There is a rather salty piece of correspondence in the new Nature Neuroscience from one Maureen Condic regarding Nature’s editorial position on the likelihood of development of ES cell-based therapies anytime soon. Apparently, Condic has a skeptical take on the issue and Nature had some disparaging words.

The issues of immune rejection, tumor formation and hESC differentiation raised in my article are not distortions or mere polemic; they are matters of scientific fact. These same concerns have been raised in the scientific literature and voiced by leading scientists in the stem cell field. James Thomson cautioned that “major roadblocks” must be overcome before hESC-derivatives could be safely transplanted into patients, and concluded that surmounting these roadblocks will be “likely to take a long time”. Similarly, Robert Lanza noted that immune rejection is a significant problem, and warned that creating hESC lines to match most patients “could require millions of discarded embryos from IVF clinics”. Although the editors dismiss as “tenuous” the connection between therapeutic use of hESCs and the genetic/epigenetic abnormalities introduced during cloning, this same concern was raised by Jose Cibelli’s recent article in Science.

I think it is important to hear about these obstacles and be realistic about what ES cells could provide. There are other uses of ES cells besides implantation type therapy, of course. For instance, they aid the understanding of basic cell differentiation and cell cycle regulation, topics that are important in cancer research.

The problem for me is that I find the ‘moral’ objections ridiculous. So if ES cells have any therapeutic or just plain scientific potential at all, then I’m all for it. Am I living in naive bliss thinking that most average people wouldn’t give a damn after they really understood what a blastocyst is? Right now, I’m thinking that this is one of a few scientific areas where you could educate the public and actually impact policy in a positive way.

There appears to be a semi-lively debate underway over at the Nature Neuro news blog: Action Potential.

John Hawks has the details on a new paper (DOI might not work yet) coming out in PNAS. The researchers trying to reconstruct the Neandertal genome are reporting biases in degradation which is aiding their task. Scientific American has a summary.

Macho stags have macho sons but daughters are little dears:

The findings show for the first time in animals that some genes are designed to benefit just one gender and can handicap the other sex.

It was found that the female offspring of the biggest and strongest stags were less successful at breeding and had fewer fawns during their lives than daughters of weedy males.

In The Mating Mind Geoff Miller proposed that variance in mutational load could account for the phenotypic variation in traits like intelligence. The brainy and beautiful are simply burdened with fewer deleterious alleles. But the study above suggests another reasons, traits which increase fitness in one sex may decrease it in another. The ideal is for sex dependent gene expression to modulate phenotypic expression so that female offspring of hyper-masculine males are not themselves somewhat masculinized. But the scaffolding of the genes which cause these traits by modifier loci takes time, and perhaps selective pressures are also running ahead so that the variational noise due to differential fitness across sexes is always extant within the population.

Via Sepia Mutiny.

Someone named Schvach Yid left an irritated comment in response to my post about the term Judeo-Christian. He also sent me a short email clearing up the fact that Judaism is more than legalism, and that it is steep to consider Jews non-Western. I think addressing these questions is worthwhile insofar as others might wonder what business a blog whose central theme focuses on evolutionary genetics has with venturing into topics such as the discussion of the history of Judaism and Christianity.

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John Hawks has an excellent decomposition of the story yesterday in The New York Times about paleoanthropology and biology.

The original human (‘Old Stone Age’) diet is good for people with diabetes:

In a clinical study in Sweden, the research group has now compared 14 patients who were advised to consume an ‘ancient’ (Paleolithic, ‘Old stone Age’) diet for three months with 15 patients who were recommended to follow a Mediterranean-like prudent diet with whole-grain cereals, low-fat dairy products, fruit, vegetables and refined fats generally considered healthy.

All patients had increased blood sugar after carbohydrate intake (glucose intolerance), and most of them had overt diabetes type 2. In addition, all had been diagnosed with coronary heart disease. Patients in the Paleolithic group were recommended to eat lean meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, root vegetables and nuts, and to avoid grains, dairy foods and salt.

The main result was that the blood sugar rise in response to carbohydrate intake was markedly lower after 12 weeks in the Paleolithic group (-26%), while it barely changed in the Mediterranean group (-7%). At the end of the study, all patients in the Paleolithic group had normal blood glucose.

Here’s a problem I see: it is a clinical study in Sweden. It stands to reason that Swedes would not be the best test case for a Mediterranean diet. Consider that agriculture became normative in Sweden about 5,000 years ago, 5,000 years after it was the dominant mode of production in the eastern Mediterranean. Note that Sweden is also the epicenter lactose tolerance (thought that seems to have become the norm after agriculture arrived on the scene), suggesting a priori expectation of localized adaptations. In any case, I think one should be cautious about broad generalizations about diet across cultures. Not only jas there been a lot of evolution in regards to the human metabolization of nutritional intakes, we shouldn’t be surprised if many of these propensities are local. Selection thinks globally, but acts locally.

Related: All diabetes, all the time.

Reguar GNXP reader Mencius has an interesting post titled The ultracalvinist hypothesis: in perspective. Mencius is one of those rare bloggers who focuses on occasional essays where he develops his own ideas as opposed to a barrage of links and responses to the thoughts of others. Here’s his introduction:

The “ultracalvinist hypothesis” is the proposition that the present-day belief system commonly called “progressive,” “multiculturalist,” “universalist,” “liberal,” “politically correct,” etc, is actually best considered as a sect of Christianity.

Update: Cryptocalvinism slight tweaked, follow up post.

Gene Variant Increases Risk For Alcoholism Following Childhood Abuse. We’ve been following this story for years in various forms. Here’s the article in Molecular Psychiatry (a Nature journal). From the abstract:

The MAOA-LPR low activity allele was associated with alcoholism…particularly antisocial alcoholism…only among sexually abused subjects. Sexually abused women who were homozygous for the low activity allele had higher rates of alcoholism and ASPD, and more ASPD symptoms, than abused women homozygous for the high activity allele. Heterozygous women displayed an intermediate risk pattern…The MAOA-LPR low activity allele was found on three different haplotypes. The most abundant MAOA haplotype containing the MAOA-LPR low activity allele was found in excess among alcoholics…and antisocial alcoholics…Finally, a MAOB haplotype, which we termed haplotype C, was significantly associated with alcoholism…and to a lesser extent with antisocial alcoholism….

(the ellipses are p-values)

The American Scene has just premiered as a new group blog with a fresh look & feel. Daniel Larison is a contributor. Now, keeping in mind that many of you use spiffy RSS readers with AJAX functionality which entails a non-trivial client side computational overhead be careful if you’re on an older machine. Larison has a tendency to go “machine gun” in regards to post frequency and he might blow up your computer’s CPU.