Monthly Archives: March 2017

Britain's Newcastle University says its scientists have received a license to create babies using DNA from three people to prevent women from passing on potentially fatal genetic diseases to their children the first time such approval has been granted.

The license was granted Thursday by the country's fertility regulator, according to the university.

In December, British officials approved the "cautious use" of the techniques, which aim to fix problems linked to mitochondria, the energy-producing structures outside a cell's nucleus. Faulty mitochondria can result in conditions including muscular dystrophy and major organ failure.

"Mitochondria diseases can be devastating for families affected and this is a momentous day for patients," said Doug Turnbull, director of the research at Newcastle University. The university has said it is aiming to treat up to 25 patients a year.

To help keep women with mitochondria problems from passing them on to their children, scientists remove the nucleus DNA from the egg of a prospective mother and insert it into a donor egg from which the donor DNA has been removed. This can happen before or after fertilization. The resulting embryo ends up with nucleus DNA from its parents but mitochondrial DNA from a donor. The DNA from the donor amounts to less than 1 percent of the resulting embryo's genes.

The license granted to Newcastle University relates only to the clinic's capacity to perform the techniques, Britain's fertility regulator said. The clinic must apply for each individual patient to be treated and no patient application has yet been approved.

Last year, U.S.-based doctors announced they had created the world's first baby using such techniques, after traveling to Mexico to perform the procedure, which has not been approved in the United States.

Critics have raised concerns about the treatment, saying it will put people at unnecessary risk of an untested procedure. Some say women with faulty mitochondria should choose simply to use egg donors and that using the new techniques will open the door to genetically modified "designer babies."

See more here:
UK grants first license to make babies using DNA from 3 people - Chicago Tribune

By Kati Marton By Kati Marton March 17

My daughter gave me a DNA-test kit for Christmas. I dutifully spat in the vial provided and mailed the contents to ancestry.com. A few days ago, I received the shocking result: I am half European Jewish, half Anglo-Irish. This is surprising news, considering my sister recently did a similar test that found her to be of 89percent European Jewish stock. How could two sisters be of such dramatically different ancestries? My Jewish half made perfect sense: My Hungarian mother and father were both Jewish. When did the Anglo-Irish strand infiltrate my DNA?

It was the second time I was shocked by my identity. At age 30, while interviewing a Hungarian woman rescued by Swedish Holocaust hero Raoul Wallenberg, I learned that my family was not Roman Catholic as I had been led to believe but Jewish. More painfully, I learned my grandparents had perished not under the Allies bombs as I had been told but in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

This revelation was a source of pride, and relief, too, at being in possession of my family history. It drew me back to the homeland I left as a small child. Hungarys violent, hate-filled history became the subject of several of my books. For my parents, it was a different matter. They were part of a generation of secret-keepers, with much to forget. They had twice suffered as a result of their identity. First, as Jews in anti-Semitic Hungary, where they barely survived the Arrow Cross reign of terror. Then, in the 1950s, they were labeled Enemies of the People (a label invented not by Stephen K. Bannon or Donald Trump, but by Joseph Stalin) and jailed as American spies for the crime of being brave reporters who supported the West during the Cold War. For my mother and father, identity was a minefield, and America was their last chance.

Now, thanks to ancestry.com, my own identity is again shadowed. Was my beloved father not my biological father? If not, who was? Searching dusty files of letters crisp with age, I found a copy of a letter (the original is in the Budapest secret police archives) that my father had written my mother from jail. Your only goal must be to leave with the children, he instructs my mother, unaware that she was by then an inmate in the same maximum-security prison in Budapest. Mathew Crosse should come and marry you. Your responsibility for the children and for yourself is to leave me. Heartbreakingly brave words, but who is this Mathew Crosse? Might he be the source of my 50 percent Anglo-Irish blood? Should I search for him? If I were to find an Englishman who visited Budapest in the late 1940s or his offspring what then?

All day I walked around in a fog of disbelief. I felt unmoored. But my family stayed calmly in character. My sister cheered that we had cause to celebrate St. Patricks Day on Friday. My analytical son and daughter suggested we do a DNA redo, using a different company. True Americans Anglo-Irish Canadian in addition to Hungarian they knew who their grandfather was: Papa, who barely survived the fevered identity politics of his Hungarian youth but taught all of us to ski and play tennis (though he failed miserably at teaching us to fence). His proudest achievement was not his career of stellar journalism but leading us to sanctuary in the United States.

In a couple of weeks, my family will celebrate the day a refugee transport brought my parents, my sister and me along with hundreds of other Hungarians to Camp Kilmer, N.J., in 1957. I was the youngest refugee, and it was my birthday. The Marine who processed me noticed this and produced the gift of a silver dollar. I still have it.

(YouTube/Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies)

My ancestry.com shock lifted the next morning. Regardless of the accuracy of this test, I know who I am. Family is about more than DNA. Identity used as a weapon of exclusion leads to hate, and once before it led to ashes gusting from Europes factories of death.

Why search for clues to an Englishman who may or may not be my biological father? Why redo a DNA test? I know who my father was, and I know who I am. I am Papas American daughter.

Of far greater concern than my own, is our countrys DNA today. Would a little girl arriving after an even more perilous journey still be greeted with a smile and a silver dollar?

See the rest here:
A DNA test upended everything I knew about my identity. Now who ... - Washington Post

Its not just you its been a miserable winter because of rain. You shared with us your rain stories and how you cope (or dont cope) in essays, poetry and photos. Bottom line: Oh, boy, did you answer.

Enjoyed the few days of partly sunny skies this week? Look out the window: The rains back.

We asked for your stories about dealing with our rain, which at the beginning of 2017 is about as bad as its ever been.

We heard from newcomers (surprise, some are not depressed) and some natives (some are really depressed).

You answered with essays, poems, a haiku, reminiscences, photos.

Some of you were like Mike Ristow, an electrical contractor born and raised in Seattle but currently residing in Kailua Kona, Hawaii, and couldnt resist gloating. (Weekend forecast for the Big Island, high 80s.) His email included a link to a video of Its a Jimmy Buffett Christmas!

And then there was Owen Ashurst, who lived six decades in Seattle. He now lives in San Diego (weekend forecast, low 70s). He sent a photo of himself on the beach. His cell number still has a 206 area code. Just to remind me!

We have particular reason for gloomy thoughts about this winter and our incessant rain. This February (8.85 inches) is the wettest on record since 1961 (9.11 inches). And in the first two weeks of March, we got nearly as much rain as is average for the entire month of March (3.55 inches versus 3.72 inches).

You can see by the accompanying historical rainfall chart for our Februaries that for a few years we get lulled into thinking its not so bad. Then, bam!

As Jerry Seinfeld once said, Seattle is a moisturizing pad disguised as a city.

And its not just the rain.

In Seattle, it always seems to look like its going to rain. In March, through the first 14 days, 12 saw at least 80 percent of the sky covered with clouds.

Rain and more rain is in this regions DNA.

The book Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition includes excerpts from explorers writing about our coastal weather. The rain continues, with Tremendious gusts of wind, which is Tremendious. The winds violent Trees falling in every direction, whorl winds, with gusts of rain Hail & Thunder, This kind of weather lasted all day, Certainly one of the worst days that ever was!

The tribal peoples had a different attitude.

The book explains that the Indians went about their daily routine knowing that wind, rain, and thunder were but spirit forces making their powers known for all to see. Paddling canoes that defied the worst waves and wearing hats and capes admirably suited to wet days, the Chinookans may have paused to wonder why the bearded men in the log lodge feared the weather and hid from it.

We had better get used to more Februaries and Marches like weve experienced.

A Seattle Public Utilities study predicts that because of climate change, the Seattle shoreline will rise 7 inches in the next 30 years. Plus, expect warmer and wetter winters.

You know the rainy street scene in Blade Runner with the unremitting drizzle? The future!

Time for your responses.

I used to tell newcomers that they had an 18-month whining period. After that you need to realize that the clouds and rain are not an aberration, and that you have to adapt, says Rick Platz, who now lives in Denver for family reasons.

In this area he worked in marketing. My personal epiphany was when I realized I wasnt looking at layers of gray every day on my commute from Bellevue to Seattle on the I-90.

The epiphany was about finding beauty in all that gray! Such beauty that Platz wrote a poem. It begins, Passing waves of pillows, Cascading from the skies, Layers of gray and light, Floating past our eyes, Evolving through the night

Then there is Meighan Pritchard, the pastor of Prospect United Church of Christ on Capitol Hill. She offered a haiku, based on her daily bicycle commute:

Bike through the monsoon Dry clothes await arrival Oh look daffodils!

Theres something about the rain that inspires our creativity.

Author Tom Robbins wrote in Edge Walking on the Western Rim, a collection of essays by Northwest writers:

Im here for the weather.

In the deepest, darkest heart of winter, when the sky resembles bad banana baby food for months on end, and the witch measles that meteorologists call drizzle are a chronic gray rash on the skin of the land, folks all around me sink into a dismal funk. Many are depressed, a few actually suicidal. But I, I grow happier with each fresh storm, each thickening of the crinkly stratocumulus. Whats so hot about the sun? I ask. Sunbeams are a lot like tourists: intruding where they dont belong, little cameras slung around their necks. Raindrops, on the other hand, introverted, feral, buddhistically cool, behave as if they live here. Which, of course, they do.

Says Brooke McDaniels of Fife who, for existential purposes, considers herself part of Rain City:

I have been a Seattle native my whole life 34 years to be exact! When youve lived here your whole life, the rain isnt something you think about much, unlike the newly implanted here. You make do the best you can rain or not. You drive in it, play in it, work in it its our life as a Washingtonian. I plan on raising my kids here and, well, Im pretty sure theyll grow up just like I did.

Writes Michael Hamilton, a Green Lake resident of Seattle:

I am a native Seattleite Swedish (Medical Center), class of 1944. Always loved the many moods of rain sprinkles, showers, downpours. Each brings its own light, smells, sounds and tastes. To fully appreciate rain, I suggest one has to listen closely to its rhythm and blues. When I catch its beat on my skylights, like a jealous lover demanding to be let in, I drift away into a deep relaxing sleep and awake refreshed, thankful for the experience.

For Owen Ashurst, who now lives happily in San Diego, the unrelenting grayness of Seattle became too much.

Over the years I found dealing with the wet, gray oppressiveness of the late fall, winter and early spring became, quite simply, unbearable. At some point, I found that using the pressure sprayer to blast away the moss and mold from the deck, sidewalk and other surfaces in the spring had lost its sense of romance and accomplishment, he writes. The overriding sense of color was well 50 shades of gray. And I dont mean that in a sensually stimulating way.

Jill Hammond, a Seattle-area resident until four years ago, emailed from Tasmania, Australia (weekend forecast, 79 degrees, sunny), where she works as a document controller for a local utility:

I had no idea how normal people lived around the world; that is, with clear skies and daylight. Here, if it rains it is usually for part of a day. There might be clouds in the sky, but there are sunbreaks as well. Light gets through. It is remarkable how much of a difference it makes to ones mood. I cannot believe I put up with the gray drizzle for so long.

Says Cyndi Aiona, a contract manager with Amazon: I went to college in Oregon. I got a job in Seattle, and I had been here a couple summers before. Summer is different, tell me about it. Ive been here since 1985, my two kids have been raised here. I still have not gotten used to the weather. She also co-produces the annual Live Aloha Hawaiian Cultural Festival in Seattle.

Seattle is fine, she says.

But returning home to visit friends and relatives in Hawaii, like she did in October, and feeling the warm air as she walks out of the airport: I just feel different. My body is alive again.

Rodelyn Coppock has moved here from the Bay Area for a job ahead of her husband and kids, wholl stay in California for another year.

Three months straight with all this rain, my scooter has only left the garage three times and Im starting to feel Stay in pajamas and sweat-socks and watch movies all weekend kind of blue. Im downing vitamin D, now every night turning on the sun lamp I told my husband I wouldnt need, and trying to feel some regret that I left sunnier California for this wet and cold adventure.

But

I love my new job and my team at my new office. Ive got a large and cute studio apartment in a cool, family-friendly neighborhood with a library, several bars and lounges, a small bookstore, coffee and ice cream shops, a church I like, a Kens Market and a bus stop 4 blocks away where I catch an express bus that takes me downtown every day.

A few weeks ago I texted a girlfriend, I love it here. Im never leaving.

See the original post here:
Rain, and more rain, is in our DNA: Your Seattle survival stories - The Seattle Times