Effeminate mice with clotted blood

Some interesting news on the science and environmental front. I have been a sometime participant on a closed genetics board called double helix for the past several years and somebody posted this link yesterday.

From Nature News:

Scientists have developed a gene-repair kit that treats the blood-clotting disorder hemophilia in mice. The technique replaces genes in targeted organs without removing cells from the body, simultaneously correcting multiple mutations. It broadens the range of diseases that can be treated with gene therapy.
The method uses enzymes called zinc-finger nucleases. These are molecular scissors that replace specific DNA sequences by cutting through the double helix, after which the cell's repair machinery fixes the break.
Until now, therapies using zinc fingers have required cells to be taken out of the body, genetically modified in a dish and returned. This works for some immune and blood disorders such as sickle-cell anaemia, and trials are underway for HIV and diabetic neuropathy, but not for diseases affecting tissues less suited to this type of manipulation.
To develop a way to correct mutations within the body, Katherine High, a hemophilia researcher at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, teamed up with experts on zinc-finger nucleases at Sangamo BioSciences in Richmond, California. Their work is reported in the magazine Nature.

I have misgivings about opening the pandora's box of gene splicing. I believe that it is beyond our skill set and the limits of our wise judgement. Soon we will be manufacturing nordic barbies right out of the tube. There does not appear to be a regulatory body that can examine the tertiary effects of our genetic experiments. I remember reading about an agricultural experiment with gene splicing that ended up killing a native moth population. We aren't smart enough to foresee the consequences of our promethean actions in this field.

When I have broached this with the geneticists I am told that species have always suffered mass extinctions and that this is nothing new. I just don't trust us and can foresee a world that may soon be relieved of our and many other species.

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In other news, researchers at the University of Missouri, Columbia have released findings that Bisphenol P (BPA), a common additive found in packaging, makes male deer mice less physically attractive to females. Their behavior suggested a de-masculinization of the rodents.

“The BPA-exposed deer mice in our study look normal; there is nothing obviously wrong with them. Yet, they are clearly different,” said Cheryl Rosenfeld, associate professor in biomedical sciences in the College of Veterinary Medicine and investigator in the Bond Life Sciences Center. “Females do not want to mate with BPA-exposed male deer mice, and BPA-exposed males perform worse on spatial navigation tasks that assess their ability to find female partners in the wild. This study sets the stage for BPA researchers to examine how BPA might differentially impact the behavioral and cognitive patterns of boys versus girls. Investigators looking for obvious BPA-induced differences, such as chromosome deletions or DNA mutations, could be missing subtle behavioral differences that eventually lead to long-term adverse outcomes, including demasculinization of male behaviors with ensuing decreased reproductive fitness.”
In the study, female deer mice were fed BPA-supplemented diets two weeks prior to breeding and throughout lactation. The mothers were given a dosage equivalent to what the U.S. Food and Drug Administration considers a non-toxic dose and safe for mothers to ingest. At weaning (25 days of age), the deer mice offspring were placed on a non-supplemented BPA diet and their behavior tested when they matured into adults.
When sexually mature, researchers tested each mouse’s ability to navigate a maze to safety. This enhanced spatial navigational ability of male deer mice is important because it allows them to find mates that are dispersed throughout the environment. Females do not have to search to find mates and thus their navigational abilities have not been enhanced by evolution. It was these navigational skills, among others, that were tested in the laboratory setting. Each animal had two five-minute opportunities per day, for seven days, to try to find its way into a home cage through one of several holes placed around the edge of an open maze which was marked with a set of visible navigational cues. Many male mice that had been exposed to BPA early in their development never found the correct exit. By comparison, male mice that had not been exposed to BPA consistently found the hole leading to their home cage within the time limit, some on the first day. In addition, the untreated mice quickly learned the most direct approach to finding the correct hole, while the exposed males appeared to employ a random, inefficient trial and error strategy, Rosenfeld said.
In addition, male deer mice exposed to BPA were less desirable to female deer mice. Females primed to breed were tested in a so-called mate choice experiment. The females’ level of interest in a stranger male was measured by observing specific preferential behaviors, such as nose-to-nose sniffing and the amount of time the female spent evaluating her potential partner. These behaviors assess a potential mate’s genetic fitness. Rosenfeld said that both non-exposed and BPA-exposed females favored control males over BPA-exposed males on a two-to-one basis.
“These findings presumably have broad implications to other species, including humans, where there are also innate differences between males and females in cognitive and behavioral patterns,” Rosenfeld said. “In the wide scheme of things, these behavioral deficits could, in the long term, undermine the ability of a species such as the deer mouse to reproduce in the wild. Whether there are comparable health threats to humans remains unclear, but there clearly must be a concern.”
“We can use this evolutionary approach to the study of BPA to determine the best way to assess differences in the risks to boys and girls to early exposure to this chemical,” said David Geary MU Curators’ Professor of Psychological Sciences.

You can read the study abstract here. BPA has been banned in Canada and eliminated by many American manufacturers but has still not been regulated by the EPA. We wait to see if a nexus can be established between sissy mice and sissy men.

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The Huffington Post had an interesting article last week about Monsanto's chemical Roundup being linked to birth defects. In a new review by the group Earth Open Source, it is suggested that industry regulators  have known for years that glyphosate, originally introduced by American agricultural biotechnology giant Monsanto in 1976, causes birth defects in the embryos of laboratory animals.

Read the actual study here.


Roundup was found to cause abnormalities such as heart dilation in studies as far back as 1993. In a 2002 study, glyphosphate was found to cause developmental malformations in laboratory animals. A 2007 study showed that Roundup induces adverse reproductive effects in the male offspring of a certain kind of rat.

A laboratory study done in France in 2005 found that Roundup and glyphosate caused the death of human placental cells. Another study, conducted in 2009, found that Roundup caused total cell death in human umbilical, embryonic and placental cells within 24 hours.

From HuffPo:

An Argentine government scientist, Andres Carrasco conducted a study, "Glyphosate-Based Herbicides Produce Teratogenic Effects on Vertebrates by Impairing Retinoic Acid Signaling" in 2009.
The study, published in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology in 2010, found that glyphosate causes malformations in frog and chicken embryos at doses far lower than those used in agricultural spraying. It also found that malformations caused in frog and chicken embryos by Roundup and its active ingredient glyphosate were similar to human birth defects found in genetically modified soy-producing regions.
"The findings in the lab are compatible with malformations observed in humans exposed to glyphosate during pregnancy," wrote Carrasco, director of the Laboratory of Molecular Embryology at the University of Buenos Aires. "I suspect the toxicity classification of glyphosate is too low.”
“In some cases this can be a powerful poison," he concluded.
Argentina has not made any federal reforms based on this research and has not discussed the research publicly, Carrasco told HuffPost, except to mount a "close defense of Monsanto and it partners."

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The chemical industry and the defenders of poison like to point out that mice are small and people large, that a nexus can not be made between rodents and humans as if scale is a defense against chemicals that destroy cells and tissue on a microscopic and cellular level. Or they blame farm workers for their faulty application of the products. Or regulators for not watching them closely enough.

Try to fight a beast like Monsanto and see how fast you get squished. A researcher is likely to end up forced to live on some lonely atoll in the middle of nowhere with his or her funding permanently cut off.

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While plastics are sending us into a male to female gender bender, the Indians are turning girls into boys.

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In other environmental news, a Pacific gray whale was seen off of Herziliya, Israel last year, an event not seen for centuries since atlantic whales were hunted to extinction in the 1700's. Scientists conclude that global warming has melted a channel through the canadian icecap. Scientists have also found a plankton species that has not existed in the waters in approximately 800,000 years.

"The implications are enormous. It's a threshold that has been crossed," said Philip Reid of the Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science in Plymouth, England.
"It's an indication of the speed of change that is taking place in our world in the present day because of climate change," he said.
Reid said the last time the world witnessed such a major incursion from the Pacific was 2 million years ago, which had "a huge impact on the North Atlantic," driving some species to extinction as the newcomers dominated the competition for food.

Some christians are pointing to the appearance of the whale as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy and an indicator of pending end times.