Decades ago, as a life sciences student, we often debated the possibility of a species-wide fatal pandemic due to human impacts on our world's ecosystems, and the huge, stressed population pools from which such diseases could mutate and take hold.
Viruses and prions were the topic, most often, as they seem to be the most opportunistic and sit on that debatable boundary of what one would scientifically consider to be a living organism. In the late 1990's, the research into all that began focusing on the phenomenon of communicable cancers, in terms of a cancer that had begun to devastate the population of Tasmanian devils. This research began having a far more human significance in the early part of this decade, when various university hospital institutes probed deeper into the transmission of cancer through affected transplant tissue, and the possibility of a mother transmitting a cancer to her fetus via the placenta. Integrating this growing body of empiric knowledge has now also made many researchers explore if a retrovirus, such as the HIV, could then become something which even a mosquito could transmit from person to person, with that billions of misses in natural selection and genetic drift, becoming the one fatal mutation that takes hold and succeeds...
Today's New York Times came as a startling echo of yet something else, which human beings ought to be focusing their attentions on rather than stupid and politicized ad hominid attacks, so a few powerful people can hang on to and control the resources of human ingenuity. In effect, the threat to the Tasmanian devil actually could be seen, like all else now threatening human existence, as an incentive for us to get off our butts. By finding solutions to the Tasmanian devil crisis, we by extension find solutions to what threatens human life. This is yet another example of how important it is for us to understand the reasons for the creeping extinction of more than 25% of the planet's animals with an internal skeleton (endoskeletal)
For that very illuminating article: New York Times
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Comments: 76
Kelly, Too sad about the Tasmanian Tiger.
Folks, every single human being - even the homeless bum passed out drunk on the park bench - has within him or her, incredibly important information for the whole of our human population to better survive.
Hope, if grounded by knowledge, often can be misinterpreted as naivety. Without that Hope, then there really is no hope
Thanks for bringing it to the forefront.
It sounds like cancers are evolving, but our immune systems are not keeping up. Speaking of evolution, I found it interesting that the Devils are now reproducing in their first year in what seems like a natural effort to save the species. How did they know to make this significant change in their breeding habits? What, if any, similar adjustments might the human race have to make in order to avoid extinction?
But, on a more hopeful note:
Thank you for posting to this group whose only purpose is to thank you for posting to this group.
Very nice article. I might chime in with some information from my own work, and that of my colleagues. You will be happy to hear that a study on cancer after transplant showed that tumors found in organ transplant recipients were not derived from the cancers found in the donors. (This was done by DNA marker analysis.) Also there was no evidence that the number of cancers in recipients was higher in those whose organs came from people with cancer, than from others.
Also, lets be clear that HIV, despite being highly mutable, has not been able to evolve into being able to be transmitted by mosquitoes, or by casual contact. There has also been concern that the Avian flu virus might be able to evolve into a much more easily transmissible agent, but that has also not happened. There are some reasons to suppose that it wont.
Putting down my cancer research hat, and putting on my genetic one, you are absolutely right, and so is Angela, that genetic diversity is a crucial component of any species survival. I don’t know if studies have been done on the Devil’s level of diversity, but once a species has had a major downswing in population (called a bottleneck) it takes thousands of years to recover such diversity. What many people don’t realize, is that human being have a very low degree of genetic diversity, surface appearances to the contrary, resulting from a severe population bottleneck about 70,000 years ago. So we need to be very careful.
Yes, there aren't very many people who know that the human population is relatively very genetically poor in diversity.
As I mention above in the commentary, it is a real stretch for the HIV to have the mosquito as its vector to humans, since it's not generally blood that is injected into the mosquito's host but its saliva to help in the biting and sucking, and the HIV does not have a long lifespan in that environment. But viral mutations have had a history of proving unpredictable in their *behavioral* expressions. Imagine, if you will, genetic manipulations of the HIV, in an effort to develop a vaccine... (not the TRIM22 or other human antigen work)
About the question of commutable cancers, I would be very interested and grateful if you'd give me a couple of research links on that work.
Epidemiologic study on the origin of cancer after kidney transplantation.Transplantation . 2004 Feb 15;77(3):426-8.
That's how sadly ignorant we are.
Yes, I believe that biologically (also as expressed in culture) human beings - as all organisms - have these seeds within. But we equally have the *seeds* of success, and I don't believe we yet have arrived at the end-all tipping point.
I honestly believe this *uncertainty* within human existence, as an integral function within the non-linear and feedback systems that engender the capacity for life on the planet, depends a lot on our collective use of that last bit of gray matter to have evolved in human beings. It was arrived at through the pressures to survive, but it can be equally self-destructive if our collective behaviors don't quickly begin reflecting a fundamental understanding of what *nature* expresses without human ego. The functions of evolution are impersonal and quite mechanical like that. It's the reality of what brought about organic life, a fundamental feature of temporary systems within the universe, and later geophysics of the planet, to bring relative order out of what some would suggest as chaos.
We are only at a kindergarten level of knowledge in all this. We often arrogantly behave as though we already know everything, and even so, our behaviors often seem to indicate we don't even act wisely with the limited knowledge we have accumulated.
I have my personal feelings - based a lot on personal experiences, a pretty strong interdisciplinary education and occasionally very logical thinking - about all this, including also whatever the human spirit might be, which is like that subtle carrot in front of our noses, a sort of mammalian curiosity that is most often apparent during the formative years of brain development, seeking something or another in adulthood that might be greater than whatever the human ego can grasp. I honestly believe there are enough human beings on this planet with a capacity to express this natural feature that we just might be able to survive.
The first polls from the debate indicate that Democrats thought Obama won by a huge margin, the undecided also thought Obama won by a large margin, and Republicans thought McCain won by a less narrow margin. Overall, the poll concludes that Obama/Biden won all four debates. I didn't write down the quick statistic that popped up on the screen, but it was quite telling, despite McCain's stronger than previous debates *presence* in the first twenty minutes of the debate. McCain obviously has undergone some basic training by his experts, but he simply was unable to sustain it - it's foreign to his character - and he quickly showed the electorate who he really is: a man frustrated by the challenges of intelligence and presence of mind.
If mosquitoes become the vehicle for a species ending pandemic, we always have DDT.
For me the comics and cartoons have been a valuable part of my science and political education.
Donald Duck created methylene Ch2, decades before scientists actually synthesized it.
There is another duck in the comics today that does better job editorializing and reporting than the major news outlets.
I'm sure you are aware of Dr. Myron Kauffman's work with the United Network for Organ Sharing registry. Does this newer research you mention, of analyzing DNA markers, then contradict the hypothesis upon which his statistical concerns were based? I found an interesting synopsis of the work you mention and will later access the whole paper, but I wondered if you would be willing to shed more light on the subject.
Thank you.
There are a great many functions - most are likely yet to be discovered - involved with Darwin's theory.
Donald Duck created methylene Ch2?
I'm, not going to dignify that with an answer.
wake up my dear brain and stert researching as I once did rather than just reguarding plants...although my mother(nature) is tierd of being overlooked ...
great read great vidio I just wish my computer was great enough for it to have taken me close to a half hour to watch it! It was worth the time and then some.~wishes Jules
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales ...When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract... thinking."
-Albert Einstein.
Now, this may sound like he would agree a bit with Duane's premise that Donald Duck is the source of that wisdom. Not even close.
Donald Duck makes no one think outside a particular frame, ie: doesn't encourage the sort of desire to expand one's horizons, as you write. There's a whole science that studies the facial features of such comic book characters, which is attractive to the minds of developing children.
Back when I worked in a zoo, we used to deal with this problem by putting a small populations through an artifical "genetic bottleneck."
We would deliberately pair the most closely-related individuals in our breeding programs. Offspring in which the deleterious or lethal genes were concentrated would die, thus ridding the population of some copies of those genes, while their siblings with fewer deleterious genes would live.
Sometimes simple curiosity is more productive than applied research.
Simple curiosity allied with applied research would be a good way to use our gray matter.
I had read about the bottle neck 70,000 years ago when the human race was almost wiped out. Best I can remember they think there were something like maybe 10,000 left at that time so that is why we have such a small gene pool.
Alas we do not see beyond the end of our noses and then we can't focus on the end of it very well...
:O\
The Tasmanian Devil was hunted close to extinction in the early part of the 20th century.
The Tasmania Tiger was hunted to extinction in the early part of the 20th century.
The aborigines in Tasmania were hunted close to extinction in the first half of the 19th century. Many were shot by European settlers in sweeps that went from one end of the island to the other. When the population had dwindled to a few hundred, they were transported to an isolated island, there to languish in squalor while the population declined to a few dozen. The last full-blooded Tasmanian aborigine died in 'captivity' in 1876.
What fools we mortals be.
yes, I have, about Genghis Khan (also the Vikings)
Also the supervolcano explosion in Toba... some theories point to an even smaller population group than 10,000 who began reproducing.
Yellowstone is statistically primed for one also, but we'd likely survive that one far better, at least, if we get our act together on all those other issues coming down the pike from many vectors.
Another example is the transplant story. It seems perfectly logical that tumor cells in a diseased organ should take hold in an immune suppressed recipient, and that was our hypothesis (I am not an author of that paper, but I worked closely with that group). But the data showed that the logical hypothesis was wrong.
'Too bad Dan Brown was ignorant of genetics as well as literary style'. Reading this I'm reminded of a quote from Alexander Pope - 'What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed'. Well said!
There is no disputing the impact of DDT, though it maybe mitigated by dose.
The Tasmanian devil is not a harbinger of doomsday. The issue if you have a pandemic and can destroy the vector for it you can choose between consequecnes. It isn't to simply accept a fatal mutagent for one species.
I was taught about Donald Duck in an organic chemicst class, I can't say whether it was 1947 panel or a year or two either way. That idea had been deined by chemists for years and then it was proven correct. In fact as I recall it was part of a strip on energy.
There was a remark that suggested getting the cartoons/comics weren't a credible place for learning. I simply offer an alternative view that cartoons and comic are read only by ignorant people, but they can be a simuous for thinking and laerning, much to how Gather is.
In any case, there is much too much trivia out there for people to know that we are all ignorant to a great degree.
Try Mallard Fillmore for a slightly different prosective, http://www.jewishworldreview.com/strips/mallard/2000/mallard1.asp
Duane, I mentioned that DDT accumulates as it goes up certain animal groups. For a better emphasis on the reality of this compound, I should perhaps have said that this organic, fat-soluble compound biomagnifies as it goes up the food chain. It's an extremely persistent organochlorine, and once it comes out of the aquatic environment, like with eagles or people (or marine mammals) catching slightly contaminated fish (where it doesn't accumulate so intensely due to physiological variations in respiration), DDT's metabolites begin to accumulate, or to help you understand, they magnify, often thousands of times the background concentration.
When I studied environmental science, we learned to our surprise that the standard for checking DDT concentrations in an ecosystem by analyzing fish fat, for example, simply did not reflect the true accumulation and impact of DDT.
DDT is used in a lot of countries still. Some nations find it the only cost-effective way of controlling certain pests, like mosquitoes, but also food. In the 90's, when I was last in Mexico, they were using it extensively even in certain agriculture, and that gets imported into the States and Europe, which bans its use. Not only do we produce *pests* resistant to the insecticide this way - like the superbug infections found in hospitals due to unwise use of antibiotics - but we stress our bodies. It's likely a carcinogen and stresses fetal development, but it definately challenges our reproductive system and our liver, and most research indicates it can have a long range chronic impact on our CNS beyond a temporary reaction (it is a CNS agent) as well as the endocrine system (hormones and all that). It's passed along in mother's milk, and the milk you buy at the grocery store if the cows have gotten feed from a farmer who bought it from Mexico or China (due to economics), for example.
What makes most people feel it is safe is that in small doses due to direct exposure, it takes a bit of the stuff to make you very sick, and only a few people have ever been documented to have died from such direct exposures. But this is an illusion. Due to the persistent nature of DDT in the environment, we still find it in the USA from when it began to be banned in the early 70's. Oddly, America manufactures and exports tons of the stuff across the border.
I must have misunderstood the initial issue. I thought it was about the potential for a specie ending condition that could be carried by mosquitoes would take it globally. It seemed that in that situation, rather than simply relinquish the species fate to the ability to treat the cause there is the alternative to eliminating the method of transmittal. The former seems to allow the species (man) to become extinct, the later seems to extend the time to work on the cause or to at least extend the life of the specie.
DDT is a bad actor, however, it would become a balance, risk of insult (which will diminish over time) to the environment or allow the specie to become extinct. I opt using DDT.
I would say that the means of delivering the DDT have so improved that lower doses would be effective and the management of the application would further reduce the amount of environmental insult. Also we now have a better understanding of the length of time DDT stay in the system and how the individual inhabitants of the environment react.
Back to Donald and methylene, in fact that cartoon panel (per the instructor) did stimulate discussion about the possibility of synthesizing the molecule which ultimately led to the creation of mehtylene. The example was use to show we should never discount because of the source only look at the idea.
Not having any knowledge of genetics, it seems possible that where there are fatal flaws there also could be superior flaws and with inbreeding if the fail flaw wasn’t as severe and took many more generation that might allow the superior flaw to dominate and overwhelm the fatal one. Just a speculation garnered from reading more comics/cartoons and effective equivalents than more rigorous tomes.
Cartoons don’t constrain the thinking, authoritative tomes can.
I've tempered my anti-insecticide stance over the decades since being surrounded by biology professors and researchers who were convinced that DDT was the cause of the calcium issue in birds. Over the years, science has placed a question mark on DDT's role in the thinning of bird eggshells. But I still believe, from all I've studied, that DDT is a major cause.
Recently, the Dengue virus has again become a serious problem in Brazil and other places, and the protozoa responsible for malaria kills a huge number of people, and DDT can quickly bring that toll down to almost insignificant numbers. Brazil asked Cuba's health system to help, and the result has been an increase in empowering police to further override personal freedoms, in the slums, further increasing the antipathy of the wealthier population to the vast population of the poor.
But the aegyptus mosquito largely responsible for transmitting such diseases to humans plays a critical role in all the ecosystems it lives in. Birds migrate often to capitalize on the rich abundance of larva and adults of it and countless other insects, when those resources are less abundant in other regions during the winter months, and they bring the problem into their more northerly habitats in the summer. Local bat groups thrive on them, and they have been shown to be particularly sensitive to DDT, and many colonies have been wiped out. Dragonflies also. That's just the tip of the iceberg. The impact includes even pollination. Without the mosquito larvae, fish and other aquatic predators that could control the larva are impacted by a reduction in population, and this has numerous cascade effects, including the supply of food to native human populations. Deep in the jungles of Brazil, the native groups there have not had an issue with this mosquito until we begin to bring that problem with deforestation, and upset the natural checks and balances inherent in those habitats. We ought to learn from that.
DDT, though discovered in the late 18th century, became a panacea after WW II. It helped many GI's. But then the supply side economics kicked in, and soon it was used everywhere.
We wind up bringing resistant strains of the mosquito into their population pools, much like unwise use of antibiotics can evolve strains of bacterial infections we have a hard time controlling. It would be far wiser to use DDT as an emergency agent, and only in heavily populated places, like the dumps of Rio, but not in the huge swamps of the jungle as we deforest them. But supply-side economics puts a pressure from several fronts against finding other means to better control the mosquito. In the Amazonian and African jungles, the native populations there have not had a real issue with mosquito borne diseases, until deforestation began. We then lose also some critically unique human genetic information when those isolated groups that have uniquely survived die off. Diseases and such have an integral function in balanced ecosystems. There's much more we could discuss on the subject, but I thought I'd leave it here and see what you and others think.
It means that we need to be far more aware as individuals of the real dangers facing us, take better personal responsibility for each footprint we make, and not be so deceived by those mostly economic forces that are driven by immediate rewards. I see this Tasmanian devil issue as a unique moment to study something fundamental about how to make our chances at survival better. And the forests where they live sure do need their presence.
In the forests of Europe, wolves were demonized to the point of religious fanaticism hundreds of years ago and not so recently, mostly due to a mistaken notion of the wolves impact on farm animals. Look at the fairy tales the Grimm brothers assembled on that. It was a very odd paradox, then, when the Europeans came to America and discovered an entirely different relationship between humans and wolves... still, they were hunted, trapped and poisoned to near extinction in most places of colonial America, making the populations of big game animals less healthy biologically, since wolves are very good at selecting away those animals with the weakest genes for the overall health of an ecosystem. I've had arguments with those who advocate long hunting seasons in places of the US east where whitetail deer populations grow unchecked. The problem's not so much that it's a a bad idea to reduce their population, but in the way we hunt. I used to hunt with my dad, and he always searched for the buck with the biggest rack. That is not how nature works.
Don't take it personal. It is right that often the smallest, most seemingly insignificant effect can result in major discoveries. To wit, Lorenz at MIT in the early sixties, when he was working with a primitive computer to predict weather, and learned something startling, which as come to be known as the butterfly effect. Its mathematics has applications even in socioeconomics.
I try to exercise my limited faculties, by trying to formulate my emotional reactions into some form of rationality.
I offer my perspective (commonly a bit off center to the conversation) both to have it challenge so I can rethink it with the new perspective. My personal problem is that I am seldom able to phrase it in such a away the reasoning challenge, normally only the position.
The vast majority of times people are seeking the same result, but differ on the method. I have always found that an alternative perspective has been a good stimulus for my thinking and considering new means and methods.
On Gather it seems the vast majority is preoccupied by the methods and is seldom willing to see the ends are the same. By that narrowing of view they seldom seek new or modified means. In the end the results are lost.
On Gather it is never person, but sometimes frustrating.
I do appreciate your patience and willingness to consider what I say. Being a simple guy I try to distill each issue or discussion to a simple line thought that then I can begin to consider it, react to it, and form a comment. The one problem is I maybe in the same stadium just not on the playing field.
As in this case I am not interested in the butterfly as much as the boundaries of thought. There are so many butterflies one can negate the other, but when the eyes of thought are so focused on each step in the path that has been taken so many of the flowers of ideas can be missed.
Even the refrigeraor magnetic figures can be used by the individual for alternative crate an alternative stimulus. I have been in a research lab ad seen those characters around a work station or two.
A friend just reminded me of an event being *celebrated* now, from 60 years ago. The definition of genocide, as adopted by the fledgling UN General Assembly in December of 1948.
People really ought to take a solid bit of time letting each and every single statistic and images for every one of those events of the recent past and the now sink in fully, self-analyzing just how many unique groups of people have have lost diversity important to us all by these targeted genocides... in war.
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I just wanted to say I am finally going through what is now under 6,400 pieces of gather new mail that is in my inbox on here. So with that in mind I have finally come to a piece of mail that was addressed to me in regards this article submission you have created to share with the gather community. Thank you for taking the time and sharing your piece with us here at gather. :o)