Science Tuesday - Rickets, Caregiving, Genetic Privacy, and Beer

The bended femurs of a 2-year-old member of the wealthy Medici family, indicating that the child may have had rickets.

Rickets Plagued Children of the Medicis
By DOUGLAS QUENQUA, The New York Times, June 17, 2013

The rich are different from you and me, F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. But according to a new study in The International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, children of the Medicis, one of history’s wealthiest families, may have had rickets, a disease typically associated with the inferior diet and cramped living conditions of the poor. What’s more, the family’s wealth may have been to blame.

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Saying Less and Doing More
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, June 17, 2013

When I received a diagnosis of breast cancer in 2009, my friend Caitlin was one of the first people I called. And when she came to see me, she said the perfect thing: nothing. Instead, she burst into tears, gave me a hug — and then took me shopping for wigs.

Caitlin has a genius for friendship. And because she had received her own diagnosis a year before, as a guide through breast cancer she was unparalleled.

She arranged for me to have eyebrows tattooed, so I would not look faceless when all my hair fell out under chemo. After my first treatment, she shaved my head in my kitchen sink. And after my mastectomy surgery, she presented me with a material assertion that there would be a life after reconstruction — a lacy bra.

Unfortunately, most people — even the most warmhearted — lack Caitlin’s intelligence and good sense. Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s new book is for us.

Ms. Pogrebin, a writer who, among other things, contributed to the founding of Ms., the feminist magazine, has produced a guide for people who have friends facing a wide range of troubles, including their own illness (or imminent death), the loss of a loved one, or the mental illness or drug addiction of a child.

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Poking Holes in Genetic Privacy
By GINA KOLATA, The New York Times, June 16, 2013

Not so long ago, people who provided DNA in the course of research studies were told that their privacy was assured. Their DNA sequences were on publicly available Web sites, yes, but they did not include names or other obvious identifiers. These were research databases, scientists said, not like the forensic DNA banks being gathered by the F.B.I. and police departments.

But geneticists nationwide have gotten a few rude awakenings, hints that research subjects in fact could sometimes be identified by their DNA alone, or even by the way their cells were using their DNA. The latest shock came in January, when a researcher at the Whitehead Institute, which is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, managed to track down five people selected at random from a database using only their DNA, ages and the states in which they lived. And he did it in just hours. He also found relatives — a total of close to 50 people.

This month an international group of nearly 80 researchers, patient advocates, universities and organizations like the National Institutes of Health announced that it wants to consolidate the world’s databases of DNA and other genetic information, making data easier for researchers to retrieve and share. But the security and privacy of the study subjects are paramount concerns, said Dr. David Altshuler of the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T., a leader of the group.

“The problems are not yet solved in any general way,” Dr. Altshuler said. “We want to work to solve them.”

For years now, a steady stream of research has eroded scientists’ faith that DNA can be held anonymously.

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For Its Latest Beer, a Craft Brewer Chooses an Unlikely Pairing: Archaeology
By STEVEN YACCINO, The New York Times, June 17, 2013

CLEVELAND — The beer was full of bacteria, warm and slightly sour.

By contemporary standards, it would have been a spoiled batch here at Great Lakes Brewing Company, a craft beer maker based in Ohio, where machinery churns out bottle after bottle of dark porters and pale ales.

But lately, Great Lakes has been trying to imitate a bygone era. Enlisting the help of archaeologists at the University of Chicago, the company has been trying for more than year to replicate a 5,000-year-old Sumerian beer using only clay vessels and a wooden spoon.

“How can you be in this business and not want to know from where your forefathers came with their formulas and their technology?” said Pat Conway, a co-owner of the company.

As interest in artisan beer has expanded across the country, so have collaborations between scholars of ancient drink and independent brewers willing to help them resurrect lost recipes for some of the oldest ales ever made.

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