Three weeks ago, ago I paid $200 to send off my spit to 23andMe for DNA analysis. I had no idea what to expect, but the results are pretty much as expected! No surprises. No dangers. I now have third-party confirmation that I am officially the Whitest White Man in All the World!
Continue reading → 23andMe: Whitest White Man in All the World!
Two alarming animal things happened over the weekend, and the conflation of the dual mendacities against human nature leads us to recognize we are not really a wholly civilized world where the weaker among us in the animal world are cared for and protected as we expect them to care for us.
First, Marius, a two-year-old Reticulated Giraffe, was killed by the Copenhagen Zoo — the very entity vested and sworn to protect him — and he was fed to lions because Marius’ genetic stream wasn’t special enough to earn continued living:
The cause of death was a shotgun blast, and after a public autopsy, the animal, who was 11 feet 6 inches, was fed to the zoo’s lions and other big cats.
Administrators said they had decided to kill Marius, who was in good health, because his genes were well represented among the captive giraffe population in European zoos. But that explanation did not satisfy animal rights activists who had mounted a furious last-minute campaign to save him.
I am concerned with an ongoing effort in the scientific community to prove, once-and-for all, that some of us are genetically predestined to be lazy. It seems there are those among us who are natural-born couch potatoes. If laziness become a medical condition, then I’m sure we’ll soon see a category of disability that will then offer the lazier among us a Federally paid way of life for sitting around all day watching television.
Continue reading → The Biology of Alzheimer’s and Couch Potato Rat DNA
If you had the choice to live to age 200, would you take up that blind offer? My beloved wife Janna would not. She’s perfectly content with her life and, if she died today, she would feel satisfied with the accomplishments of her life. I, on the other hand, would love to live to age 200 if, of course, there were no sort of Twilight Zone curse involved where I was confined to a bed in a coma for 125 years, or I became a pack mule in the Himalayas for a century, or if I had to live in an active sewer and never see the light of day for 110 years.
Continue reading → Living 200 Years and Knowing the Date of Your Death
I’m not certain if Native American Gangs or casinos owned by Native American tribes do more harm to the heritage of a once proud nation. Both gangs and casinos serve two evil masters — money and power — and in the end, the result is always emotional evisceration and a disgraced death.
Our blood knows our secrets and foretells our health. Sometimes we’re told the now of the being of our bloodstream — high cholesterol, bad thyroid, liver complications — but what if our blood could tell us today, how we’ll end up in the future? Would you want your blood to tell your longevity status? Or would you prefer to live only in the now?
When I taught Public Health at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, I remember one day when the school was having a “Bone Marrow Drive” to help an employee stricken with cancer. You could sign up for a free bone marrow screening to see if you were a match and, if you were not, your bone marrow would be placed in a database for future reference. Bone marrow transplants are expensive, and painful, for both donor and recipient, but in many ways, that marrow is the manna of life.
Continue reading → The Manna of Life: Bone Marrow and Supermodels
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