Category: Side Dishes

Travel -> Evolution on steroids

Published on by alliehajian

The other day, I was pondering randomness and chance. Specifically, I was pondering population genomics and how randomness drives evolutionary changes.

Evolution finds an answer that works, not the best answer

If you’re wondering why I believe in evolution – randomness – rather than intentional design, it’s because of the human eye is a poor design. I mentioned this to my eye doctor, and he immediately knew what I meant. The lenses and muscles are arranged in the wrong order. I mean, it works, but it also means that as we age, we all get far-sighted. If the lens and muscles were the other way around, this wouldn’t happen.

Limited range –> limited opportunity to thrive

For thousands (millions) of years, evolution happened in pockets, and slowly. The whims of chance drove variations where they happened, and whether those variations lived on or died depended on local conditions: did the variation help in the environment then and there? The chance that a random mutation would be beneficial was smaller because each person’s world was smaller.

The conditions – when and where – a variation occurred are as important as the change itself. Polar bears are only white because it was the paler variations that made it through the gauntlet of evolution. If the variation had appeared in a jungle bear, it wouldn’t have been passed on.

Travel changes everything

What happens if variants get a chance in all sorts of different environments? I’m thinking their chances of getting passed on go up: evolution on steroids. How much depends on how far and how many people travel.

It would be interesting to see how evolution rates correlate with travel: cars, trains, planes. And… spaceships, anyone?

Check it out! Look more closely...

Why would evolution allow depression?
This is a super-interesting article arguing how evolution could “choose” for a variant that would predispose someone for depression.

Did your brain evolve to be depressed

TL;DR The article poses two possibilities

1) People who have depression seem to be also have a boosted immune system.

2) Depression is a condition of intense rumination – on the negative. Perhaps the focus is helpful in other aspects of life…

 

 

The beauty (and fairness) of random

Published on by alliehajian
Having been through the process (from the parent’s end) twice, I question how college admissions works. My daughter has applied to a dozen colleges, as have many (most) of her friends. You know why? They know that getting in is a crap shoot and they don’t want to be left stranded. They’ve heard the stories of people with 4.2 GPAs from magnet STEM schools who won the Westinghouse Science Fair and agonize over applications. After months of worry, they get into Harvard, only to be rejected by Yale.
It must seem pretty much random, and that’s a heck of a lot of stress and self-doubt. So why not go full random. Elite schools haven’t really found a magic number that predicts how someone will do at college. Please, let’s dispense with the pretense of meritocracy.

Here’s how random would work

Every kid gets to apply to a set number of colleges, like six. If they want to increase their odds, they can use their six spots for the same school. Every school goes through all the applicants and divides them into two groups – those that would be likely to succeed and those that wouldn’t. For some colleges, everyone who applies would be in the “succeed” group and that’s OK.
The freshman class is picked using a lottery from the pool of applicants likely to succeed. I am going to posit that schools won’t find their students any less worthy than the ones they pick now with a combination of academic hoops and some nepotism (and niche sports ability) thrown in for good measure. A longitudinal study comparing this class to other years(I love longitudinal studies!) would be awesome…

Advantages

Truly random is a beautiful thing, not to mention the right thing. There are many gems out there that get tossed aside with the system we use now. That’s not great. What’s even worse is the systemic disadvantages of entire groups of people. With this approach, all sorts of traditionally disadvantaged people would be on truly equal footing with every other applicant.
High School seniors could spend their senior year learning instead of stressing so much to impress the admissions committee of their dream college. My daughter is “done” with school – so done that she apparently has no time or energy to run marathons or practice parallel parking so she can get her driver’s license. I think if she hadn’t been working all summer and all fall on college applications, she might still have some energy left.
Everyone could get their acceptances on exactly the same day. Kind of a national celebration. In fact, maybe give seniors and their parents the day off. To celebrate or mourn.

Caveats

Of course there would need to be some tweaks. Ways to make sure that everyone who applied to college got in somewhere, for example. I am confident we’d figure out the details if we (society) put our minds to it. It’s kind of like how people graduating from med school get residencies… So, we could look at that model for a starter.
Check it out! Look more closely...
TAKE a closer look!
The NYT had this article on an experiment with a similar theme… and it turned out (shocker) pretty well!
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/us/politics/college-admissions-poor-students.html

Thoughts?

Vaccines are not the boogeyman

Published on by alliehajian

I straddle two worlds – the world of science and the world of yoga and organic food. The voices in the first are steadfast in their support for vaccines in general – and the recently developed Covid vaccines in particular. The yoga and organic food crowd, sometimes not so much. I’ve heard a lot of criticism of Big Pharma since the pandemic began. Here’s the thing, these are not the droids you’re looking for.

Vaccines are like exercise for your t-cells

When you want to grow your muscles, you lift weights. To build the most and best muscles in the least amount of time without hurting yourself in the process, you might hire personal trainer to guide you through the exercises. You would never say that exercising like this is an “artificial” way to build muscles! You would never say “well, if you want to lift something heavy, you shouldn’t build up your muscles. Just get an electric-powered lift.”

That’s crazy talk.

A vaccine is like a personal trainer for your immune system. The vaccine helps your immune system prepare to fight off a virus. It’s pretty much as natural a way of fighting illness as you can get. Yes, you could just “fight off the virus naturally” – except that viruses are very good at what they do, and too often “fighting them off naturally” doesn’t end well. Just ask relatives of the 200,000 people who died of measles in 2020 because they weren’t vaccinated.

The dangers of letting nature take its course

Viruses have evolved to trick the body’s immune system into ignoring them. Vaccines teach those T cells and red blood cells to see through those tricks and do their job anyway. In a way that might make you sick, but is vastly less likely to kill you.

Vaccines have been carefully crafted by very dedicated, very smart people to keep people from being hurt, from dying, from suffering. A vaccine is enough like the virus so your body learns to fight when a real one shows up, but not enough like the virus that it kills you. You might get a fever, or feel crappy for a few days, but that’s a pretty small price to pay.

P.S. If you want to learn more about vaccines and vaccine development, see this blog post (in Main Entrees).

Vaccines are not like that electrical lift

I understand if you’re up in arms about Big Pharma for being elite money corporate colluding to make big money off the backs of  sick people. But vaccines are not the boogyman. They’re not cheating and they’re not dangerous.

You know what is that boogeyman? For-profit insurance companies with zero incentive to lower costs, and lots of incentives to promote expensive treatments (i.e. medications) whether or not they’re effective.  Expensive drugs for chronic conditions, and a medical/healthcare system that’s set up to slap a bandaid on what ails you instead of figuring out what’s gone wrong to cause your high blood pressure/high cholesterol/name-your-favorite-ailment here.

Drugs have their place. So do lifestyle changes.

Not everything can be cured with better nutrition, more exercise, less stress. But a lot of things can. So if you’re going to beat up on Big Pharma, take a hard look at where there are other, better options. Advocate for universal health care. And doctors who have time to listen to your history and figure out what is going wrong and how to fix it. And food regulations designed to make sure what you eat is good and good for you. Get involved in and work to improve those things, for sure.

Please, don’t spend your finite energy bashing one of the most amazing miracles of modern medicine. Go get your Covid vaccine, so you can stay healthy to fight the good fight against real evils.

 

 

 

Tunneling to the cure

Published on by alliehajian

Science research might not seem much like digging a tunnel or building a railroad, but hear me out.

The continental railroad versus the chunnel – Did you know?

It took seven years to build the transcontinental railroad. and join the east and west coast of the USA, separated by more than 3,000 miles

The Chunnel that connects England to the continent of Europe was a six year endeavor that cost 12 billion pounds

Multiple routes to a final goal

You know the saying “many hands make light work.” It’s not exactly news that tackling a job from many angles can multiply individual efforts. The longer or harder the job, the more it helps to have all hands on deck. In the case of the railroads or the chunnel, they likely completed the task in half the time it would have taken if they’d worked on it linearly.

Science discovery often works much the same way, with different groups of scientists tackling the same complex problem from two very different directions.

For example, at the Broad Institute of MIT/Harvard, where I currently work, researchers are trying to combat antibiotic-resistance by asking genome-related questions, like “what is different about the DNA of the resistant bacteria?” Meanwhile, at Draper (where I previously worked), engineers are developing a clever device that uses engineering tricks to solve the same problem by reducing antibiotic overuse. Pairing the device with a throat swab can tell your doctor in a few hours exactly what antibiotic will be effective at treating your ills, eliminating the overuse of ineffective antibiotics that leads to resistant strains of bacteria.

Each company leverages their particular strengths in the quest for a solution.

All options on the table as a means of getting to the best option

Maybe, like me, you’re thinking: that’s obvious! When you’ve got a super tough problem, it only makes sense to try lots of different possible solutions, to not put all your eggs in one basket. That’s nothing new. It’s why the NIH gives out multiple grants for the same sorts of research.

Optimizing evolution – Communication makes things better

Here’s where the train analogy comes in. There was a lot of effort that went into making sure the two groups building the Transcontinental Railroad and the Chunnel met in the middle. Because if not, the efforts of both sides would be wasted.

How often do you think groups of scientists, working in different directions, miss each other completely – maybe because they don’t even know that someone else is working on the same problem? Instead of breaking through to match the the group working on the other side, each group just keeps on tunneling, working, studying, their own path, without ever reaching the end. That’s sad.

What would make it more likely that two groups of researchers coming at a problem from different directions would find a solution? I recently came across someone who digs into publications, collecting and categorizing similar work. Could this be a clue about a low-cost, high-impact way to improve the random-walk of science discovery??

Free communication makes things even better

There’s a lot of talk about Open Science and Open Science principles (do a Google search and start down the rabbit hole!). In order to be truly useful, science must be aware (of other efforts) as well as open.