would open them up and then I would use a swab to swab around the inside of the pots that contained the samples to recover the DNA," he said.

"Once I'd done that, I'd have an extraction tube ready and you cut the tip off the swab and put it in the extraction tube for processing."

Mr Talbot said he would have carried out the process twice, keeping AJM40 and AJM42 separatefrom AJM46 and AJM48 to prevent contamination.

"The whole point of the clean lab is to prevent contaminating your sample with extraneous DNA," he said.

"There are safety cabinets for working in so the airflow is designed to prevent contamination and the labs themselves have a positiveair pressure."

Mr Talbot then added a chemical solution to the tubes with the swabs inside and they underwent a heating and spinning process for the DNA to be extracted.

He noted that the first time he tried to extract the DNA, it failed, as some of the chemical solution - the phenol - he had added to the tubes appeared frozen or crystallised.

He then added more phenol to the samples from a new bottle and repeated the process, which successfully separated the DNA.

A further several stages of the extraction were then carried out, with Mr Talbot estimating it would have taken a "few hours" to get to the final extract.

Witnesses were present for the key stages of the extraction process, to peer review Mr Talbot's workings.

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Claremont killer trial LIVE: Court sits into night for UK witnesses to give evidence on breakthrough DNA moment - WAtoday

You might be familiar with a womens clinic that provides care and treatment specifically for womens health concerns such as pregnancy, menstrual concerns. Infertility issues and chronic disorders that involve womens reproductive health. Just like women, men also have their own medical issues and it is universal fact men and women have different medical issues concerning their reproductive health and related problems.

A typical mens clinic such as DBClinic in Singapore focuses on mens health especially on topics or health issues that most men arent comfortable to talk about. These include sexual health issues like testicular and penile concerns, fertility issues, screening and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and HIV infection, prostate problems and even disorders like hair loss in men.

If you and your partner have been trying to conceive but to no avail, then it is recommended that you (and your partner) undergo fertility screening to determine what causes infertility. A proper diagnosis from fertility screening will enable your doctor to devise an appropriate treatment and management plan to help you and your partner. Fertility screening is also useful for people who plan to conceive or get married to determine whether they are able to make children.

It cannot be denied that there is a stigma concerning STDs and HIV not only in Singapore but worldwide. This is why people who are affected by these infections are not very open to seeking treatment and proper diagnosis because of the fear of being exposed. A mens clinic in Singapore is a safe haven for people with STDs and HIV because they are treated with the utmost care and confidentiality.

Prostate cancer is one of the top cancers affecting men in Singapore and usually affects men at an older age (usually beyond 50). It can be manifested by urination problems, blood in urine and semen, pain during ejaculation and erection problems. Early detection of prostate cancer gives you a chance for seeking treatments as early as possible. Another type of prostate problem is called benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH) and characterized by an enlarged prostate. Hough this condition isnt cancerous, it can bring lots of negative effective effects to ones quality of life.

Medically called Androgenic Alopecia is a common occurrence in men. It can even occur in men in their early 20s and it is a condition that is influenced by genetics. Meaning, it can run in the genes. While male pattern hair loss is not a serious medical concern, it can be a serious cosmetic concern for men. Thinning hair can make you look older than you actually are and in severe cases, it can cause total baldness.

DB Clinic for Mens Health

DB Clinic is a mens health clinic in Singapore that provides expert and personalized treatments and guidance to men who are experiencing sensitive and personal medical issues. Men in general, arent really open to sharing very personal concerns because it is just part of their nature. And when dealing with personal health issues, it is good to have someone you can trust. Someone who can help you have effective treatments. The doctors at DB Clinic are trained to deal with mens health. They are experts in creating an environment where patients can freely and comfortably share their issues which ultimately, builds trust.

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Services and Treatments That You Can Receive at a Mens Clinic in Singapore - Chiang Rai Times

Dwarf woolly mammoths that lived on Siberia's Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago were plagued by genetic problems, carrying DNA that increased their risk of diabetes, developmental defects and low sperm count, a new study finds.

These mammoths couldn't even smell flowers, the researchers reported.

"I have never been to Wrangel Island, but I am told by people who have that in the springtime, it's just basically covered in flowers," study lead researcher Vincent Lynch, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University at Buffalo in New York, told Live Science. "[The mammoths] probably couldn't smell any of that."

Related: Mammoth resurrection: 11 hurdles to bringing back an ice age beast

Wrangel Island is a peculiarity. The vast majority of woolly mammoths died out at the end of the last ice age, about 10,500 years ago. But because of rising sea levels, a population of woolly mammoths became trapped on Wrangel Island and continued living there until their demise about 3,700 years ago. This population was so isolated and so small that it didn't have much genetic diversity, the researchers wrote in the new study.

Without genetic diversity, harmful genetic mutations likely accumulated as these woolly mammoths inbred, and this "may have contributed to their extinction," the researchers wrote in the study.

The team made the discovery by comparing the DNA of one Wrangel Island mammoth to that of three Asian elephants and two other woolly mammoths that lived in larger populations on the mainland.

"We were lucky in that someone had already sequenced the [Wrangel mammoth's] genome," Lynch said. "So, we just went to a database and downloaded it."

After comparing the mammoths' and elephants' genomes, the researchers found several genetic mutations that were unique to the Wrangel Island population. The team had a company synthesize these tweaked genes; then, the researchers popped those genes into elephant cells in petri dishes. These experiments allowed the researchers to analyze whether the proteins expressed by the Wrangel Island mammoth's genes carried out their duties correctly, by sending the right signals, for instance, in the elephant cells.

The team tested genes involved in neurological development, male fertility, insulin signaling and sense of smell. In a nutshell, the Wrangel Island mammoths were not very healthy, the researchers found, as none of those genes carried out their tasks correctly.

That said, the study looked at only one Wrangel Island mammoth, so it's possible that this individual's comrades didn't have similar genes. But "it's probably unlikely that it was just this one individual that had these defects," Lynch said.

In fact, the case of the Wrangel Island mammoths is a cautionary tale about what can happen to a population that is too small and therefore lacks genetic diversity, he said.

The findings build on those from a study published in 2017 in the journal PLOS Genetics that found that the Wrangel Island mammoth population was accumulating damaging mutations.

The new study was published online Feb. 7 in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution.

Originally published on Live Science.

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The last woolly mammoths on Earth had disastrous DNA - Livescience.com

Their nine lives may be running out but if a major project works, Scottish wildcats could eventually roam the nation once again, finds Sandra Dick

Somewhere between the polar bear, the Bactrian camel and the Japanese macaque, Felis silvestris, among the rarest of them all, is usually found hiding behind a cairn, up a tree or curled up in a ball, snoozing.

At noon most days, however, visitors to the Highland Wildlife Park at Kincraig near Aviemore will be treated to a fleeting glimpse of its bushy tail, mean green-yellow eyes and thick fur, as one of the nations most elusive creatures emerges to snatch a lump of meat for lunch before retreating to the shadows.

For most park visitors, that brief glimpse of the Scottish wildcats is at the top of their list of must-see attractions, possibly alongside Hamish the juvenile polar bear, a national treasure and the first cub born in the UK for 25 years, and the Amur tiger.

What they wont see, however, is a massive behind-the-scenes effort spanning the UK and Europe, and which its hoped will throw a lifeline to ensuring Scottish wildcats 70 times more endangered than the giant panda will not just be around for generations to come, but could eventually become established in locations right across Scotland.

Tucked out of sight on a patch of the Royal Zoological Society of Scotlands park which is out of bounds to visitors, a new wildcat reintroduction centre is about to become "ground zero" for the survival of a fragile species entwined in Scottish national identity but currently in a fierce catfight for its very survival.

A combination of cross-breeding with feral and domestic cats, habitat loss, road accidents, historic persecution and disease has all but wiped out the purest of Scotlands treasured wildcat population.

Left to their own devices, the tiny number with genes not already severely diluted from mating with outsiders, will dwindle, fade and disappear.

Hopes are now pinned on a 5.5 million scheme led by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) and, almost certainly, some amorous intervention from the species closest European cousins to help the Scottish wildcat get back on its feet.

By the end of this year, the first wildcats will be in settled in at the new reintroduction centre, 12 breeding pairs which assuming nature takes it course should produce enough healthy offspring to see 60 wildcats reintroduced to carefully picked spots in the Cairngorms over a three-year period.

Eventually its hoped they could be reintroduced elsewhere in Scotland raising the possibility of the creatures becoming commonplace across the country.

Although, according to David Barclay, cat conservation project officer with the RZSS who currently oversees the 107 wildcats in the UK-wide breeding programme, the first challenge is to save the handful of remaining Scottish wildcats from extinction.

Theres perhaps a very small number of wildcats left in Scotland, he admits. And we have a lot of evidence that says the population is non-viable.

Without putting more wildcats back, they will almost certainly go extinct in the next few years.

Wildcats are in that short list of animals that are iconic species for Scotland, such as the golden eagle and the red squirrel, he adds.

For Scotland not to have wildcats would be a very sad day.

At Kincraig, a recent 3.2million EU LIFE grant added to funding from the Garfield Weston Foundation, the National Trust for Scotland, the Peoples Trust for Endangered Species and the European Nature Trust, has enabled work to start on building the new centre.

A recruitment drive is now under way to find 16 staff while plans are being drawn up for a major campaign to encourage domestic cat owners to neuter their pets to avoid the main threat to wildcats future, hybridisation.

Feral or domestic cats that enter the wildcat reserve will be trapped, neutered, vaccinated and released.

Most of the 12 breeding pairs are expected to be sourced mainly from the UK-wide wildcat breeding programme but some are likely to make the journey from Europe, in particular Spain, where wildcats have been found to share physical similarities to their Scottish relations, and populations are more stable.

It may sound like a further erosion of the Scottish wildcats precious gene pool, however Mr Barclay insists the European presence will strengthen, not weaken, the wildcats chances of survival.

The European wildcats will improve the gene pool, he states. The cat we have is a European wildcat, its just a different population thats more critically endangered.

If we have to bring some cats from Europe and it would be a relatively small number we would want to bring them from a population where we feel that there are similarities with Scottish cat.

And Spanish wildcats look very similar to Scottish wildcats.

If you bring wildcats from Europe, you are bringing new genetic material which gives Scottish wildcats a boost in terms of the gene pool.

The fight to save Scotlands wildcats has already crossed international boundaries: as well as working with Scottish Natural Heritage, the Cairngorms National Park Authority and Forestry and Land Scotland, the RSZZ Saving Wildcats project the only official wildcats project in the country is partnered with Swedish wildlife park Nordens Ark, and Spains Junta De Andaluca, which led the successful recovery of the Iberian lynx.

It has been boosted by the arrival of two potential "Adam and Eve" wildcats: male and female, both accidentally trapped, both found to have surprisingly strong wildcat genes.

While the male is now at an English zoo where its hoped nature will soon play its part in boosting wildcat numbers, the female, Lossie, has already produced five kittens from two litters.

Last year, one of her offspring, Katrine, delivered her first litter four kittens, each carrying on its tiny shoulders the future of a species which has roamed Scotlands hills since the Ice Age.

For next few years its about getting all the right tools in one place so we can create a viable, sustainable population of wildcats in one location, adds Mr Barclay.

Once we have been through that process and know that the reintroduction technology works, then we can replicate that across Scotland.

The crucial element is controlling the threat: we cant release them until the threat is removed, and one of the biggest threats in hybrid and domestic cats.

The reintroduction of wildcats would follow in the wake of the reintroduction of sea eagles, water voles and beavers to the wild each native to Scotland but brought to extinction through hunting and loss of habitat.

The wildcats return could also pave the way for other animals including lynx and wolves. Campaign group Rewilding Britain has also suggested the reintroduction of long-gone species including the dalmatian pelican, bison, boar and moose.

Worryingly, however, are further signs that Scottish wildcats and in some cases their European cousins are hanging by the thinnest of threads.

Last month an international genetic study of wildcats in 13 European countries published in the journal Conservation Genetics warned it had failed to identify a single pure wildcat in Scotland.

Across Europe, wildcat numbers were also found to be affected by hybridisation, with the first example of a hybrid cat in the Eastern Alps of Austria.

In Scotland, we found exclusively hybrids of different classes, indicating hybridisation has been occurring for several generations, it states. All samples from Scotland were identified as hybrids supporting previous findings that the genetic integrity of that wildcat population has been seriously compromised.

It also presented a dire warning for the future of the species.

Frequent hybridisation with the domestic cat may regionally threaten the genetic integrity of the European wildcat, as documented by the example of the wildcat in Scotland, it adds, potentially leading even to the genetic extinction of local populations.

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Meet the kittens with the future of a species on their shoulders - HeraldScotland

The mechanism that controls the switch to meiosis has been a topic of scientific investigation for some time, and this breakthrough offers a unique look at a gene trigger that only sometimes becomes active. An important issue for reproductive medicine, researchers are excited for what this discovery could mean.

Knowledge of this process and the gene will be useful in providing a potential answer, but more answers could also mean more treatment options for people struggling with infertility.

"If it eventually becomes possible to control meiosis," said Ishiguro, "the benefits would be far-reaching for reproductive medicine, agricultural production, and even assisting rare species reproduction."

This research is still in early stages, with the announcement of the genetic discovery only being published this week. But it does provide a starting point for a whole new area of research in reproductive medicine going forward, that could result in even more new breakthroughs. Further studies will need to investigate the process of Meiosin in human subjects.

While we may not see this breakthrough being used in medicine anytime soon, it's exciting to know that it may help people in the future. If you're hoping to start a family and are worried about fertility, there's plenty of expert advice for boosting fertility that can be easily adopted.

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Researchers May Have Found A Genetic Cause Of Infertility - mindbodygreen.com

Some of the first biological evidence of the incongruence transgender individuals experience, because their brain indicates they are one sex and their body another, may have been found in estrogen receptor pathways in the brain of 30 transgender individuals.

Twenty-one variants in 19 genes have been found in estrogen signaling pathways of the brain critical to establishing whether the brain is masculine or feminine, saysDr. J. Graham Theisen, obstetrician/gynecologist and National Institutes of Health Womens Reproductive Health Research Scholar at theMedical College of GeorgiaatAugusta University.

Basically and perhaps counterintuitively these genes are primarily involved in estrogens critical sprinkling of the brain right before or after birth, which is essential to masculinization of the brain.

Variants investigators identified may mean that in natal males (people whose birth sex is male) this critical estrogen exposure doesnt happen or the pathway is altered so the brain does not get masculinized. In natal females, it may mean that estrogen exposure happens when it normally wouldnt, leading to masculinization.

Both could result in an incongruence between a persons internal gender and their external sex. The negative emotional experience associated with this incongruence is called gender dysphoria.

They are experiencing dysphoria because the gender they feel on the inside does not match their external sex, Theisen says. Once someone has a male or female brain, they have it and you are not going to change it. The goal of treatments like hormone therapy and surgery is to help their body more closely match where their brain already is.

It doesnt matter which sex organs you have, its whether estrogen, or androgen, which is converted to estrogen in the brain, masculinizes the brain during this critical period, saysDr. Lawrence C. Layman, chief of the MCG Section of Reproductive Endocrinology, Infertility and Genetics in theDepartment of Obstetrics and Gynecology. We have found variants in genes that are important in some of these different areas of the brain.

These brain pathways are involved in regions of the brain where the number of neurons and how connected the neurons are typically differ between males and females.

They note that while this critical period for masculinizing the brain may seem late, brain development actually continues well after birth and these key pathways and receptors already need to be established when estrogen arrives.

While its too early to definitively say the gene variants in these pathways result in the brain-body incongruence called gender dysphoria, it is interesting that they are in pathways of hormone involvement in the brain and whether it gets exposed to estrogen or not, says Layman.

He and Theisen are co-corresponding authors of the study in the journalScientific Reports.

This is the first study to lay out this framework of sex-specific development as a means to better understand gender identity, Theisen says. We are saying that looking into these pathways is the approach we are going to be taking in the years ahead to explore the genetic contribution to gender dysphoria in humans.

In fact, they already are exploring the pathways further and in a larger number of transgender individuals.

For this study, they looked at the DNA of 13 transgender males, individuals born female and transitioning

to male, and 17 transgender females, born male and transitioning to female. The extensive whole exome analysis, which sequences all the protein-coding regions of a gene (protein expression determines gene and cell function) was performed at the Yale Center for Genome Analysis. The analysis was confirmed by Sanger sequencing, another method used for detecting gene variants.

The variants they found were not present in a group of 88 control exome studies in nontransgender individuals also done at Yale. They also were rare or absent in large control DNA databases.

Reproductive endocrinologist/geneticist Layman says his experience with taking care of transgender patients for about 20 years, made him think there was a biological basis. We certainly think that for the majority of people who are experiencing gender dysphoria there is a biologic component, says Theisen. We want to understand what the genetic component of gender identity is.

While genetics have been suggested as a factor in gender dysphoria, proposed candidate genes to date have not been verified, the investigators say. Most gene or gene variants previously explored have been associated with receptors for androgens, hormones more traditionally thought to play a role in male traits but, like estrogen in males, also are present in females.

MCG investigators and their colleagues decided instead to take what little is known about sex-specific brain development that estrogen bath needed in early life to ensure masculinization of the brain to hone in on potential sites for relevant genetic variances. Extensive DNA testing initially revealed more than 120,000 variants, 21 of which were associated with these estrogen-associated pathways in the brain.

Animal studies have helped identify four areas of the brain with pathways leading to development of a male or female brain, and the investigators focused on those likely also present in humans. Laboratory studies have indicated that disrupting these brain pathways in males and females during this critical period results in cross sex behavior, like female rodents mounting and thrusting and males taking on a more traditional female posture when mating. These cross sex behaviors, which also have been documented in non-human primates, emerge during the natural sex hormone surge of puberty.

While sex specific brain development has not been thoroughly evaluated in humans, as with animals, the effects typically play out most at the time of puberty, a time when sex hormones naturally surge, when the general awareness of our sexuality really begins to awaken and when the complex state of gender dysphoria may become easier for adolescents to articulate, the investigators say. Layman notes that many individuals will report experiencing gender incongruent feelings as early as age 5.

Theisen notes that we all are full of genetic variants, including ones that give us blue eyes versus brown or green, and the majority do not cause disease rather help make us individuals. I think gender is as unique and as varied as every other trait that we have, Theisen says.

The investigators suggest modification of the current system for classifying variants that would not imply that a variant means pathogenic, or disease causing.

Last year, the World Health Organization said that genderincongruenceis not a mental health disorder and six years before thatThe Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, replaced gender identity disorder with general dysphoria.

About 0.5 to 1.4% of individuals born male and 0.2 to 0.3 % of individuals born female meet criteria for gender dysphoria. Identical twins are more likely than fraternal twins to both report gender dysphoria.

Gender affirming therapies, like hormone therapies and surgeries along with mental health evaluation and support, help these individuals better align their bodies and brains, the physician-scientists say.

Transgender individuals experience increased rates of discrimination, sexual violence and are at increased risk of depression, substance abuse and attempted suicide. About 26% report use of alcohol or other drugs to help cope; 19% have been denied medical care by a physician or other provider, some report verbal harassment in a medical environment and insurance companies do not consistently cover the cost of gender affirming hormone or surgical therapies.

A problem, the investigators say, is an overall lack of understanding of the biologic basis of gender dysphoria.

While their study of 30 individuals they now have data on more than 30 others appears to be the largest to date, the sample size prompted them to classify the published findings as preliminary.

Reference: Theisen et al. (2019).The Use of Whole Exome Sequencing in a Cohort of Transgender Individuals to Identify Rare Genetic Variants. Scientific Reports.DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-53500-y.

This article has been republished from the following materials. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

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Genetic Variants Linked to Disparity Between a Persons Internal Gender and Their External Sex - Technology Networks

Adapted from the cover of Human Diversity(Twelve)Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, by Charles Murray (Twelve, 528 pp., $35)

The dumb kids at Middlebury College had no idea what they were setting in motion when they stopped Charles Murray from speaking. At an instantly infamous 2017 lecture, students shouted down his speech, waited through a livestreamed discussion between him and a faculty member given from a private location, and swarmed him after the event, injuring the faculty member.

Murray, you see, had been thinking about swimming back toward the fraught waters he and the late Richard Herrnstein had explored in 1994s The Bell Curve notions that traits such as intelligence are hugely important in determining who gets ahead in modern societies, and that gaps on those traits among social groups, including racial groups, could be partly genetic in origin. His wife had been telling him not to.

Confound it! he recalls her saying after the Middlebury affair (. . . or two syllables to that effect). If theyre going to do this kind of thing anyway, go ahead and write it. And now, three years later, we have Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class.

This isnt an intemperate screed meant to trigger oversensitive 19-year-olds, however. Instead, its a patient and generally cautious explanation of where the science stands in the three highly contentious areas mentioned in the subtitle: the biological underpinnings of sex differences, social-class differences, and racial differences.

Those whove been following developments in these areas will find little thats surprising. But those new to the topics will learn a lot, so long as they understand basic statistical concepts well enough to follow Murrays often-a-bit-technical prose. Murray provides some of his own entry-level instruction, but its a little scattershot in terms of what concepts get an explanation in the text, which definitions are relegated to an appendix, and what terms the reader is simply expected to know.

Murray begins with sex differences because theyre the most obvious and hard to deny, so Ill do the same. Men and women have measurably different abilities, preferences, and behaviors; many of those differences do not seem to be shrinking in societies that strive for gender egalitarianism; and new research is establishing some connections between the sexes behaviors and their brains.

Theres a long list of sex differences that researchers have found repeatedly, and they go well beyond physical size. Men are more likely to have autism, women depression. Women are more concerned with the well-being of others; men are more assertive. Men have stronger visuospatial skills, women better verbal ability. Men tend to have higher variation in ability; for example, the sexes have the same average IQ, but men are overrepresented among people with very high or very low IQs. Men and women also have markedly different interests, especially in that men are more likely to prefer working with things, women with people.

These gaps are no doubt at least partly due to socialization and culture, but at least some almost certainly have a biological component. One way of seeing this is to look at what happens when societies adopt stronger norms in favor of gender equity: Do the gaps shrink, as would be expected if socially enforced gender norms caused the gaps to begin with?

Sometimes, sometimes not. Murray goes through a long list of different trends. Male overrepresentation among high scorers on the math portion of the SAT, for example, has shrunk steadily for decades. Womens movement into jobs that involve working with things rather than people, though, happened speedily in the 1970s and 1980s and stopped thereafter, with women still underrepresented in things jobs. (This Murray shows through a fascinating original analysis of federal job classifications and survey data.) Meanwhile, the most gender-egalitarian countries actually have bigger gaps in certain outcomes, such as the share of women who score highly in STEM (science, tech, engineering, and math) tests but choose not to go into those fields. Some theorize that living in an advanced country allows talented women to do what they want rather than what pays most. Another important fact is that women who score highly in STEM tend to have better language skills, and thus more non-STEM job options, than do men who score highly in STEM.

Theres also a growing body of research that looks directly at the effects of male and female hormones and differences in the brains of men and women. Changes in hormone levels tend to exaggerate or reduce sex differences in exactly the direction youd expect people injected with testosterone become more impulsive; prenatal exposure to testosterone predicts a childs future visuospatial ability, autism risk, empathy, and interest in children. As for brains, women have stronger functional connectivity in regions involved in emotion processing and social cognition, and there are sex differences in the sizes of numerous brain regions as well.

Murrays discussion of class differences, meanwhile, relies heavily on a much older body of evidence: the research of behavioral genetics, especially twin studies. Over a period of decades this work has shown that genes are incredibly powerful, though hardly all-powerful, in shaping how a person turns out within a given society whether its his personality, health, intelligence, or education while the shared environment, which is to say the effect of being raised in the same home (with the same income, neighborhood, parenting philosophy, etc.), is generally weak. Newer methods, involving the DNA sequencing of thousands of subjects, actually pinpoint some of the specific genes that affect important traits, and these methods can even be used to generate a polygenic score that predicts from DNA (very imprecisely, but far better than chance) how strongly a person will exhibit a trait.

The clear role of genes in life outcomes, coupled with a weak role for the home environment, implies that social class is not just a matter of privilege and oppression and public policy, and not just a matter of personal responsibility and effort, but also heavily a function of natural abilities. This is not exactly a shocking conclusion, though it does challenge some of the more extreme narratives put forth by both Left and Right.

One criticism Ill make of Murray here, though, is that in noting the limits of public policy he could have dealt more thoroughly with various strains of research showing that environments do matter, sometimes a lot, including Raj Chettys work on how neighborhoods affect social mobility and Susan Dynarskis recent study showing that something as simple as promising financial aid up front, rather than later in the process, can make poor kids much more likely to go to a top-tier college. Educational attainment, by the way, is an important trait that is affected by the shared environment quite a bit: 25 percent in a table presented here, though its also 50 percent genetic.

Lastly, theres race the topic that attracted nearly all of the controversy associated with The Bell Curve despite taking up only a minority of its pages. Interestingly, Murray is more circumspect now than he was in that tome a quarter century ago, when he and Herrnstein wrote that it was highly likely that part of the gap between blacks and whites IQ scores was genetic. Here he is more interested in debunking the notion that race is nothing more than a social construct that has nothing to do with genes at all.

Even on that front hes pretty timid. Indeed, he begins by agreeing to dispense with the word race when talking about genetics, because the word carries so much baggage and the professional geneticists have mostly abandoned it. Instead he goes with population, while noting that the ancestral populations that geneticists distinguish from one another overlap heavily with commonly used racial categories.

Yes, these groups can be identified using nothing but DNA, and yes, there are some important genetic differences among populations: Some less controversial ones affect skin color, malaria resistance, and adaptations for living at high altitudes. In other words, humans have continued to evolve in lots of ways since they spread out across the globe, and different changes have taken hold in different environments. But what about hot-button psychological characteristics such as intelligence?

Youd think wed be getting close to answering that question by now. Recall that weve actually identified a lot of genes that affect these traits, and even developed scoring systems that roughly predict from someones DNA how hell turn out. One imagines you could just apply these techniques to the average DNA profile of each racial group excuse me, population and get a simple answer, albeit a tentative one that would become more precise as methods improved and additional influential genes were discovered.

But its not that easy. For a variety of technical reasons, you cant apply a single scoring system across multiple populations, at least with current methods. Murray notes that the genetic variants weve singled out as playing a role in assorted traits often show up more frequently in some populations than others a point he makes more painstakingly than he probably needs to, with a series of scatterplots and tabulations but he admits these gaps are only grist for future, more sophisticated research. His bottom line is not much different from the point made by the prominent Harvard geneticist David Reich in a 2018 New York Times piece: Human populations differ at the genetic level, and we have to prepare for the possibility that these genetic differences substantively affect traits wed rather they didnt, but we dont know the specifics yet.

In 1994, Herrnstein and Murray lit the world on fire with a book that made highly controversial claims about IQ, class, and race. Human Diversitys publicists no doubt hope for a repeat performance; I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement to see the text before the release date. But the result is actually, as Murray himself promises early on, pretty boring for those already familiar with the topics it covers. What it is, is an excellent primer for the uninitiated at least for a few years, by which point new science will likely have superseded much of the research discussed here.

Hopefully the Middlebury kids and their ilk will bother to read it before denouncing it.

This article appears as The Power of Genes in the February 24, 2020, print edition of National Review.

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'Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class' Book Review - National Review

Following is a transcript of the video.

Graham Flanagan: Look at that beautiful bald man. He's oozing swagger and confidence. He owns it. But it wasn't always like this. This is Rob. He's 33. This is also Rob. He started to lose his hair when he was about 20. So, what happened? Why did Rob go bald, and what does it mean? There's something about being bald and owning it. I mean, look at all these bald icons. Michael Jordan, Jason Statham, his sidekick, The Rock. But losing your hair is not something you aspire to.

Commercial: If you're concerned about your thinning hair, call Hair Club for Men and receive our free brochure.

Flanagan: In fact, there's an entire industry built around fighting it.

Man: And remember: I'm not only the Hair Club president, but I'm also a client.

Flanagan: I asked a dermatologist about why some men lose their hair and if going bald is my destiny as well.

Jennifer Chwalek: So, when we say "baldness," we're usually referring to male-pattern baldness, or androgenetic alopecia. The hair follicle is slowly, over time, becoming smaller and smaller, to the point when it stops producing a full hair. Testosterone is becoming converted to dihydrotestosterone in the hair follicle by an enzyme called 5-alpha-reductase, and when it attaches to the androgen receptor in the hair follicle, it causes the follicle to produce a smaller hair.

Flanagan: So, I want to show you my friend Rob here. Rob started losing his hair in his early 20s, and, as you can see, there's little to...well, there's none left. So what is going on with Rob?

Chwalek: Well, Rob has what we call androgenetic alopecia, or male-pattern baldness. This is due to several genes. And some of the genes are early expressing, and some susceptible individuals, they start to lose their hair very young, usually by age 30.

Flanagan: The fact that Rob is bald, does that make him any less virile?

Chwalek: No. So, it's a myth that hair loss or balding is associated with virility in men. Men who go bald don't have abnormal levels of testosterone. It's really that the hair follicle becomes sensitized to the effects of testosterone or androgens, and it starts to create a smaller hair, and eventually it stops producing hair.

Flanagan: So, what role do genetics play, and is it true that baldness is inherited from your mom's side?

Chwalek: The genetics of male-pattern thinning and baldness is complicated. We know that the androgen receptor gene is on the X chromosome, which is inherited from your maternal side, typically. So, there are some studies showing that having a brother who expresses male-pattern baldness might be more predictive than if your father has male-pattern thinning.

Flanagan: Let's talk about me.

Chwalek: Mm-hmm.

Flanagan: I'm 37. I've still got some hair.

Chwalek: Yeah.

Flanagan: But can you tell me what's going on? Am I gonna go bald?

Chwalek: Well, do you have a family history of any thinning?

Flanagan: Yes, I do, on my dad's side. My dad, pretty much bald, his brother is bald. I have a brother who has a very thick head of hair.

Chwalek: Do you think your hair has been thinning?

Flanagan: I think it might be, like, in the front a little bit. I don't really know what's going up top there.

Chwalek: Yeah, maybe a little.

Flanagan: Really?

Chwalek: Maybe a little. So, androgenetic alopecia is actually not an uncommon trait. About 40% of the population has some degree of thinning, usually between the ages of, like, 20 to 40.

Flanagan: My wife, Janet, she really likes my blond hair, and if it were to go, that could be a problem. So, how long do you think I've got to keep some semblance of this?

Chwalek: I think you probably have a while to go. I think you're gonna be OK. The men who tend to go bald-bald tend to do so by age 30, usually.

Flanagan: Based on what you see, my age, what I've described about my family, you don't expect my hair to just fall out in the next, like, five years?

Chwalek: No, it would be unusual, but you may notice, you know, as you get a little bit older, it may continue to thin slightly.

Flanagan: OK, that's a relief. Fantastic. That's great!

Excerpt from:
The reason some men go bald, according to a dermatologist - Business Insider - Business Insider

Following is a transcript of this movie.

Graham Flanagan: Look at this gorgeous bald guy. He has oozing swagger and confidence. He possesses it. Nevertheless, it was not always like this. That is Rob. He is 33. This can also be Rob. He began to lose his hair when he was going 20. So, what happened? Why did Rob go hairless, and what exactly does it mean? There is something about being owning it. I mean, look at these bald icons. Michael Jordan, Jason Statham, his sidekick, The Rock. However losing your hair isnt something you aspire to.

Commercial: In case you are worried about your thinning hair, telephone Hair Club for Men and get our free brochure.

Flanagan: In actuality, there is an whole industry built around battling it.

Person: And remember: I am not the Hair Club president, however I am also a customer.

Flanagan: I requested a dermatologist about why some men lose their hair and when moving bald is my fate too.

Jennifer Chwalek: Therefore, once we sayhair thinning, we are generally referring to male-pattern baldness, or androgenetic alopecia. The hair follicle is gradually, with time, getting smaller and smaller, to this stage when it ceases producing a complete hair. Testosterone has turned into to dihydrotestosterone in the hair follicle via an enzyme known as 5-alpha-reductase, and once it attaches to the androgen receptor from the hair follicle, it causes the follicle to create a more compact hair.

Flanagan: Therefore, I wish to reveal my buddy Rob here. Rob began losing his hair in his ancient 20s, and, as you may see, there is little . . .well, there is none left. So whats happening with Rob?

Chwalek: Well, Rob has that which we call androgenetic alopecia, or male-pattern hair loss. This can be due to many genes. And a few of the genes have been ancient expressing, and a few vulnerable people, they begin to lose their own hair really young, typically by era 30.

Flanagan: The very fact that Rob is hairless, does this make him less virile?

Chwalek: No. Thus, it is a fantasy that hair balding or loss is connected with virility in men. Men who go bald do not have abnormal levels of testosterone. It is really the hair follicle becomes more sensitized to the effects of testosterone or androgens, and it begins to make a more compact hair, and finally it stops generating hair.

Flanagan: So, what part do genetics play, and can it be accurate that hair loss is inherited from the mothers side?

Chwalek: The genetics of male-pattern thinning and hair loss is complex. We are aware that the androgen receptor gene is on the X chromosome, which is inherited from the maternal side, generally. So, there are a number of studies showing that with a brother that expresses male-pattern baldness may be more predictive than if your dad has male-pattern thinning.

Flanagan: Lets talk about me.

Chwalek: Mm-hmm.

Flanagan: I am 37. I have still got a few hair.

Chwalek: Yeah.

Flanagan: But can you tell me what is happening? Am I gonna go bald?

Chwalek: Well, have you got a family history of any thinning?

Flanagan: Yes, I really do, in my fathers side. My father, pretty much bald, and his brother is hairless. Ive a brother with quite a thick head of hair.

Chwalek: Can you believe that your hair was thinning?

Flanagan: I think that it could be, for example, at front just a little bit. I do not know what is going up .

Chwalek: Yeah, perhaps just a bit.

Flanagan: Really?

Chwalek: Perhaps a bit. Thus, androgenetic alopecia is really not an unusual trait. Approximately 40percent of the populace has some level of thinning, normally between the ages of, for example, 20 to 40.

Flanagan: My wife, Janet, she actually likes my blonde hair, and if it were to proceed, that might be an issue. So, how long do you believe I have to maintain some semblance of the?

Chwalek: I believe you most likely have some time to go. I believe you are gont be OK. The guys who are inclined to go bald-bald often do this by era 30, generally.

Flanagan: According to what you see, my era, what I have described about my loved ones, you do not expect my hair to simply fall out at another, for example, five decades?

Chwalek: It would be odd, but you could notice, you understand, as you get a little bit old, it might continue to lean slightly.

Flanagan: OK, that is a relief. Excellent. That is fantastic!

See original here:
The reason some guys go hairless, as reported by a dermatologist - BingePost

If you look up the word "chin" in the encyclopedia, you will read about Kirk Douglas. This isn't an exaggeration or a figure of speech: Douglas is literally named as an example of someone with a chin in the Oxford University Press entry for the mandibular arch.

It makes sense: there have been few chins in human history as noteworthy as Douglas'. When the actor died at the extraordinary age of 103 on Wednesday, obituaries seemed to mourn the loss of his dimple as much as his talent. "That famously dimpled chin, which you'd never believe on a statue, nonetheless gave the Hollywood icon a granite jaw that served him well as a leading man for more than 60 years," wrote Vanity Fair. "When you hear his name, so crisp and ramrod strong (Kirk!), you think, at first, of how he looked: the jutting chin with a dimple that made it unlike all other jutting chins," gushed Variety. The Los Angeles Times chose to describe the actor as a "dimple-chinned screen icon who was known for bringing an explosive, clenched-jawed intensity to a memorable array of heroes and heels."

Embed from Getty Images

Of course chins, being at the lower center of our faces, have an outsized effect on perceived attractiveness, for better or worse. Curiously, humans are actually the only animal that have jutting lower jaws; "even chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest genetic cousins, lack chins," writes The Smithsonian, noting that the great apes' jaws slope down and back from their teeth instead of protruding forward. While researchers aren't sure why exactly humans have chins in the first place even Neanderthals didn't have them one hypothesis is that they were possibly a sexually selective feature that factored unconsciously into our choice of mates. These days, though, it's not so unconscious: Vulture has ranked Batmans by their chins, and BuzzFeed once ran a list of the Most Important Jawlines of 2014.

Despite being best known for portraying a rakish Spartacus in Stanley Kubrick's 1960 epic of the same name, Douglas' bullseye on his jaw wouldn't have been considered attractive 2,000-odd years ago. "In images whose beauties were of a lofty cast, the Greek artists never allowed a dimple to break the uniformity of the chin's surface," claimed Johann Joachim Winckelmann in The History of Ancient Art Among the Greeks in 1764, adding that "when, in drawings made from them, the lower part of [the chin] seems, as it were, to be pinched in ... it may justly be suspected that some modern ignorant hand has been attempting to improve upon them." In other words, dimples like Douglas', while left up to the mercy of genetics, have come and gone in popularity; the screen actor just happened to be born at the right time for his maximalist jawline to be in fashion.

Story continues

Even by the standards of the time, though, when masculine icons from Batman to Clark Gable boasted clefts, Douglas was an extreme. "When I made my first picture [The Strange Love of Martha Ivers in 1946] with Barbara Stanwyck, the director wanted me to fill it in and I said 'listen, this is what you get.' I didn't cave," Douglas told The Telegraph in 2016. It was a decision that would have a lasting impact; as Douglas began to collect more on-screen roles, directors and agents realized they could use his dimple to their advantage, alternating between emphasizing it as a trait of a classical (if anachronistic) hero, or to accentuate the look of a tougher sort, like his character in Champion. As the Financial Times put it, regardless of if he was playing a good guy or a bad guy, "the Kirk jaw was made for clenching."

Embed from Getty Images

It was also made for exaggerating. Artists leaned into depicting Douglas' distinctive jaw, but the actor never minded; in addition to the customary hand and foot prints outside the TCL Chinese Theater in Hollywood, he jokingly left behind an imprint of his chin as well. The body part was also a favorite topic of conversation in interviews: "It's not really a dimple, it's a hole in the chin," a bearded Douglas once told Dick Cavett, who quipped in response, "well I know if we could see it, it'd be the most cleavage we've had on the show in a long time." Seemingly everyone had questions about how he navigated shaving the thing. Later, when Douglas' grandson, Dylan, was born in 2000, The New York Post announced "NEWBORN HAS THE DOUGLAS DIMPLE" with the same drama as Rafiki holding up Simba to the savannah. Subsequent male actors with head-turning chins rode on the coattails of his success, from John Travolta to Simon Cowell. Nevertheless, on the occasion of Douglas' 100th birthday in 2016, The New Yorker declared that "the cleft in the Douglas chin is, with the exception of the Grand Canyon, the most popular natural rift in America."

Embed from Getty Images

But physical trends come and go; just as Douglas' passing marks the loss of one of the last remaining legends of the Golden Age of Hollywood, so too do we lose one of the great chins of history. These days, plastic surgery websites advertise procedures to smooth out one's jawline: "Although chins with a dimple were once more popular, these have largely gone out of fashion, and some patients have preferred to have their dimple reduced, often with the use of fillers," cosmetic surgeon Dr. Julian De Silva told The Daily Mail in 2017.

Douglas, though, was nothing if not a titan of the industry, and he didn't make over 90 movies, many of them masterpieces of classic Hollywood cinema, by relying on his facial structure alone. To quote Angelo Dundee, a boxing instructor who coached Muhammad Ali, "You can't train a chin." The mandible, just like stardom, is elusive, innate, impossible to capture with words. You either have it or you don't.

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Kirk Douglas was the best thing to ever happen to chins - Yahoo News

At dusk on January 24th I was walking along the side of the road. There was a lull in traffic and it was wonderfully quiet. Immersed in my own thoughts, this metallic buzzing chirp somehow entered my head.

At dusk on January 24th I was walking along the side of the road. There was a lull in traffic and it was wonderfully quiet. Immersed in my own thoughts, this metallic buzzing chirp somehow entered my head. It came from the open overgrown pasture behind trees. I paused and counted up to fifteen weird chirps before they ended. A minute or two later I heard a faint twittering chip chip whistling sound from high above descending to earth. Seconds later the whistling stopped. At ground level from the hidden field came subdued but excited bird talk. It quickly hushed.

I had just heard, not seen, the sky dance of the woodcock. The male puts on a spectacular courtship display to impress his lady. This guy tried to first catch her attention by issuing piercing peents, launched high into the sky before circling down chirping as wind whistled through his flight feathers, then apparently landed near her and had tried to strike up a conversation. Whats a timberdoodle like you doing in a place like this? He started to repeat the entire process again, but four widely spaced trucks drove past as darkness settled. By the time the noise had ceased, it was dark and still.

The woodcock (Scolopax minor) goes by many curious names: timberdoodle, big-eye, mudbat, bogsucker and night partridge. It is a shore bird that has come inland to live, like the Killdeer. The bird, about the size of a robin, is disguised in russets, browns and blacksnatural camouflage. These hardy birds have long thin bills since they like to slurp down earthworms. Woodcocks are part of the natural food chain, they themselves eaten by hawks, owls and other predators. Unfortunately, their populations are in decline as habitats are being destroyed. by us. Fields sprayed with herbicides and fertilizers to support cattle, tainted water sources and development (houses, roads) are all culprits.

The perfect lead-in to Gardening with the Experts held January 25th at Gordon Cooper Tech Center. The 22nd annual program was presented by the Shawnee Community Beautification Committee. Master Gardener Tom Terry introduced the first speaker, Dr. Yoon Kik Kim, bee savior of Urban Landscaping for Pollinators.

What affects honeybee populations? Small hive beetles make a gooey mess of honey and bees abandon their hive. Varroa mites, comparable to ticks, feed on bee body fat and cause deformed wings and disturbed immune systems. Genetically modified corn and soybean pollen often kill bees. The herbicide Glyphosate (we saw pictures of rats riddled with tumors) destroys the gut bacteria in bees and disrupts their navigation systems. Bees can travel up to three miles from their hive. Dr. Kim noted agricultural chemical researchers for Bayer test adult bees, not the eggs or grubs.

In the Dec/Jan 2020 issue of Mother Earth, Jonathan Lundgren said many pesticides dont kill bees outright, but affect genetics, hormones and microbial allies. Agriculture is reshaping biological communities too fast, and the honeybee is one of the casualties. Lundgren feels no approach will succeed unless agriculture itself is reformed. Healthy soils make healthy plants.

Beekeeper Kim knows all too well the ups and downs of the bee world. He lost most of his bees last year to small hive beetle.

Solutions: Diversify plants to scatter bloom times through spring, summer and fall. Maples bloom February and March, black locusts April to May, alfalfa and Vitex May to frost, white sweet clover April to July (yellow sweet clover later May to July), persimmons May to June, cotton July to frost and buckwheat late summer to frost (buckwheat honey is dark sweet axle grease ). Do not mow when plants are blooming and producing nectar. Dont create green deserts by mowing everything. Develop sustainable environmental laws in Shawnee. Healthy plants make healthy bees.

Gardening in a Box with Larry and Letitia Pierce is an easier way to garden. Benefits: no weeding, boxes are portable and the automatic watering system saves up to 70% in water usage. The gardening boxes seem to encourage robust plants. Larry demonstrated the basic layout of the gardening box. He revealed the false bottom, plastic shelf with two wicking holes, white water tube and overflow hole in side. A small box with float valve controlled the water level of boxes which are linked by tubes.

Leticia knows how important bees are to flowers and proclaimed she was a secret stalker of Dr. Kim! Beautiful color pictures were shown of the January 2019 pepper harvest, Bloody Butcher and Japonica corn, enormous tomato plants and huge cabbages.

The talk ended with this quote by Alice Walker (The Color Purple): In search of my mothers garden, I found my own. A sentiment shared by many. My mothers father always raised a garden. She loved azaleas and patio plants. I go for trees.

Dr. Qing Lana Luo spoke about Rain Gardens for Naturally Resilient Communities and Sustainability. For 17 years she was a park designer of public open spaces and is well qualified to discuss gardens that cleanse and encourage water to infiltrate into the soil. Rain gardens may be in-ground, raised beds, wet, dry, oval, round, free form, with or without curbs.

Rain gardens must have level basins with inflow and overflow components. They are designed to receive runoff from the roof or impervious surfaces and planted areas. Placement must be 10 feet away from a building or house foundation, 100 feet from a wellhead and not in an area with a high-water table.

So, how well does the soil drain? A percolation test can be easily done. Dig a hole 6 inches deep and 6 inches wide, fill with water and measure how fast it drains in 24 hours. Excellent time is 1-6 hours. Passable is from 6-16 hours, but if it takes over 24 hours, find another spot.

Rain gardens act as sponges that mitigate the soil. In a natural system there is 10% runoff and 50% infiltration. Urbanized areas have 55% surface runoff and only 15% infiltration. Rain gardens are important in sustainable stormwater management since they reduce flooding and improve water quality. OSU Fact Sheet HLA-6454 Sustainable Landscapes: Designing a Rain Garden for Residential Property gives the whys, how-to-dos and right plants for the job.

The program finished on a high note. Twenty-four cool gardening ideas had been submitted by attendees. Top tips:

For simple plant food, save the veggie water from lunch or supper (no salt please) and put on plants or garden.

To prevent mosquitoes, add some drops of veggie oil to your birdbath or rain barrel. It will form a protective film over the surface of water. Oil floats.

For the physically impaired gardener who wants to extend or make a new plant bed, consider the Lasagna Garden. Begin with cardboard over grass, cover with leaves, compost, more leaves, aged manure and topsoil.

Some amazing door prizes were given away. The seed swap ended the informative morning. National Seed Swap Day is always the last Saturday in January.

Bee gardens, box gardens, rain gardens. Landscape with nature in mind. Choose one or all three. Spring is coming, so twitters the timberdoodle.

Becky Emerson Carlberg, graduate of Oklahoma State (Plant Pathology) is a teacher, artist, writer as well as certified Oklahoma Master Gardener and Master Naturalist. Contact her at Becscience@att.net.

Originally posted here:
Gardens of the Cross Timbers: Bee, box and rain gardens - Miami News Record

San Diegos first zoo elephants arrived by train in 1923, from San Francisco.

Queenie and Empress walked off a special railroad car and refused to budge. Harry Wegeforth, the zoos founder and a legendary quick-thinker he sometimes stopped his car to snatch wild animals for the collection tried another approach.

Suspecting that the elephants were used to being ridden, he climbed on one, another zoo employee got on the other, and off they went, clomping up Fourth Street, across the Cabrillo Bridge, and onto the zoo grounds in Balboa Park. People stopped what they were doing and stared.

Almost a century later, the worlds largest land mammals still make jaws drop. But nobody rides them to the zoo any more. Many things about their handling and care have changed as the zoo and its sister site, the Safari Park, became leaders in an industry that draws 180 million visitors annually and increasingly prides itself on conservation, not just entertainment.

Much remains unknown about elephants, too witness the death in December at the zoo of 48-year-old Tembo. A sudden change in the African pachyderms condition prompted keepers to euthanize her, according to zoo officials. They said shed been under veterinary care for age-related ailments for a while. Results of a necropsy are pending.

Tembo

(Ken Bohn / San Diego Zoo Global)

Her death came four weeks after another African elephant, MDunda, collapsed and died at the Oakland Zoo. She was 50 and had shown no signs of existing medical issues, albeit her advanced age, the zoo said. A necropsy is under way there, too.

Elephants also die in the wild, of course, and often violently. But their passing in zoos raises thorny questions about what is gained by keeping them captive.

A 2012 investigation by The Seattle Times analyzed the deaths of 321 elephants at accredited zoos in the U.S. over the previous 50 years and found that most died from injury or disease linked to conditions of their captivity. Half of the elephants were dead by the age of 23, well below their expected life spans, according to the report.

The decades-long effort by zoos to preserve and protect elephants is failing, exacerbated by substandard conditions and denial of mounting scientific evidence that most elephants do not thrive in captivity, the newspaper concluded.

The difficulties and cost of keeping elephants healthy, coupled with persistent pressure from animal activists and other critics, have prompted more than 30 North American zoos to shut down their elephant exhibits since the early 1990s, including sites in Detroit, San Francisco, Toronto and other major cities. But zoos in Milwaukee and Atlanta have gone in the other direction, expanding their elephant exhibits or building new ones.

San Diego Zoo Global, the umbrella organization for the zoo and the Safari Park in Escondido, maintains one of the largest herds of elephants outside their natural ranges. The zoos Elephant Odyssey, designed for older animals, has three ages 40, 43, and 56. There are nine at the Safari Parks Elephant Valley, ranging from age 1 to 30.

Behind the scenes, keepers and scientists are studying the animals behaviors and biology in ways they believe have improved the care there and may help sustain populations in Asia, where elephants are considered endangered, and in Africa, where they are threatened. They point to the unusual breeding success of the elephants at the Safari Park so productive that five of them were sent to a zoo in Tucson, Ariz., in 2012 to start a satellite herd. A baby was born there two years later, and the mother is pregnant again.

Such is the nature of the ongoing controversy about elephants in captivity that San Diego Zoo Global has been both praised and scorned for its breeding program. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums gave it an award in 2014 for a truly significant captive propagation effort that clearly enhances the management of the species. Last month, the activist group In Defense of Animals, citing a lack of adequate space and social structures for more babies, placed the Safari Park on its annual list of the Ten Worst Zoos for Elephants.

Krissy Boeche, senior elephant keeper at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park takes a blood sample from Neepo, an eight-year-old African elephant during a physical exam on January 22, 2020.

(Howard Lipin / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

On a recent weekday afternoon in a back corner of the elephant exhibit at the Safari Park, senior keeper Krissy Boeche called Neepo over for a health check.

Hes an 8-year-old African elephant. Like the others, hes been painstakingly trained (with food as the reward) to stand next to metal bars and present various body parts for inspection: feet, trunk, teeth, ears.

On this day, Boeche also drew blood from one of Neepos ears for a new project aimed at better understanding a herpes virus that kills elephants. For a long time, experts believed the EEHV virus was a problem mostly for Asian elephants, but an outbreak last year at the Indianapolis Zoo changed that. Two African elephants, one 6 years old and the other 8, died within weeks of each other.

We realized theres a lot we dont know, said Dr. Lauren Howard, a zoo veterinarian. This is a chance to learn more.

The virus circulates in the Safari Park herd, a normal occurrence. But why does it become active in some elephants and not in others? Regular blood draws and other tests over the next year will help establish baselines, identify risk factors and point the way toward evidence-based care recommendations, Howard said.

Were trying to build up confidence in what we find, not just in one elephant, but the whole herd, Howard said. We want to be able to tell colleagues in the elephant-care community: This is the way you can monitor or manage your elephants to reduce and prevent death from herpes virus.

Zoo workers are also looking for ways to find the virus that might help managers in the wild. Being able to do a blood-draw from an elephant there is difficult, if not impossible, and its dangerous. Can the virus be evaluated instead in saliva or feces, both easier to collect?

Neepo was born at the Safari Park, as were five other current occupants there. In general, zoo managers see births as evidence that animals are thriving.

Mindy Albright, the lead elephant keeper, said newborns also provide opportunities to record various developmental milestones information that can help managers in the wild figure out how old certain elephants are and whether they are healthy. Another study of elephant milk at the park may lead to improvements in formula given to orphaned elephants in Africa.

Umzula-zuli was the San Diego Zoo Safari Parks 13th elephant was born August 13, 2018, which coincidentally is World Elephant Day. The male calf African elephant walking next to his mother, Ndlulamitsi.

(Nelvin C. Cepeda / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Its exciting that things we do here go back to help elephants in the wild, she said.

Critics like Ed Stewart, co-founder of Performing Animal Welfare Society or PAWS think the money and effort would be better spent preserving and restoring wild habitats, beyond what SD Zoo Global, considered a leader in conservation, is already doing.

Thats the problem we need to solve, he said. The only way to save elephants is to save their habitat. And thats not the work of zoologists. Thats the work of politicians, land-use attorneys, economists.

His group operates three sanctuaries in Northern California, including a 2,300-acre one that houses eight elephants sent there from zoos and circuses. Even at our place, and we have more space than anywhere else, we cant match what the elephants need, he said. Theres no state of the art way to keep elephants in captivity.

He said laudable research is being done on elephants in San Diego, but he questioned the validity of captive breeding.

In some cases, such as the California condor, captive breeding followed by reintroduction to the wild has been credited with saving a species from extinction. But nobody has taken a captive-born elephant and turned it loose in nature, Stewart said, so the main reason zoos breed them is to maintain populations for public display. Entrance fees fund the zoos, and elephants have long been popular with customers. Cute newborns trigger spikes in attendance.

I dont look at a baby elephant standing behind a fence as a success, he said. I think the public thinks if you can breed elephants, theres nothing to worry about. But youre creating animals that will just grow up in captivity and live in a deprived situation. Theres no other way to put it.

Zoo keepers would disagree with the deprived part. Albright said elephants in captivity dont have to scrounge for food or water. Poachers, climate change, fatal interactions with humans moving into previously undeveloped territory life in the wild is no picnic, either.

These guys, she said, nodding at the parks herd, get to relax.

Khosi, a thee-year-old African elephant opens her mouth so Peter Hagopian, an elephant keeper at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park , can get a look at her teeth during a physical exam on January 22, 2020.

(Howard Lipin / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

When the group In Defense of Animals released its yearly Ten Worst Zoos list on Jan. 23, it criticized San Diego Zoo Global for breaking the social bonds between elephants at the Safari Park by moving several to other sites in 2019. Two males were sent to a zoo in Texas, two others to one in Alabama. A fifth elephant went to Zoo Atlanta.

Zoos regularly attempt to justify moves like these by pointing out that wild male elephants leave their families at about age 13, said Laura Bridgeman, director of In Defense of Animals elephant campaign. However, in nature, young males separate gradually from their families they are not suddenly ripped away from them to be transported across the country.

The San Rafael-based group has been compiling the list for 16 years, and the one other time San Diego made it, in 2006, was for moving elephants, too. That came after seven African elephants were brought to the park from Swaziland, where managers said the animals risked being killed because of space constraints in the tiny countrys nature preserves. To make room for the arrivals, the Safari Park sent three of its elephants to the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. All were dead within two years.

Zoo officials have not publicly responded to In Defense of Animals, but the industry moves animals around for a variety of reasons, including breeding and herd compatibility, and its rarely done hastily. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums has a Species Survival Plan that tracks the age, health, genetics and other factors of the roughly 300 elephants currently kept at about 65 accredited zoos in the U.S. The plan guides when and where elephants are moved.

Ongoing research at zoos into nutrition, physiology and reproduction also plays a role in transfers, according to the association.

While the debate about moving elephants around continues, zoos routinely point to another reason for keeping the animals in captivity. One of our main efforts is to inspire all our guests to care about wildlife, Robert Wiese, chief life sciences officer for San Diego Zoo Global, told the Union-Tribune in a 2016 interview. Getting up close to an elephant or feeling a bird swoop over us or seeing a bizarre insect those are opportunities to transform someone so when they go home and hear about wildlife issues they can be ready to act.

The potential audience is huge. According to industry estimates, more people go to zoos and aquariums in the U.S. than attend professional baseball, football, basketball and hockey games combined. A 2018 book, The Ark and Beyond: The Evolution of Zoo and Aquarium Conservation, notes that annual visitors to zoos, aquariums, botanical gardens, nature centers and natural history museums make up a tenth of the people on the planet.

But whether they are motivated to help animals later is an open question. Research has been mixed.

People go to the zoo to laugh, eat popcorn and watch their kids run around, said Lisa Landres, a former elephant keeper at the San Diego Zoo. The amount of people enjoying animals for what they are you could count on one hand.

Landres was a key whistleblower in a notorious elephant-mistreatment incident at the Safari Park (then called the Wild Animal Park) in 1988, which involved trainers disciplining an elephant by hitting her on the head repeatedly with wooden sticks. Landres later became an investigator for the Humane Society of the United States, traveling around the country for more than 10 years to inspect zoos and circuses. What she saw, she said, prompted her to leave that world.

We cant give elephants what they need in captivity, she said. We just cant. A few enlightened zoos have come to the conclusion that if we cant do it properly, we shouldnt do it at all. But too many others just care about the money they can make, the bottom line.

Shed like to see a day when people visit hologram zoos and there are no elephants in captivity. If you want to see one in the flesh, you have to go where they live, she said.

Her wish may come true. In North American zoos as a whole, the populations of Asian and African elephants are not self-sustaining. Previously productive elephants are getting too old to have babies, and there arent yet enough young ones to fill the gap.

But some zoos are more optimistic than others. At the Safari Park, plans are under way to build a new viewing area that will bring visitors closer to the elephant herd.

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The elephant in the room: Are zoos suitable homes for the world's largest land mammals? - The San Diego Union-Tribune

Vincent Smith

Without long-term outcome data, the risks of individual procedures cant be quantified, nor can the advantages of waiting versus intervening early. Its also unclear whether patients whove gone public reflect most intersex peoples experiences. Clinicians dont know how much of the reported distress arises from outdated surgical techniques, nor do they know yet whether current procedures will prove any better.

Researchers are attempting to better gauge outcomes and satisfaction rates. A forthcoming European report will describe the opinions of more than one thousand intersex patients and their doctors regarding satisfaction with anatomical and functional results of genital surgery, according to a 2019 review article in theJournal of Pediatric Urology. Institutions are conducting other retrospective and prospective studies, such as a U.S. endeavor at multiple sites, including HMS.

Clinicians also are turning to transgender patients for insight. Teens and adults can provide immediate feedback on medical and surgical procedures and describe broad ranges of desired outcomes, which can then inform intersex care, says surgeon Diamond. The relationship seems fitting, since certain surgical interventions for transgender affirmation were informed by procedures developed for infants with DSDs.

But for many intersex advocates, the wait is too long for the results of such endeavors. Over the past decade, advocacy groups have led a global movement calling for a moratorium on genital and gonadal surgeries without patient consent. International health and human rights organizations, including the United Nations and the World Health Organization, have condemned the procedures, and several countries have restricted them. In February, the European Parliament urged member states to prohibit nonconsensual sex-normalizing surgeries as soon as possible. Some medical societies, consortia, and prominent figures such as a trio of former U.S. surgeons general have echoed the call. Several states, such as California, have considered bans.

This sea change has evoked an array of reactions, even among patients. People with CAH in particular say that an outright ban will do more harm than good by depriving families of the option to choose surgery. Appending an objection to a 2019 consensus paper by German academics that supported a ban, one CAH group said the majority of those with CAH who identify as female are satisfied with the results of their feminizing surgery and glad to have completed it in infancy.

The idea that the bodily autonomy of intersex children supersedes parents traditional roles as health care proxies remains a point of contention. National medical ethics councils in Finland, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland say parents cannot authorize medically unnecessary surgery on genitals or gonads; the 2016 Global DSD Update says they can. Though the United States has not ruled on DSDs, its law and culture generally side with parents right to choose, say Garland and Diamond, and many clinicians continue to defer to them on intersex care.

When we discuss the pros and cons of surgery with the family and they say, We understand the different ways to go and this is what we think is best for our child, I accept that that is a responsible way to manage the child, says Diamond.

Some clinicians fear losing the ability to use their medical expertise to guide families and make decisions based on individual cases. It is not logical to impose mandatory restrictions on surgery in an area as complicated as this, reads a 2017 joint statement from seven U.S. urology and endocrinology societies.

Rosario served as chair of the medical advisory board for the Intersex Society of North America from 2002 to 2006 before he joined the UCLA DSD clinic. Initially against infant genital-normalizing surgery, he found that my opinion softened with actual clinical experience, he says.

Arguments roil about where gender-normalizing surgery falls along the spectrum of acts performed on infant genitalia. All fifty U.S. states condemn female genital mutilation, some advocates point out, so why should intersex surgery be considered differently? Others make comparisons to male circumcision, yet that practice also has been questioned. Professional societies are increasingly supporting interventions for transgender patients, so why deny the choice to those with DSDs, people ask?

While individual clinicians may support restricting infant genital-normalizing surgery, Garland wonders whether the threat of malpractice litigation explains why the U.S. medical profession tends to emphasize following the standard of care rather than trying nonintervention. He adds that in countries where the law requires scientific evidence and careful testing to establish the safety and efficacy of medical interventions, its been determined that these surgeries clearly dont meet that standard.

Pressure to change may come from peers, such as the Massachusetts Medical Society, which is debating a recommendation to delay surgeries on infants with DSDs that are of a non-emergent status until the individual has the capacity to participate in the decision. Doctors listen to other doctors, points out Smith, who serves on the LGBTQ committee that submitted the proposal.

Lawsuits also could influence U.S. medical practice. In a case that settled out of court in 2017, parents sued two South Carolina hospitals and a social services department for having performed feminizing surgery on a child they later adopted who grew up to identify as male.

Should DSD care shift, we will need a new way of thinking about how to determine when a child is able to consent, says Garland.

Those who worry about the lack of comparative data between early, delayed, and no intervention may take note as more nations and institutions restrict surgery on minors.

We may have our control group developing in Europe, says Diamond.

As more practitioners view forgoing surgery as an option, they turn to more flexible alternatives meant to support patients gender expression, such as hormone treatments. Surgeons also consider middle-ground procedures that preserve gender options as children grow.

In a 2018 case review in theJournal of Pediatric Urology, Diamond and colleagues described three infants with genetic mosaicism and complex urogenital and gonadal features whose parents all opted, among other procedures, to create vaginas but preserve the phalluses while they waited for their children to develop a gender. Two families were tentatively raising their children female; the other, gender neutral.

I wouldnt have thought that way at all ten years ago, says Diamond, who estimates he sees one hundred DSD patients a year in the Behavioral Health, Endocrinology, Urology (BE-U) program at Boston Childrens. My frame of mind would have been that the surgical options were more of a binary choice.

To those who believe that refraining from intervention does the least harm, Diamond says, You do your best, and you do it with a lot of humility because you know that no matter what you do, as much data as you have, you may be wrong.

Clinicians continue to learn how to avoid inadvertently making things worse for people with DSDs. Research studies and patient advocacy reports have documented the long-term psychological harm stemming from health care experiences such as repeated genital examinations and photography, depersonalization, and demeaning language.

Thats part of why psychologists and social workers have become essential members of DSD care teams over the past 20 years, although experts agree that psychosocial care still isnt available to enough families.

Surgeons and other specialists focus on their areas, particularly on the genitals, and they dont pay as much attention to the rest of the person, says Rosario. My job is to ask, how are you doing in school, and how are you doing with friends?

Although there is variation across conditions, initial research suggests that people with DSDs are more prone than the general population to mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, post-traumatic stress disorder, and trouble with intimacy. Such disparities may arise from treatment, culture, or the biology of the DSDs themselves.

Other studies assess the frequency, severity, and nature of parental distress when children receive DSD diagnoses. Researchers at HMS and elsewhere have found that unexpected anatomical variations, the possibility of stigma, and lack of clarity about the childs cancer risk, fertility, and future gender identity can cause significant anguish. Yet they also have found that caregivers of intersex children are no more depressed and, in fact, are less anxious than the general population.

Still more questions center on what should be done if the bulk of distress over DSDs arises from societal rather than medical issues.

In an era of gender-reveal parties and bathroom access controversies, having a perfectly happy baby with DSD can be like a crisis for families, says Smith. If there are no accompanying medical issues, then it becomes an entirely social-driven crisis.

Clinicians and parents often cite the desire to protect children from social harm when they opt for gender-normalizing procedures. Why, critics ask, in a culture built around binary sex, is the standard solution to alter bodies that are nonbinary rather than broaden societal conceptions of sex and gender?

Its really fraught when a concerned parent or physician thinks that a child who is intersex, and maybe doesnt present in a typical manner, is therefore going to have a harder time in the world, says Potter. That might be true, it might not be true, but in any event, trying to fix it so that they look like people with binary bodies may make a big mess of things.

Maybe we should be trying to help parents, and by extension the people surrounding the parentsthe extended family, the school system, all of these placesbecome more knowledgeable that theres a spectrum of sex presentation, she adds. Instead of conforming a child to something, transform the world in which they live. Then life may not be so hard.

Thats where law can also play a significant role, stopping discrimination and encouraging increased support for parents and children, says Garland.

While Garland, Potter, and others envision a more DSD-friendly future, they acknowledge that the systemic changes required will take time and effort. Meanwhile, others point out, clinicians, patients, and families must live in todays cultural contexts.

Discomfort with atypical sex characteristics is very much a societal problem, but we are caring for human beings who are brought up in our society to think in certain ways, says Diamond. As physicians and as a society, weve evolved a great deal, but were not at the point, I think, where we can routinely be comfortable with ambiguity. Some families can take that leap, but they are so uncommon.

As our culture progresses, that balance may shift. The sharing of peoples preferred pronouns, encompassing a spectrum of identities beyond he/his and she/hers, is becoming more common. People with transgender, gender nonconforming, nonbinary, and intersex identities are increasingly out and proud.

Ive been very surprised and pleased to see how much has changed in the LGBT arena in the past twenty years, says Garland. Its dramatic worldwide. Acceptance has increased of people with different sexualities and genders.

If trends continue, then in another generation or two, the agitation around DSDs may calm. Doctors may deliver healthy intersex babies and simply say: Congratulations.

Stephanie Dutchen is a science writer in the HMS Office of Communications and External Relations.

Image: Cici Arness-Wamuzky (top); John Soares (Smith and Diamond); John Davis (Rosario)

(Reprinted with permission from the Harvard Gazette.)

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Don't Judge, Wait, and Know the Science: InterSex,The Body and The Self - India New England

The 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak has sparked a speedy response, with scientists, physicians, and front-line healthcare professionals analyzing data in real-time in order to share findings and call out misinformation. Today, The Lancet published two new peer-reviewed studies: one which found that the new coronavirus is genetically distinct from human SARS and MERS, related viruses which caused their own outbreaks, and a second which reports clinical observations of 99 individuals with 2019-nCoV.

The first cases of the coronavirus outbreak were reported in late December 2019. In this new study, Nanshan Chen and colleagues analyzed available clinical, demographic, and laboratory data for 99 confirmed coronavirus cases at the Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital between Jan 1 to Jan 20, 2020, with clinical outcomes followed until 25th January.

Chen and colleagues reported that the average age of the 99 individuals with 2019-nCoV is around 55.5 years, where 51 have additional chronic conditions, including cardiovascular and cerebrovascular (blood flow to the brain) diseases. Clinical features of the 2019-nCoV include a fever, cough, shortness of breath, headaches, and a sore throat. 17 individuals went on to develop acute respiratory distress syndrome, resulting in death by multiple organ failure in 11 individuals. However, it is important to note here that most of the 2019-nCoV cases were treated with antivirals (75 individuals), antibiotics (70) and oxygen therapy (75), with promising prognoses, where 31 individuals were discharged as of 25th January.

Based on this sample, the study suggests that the 2019 coronavirus is more likely to affect older men already living with chronic conditions but as this study only includes 99 individuals with confirmed cases, it may not present a complete picture of the outbreak. As of right now, there are over 6,000 confirmed coronavirus cases reported, where a total of 126 individuals have recovered, and 133 have died.

In a second Lancet study, Roujian Lu and their fellow colleagues carried out DNA sequencing on samples, obtained from either a throat swab or bronchoalveolar lavage fluids, from eight individuals who had visited the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, China, and one individual who stayed in a hotel near the market. Upon sequencing the coronaviruss genome, the researchers carried out phylogenetic analysis to narrow down the viruss likely evolutionary origin, and homology modelling to explore the virus receptor-binding properties.

Lu and their fellow colleagues found that the 2019-nCoV genome sequences obtained from the nine patients were very similar (>99.98% similarity). Upon comparing the genome to other coronaviruses (like SARS), the researchers found that the 2019-nCoV is more closely related (~87% similarity) to two bat-derived SARS-like coronaviruses, but does not have as high genetic similarity to known human-infecting coronaviruses, including the SARS-CoV (~79%) orMiddle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) CoV (~50%).

The study also found that the 2019-nCoV has a similar receptor-binding structure like that of SARS-CoV, though there are small differences in certain areas. This suggests that like the SARS-CoV, the 2019-nCoV may use the same receptor (called ACE2) to enter cells, though confirmation is still needed.

Finally, phylogenetic analysis found that the 2019-nCoV belongs to the Betacoronavirus family the same category that bat-derived coronaviruses fall into suggesting that bats may indeed be the 2019-nCoV reservoir. However, the researchers note that most bat species are hibernating in late December, and that no bats were being sold at the Huanan seafood market, suggesting that while bats may be the initial host, there may have been a secondary animal species which transmitted the 2019-nCoV between bats and humans.

Its clear that we can expect new findings from the research community in the coming days as scientists attempt to narrow down the source of the 2019-nCoV.

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Swamp sparrows can guess each other's ages from the sounds of their song - Massive Science

The 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak has sparked a speedy response, with scientists, physicians, and front-line healthcare professionals analyzing data in real-time in order to share findings and call out misinformation. Today, The Lancet published two new peer-reviewed studies: one which found that the new coronavirus is genetically distinct from human SARS and MERS, related viruses which caused their own outbreaks, and a second which reports clinical observations of 99 individuals with 2019-nCoV.

The first cases of the coronavirus outbreak were reported in late December 2019. In this new study, Nanshan Chen and colleagues analyzed available clinical, demographic, and laboratory data for 99 confirmed coronavirus cases at the Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital between Jan 1 to Jan 20, 2020, with clinical outcomes followed until 25th January.

Chen and colleagues reported that the average age of the 99 individuals with 2019-nCoV is around 55.5 years, where 51 have additional chronic conditions, including cardiovascular and cerebrovascular (blood flow to the brain) diseases. Clinical features of the 2019-nCoV include a fever, cough, shortness of breath, headaches, and a sore throat. 17 individuals went on to develop acute respiratory distress syndrome, resulting in death by multiple organ failure in 11 individuals. However, it is important to note here that most of the 2019-nCoV cases were treated with antivirals (75 individuals), antibiotics (70) and oxygen therapy (75), with promising prognoses, where 31 individuals were discharged as of 25th January.

Based on this sample, the study suggests that the 2019 coronavirus is more likely to affect older men already living with chronic conditions but as this study only includes 99 individuals with confirmed cases, it may not present a complete picture of the outbreak. As of right now, there are over 6,000 confirmed coronavirus cases reported, where a total of 126 individuals have recovered, and 133 have died.

In a second Lancet study, Roujian Lu and their fellow colleagues carried out DNA sequencing on samples, obtained from either a throat swab or bronchoalveolar lavage fluids, from eight individuals who had visited the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, China, and one individual who stayed in a hotel near the market. Upon sequencing the coronaviruss genome, the researchers carried out phylogenetic analysis to narrow down the viruss likely evolutionary origin, and homology modelling to explore the virus receptor-binding properties.

Lu and their fellow colleagues found that the 2019-nCoV genome sequences obtained from the nine patients were very similar (>99.98% similarity). Upon comparing the genome to other coronaviruses (like SARS), the researchers found that the 2019-nCoV is more closely related (~87% similarity) to two bat-derived SARS-like coronaviruses, but does not have as high genetic similarity to known human-infecting coronaviruses, including the SARS-CoV (~79%) orMiddle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) CoV (~50%).

The study also found that the 2019-nCoV has a similar receptor-binding structure like that of SARS-CoV, though there are small differences in certain areas. This suggests that like the SARS-CoV, the 2019-nCoV may use the same receptor (called ACE2) to enter cells, though confirmation is still needed.

Finally, phylogenetic analysis found that the 2019-nCoV belongs to the Betacoronavirus family the same category that bat-derived coronaviruses fall into suggesting that bats may indeed be the 2019-nCoV reservoir. However, the researchers note that most bat species are hibernating in late December, and that no bats were being sold at the Huanan seafood market, suggesting that while bats may be the initial host, there may have been a secondary animal species which transmitted the 2019-nCoV between bats and humans.

Its clear that we can expect new findings from the research community in the coming days as scientists attempt to narrow down the source of the 2019-nCoV.

Read more here:
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, the stories of two Jewish scientists - Massive Science

Today is the International Day of Commemoration, in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, where over six million Jews, allies and collaborators were persecuted and murdered by the Nazi regime. Six million is a difficult number to even begin to comprehend, so picture it this way: about two out of every three Jews in Europe were killed in this horrific genocide.

For many Jewish scientists, to practice science publicly in a region ruled by Nazi ideology was a death sentence. No one was exempt from this persecution. These are just two stories of those lost.

Born in Romania, Leonore Rachelle Brecher lived in a vibrant Jewish communities. At age twelve, she went to live with relatives after the death of both of her parents. Brecher went on to study zoology at a university in Chernivtsi, in what's now Ukraine. As her career started gaining traction, she moved to study at the University of Vienna where she defended her doctorate on color adaptation in insect chrysalides.

Applying to her alma matter, Brecher was denied a professorship. She later found employment in Berlin, and then moved through many universities and cities, before being forced back to Vienna in 1930. After the German occupation of Austria, she lost her job at the Vienna Institute for Experimental Biology because of her Jewish faith and began to teach in a Jewish gymnasium.

Like many Jewish European scholars, Brecher applied for refugee scholarship but was denied financial assistance by a British agency as her specialty was deemed too narrow, and rejected by the US because of the limited quota for Romanian immigrants. On 14 September 1942, Brecher was arrested and deported to the Maly Trostinets extermination camp, where she was killed immediately upon arrival.

Ernst Julius Cohen was born in March 1869 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He studied Latin and Greek, before going to pursue a PhD in chemistry, under the supervision of J.H. Van't Hoff, at the University of Amsterdam, where his doctorate was titled "Het bepalen van overgangspunten langs electrischen weg en de electromotorische kracht bij scheikundige omzetting" (Determining transition points by electric way and the electromotor force in chemical conversion). After his defense in 1893, Cohen continued as a researcher, where subsequent positions included serving as a professor of physical chemistry in Amsterdam, and later, the director of a chemical laboratory at the University of Utrecht (until his retirement in 1939).

Ernst Julius Cohen (1869-1944)

By Unknown photographer - Universiteitsmuseum Utrecht

After contributing to the discovery of two tin allotropes (white and gray tin), Cohen was propelled into the spotlight and began lecturing across the US and Europe. Cohen's studies spanned various fields, including electro- and thermochemistry, and was considered as the "greatest of the disciples of Van't Hoff."

Just like Brecher however, Cohen was caught in the Nazi's sweep across Europe. In 1941, Cohen's property was seized. In May 1942, Cohen was obligated to wear the "yellow star" and faced multiple restrictions because of his Jewish faith. In 1943, Cohen was arrested in his own laboratory on the charge of entering a "public" building. His friends' efforts were insufficient to secure his release, and he was deported to a concentration camp at Vught in Holland, but was fortunately released thanks to a plea made by the Council of the Dutch Chemical Society to the S.S. authorities at the Hague. However, troubles slowly continued, and on March 3rd 1944, Cohen was transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was murdered in the gas chambers.

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My brother has 4% Neanderthal DNA. What does that actually mean? - Massive Science

New Delhi, Jan 24 : Breast cancer in men is rarely seen. It shares many similarities with cancer of the breast in women but there are some important differences too.

Male breast cancer represents between 0.5 and 1 per cent of all breast cancers diagnosed each year. Higher rates of male breast cancer in central and eastern Africa may be related to higher liver infectious diseases that lead to hypoestrogenism.

Dr Kumardeep Dutta Choudhury, Senior Consultant & Head of Department, Dept of Medical Oncology (IOSPL), Fortis Hospital, Noida, shares the facts you need to know about it.

Risk factors associated with breast cancer in men:Genetics and family historyFamily history of breast cancer in a first-degree relative is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer among men. Approximately 15 to 20 per cent of men with breast cancer have a family history of the disease compared with only 7 per cent of the general male population.

The risk is higher with inherited BRCA2 rather than BRCA1 mutations. Other genes which have been associated with an increased risk of breast cancer in men are PTEN tumor suppressor gene (Cowden syndrome), tumor protein p53 (TP53; Li-Fraumeni syndrome), partner and localizer of BRCA2 (PALB2), and mismatch repair genes (Lynch syndrome).

Alterations of the estrogen to androgen ratioExcessive estrogen stimulation may be due to hormonal therapies (e.g., estrogen-containing compounds or testosterone), hepatic dysfunction, obesity, marijuana use, thyroid disease, or an inherited condition, such as Klinefelter syndrome may increase risk of male breast cancer.

Primary testicular conditionsTesticular conditions may increase risk of breast cancer in men include orchitis, undescended testes (cryptorchidism), and testicular injury.

PRESENTATION:Male breast cancer has been diagnosed at a more advanced stage than female breast cancer, due to a lack of awareness. They generally present with a painless, firm mass that is usually subareolar, with nipple involvement in 40 to 50 percent of cases. The left breast is involved slightly more often than the right, and less than 1 percent of cases are bilateral. There may be associated skin changes, including nipple retraction, ulceration, or fixation of the mass to the skin or underlying tissues. Axillary nodes are typically palpable in advanced cases.

Most histologic subtypes of breast cancer seen in women are also present in men, men with breast cancer are rarely diagnosed with lobular carcinomas is due to lack of acini and lobules in the normal male breast, although these can be induced in the context of estrogenic stimulation.

TREATMENT:Approach to treatment in men is same as that for women. However, role of breast conserving surgery is limited because of small volume of breast tissue. In hormone receptor-positive disease, we give adjuvant tamoxifen rather than an aromatase inhibitor (AI), because of insufficient evidence to support AI monotherapy for men. If there are contraindications to tamoxifen (e.g., hypercoagulable state), an AI with GnRHa may be administered. AIs do not reduce testicular production of estrogens, that's why GnRHa is administered concurrently with AI. They are treated with mastectomy, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and hormone therapy.

SURVEILLANCE:Limited data suggest these patients are at an increased risk of a contralateral breast cancer, but absolute risk is low. They are also at risk for secondary malignancies and 12.5 percent may develop a second primary cancer. The most common types were gastrointestinal, pancreas, non-melanoma skin, and prostate cancerPROGNOSIS:Ten-year disease-specific survival rates for histologically negative nodes - 77 and 84 per cent, one to three positive nodes - 50 and 44 per cent and four or more histologically positive nodes - 24 and 14 per cent.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text

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All you need to know about Male Breast Cancer - Prokerala

RECENTLY Ive been searching for a word that describes our present system of government.Liberal democracyisnt quite right (though it has features of both) because the phrase omits too many of its other features: notably, the rise and dominance of cranks, the casual overriding of well-established professional rules, and the imposition of formal and informal censorship on matters of controversy.

All three hang together, and all are dealt with below, but the key one seems to me to be the rise and dominance of cranks. Several people have suggested that the wordidiocracyis the one for which Ive been looking. Its also the title of a clever comedy of a few years back which some commentators predictably argue forecast the presidency of Donald Trump. Its producers have recently coined the witty advert: The film that started as a comedy . . . but became a documentary. Fair play to them. Its a funny movie, now on video. Watch it.

But its not about Trump who, though an infuriating mix of cleverness, boldness, impulsiveness, touchiness and at times mean-spiritedness, is not an idiot, still less a crank. Theyre not the same thing, anyway. An idiot is simply a stupid person. A crank may actually be quite clever, but hes in possession of One Big Idea (or maybe two) that drives him to promote it interminably and with no sense of proportion or practicality.

Cranks have been around in politics a long time, probably always Swift lampoons them as projectors inGullivers Travels but there seem to be more of them around since the rise of ideological politics in the French Revolution and, still more significantly, with the later rise of socialism. Ideological politics are the attempt to use government to implement some ambitious project of human betterment that will avert a vast catastrophe and bring about a new ideal society without greed, inequality, division and other human vices. Both the end of the world and utopia usually figure in ideology, and its sometimes hard to tell them apart.

Crankery figures too. The nineteenth century socialist theoretician Saint-Simon believed that under socialism the oceans would turn into lemonade. That didnt happen because it was fanciful nonsense and, besides, there werent any socialist governments around to give it a try. Stalin was around in Russia by the 1930s, however, and as part of the campaign to improve grain production, he supported applying the cranky anti-scientific theories of the geneticist Trofim Lysenko to agriculture (largely because they fitted in with Marxist ideology). Grain production and Soviet agriculture suffered, but Lysenkos theories remained Soviet orthodoxy until after Stalins death. Scientists who criticised them were dismissed in large numbers and some very distinguished geneticists were imprisoned and executed.

Theres an almost logical progression here. A government claims intellectual authority in some non-political field, genetics, say, or music. Some of its pronouncements run counter to established scientific truths, but they are backed by strong pressuresfrom loss of employment to execution, and the usual professional rules and legal safeguards designed to prevent the spread of quackeries are ignored from a prudent cowardice. And when the crankish policy begins to fail, censorship is imposed and its critics are dismissed, silenced, or worse.

Crankocracy = the rise of bogus experts + the junking of professional standards and legal protections x the repression of objectors.

We might think that with Saint-Simon and Lysenko in our history we would be alert in future to such dangers. Not so.

Marxist socialism is itself one vast exercise in crankery applied to politics, philosophy and economics, and it seems to have a family affection for lesser fallacies. But only thirty years since the collapse of Soviet communism revealed the economic wastelands and the mass graves of its political victims across the USSR, there is now a growing revival of support for socialism/communism/Marxism on the Left and among young people in the Western world.

And any large movement of perverse decadence, which this surely is, will be unlikely to leave other aspects of life alone. When the rules and protections and protections that sustain civilization in one area of life and thought begin to collapse, they knock down others elsewhere just as falling dominoes spread instability across an entire table. As Auden writes inThe Fall of Rome:

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;Agents of the Fisc pursueAbsconding tax defaulters throughThe sewers of provincial towns.

One might argue that in modernity, as in modernism and dominoes, everything is ultimately disconnected from everything else. Let me suggest two areas where crankery has already won significant victories. The first is genderand transgender theory. This holds that someones identity is not determined by his/her biological sex but by his/her gender identity, which may be malleable and is anyway a matter of individual conviction. As one slogan has it: If your boy says shes a girl, then shes a girl.

That seems false to me, but even if it were true, its effects should be limited at least by its own founding theory. Our social interactions with others, whatever their theoretical identities, should always be shaped by courtesy and goodwill, including treating them as they wish within reason. But we would surely not base a transwomans medical treatment on the assumption that her gender identity is a better guide than his biological sex to what they need.

Yet hospitals, schools, colleges and woke corporations do exactly that when they make available tampons to transwomen. Athletic bodies do likewise when they decree that transwomen with male bodies are eligible to play in womens sports, with the predictable result that many able women players who might win in a fair contest are defeated. If this goes uncorrected, it will simply end in the abolition of womens sports.

Admitting transwomen into womens-only safe spaces will similarly end a civilised protection for women in a world that certainly doesnt seem to be becoming less dangerous for them. Above all, as John Whitehall has documented inQuadrant,needless human tragedies and massive lawsuits are hurtling towards us when young people persuaded to undergo transitioning surgery and drug treatments that are life-changing and unalterable at an age when they cannot possibly understand the consequences believe in adulthood they have made a terrible mistake.

In all these cases the major institutions of society have capitulated to aggressive pressure groups pushing a theory that is highly dubious, unsupported by the great majority of clinical researches, regarded by many gays and feminists as a threat to their identities, and above all damaging to its supposed beneficiaries. Not enough attention has been devoted to examining the science behind the activism. A research project on gender-transitioning by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) did not include the control group required by the rules. And as Madeleine Kearns ofNational Reviewhas detailed,when sceptics seek to raise these questions in public meetings, they are shouted down and threatened. Crankery or should it be quackery? is followed by ignoring the rules and enforced by repression.

Its a similar story in the academys history wars, reliant as they are on student rebellions (which in reality are highly conformist) and enforced by riots and iconoclasm. These, too, are a consequence of abolishing the border between truth and falsehood in postmodern scholarship. Of course, truth is sometimes hard to discover and to distinguish from persuasively false interpretations. The answer to that is more work in the archives. For postmodern historical interpretation was refuted in the 1920s by Georges Clemenceau, who led France in the Great War. A young historian kindly explained to him that future historians would re-examine the war from different perspectives and reach different conclusions different from his own. Yes, replied Clemenceau, future historians will say many things I might dispute. But one thing they will not say. They will not say that Belgium invaded Germany.

He may have been too optimistic. Relieved of the obligations of truth and accuracy, students all too often replace research with the pre-cooked conclusions of Marxist Critical Theory, as illustrated by theNew York Times1619 Project,which starts from the conclusion that slavery is the true essence of American history. As historian Richard Brookhiser said when asked about this recently: Two weeks before those first slaves landed, the colony adopted a democratic constitution. No one owns slaves in America today. But were still voting. How often will such rebuttals be heard in colleges in which the administrators as well as the students are striving to decolonise the curriculum, and when in effect both co-operate to close down debates and shut out speakers who might enlighten them. Once again, academic (and media) crankery is followed by, first, throwing overboard the rules of scholarship and, next, by the banishment of heretics.

It might reasonably be objected that not all of these are examples of rule by cranks. In part, thats a fair criticism. The cranks are in the streets; the corridors of power contain the cowards who yield to them. But Im not sure thats much of a comfort. Im getting the queasy feeling that in about five years anyone who has criticised Greta Thunbergs absurd views on the demise of Planet Earth by next Thursday will be up before the magistrates. It seems agreed by all well-meaning people that its a coarse and brutal insensitivity to express any scepticism aboutArmageddon predicted by a child.

All of which is a little odd, not least because the feisty Ms Thunberg is not a child. Shes a young woman of some 17 years, able to vote in progressive jurisdictions, and a rather typical self-righteous adolescent too. Now, it used to be a breach of feminist etiquette to refer to young women as if they were just starting high school. Yet we have not had any feminist complaints that Gretas honorary girlhood is an offensive slight even in these much woker days.

But could you have a better illustration of the coming crankocracy than the assembled leaders of the world nodding solemnly and applauding timidly as a 17-year-old adolescent condemns them angrily for not halting the medieval plague about to descend on them unless they replace their business suits with sackcloth and ashes?

They know their place.

This article first appeared in Quadrant Online on January 19, 2020, and is republished by kind permission.

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Greta and the rise of the crankocracy - The Conservative Woman

Its not even February yet, and Florida panthers are already having a bad year. Three have been killed by vehicles and one by a train in the first two weeks of 2020 alone.

The big cats once ranged across the South but now are mostly found slinking between fragments of habitat in southern Florida. Traffic poses a significant hazard: Last year 23 panthers were killed by vehicles a significant blow to a wild population that hovers precariously at only around 230 animals.

But there likely wouldnt be any Florida panthers today if it werent for decades of work to save them. The story of how Florida panthers, a puma subspecies, were rescued from the brink of extinction is expertly told in the new book Cat Tale: The Wild, Weird Battle To Save the Florida Panther, by journalist and New York Times best-selling author Craig Pittman. Pittmans been tracking the story for 20 years at the Tampa Bay Times.

The cast of characters and wild turns of event in Pittmans book seem like the stuff of fiction. Theres the Stetson-wearing Texas cougar hunter Roy McBride, who becomes a master panther tracker. Veterinarian Melody Roelke rings the alarm on the panthers genetic problems, only to have her male colleagues look the other way. And the arch villain of the story, a biologist nicknamed Dr. Panther, establishes himself as the preeminent expert but is actually fudging his research and colluding with developers.

Pittman traces these and other characters through years of discoveries, mistakes, public backlash and breakthroughs a fledgling program to radio-collar and track the animals that taught important lessons about tranquilizing big cats high up in trees; a failed captive-breeding program; a failed reintroduction plan in north Florida; and a last-ditch effort to bring in new genes by releasing Texas cougars in panther habitat.

The story is tragic, inspiring and deeply poignant. In his prologue Pittman calls it a scientific cautionary tale. As we grapple with mass extinction across the world, he writes, This is a guide to what extraordinary efforts it takes to bring back just one sub-species one thats particularly popular and what unexpected costs such a decision brings.

Pittman talked to The Revelator about the threats that panthers continue to face and what lessons we can learn about saving other endangered species.

When you first started writing about panthers 20 years ago, what did you think about their prospects?

My first stories were around 1998-1999. Nobody knew if the Texas cougar experiment had worked yet. Things looked pretty grim and a lot of developers were proceeding on the understanding that panthers wouldnt be a problem anymore, so it was OK to build in panther habitat.

Things looked dire at that point and it wasnt until around 2001 or 2002 where you started seeing these new kittens being born and thinking maybe things would be OK. The concern then became making sure that the Texas cougar genetics didnt swamp the panther genetics.

We know that panthers arent out of the woods yet. Is there clear science on what would be considered a recovered population?

Ever since scientists drew up the very first recovery plan decades ago, they said the key was to have three [geographically] separate populations of about 250 or 300 panthers. Obviously, were still a long way from that and from even starting a second population. You could call whats going on in central Florida the start of a new population, but theres just a handful of panthers there.If they choose to follow those particular goals, theyre a long way away.

But I phrase it that way because [the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] did not follow their own recommendations when they down-listed manatees [from endangered to threatened]. They didnt follow their recovery plan. They just said, Well, this computer model says its OK, so were going to say its OK, even though the threats are still there.

You know a good bit about manatees, which you wrote about in Manatee Insanity: Inside the War Over Floridas Most Famous Endangered Species. How does the manatees story compare to the panthers?

I call manatees the endangered species you can see, because they will show up everywhere people are theyre in your backyard canal, swimming around your dock. At the time I wrote that book, they were an endangered species, but one that you could see with your own eyes.

Panthers, not so much. Panthers are very elusive. They dont like to be around people. So theyre more of an abstract concept to a lot of folks. People know the panthers exist, but theyve never seen one. So its not quite as personal with panthers.

And the other thing that I wrote about in Manatee Insanity is that the Save the Manatee Club, and specifically its cofounder Jimmy Buffett, came up with this brilliant marketing concept called adopt a manatee, where they took the IDs from a whole bunch of the manatees that the state had been following and, for a contribution of around $5 or so originally, you could adopt a manatee. Youd get a little adoption certificate with the name of your manatee on it and its background.

People became personally invested in the fate of their particular manatee. I was digging through state archives and I saw letters from, you know, Mrs. Johnsons fourth grade class in Mesa, Arizona to the Citrus County Commission saying, Why are you being mean to our manatee and not passing this rule to make boats slow down?

They found a way to make people all over the country care about individual manatees as a way of getting them to care about the species as a whole. Theres no similar project for panthers and generally most of the panthers dont have nicknames like the manatees do.

There are people who absolutely love panthers, mostly in the abstract. And there are some folks who would dearly love to see a hunting season opened on them and feel like the governments lying about how many there are. But I think the majority of Floridians support panthers and are happy that they seem to be coming back.

Your book is a really incredibly in-depth case study of what it takes to save one endangered species. Are there lessons we can learn from it about saving other species?

I like what Melody Roelke said at the point where they started to realize they needed to take action [to save the panthers], it was almost too late to do anything. So her advice was, if you see it heading this way, take action immediately. Dont dawdle around and get into arguments and get mired down in bureaucratic red tape about what youre going to do.

They really were almost too late to save the panther. It basically came down to five female Texas cougars breeding with the remaining male panthers. And had that not worked, that wouldve been it. Theyd probably be gone by now.

The other thing is, if youre going to spend this much money and work this hard to bring back an endangered species, think about whats going to happen afterwards. What are the ramifications going to be? Because as we saw with the captive-breeding experiment that they started and then dropped, they had not planned very well. They had figured out they were going to take these panther kittens out of the wild and breed them in captivity to put [grown] panthers back in the wild, but they hadnt really thought about where they were going to put them and how they were going to train these captive panthers to be OK in the wild.

What are the biggest threats they face now?

The reason I waited so long to write this book is because I needed a good ending and I finally got one. [Editors note: We wont give it away, but its a doozy.]

But just because I found an ending for the book doesnt mean the story of the panther is over. Were now dealing with this mystery ailment thats afflicting some panthers and bobcats, to the point where they cant walk and scientists dont know why.

Weve also got more large development coming down the pike headed for the area [where most panthers live]. In particular theres a proposal backed by the governor who is supposedly pro-environment to build this enormous toll road right through panther habitat, which would bring more development into that area.

One of my colleagues, Lawrence Mower, just wrote a story where wed gotten copies of some emails from Fish and Wildlife Service biologists who study the panthers saying this will just basically be a stake in the heart of panther recovery if you build this toll road through there.

So there are continuing threats, and were a long way from them being considered recovered. But things are looking hopeful in ways they havent for a long time and all because of the very hard work from these folks who labored for years mostly in anonymity because they believed in the cause and they believed that what was going on was something worth devoting their lives to even though it led to burnout and fighting and depression and, in one case, suicide.

In a way, I wrote the book to call attention to the role of those unsung heroes to say, look at what they did, look at the risks that they took, look at the brutal work days they put in trying to figure this out sometimes even against the publics own desires.

Excerpt from:
The Crazy Story of How Florida Panthers Were Saved From Extinction - The Revelator