![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brdgt
Helping Cats to Make Their Way Back Home
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, September 13, 2010
Less than 2 percent of cats in animal shelters make it back to their owners, whereas about 15 to 19 percent of dogs are returned, and one reason is that more dogs wear collars.
Putting collars on some of the country’s 88 million cats may help change this situation, according to a new study published in The Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association.
Most dog owners are required to register their dogs and obtain a pet license. This is not always a requirement for cats. Cat owners are also less likely than dog owners to use identifying collars.
There is fear that a collar could strangle a cat, or that cats will rip them off, said Linda Lord, a veterinary scientist at the Ohio State University and the study’s lead author.
To test these perceptions, Dr. Lord and her colleagues studied 538 collared cats for six months. At the end of the six months, 75 percent of the cats were still wearing their collars. Only a few had injured themselves, but none severely.
“The big message is that people really need to think about identifying their cats,” Dr. Lord said. “Cats will tolerate wearing a collar, and this could be a new paradigm shift in thinking.”
The researchers also found that embedding microchips that store identification information under the skin of the cat is effective. If a cat is lost, a scanner detects the chip and reads the owner’s information on it.
Biotech Company to Patent Fuel-Secreting Bacterium
By MATTHEW L. WALD, The New York Times, September 13, 2010
A biotech company plans to announce Tuesday that it has won a patent on a genetically altered bacterium that converts sunlight and carbon dioxide into ingredients of diesel fuel, a step that could provide a new pathway for making ethanol or a diesel replacement that skips several cumbersome and expensive steps in existing methods.
The bacterium’s product, which it secretes like sweat, is a class of hydrocarbon molecules called alkanes that are chemically indistinguishable from the ones made in oil refineries. The organism can grow in bodies of water unfit for drinking or on land that is useless for farming, according to the company, Joule Unlimited of Cambridge, Mass.
“We make very clean, sulfur-free hydrocarbons that drop directly into the existing infrastructure for the production of diesel fuel,” said William J. Sims, the chief executive of Joule. The object, he said, was not to be an alternative for fossil fuels, but “to become a viable replacement.”
Joule said it was the first company to patent an organism that secretes hydrocarbon fuel made continuously, directly from sunlight. Other companies, including Amyris Biotechnologies of Emeryville, Calif., and LS9 of San Carlos, Calif., are working on organisms that will make fuel if fed sugar from corn or cellulosic sources, but Joule’s bacterium does not require any sugar. Another company, Aurora Algae of Alameda, Calif., said Monday that it had developed an algae-based platform for production of fuel, pharmaceuticals and other valuable chemicals.
Development of a photosynthetic organism to make hydrocarbons is “an important step,” said Eric J. Toone, the deputy director for technology at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, a new agency within the Energy Department that makes grants for high-risk, high-reward projects. But Mr. Toone and others cautioned that there were other steps to be mastered before such a technology could be commercialized.
The organism is a cyanobacterium, also known as blue-green algae, although it is technically not an algae. It produces the fuel using photosynthesis, the process that plants use to make sugars and other materials from water, carbon dioxide and sunlight.
Alternative energy experts agree that photosynthesis is a promising avenue for biofuel research. The challenge is turning the resulting product into a fuel. Many companies are trying to develop an algae to do that job. But it requires energy to separate the algae from the water and then process the oil they make internally into a usable fuel. An organism that secretes the desired product directly avoids both problems.
In a test in Leander, Tex., Joule’s bacteria strain produced ethanol. Different variants can also make polymers and other high-value chemicals that are ordinarily derived from petroleum, according to Joule.
The system can run on the carbon dioxide in ordinary air but will do better using the exhaust from a power plant, once pollutants like sulfur and nitrogen oxides have been removed, according to the company.
Joule said it would begin construction next year on a commercial plant, which it hopes will begin operations in 2012. The company predicts a yield of 15,000 gallons of diesel components per acre — far more fuel than an acre of corn grown for ethanol can produce.
Mr. Sims says the pilot project covers a little less than five acres. Because the process is modular, he said, a full-scale factory would simply mean making multiple copies of a smaller setup. And with a small amount of refining, he said, the hydrocarbons can be converted to an ingredient of jet fuel.
An independent expert, Matthew C. Posewitz, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines, said that making an organism that secreted hydrocarbons was “definitely one of the most active areas in the whole game right now.”
He said that Joule did not yet have a proved process, but that it had strong research and development capabilities. “They have some extreme horsepower within that company,” he said.
Tug of War Pits Genes of Parents in the Fetus
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, September 13, 2010
Under Mendel’s laws of inheritance, you could thank mom and dad equally for all the outstanding qualities you inherited.
But there’s long been some fine print suggesting that a mother’s and father’s genes do not play exactly equal roles. Research published last month now suggests the asymmetry could be far more substantial than supposed. The asymmetry, based on a genetic mechanism called imprinting, could account for some of the differences between male and female brains and for differences in a mother’s and father’s contributions to social behavior.
A person gets one set of genes from each parent. Apart from the sex chromosomes, the two sets are equivalent, and in principle it should not matter if a gene comes from mother or father. The first sign that this is not always true came from experiments in which mouse embryos were engineered to carry two male genomes, or two female genomes. The double male and double female mice all died in the womb. Nature evidently requires one genome from each parent.
Biologists then made the embryos viable by mixing in some normal cells. The surprising outcome was that mice with two male genomes had large bodies and small brains. With the double female genome mice, it was the other way around. Evidently the maternal and paternal genomes have opposite effects on the size of the brain.
The root of the asymmetry is a procedure called imprinting in which either the mother’s or the father’s copy of a particular gene is inactivated. The best worked out example concerns a gene called insulinlike growth factor-2, which promotes the growth of the fetus. The IGF-2 gene is active in the paternal genome but imprinted or inactivated in the genome the fetus receives from its mother.
The leading explanation for imprinting is a theory that invokes conflict between relatives. Developed by David Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, the theory holds that there is a clash of interests between the fetus, whose purpose is to extract as much nutrition as possible, and the mother, whose interests lie in allocating her resources evenly to all the other children she may bear in the future.
Over the course of evolution this conflict has come to be mediated at a genetic level, Dr. Haig’s explanation goes, because the mother and the father have different interests. Speaking of mammals in general, the conflict is driven by female promiscuity. The mother wants to share her resources among progeny who may have different fathers, whereas the father is interested in the survival of only his own child. So the father always confers the IGF-2 gene in active form and the mother always bequeaths it in imprinted or silent form. The gene is imprinted in mice, humans and many other mammals.
It may seem strange to have a genetic tug of war within the fetus, with the paternal copy of the IGF-2 gene always asking for more, and the maternal copy refusing to ask at all, but presumably over the course of evolution the individuals who carried these two warring copies of the gene left more offspring than those with the gene in any other form.
Until last month only a hundred imprinted genes were known, and the mechanism seemed just an interesting deviation from Mendelian genetics. Research led by Christopher Gregg and Catherine Dulac of Harvard has shown that imprinting is far more common and more intricate than supposed.
Working in mice, the Harvard team showed that around 1,300 genes are imprinted. Dr. Dulac said that she expects a substantial, though lesser, proportion to be imprinted in people — maybe some 1 percent of the genome — because humans are more monogamous than mice and so the parents’ interests are more closely aligned.
Dr. Dulac was able to detect so many new imprinted genes by taking advantage of the ease with which genes can now be decoded. She cross-bred two very different strains of mice, thus ensuring that the maternal and paternal versions of each gene would have recognizably different sequences of DNA.
When a gene is activated, the cell transcribes it into RNA, DNA’s close chemical cousin. By decoding all the RNA transcripts in the mouse’s cells, Dr. Dulac could pick out those genes in which the paternal version was being transcribed much more than maternal version, and vice versa.
Besides finding far more imprinted genes than expected, Dr. Dulac’s team also picked up unexpected patterns in the way the genes were expressed. Maternal genes were more active in the embryo’s brain, but paternal genes became more active in the adult.
In another novel pattern, she found sex differences in imprinted genes in different region of the brain, particularly those concerned with feeding and with mating behavior. A gene called interleukin-18 is activated from the mother’s version in two important regions of the brain. This asymmetry is of interest because the gene in people has been linked with multiple sclerosis, a disease that predominates in women.
Altogether Dr. Dulac found 347 genes where either the mother’s or the father’s copy was more actively expressed in certain regions of the brain. Sex differences in the brain are usually attributed to the influence of hormones, but sex-based differences in imprinting may be another mechanism by which nature spins male and female brains out of the same genome.
“In your brain, your mom and your dad keep telling you what to do — I keep laughing when I think about it,” Dr. Dulac said.
In the cortex of the brain, Dr. Dulac discovered another unexpected asymmetry. Women have two X chromosomes, one from the mother and one from the father. The usual rule is that in each cell either the mother’s or the father’s copy is chosen at random to be switched off. But in the neurons of the cortex, there is a much greater chance that the paternal X chromosome will be switched off. “So again, it’s the conflict between mom and dad — each tries to use different chromosomes to influence you,” Dr. Dulac said.
Dr. Haig says that his theory of imprinting explains not only the tug of war between mother and fetus but also why there are imprinted genes in the brain.
It all has to do with the different interests of the mother’s family and the father’s family, which tug the individual in different directions. Relatives get into the argument because they share varying proportions of an individual’s genes.
Evolutionary fitness depends on passing one’s genes on to the next generation. But it also counts to pass on the identical genes that have been co-inherited by one’s siblings, uncles and aunts. The doctrine, known as inclusive fitness, was proposed by the biologist William Hamilton in the 1960s and is widely accepted, though is not without critics. It was challenged last month in the journal Nature by the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson and two colleagues.
Under inclusive fitness, Dr. Haig has pointed out, a conflict of interest between the mother’s and father’s relatives would have arisen because of the different dispersal patterns of men and women. Most often it has been the woman who leaves her ancestral village and goes to live with her husband’s family.
The maternal genes stand to gain if the woman is as selfish as possible and focuses just on her and her children’s welfare. But since the father is related to everyone else in the village, the father’s genes will gain from altruistic behavior. Such a conflict will result in imprinted genes, just like the battle between the mother and fetus over the mother’s resources, in Dr. Haig’s view.
Two evolutionary biologists, Francisco Ubeda of the University of Tennessee and Andy Gardner of the University of Oxford in England, have devised a mathematical model for assessing the consequences of a woman living in her husband’s village, among people to whom she is not related. Natural selection, they say in an article in the current issue of Evolution, will favor the activation of paternal genes that underlie altruistic behavior and maternal genes that promote selfishness. “Your paternal genes want you to be nicer to your neighbors than your maternal genes do,” Dr. Gardner said in an interview.
In most people the altruistic and selfish motives operate in some reasonable kind of balance. But the imprinted genes carry a serious vulnerability: since they are silenced, a mutation to the other copy can be disastrous. Diseases like autism may be connected with disruptions to imprinted genes, Dr. Gardner said.
Imprinting, far from being a genetic curiosity, may play a central role in sexual differences and in psychiatric disease, if Dr. Haig’s explanation is correct. Much of the available evidence comes from mice, and people may to some extent have emancipated themselves from imprinting when they evolved the pair bond system of mating about a million years ago. But the pair bond does not mean perfect monogamy, and in its deviations from perfection there is plenty of room for imprinting to thrive.
Rape: Rights Group Calls Test to Determine Sexual Activity a ‘Second Assault’ in India
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, September 13, 2010
An international human rights group urged India last week to ban a “degrading and unscientific” test commonly performed on rape victims to see if they have previous sexual experience.
In the test, a doctor inserts fingers into the victim during the forensic examination to test for “vaginal laxity” and is expected to deliver a medical opinion as to whether she appears to be “habituated to sexual intercourse.” The group, Human Rights Watch, argued that the test constituted a second assault on a traumatized woman.
The test is required by courts in some Indian states — including those of Delhi and Mumbai, the national and financial capitals — and, according to local reports, is in the forensic examination still endorsed by the Indian Medical Association.
In most democracies, whether or not a woman has ever had sex before is considered irrelevant in deciding whether she consented to the act under consideration. In 2003, India’s Supreme Court ruled that victims could not be cross-examined on their general moral character, Human Rights Watch said. But it has not ensured that its decision is enforced, and references to those who allege rape as “dissolute” or “of doubtful character” still appear in court rulings.
World Health Organization guidelines calls for victims of sexual violence to get health care at the same time as the forensic examination and from the same person, and for minimally invasive examinations.
Russia Finds Last-Days Log of 1912 Arctic Expedition
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, The New York Times, September 13, 2010
MOSCOW — Russian explorers said Monday that they had found a sailor’s log from aboard a legendary Arctic expedition that vanished as it sought to forge through the ice-choked Northeast Passage in 1912.
For decades, mystery clouded the fate of Georgy Brusilov, the captain of the first Russian crew to seek the elusive Arctic trade route from Asia to the West. His expedition’s disappearance inspired a generation of books and films.
But the voyagers’ remains and a journal — dated to May 1913 from aboard their vessel, the St. Anna — were found this summer on the icy shores of Franz Josef Land, Europe’s northernmost landmass.
“There is no doubt that the skeletons and notebook pages we found at the end of July on Franz Josef Land are the remains of Georgy Brusilov’s expedition, which were thought forever lost,” said Oleg Prodan, who led a mission in the expedition’s footsteps.
The Brusilov expedition ran aground on thick ice floes midway into its journey along the Siberian coast, after navigating the Vilkitsky Strait into the Kara Sea.
Vladimir Melnik/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The remains of a notebook from the long-lost expedition.
One of its only two survivors, the navigator Valerian Albanov, described in his memoirs two grueling winters clinging to the doomed ship and floating ever closer to the North Pole.
Mr. Albanov was among the 11 members of the 24-man crew who abandoned the ice-locked vessel and set out across the snow drifts seeking firm land. Their desperate trek was depicted in the popular novel “The Two Captains” by the Russian author Veniamin Kaverin.
Until now, the St. Anna and the rest of its crew had vanished without a trace. But pages of the sailor’s log, which were found well preserved, offer glimpses into the lingering fight for survival aboard the ship.
“Today we got our last brick of tobacco; the matches ran out long ago,” it reads, adding that crew members hunted polar bear as they struggled on low supplies.
Other traces of the expedition were found nearby: a watch, snowshoes, a knife, a spoon engraved with a sailor’s initials and sunglasses made from the glass of empty rum bottles.
“It was so overwhelming to find those sunglasses, which we had all been able to imagine so well after Albanov’s description,” said Vladimir Melnikov, a member of the search mission, at a press conference in Moscow.
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, September 13, 2010
Less than 2 percent of cats in animal shelters make it back to their owners, whereas about 15 to 19 percent of dogs are returned, and one reason is that more dogs wear collars.
Putting collars on some of the country’s 88 million cats may help change this situation, according to a new study published in The Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association.
Most dog owners are required to register their dogs and obtain a pet license. This is not always a requirement for cats. Cat owners are also less likely than dog owners to use identifying collars.
There is fear that a collar could strangle a cat, or that cats will rip them off, said Linda Lord, a veterinary scientist at the Ohio State University and the study’s lead author.
To test these perceptions, Dr. Lord and her colleagues studied 538 collared cats for six months. At the end of the six months, 75 percent of the cats were still wearing their collars. Only a few had injured themselves, but none severely.
“The big message is that people really need to think about identifying their cats,” Dr. Lord said. “Cats will tolerate wearing a collar, and this could be a new paradigm shift in thinking.”
The researchers also found that embedding microchips that store identification information under the skin of the cat is effective. If a cat is lost, a scanner detects the chip and reads the owner’s information on it.
Biotech Company to Patent Fuel-Secreting Bacterium
By MATTHEW L. WALD, The New York Times, September 13, 2010
A biotech company plans to announce Tuesday that it has won a patent on a genetically altered bacterium that converts sunlight and carbon dioxide into ingredients of diesel fuel, a step that could provide a new pathway for making ethanol or a diesel replacement that skips several cumbersome and expensive steps in existing methods.
The bacterium’s product, which it secretes like sweat, is a class of hydrocarbon molecules called alkanes that are chemically indistinguishable from the ones made in oil refineries. The organism can grow in bodies of water unfit for drinking or on land that is useless for farming, according to the company, Joule Unlimited of Cambridge, Mass.
“We make very clean, sulfur-free hydrocarbons that drop directly into the existing infrastructure for the production of diesel fuel,” said William J. Sims, the chief executive of Joule. The object, he said, was not to be an alternative for fossil fuels, but “to become a viable replacement.”
Joule said it was the first company to patent an organism that secretes hydrocarbon fuel made continuously, directly from sunlight. Other companies, including Amyris Biotechnologies of Emeryville, Calif., and LS9 of San Carlos, Calif., are working on organisms that will make fuel if fed sugar from corn or cellulosic sources, but Joule’s bacterium does not require any sugar. Another company, Aurora Algae of Alameda, Calif., said Monday that it had developed an algae-based platform for production of fuel, pharmaceuticals and other valuable chemicals.
Development of a photosynthetic organism to make hydrocarbons is “an important step,” said Eric J. Toone, the deputy director for technology at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, a new agency within the Energy Department that makes grants for high-risk, high-reward projects. But Mr. Toone and others cautioned that there were other steps to be mastered before such a technology could be commercialized.
The organism is a cyanobacterium, also known as blue-green algae, although it is technically not an algae. It produces the fuel using photosynthesis, the process that plants use to make sugars and other materials from water, carbon dioxide and sunlight.
Alternative energy experts agree that photosynthesis is a promising avenue for biofuel research. The challenge is turning the resulting product into a fuel. Many companies are trying to develop an algae to do that job. But it requires energy to separate the algae from the water and then process the oil they make internally into a usable fuel. An organism that secretes the desired product directly avoids both problems.
In a test in Leander, Tex., Joule’s bacteria strain produced ethanol. Different variants can also make polymers and other high-value chemicals that are ordinarily derived from petroleum, according to Joule.
The system can run on the carbon dioxide in ordinary air but will do better using the exhaust from a power plant, once pollutants like sulfur and nitrogen oxides have been removed, according to the company.
Joule said it would begin construction next year on a commercial plant, which it hopes will begin operations in 2012. The company predicts a yield of 15,000 gallons of diesel components per acre — far more fuel than an acre of corn grown for ethanol can produce.
Mr. Sims says the pilot project covers a little less than five acres. Because the process is modular, he said, a full-scale factory would simply mean making multiple copies of a smaller setup. And with a small amount of refining, he said, the hydrocarbons can be converted to an ingredient of jet fuel.
An independent expert, Matthew C. Posewitz, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines, said that making an organism that secreted hydrocarbons was “definitely one of the most active areas in the whole game right now.”
He said that Joule did not yet have a proved process, but that it had strong research and development capabilities. “They have some extreme horsepower within that company,” he said.
Tug of War Pits Genes of Parents in the Fetus
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, September 13, 2010
Under Mendel’s laws of inheritance, you could thank mom and dad equally for all the outstanding qualities you inherited.
But there’s long been some fine print suggesting that a mother’s and father’s genes do not play exactly equal roles. Research published last month now suggests the asymmetry could be far more substantial than supposed. The asymmetry, based on a genetic mechanism called imprinting, could account for some of the differences between male and female brains and for differences in a mother’s and father’s contributions to social behavior.
A person gets one set of genes from each parent. Apart from the sex chromosomes, the two sets are equivalent, and in principle it should not matter if a gene comes from mother or father. The first sign that this is not always true came from experiments in which mouse embryos were engineered to carry two male genomes, or two female genomes. The double male and double female mice all died in the womb. Nature evidently requires one genome from each parent.
Biologists then made the embryos viable by mixing in some normal cells. The surprising outcome was that mice with two male genomes had large bodies and small brains. With the double female genome mice, it was the other way around. Evidently the maternal and paternal genomes have opposite effects on the size of the brain.
The root of the asymmetry is a procedure called imprinting in which either the mother’s or the father’s copy of a particular gene is inactivated. The best worked out example concerns a gene called insulinlike growth factor-2, which promotes the growth of the fetus. The IGF-2 gene is active in the paternal genome but imprinted or inactivated in the genome the fetus receives from its mother.
The leading explanation for imprinting is a theory that invokes conflict between relatives. Developed by David Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, the theory holds that there is a clash of interests between the fetus, whose purpose is to extract as much nutrition as possible, and the mother, whose interests lie in allocating her resources evenly to all the other children she may bear in the future.
Over the course of evolution this conflict has come to be mediated at a genetic level, Dr. Haig’s explanation goes, because the mother and the father have different interests. Speaking of mammals in general, the conflict is driven by female promiscuity. The mother wants to share her resources among progeny who may have different fathers, whereas the father is interested in the survival of only his own child. So the father always confers the IGF-2 gene in active form and the mother always bequeaths it in imprinted or silent form. The gene is imprinted in mice, humans and many other mammals.
It may seem strange to have a genetic tug of war within the fetus, with the paternal copy of the IGF-2 gene always asking for more, and the maternal copy refusing to ask at all, but presumably over the course of evolution the individuals who carried these two warring copies of the gene left more offspring than those with the gene in any other form.
Until last month only a hundred imprinted genes were known, and the mechanism seemed just an interesting deviation from Mendelian genetics. Research led by Christopher Gregg and Catherine Dulac of Harvard has shown that imprinting is far more common and more intricate than supposed.
Working in mice, the Harvard team showed that around 1,300 genes are imprinted. Dr. Dulac said that she expects a substantial, though lesser, proportion to be imprinted in people — maybe some 1 percent of the genome — because humans are more monogamous than mice and so the parents’ interests are more closely aligned.
Dr. Dulac was able to detect so many new imprinted genes by taking advantage of the ease with which genes can now be decoded. She cross-bred two very different strains of mice, thus ensuring that the maternal and paternal versions of each gene would have recognizably different sequences of DNA.
When a gene is activated, the cell transcribes it into RNA, DNA’s close chemical cousin. By decoding all the RNA transcripts in the mouse’s cells, Dr. Dulac could pick out those genes in which the paternal version was being transcribed much more than maternal version, and vice versa.
Besides finding far more imprinted genes than expected, Dr. Dulac’s team also picked up unexpected patterns in the way the genes were expressed. Maternal genes were more active in the embryo’s brain, but paternal genes became more active in the adult.
In another novel pattern, she found sex differences in imprinted genes in different region of the brain, particularly those concerned with feeding and with mating behavior. A gene called interleukin-18 is activated from the mother’s version in two important regions of the brain. This asymmetry is of interest because the gene in people has been linked with multiple sclerosis, a disease that predominates in women.
Altogether Dr. Dulac found 347 genes where either the mother’s or the father’s copy was more actively expressed in certain regions of the brain. Sex differences in the brain are usually attributed to the influence of hormones, but sex-based differences in imprinting may be another mechanism by which nature spins male and female brains out of the same genome.
“In your brain, your mom and your dad keep telling you what to do — I keep laughing when I think about it,” Dr. Dulac said.
In the cortex of the brain, Dr. Dulac discovered another unexpected asymmetry. Women have two X chromosomes, one from the mother and one from the father. The usual rule is that in each cell either the mother’s or the father’s copy is chosen at random to be switched off. But in the neurons of the cortex, there is a much greater chance that the paternal X chromosome will be switched off. “So again, it’s the conflict between mom and dad — each tries to use different chromosomes to influence you,” Dr. Dulac said.
Dr. Haig says that his theory of imprinting explains not only the tug of war between mother and fetus but also why there are imprinted genes in the brain.
It all has to do with the different interests of the mother’s family and the father’s family, which tug the individual in different directions. Relatives get into the argument because they share varying proportions of an individual’s genes.
Evolutionary fitness depends on passing one’s genes on to the next generation. But it also counts to pass on the identical genes that have been co-inherited by one’s siblings, uncles and aunts. The doctrine, known as inclusive fitness, was proposed by the biologist William Hamilton in the 1960s and is widely accepted, though is not without critics. It was challenged last month in the journal Nature by the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson and two colleagues.
Under inclusive fitness, Dr. Haig has pointed out, a conflict of interest between the mother’s and father’s relatives would have arisen because of the different dispersal patterns of men and women. Most often it has been the woman who leaves her ancestral village and goes to live with her husband’s family.
The maternal genes stand to gain if the woman is as selfish as possible and focuses just on her and her children’s welfare. But since the father is related to everyone else in the village, the father’s genes will gain from altruistic behavior. Such a conflict will result in imprinted genes, just like the battle between the mother and fetus over the mother’s resources, in Dr. Haig’s view.
Two evolutionary biologists, Francisco Ubeda of the University of Tennessee and Andy Gardner of the University of Oxford in England, have devised a mathematical model for assessing the consequences of a woman living in her husband’s village, among people to whom she is not related. Natural selection, they say in an article in the current issue of Evolution, will favor the activation of paternal genes that underlie altruistic behavior and maternal genes that promote selfishness. “Your paternal genes want you to be nicer to your neighbors than your maternal genes do,” Dr. Gardner said in an interview.
In most people the altruistic and selfish motives operate in some reasonable kind of balance. But the imprinted genes carry a serious vulnerability: since they are silenced, a mutation to the other copy can be disastrous. Diseases like autism may be connected with disruptions to imprinted genes, Dr. Gardner said.
Imprinting, far from being a genetic curiosity, may play a central role in sexual differences and in psychiatric disease, if Dr. Haig’s explanation is correct. Much of the available evidence comes from mice, and people may to some extent have emancipated themselves from imprinting when they evolved the pair bond system of mating about a million years ago. But the pair bond does not mean perfect monogamy, and in its deviations from perfection there is plenty of room for imprinting to thrive.
Rape: Rights Group Calls Test to Determine Sexual Activity a ‘Second Assault’ in India
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, September 13, 2010
An international human rights group urged India last week to ban a “degrading and unscientific” test commonly performed on rape victims to see if they have previous sexual experience.
In the test, a doctor inserts fingers into the victim during the forensic examination to test for “vaginal laxity” and is expected to deliver a medical opinion as to whether she appears to be “habituated to sexual intercourse.” The group, Human Rights Watch, argued that the test constituted a second assault on a traumatized woman.
The test is required by courts in some Indian states — including those of Delhi and Mumbai, the national and financial capitals — and, according to local reports, is in the forensic examination still endorsed by the Indian Medical Association.
In most democracies, whether or not a woman has ever had sex before is considered irrelevant in deciding whether she consented to the act under consideration. In 2003, India’s Supreme Court ruled that victims could not be cross-examined on their general moral character, Human Rights Watch said. But it has not ensured that its decision is enforced, and references to those who allege rape as “dissolute” or “of doubtful character” still appear in court rulings.
World Health Organization guidelines calls for victims of sexual violence to get health care at the same time as the forensic examination and from the same person, and for minimally invasive examinations.
Russia Finds Last-Days Log of 1912 Arctic Expedition
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, The New York Times, September 13, 2010
MOSCOW — Russian explorers said Monday that they had found a sailor’s log from aboard a legendary Arctic expedition that vanished as it sought to forge through the ice-choked Northeast Passage in 1912.
For decades, mystery clouded the fate of Georgy Brusilov, the captain of the first Russian crew to seek the elusive Arctic trade route from Asia to the West. His expedition’s disappearance inspired a generation of books and films.
But the voyagers’ remains and a journal — dated to May 1913 from aboard their vessel, the St. Anna — were found this summer on the icy shores of Franz Josef Land, Europe’s northernmost landmass.
“There is no doubt that the skeletons and notebook pages we found at the end of July on Franz Josef Land are the remains of Georgy Brusilov’s expedition, which were thought forever lost,” said Oleg Prodan, who led a mission in the expedition’s footsteps.
The Brusilov expedition ran aground on thick ice floes midway into its journey along the Siberian coast, after navigating the Vilkitsky Strait into the Kara Sea.
Vladimir Melnik/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The remains of a notebook from the long-lost expedition.
One of its only two survivors, the navigator Valerian Albanov, described in his memoirs two grueling winters clinging to the doomed ship and floating ever closer to the North Pole.
Mr. Albanov was among the 11 members of the 24-man crew who abandoned the ice-locked vessel and set out across the snow drifts seeking firm land. Their desperate trek was depicted in the popular novel “The Two Captains” by the Russian author Veniamin Kaverin.
Until now, the St. Anna and the rest of its crew had vanished without a trace. But pages of the sailor’s log, which were found well preserved, offer glimpses into the lingering fight for survival aboard the ship.
“Today we got our last brick of tobacco; the matches ran out long ago,” it reads, adding that crew members hunted polar bear as they struggled on low supplies.
Other traces of the expedition were found nearby: a watch, snowshoes, a knife, a spoon engraved with a sailor’s initials and sunglasses made from the glass of empty rum bottles.
“It was so overwhelming to find those sunglasses, which we had all been able to imagine so well after Albanov’s description,” said Vladimir Melnikov, a member of the search mission, at a press conference in Moscow.
