Tag Archives: creepy

The Ripple Effect of Oil

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We probably all remember the disastrous BP oil spill of 2010, when over 4.1 billion barrels of crude oil spewed into the ocean over the course of three months. This has become old news– I personally haven’t heard about this oil spill for a long time and the media rarely talks about it anymore. But even though the leak has been stopped and the panic has died down, some of the more serious effects of this event are only just starting to be felt.

This past fishing season has unearthed an extremely high number of deformed animals, including eyeless, clawless, or shell-less crabs, fish with lesions and tumors and no livers, and clams with soft shells.

The Simpsons called it years ago (Picture courtesy of taringa.net)

The Simpsons called it years ago        (Picture courtesy of taringa.net)

In fact, according to Louisiana commercial fisher Tracy Kuhns, more than half of the shrimp caught in a popular shrimping area by the Gulf of Mexico had no eyes. One fisherman caught 400 pounds of shrimp at the height of the shrimp season, none of which had eyes (or even eye sockets).

In the meantime, researchers from the US and Australia discovered that embryos of large commercial fish (including herring, salmon, tuna, etc.) also tended to develop deformities and have shorter lifespans after being exposed to crude oil.This study was done in a lab, and although people haven’t noticed major dents in commercial fish populations due to these deformities, it’s a little alarming that oil can have long-lasting effects that go beyond just coating someone’s feathers or gills, and that can appear a long time after the disaster.

But why are these effects only showing up now? It turns out that crude oil is a mutagen that damages the DNA of many different animals. After several generations, these changes actually become part of the species’ genome and can lead to birth defects or cancer.

Shrimp with tumors and no eyes
(Photo courtesy of thinkprogress.org)

This raises even more concerns— how can this affect beachgoers in Florida and other places in the South? What did the fishermen do with all the deformed animals they caught? What about dolphins, whales, and sharks that depend on these creatures for food? Are there any other less visible effects that could be even more dangerous? One thing we can be sure about is that the consequences of the spill are turning out to be much messier than we had thought.

So what does the government plan to do to address this issue? Go back to offshore drilling as soon as possible, of course. In fact, oil companies have pretty much gone back to doing whatever they were doing before the spill, and Senator David Ritter of Louisiana is currently advocating for more drilling permits for the Gulf of Mexico. “Mother Nature has proved amazingly resilient with recovering from the spill,” he cheerfully observed.

 

Sources:

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/04/18/466660/legacy-of-bp-oil-spill-eyeless-shrimp-and-fish-with-lesions/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/us/fish-embryos-exposed-to-oil-from-bp-spill-develop-deformities-a-study-finds.html?ref=science

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140310090615.htm

Gene Screen

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It seems like every day, people come up with new things to do with DNA that could either be borderline creepy or incredibly brilliant. Today is no different.

Hospitals have been switching from paper to electronic medical records in the past few years—now, 93% use some kind of electronic records, and 2.2% are now completely paperless. Because electronic records are much easier to scan on a massive scale, they are being used to link diseases and genes. Since 2005, there has been a type of research called genome-wide association studies, where scientists identify a lot of people with the same disorder, obtain tissue samples, and look for links between the conditions and certain mutations that are more common among these people than among everyone else.

This week, researchers are trying a new thing called phenome-wide association studies, where they take a mutation and, using electronic medical records, track down everyone who has it and look for disorders they have in common. Dr. Joshua Denny, an author of this study, explained that because of the electronic system, “we have everything they come to the doctor for.” So far, this has proved to be much more reliable than genome-wide association studies.

The medical records used in this research come from the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics Network, which includes several very prestigious hospitals.

This doesn’t exactly have controversy surrounding it because it’s such a new system, but I couldn’t help but wonder— when you work in a hospital, you have to carry all patient records in a sealed pouch to keep you from reading it. This is because hospitals are legally not allowed to give out any health information about their patients. But phenome-wide association studies gather huge amounts of data from tens of thousands of people, along with blood or tissue samples (to obtain DNA), often without the patient’s knowledge. Is this really ethical?

So what do you think about this? Are these concerns just conspiracy-theory ramblings and this research can do much more good than harm, or should privacy be protected no matter what?

 

Source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/28/science/linking-genes-to-diseases-by-sifting-through-electronic-medical-records.html?ref=science&_r=0

100% Certified Lab-Grown

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As the population continues to increase exponentially, world hunger is becoming a much more widespread and serious issue, and more extreme measures are being taken to solve it. One of those ways is growing meat in petri dishes.

This August, a completely lab-grown burger was fried and eaten in London after having been grown from cow stem cells in a lab. This burger is all muscle– because there were no fat or skin or cartilage cells to begin with, there was no such tissue in the meat. This development could have some interesting implications for world hunger– if meat can be mass-produced in places with climates that can’t support large numbers of animals, everyone can get their protein.

Widespread use of this discovery could also help environment in some major ways. Right now, it’s estimated that confined animals produce three times as much waste as humans in the US, and account for a huge percentage of carbon and methane emissions. Runoff from factory farms ends up in groundwater and ecosystems, causing diseases to develop in places that they shouldn’t be developing in.

So how much value do lab-grown burgers have? Are they the next “pink slime”? Or are they the solution to world hunger and the destructive consequences of factory farming?

Or do you think hunger can be fixed in a much less creepy and “scientific” way? After all, meat is being produced so fast, and there is so much of it, that it has already become less expensive than vegetables. Things like Epic Meal Time, a Youtube series that features recipes for 60-pound 6 piece chicken nuggets, among other food items, show that getting enough animal protein in your diet is clearly not an issue in some places. Should we focus first on the politics and socioeconomic barriers that contribute to world hunger, instead of trying to fix everything with science?

 

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/science/a-lab-grown-burger-gets-a-taste-test.html

http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/11-facts-about-factory-farms-and-environment