In most long-term adult relationships, the idea of one day having kids is a pretty big deal. There are many ways people have been able to go about this of course: naturally, adoption, IVF, etc. However, for some people, their sexual orientation limits their options when it comes to having kids. Still today, if two men want to raise a child, they can either adopt or use a surrogate mother and an egg donor. In both of these cases, only one (or none) of the two men has a chance to pass on his DNA and be the child’s biological father. This was a long accepted truth before a recent publication from CellPress determined that it might actually be possible for two men to biologically father a child.

The article talks about different manipulating genetic regulators that influence the early cell differentiation that determines whether you’re going to be a girl or a boy. What they found is that someday it might be possible to use this manipulation to create an egg using male stem cells.

The second a zygote starts developing, it is set on a path to be a female. This is until the SRY (sex determining region Y) part of the genome kicks in from the Y chromosome and allows the developing human to have male features. Another gene in this family is SOX17, which is just another regulator of primordial germ cells. However, manipulating this gene is what scientists think to be the key. In upcoming research, scientists will mess around with the SOX17 gene to see just how possible it is to make egg cells (oocytes) from male stem cells.

Females have two X chromosomes (XX) and males have one X and one Y chromosome (XY). Because males have both chromosomes, they have a full copy of maternal information stored in their X chromosomes. This leads scientists to believe that a “male-made” egg could be fully functional. Granted this process works, one man would provide stem cells to create the egg, and the other would provide the sperm cells in order to fertilize the egg. A female surrogate would still be needed, however, to carry the baby until it is ready to be born.

At this point in time, this still seems like science fiction. But we have the knowledge and the background scientific information to make it happen, now it’s just a matter of funding, know-how, and trial and error until this becomes a full reality. But there are a lot of problems something like this could run into. For example, if scientists are actually able to create a human egg cell, this means that we’re reaching the capacity to create “designer babies” which is an infamously notorious controversy. Cultures and societies that are prejudiced against homosexuals would probably also have a problem with this happening, the same way that IVF was a big deal when that started gaining popularity as well.

Overall, we’ve come a long way but there’s still so much to learn and figure out before this can actually happen, but I think things are looking pretty good.

In about fourteen hours I will be starting my first shift of THON 2015 setting up the BJC with the rest of the OPPerations committees. This is such an exciting time and I think it’s super appropriate for this week’s passion blog entry to be about a new vaccine from a senior author at Harvard that “self-assembles” into a 3D structure to manipulate immune cells so that they can attack cancer and other infectious diseases.

With this vaccine, tiny nanoscale silica rods are injected into the body and group together into a scaffold-like structure. They then draw immune cells toward them and somehow “teach” the cells how to take on bodily threats. This is a revolutionary advance because it is the first time we are directly aiding the immune system rather than introducing a weakened version of the disease and forcing the immune system to figure it out and fight back.

The research that has been done so far has been in mice with lymphoma. After a thirty day testing window, sixty percent of the mice who received traditional medicines and antibiotics were still alive while ninety percent of the mice with the scaffold vaccine lived! By targeting dendrite cells, which are responsible for locating antigens on the surface of cancer cells, the vaccine was able to successfully slow tumor progression.

This is an elegant new example of cell re-programming that takes advantage of the dendritic cell’s natural behavior and has an extremely positive response so far. Researchers are extremely excited at the prospect of avoiding dangerous (and expensive) surgeries and treatments in favor of this completely non-invasive new method. The possibilities with a vaccination of this sort can also be tailored to treat a wide array of diseases and not just cancer.

The author of the study, David Mooney says that “This is going to be the first of a number of examples where we utilize ideas of self-organization in the body instead of having to create structures outside of the body and then placing them in”. Things like 3D printing and artificial organs are absolutely amazing, but what if the answer could be right inside of us from the beginning? This sort of technology will one day be able to expand its horizons from just reprogramming immune cells to whole tissues as well! Something like this would radicalize the face of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine entirely.

Of course, this study was only done on mice, and is yet to reach human trials, but with things looking up I think it looks extremely promising.

A silly question doctors are sometimes asked is if an unborn baby can get pregnant (FYI they can’t). But that doesn’t mean conditions like fetus in fetu don’t exist. Now, the baby isn’t actually pregnant, but this is where a baby is born with a “malformed parasitic twin inside its own body,” it’s when a baby literally absorbs its undeveloped twin. This is a freak occurrence and is super rare; there are less than two hundred documented cases of it in all of medical history. So now imagine just how freaky it is that a baby in China was born with not one, but two fetuses inside her abdomen.

Doctors first knew something was wrong when they saw a mass inside the baby’s stomach during an ultrasound. They thought it was something more common like a tumor or a hemorrhage of sorts. But a few days later, a new ultrasound revealed that the “tumor” was actually two solid masses that each contained two long bones and a spine. There were no reported complications with the birth of the baby, but when she was just two weeks old doctors decided to remove the masses.

The “masses” turned out to be two fetuses. In addition to the long bones and spines the doctors already knew about, they also found umbilical cords that were even joined to a structure resembling a placenta. They were less than four centimeters long and determined to be about ten weeks into development with all four limbs, segmented spines, developed rib cages, intestines and even primitive brain tissue. The regional obstetrics and gynecology (OB/GYN) specialist said that they were too small to properly detect in any prenatal check-up.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), fetus in fetu is might actually just be a highly developed teratoma. Now…if you thought this was a weird story so far, this is where s*** really gets cray. Teratomas are a type of tumors that show multiple germ layers and their tissue tends to be different than those surrounding them. So basically, teratomas can actually grow teeth, hair, bone, and sometimes even crude and non-functional eyes and limbs. If you wanna see a picture, here’s the link. Be warned, it’s absolutely disgusting and I love it. It’s the thing nightmares are made out and it’s just so cool. Anyways, the WHO also classifies fetus in fetu as a twin that starts developing normally but then gets enveloped by the other twin.

PS – I hope you all look at the picture. (Also sorry for completely nerding out in this post, I got unreasonably excited about this)

The word psychopath is very controversial and has many stigmas and negative connotations associated with it. But psychologists can agree that a psychopath is generally a person who lacks empathy and remorse. These are the people who make up twenty percent of violent criminal offenders. However, their mannerisms are very different from regular violent criminals. It is common knowledge that criminals in general are quick tempered, aggressive and respond hyperactively towards threats. Psychopaths on the other hand are very logical and collected, their aggression is premeditated and their mannerisms are cold and impersonal. These differences can be attributed to everything from upbringing to body chemistry, but now new research has shown that the brains of people labeled as “psychopaths” actually respond abnormally to forms of punishment. However, before we go on, the study found it important to note that not all psychopaths are violent or criminals. The conclusions tentatively reached by this project are not sweeping generalizations of everyone who suffers from psychopathy and further research is still needed to test the broader relevance of these new findings.

The study took place at King’s College London and compared fMRI scans of violent offenders, to psychopathic violent offenders with convictions for things such as murder and rape, as well as people with no history of criminal violence. The subjects had to play a matching game while inside the MRI machine, but the game was tricky because the rules changed without warning. The scans showed how the offenders failed to learn from the “punishments” implemented by the game when the wrong choice was made. Through this study the researchers found actual structural differences between both the gray and white matter fibers tracts of the psychopaths.

When “punished” by the game by receiving a deduction of points for something that used to result in a gain, the brains of the non-psychopathic criminals’ scans were very similar to those of the “normal” people. In the brains of the psychopaths, the regions of the brain associated with both empathy and learning responded differently. This suggests that psychopathic criminals have structurally different mental pathways of learning from a punishment/reward system. This can tie into an inability to learn from or anticipate different consequences when planning or committing a crime.

A good insight to take away from this study is that maybe if children who are found to have pre-psychopathic tendencies such as aggression and anti-socialness, that there can be an intervention of their learning patterns that could potentially change specific brain mechanisms behind psychopathy. If a program such as this were to come about it could have the potential to significantly reduce the amount of psychopathically violent criminals.