Ricki Lewis

A few weeks ago a report claiming a love for coffee is “in the genes” fleetingly flashed across screens. I thought I’d let the grounds settle and then take a closer look, fitting with my writing about food every Thanksgiving (pumpkins last year, yo-yo dieting in 2016, and turkeys in 2015).

I keep a mental list of dumb things linked to genes.

Geno-Everything

“Get the giggles easily? Blame your genes: Genetic variant enhances how people react to funny – and sad – situations,” reported the Daily Mail, echoing a paper published in the journal Emotion. It refers to the long and short variants (alleles) of the 5-HTTLPR gene, which encodes the serotonin transporter. Variants of that gene are connected to whether participants laughed at Gary Larsen cartoons or not.

An article in The Telegraph, “It’s All In Your Genes: How DNA Explains Your Sense of Humor, Sleep Patterns, and Phobias,” explored arachnophobia, speculating about a genetic advantage handed down from an ancient aversion to spiders. The article links to another Telegraph article about a genetic connection to shopping style.

Soon I found myself sucked into a quagmire of British newspapers parroting each other, but not the technical reports. They evoke “in your genes” to cover quite a technological territory, including twin studies, comparing behaviors to having certain gene variants, to genome-wide association studies, to spinning stories that just make sense, like a fear of scorpions or not eating toxic bugs.

To continue reading go to DNA Science, my blog for Public Library of Science, where this article first appeared.  Read More 

Shortly into the film Bohemian Rhapsody, Freddie Mercury attributes his magnificent voice to four extra incisors: “extra teeth equals extra range.”

The dental endowment had gradually pushed his front teeth forward, causing a great deal of teasing (“Bucky”) when Freddie was a boy and teen, then known as Farrokh Bulsara. He hid them behind his hand and, later on, a mustache. But it never squelched his singing.

The Internet is overflowing with accounts of the transplendent Rami Malek preparing for his role as the four-octave frontman by slipping on a pair of customized prosthetic upper teeth to practice speaking and singing.

While Freddie’s extra teeth were unlikely due to a specific genetic disorder, at least one group of researchers has suggested an alternate biological explanation.

To continue reading go to Genetic Literacy Project, where this article first appeared.  Read More 

Every week, it seems, yet another politician, or someone in a politician’s orbit, releases a book and lights up the media. Against a backdrop of ordinary people recording nearly everything, celebrities and politicians become insta-authors with the big publishers, raking in the huge advances.

Writing these tomes typically takes a few months, maybe a year. How can someone with a full time job do this? Does a politician wake up one day an accomplished writer, like me overnight becoming a proctologist, a plumber, or a porn star?

Political insta-authors often have help.

To continue reading go to my DNA Science blog, where this article first appeared. Read More 

Tomorrow is the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, “The Night of Broken Glass.” On November 9 and 10, 1938, Storm Troopers, Hitler Youth, and civilians rampaged through Nazi Germany, shattering the windows of more than a thousand synagogues, Jewish homes, and more than 7,000 businesses, arresting 30,000 Jews and transporting them to concentration camps. Some say the event marked the start of the Holocaust.

The anniversary comes just 13 days after the massacre of innocents at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, a chilling reminder that the flame of anti-Semitism burns on.

History books and the media chronicle the hatred and misplaced sense of superiority that fuels destruction of a people, like the remembrances of Kristallnacht. But evidence also lies in our genomes. That’s the case for the Ashkenazi Jews, whose ancestry traces back to Eastern Europe, not so very long ago.

Continue reading at my DNA Science blog for Public Library of Science, where this article first appeared. Read More 

Halloween brings a cornucopia of candy body parts, so it’s a good time to review recent advances in organoid technology.

I’m missing a few body parts myself, so I have an interest in replacements that are biological: Mini-organs grown from stem cells. They’re even implanted with chips to record and send data, like this smart liver. Organoids more accurately model humans than do mice or monkeys, and can stand-in for experiments done on people. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the recent developments in this arena.

Mini-kidneys
Polycystic kidney disease affects about 12 million people, gumming up the intricate, highly symmetrically aligned tubules of the paired organs that filter 50 gallons of blood a day. Researchers from the Kidney Research Institute at the University of Washington describe their mini-kidneys, grown from human stem cells, in this issue of Nature.

To continue reading go to Genetic Literacy Project, where this article first appeared. Read More 

I’ve just discovered that my birthday, October 29, is also National Sea Slug Day, so I thought I’d look into these creatures about which I know nothing, alerted by a news release.

A new 74-page paper in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society offers numerous photos, sketches, and electron micrographs of the animals, a type of marine invertebrate also known as a nudibranch (“naked gills”).

In the past, invertebrate zoologists have sorted out the 3,000 or so species of sea slugs by color patterns; whether the gills are elevated, vibrating, or neither; and the shapes of the jaw and the radula, a tongue-like structure with tiny teeth. The new paper adds DNA sequencing to the list of classifying criteria, which added 17 new species to the known 57 or so. All 17 are members of the vibrantly-colored genus Hypselodoris.

To continue reading go to my blog DNA Science at Public Library of Science, where this post first appeared. Read More