Epigenetics

[uranian]

Anyone know about this? Essentially that story about genes determine your life is bollocks? Lots of good stuff by Bruce Lipton (the biology of belief on google vid is your starter for 10), here are 2 twin mice (genetically identical), one that has been given a supplement to enhance youthfulness, one that hasn't:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVaMZH5CC9s

this product is going to be available in a few months, i'm going to try it as of next month (thanks to a forward thinking friend), it is fascinating to me to see science beginning to prove the survival of the fittest meme is bollocks, and that how you think = your direct experience of the world.

[Olmstein]

I got the advance version of the youth serum..

http://nathan-lee.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/snake-oil.jpg

[TheNocturnalEgyptian]

We all know the placebo effect works. But then, in the next breath, we say it's fake.

My question to all of you is: if we know the placebo works....why don't we embrace this? If we can alter blood pressure, reduce fear, and bring on other internal changes via the placebo effect, why is that not something you'd want to foster? Something to cultivate and make stronger?

Sometimes, I don't ask how it works. Sometimes, I just ask, "Does it work?"

[hoarder]

We all know the placebo effect works. But then, in the next breath, we say it's fake.

My question to all of you is: if we know the placebo works....why don't we embrace this? If we can alter blood pressure, reduce fear, and bring on other internal changes via the placebo effect, why is that not something you'd want to foster? Something to cultivate and make stronger?

Sometimes, I don't ask how it works. Sometimes, I just ask, "Does it work?"
If lying to myself "works", I need to back up and define "works".

[TheNocturnalEgyptian]

It would work - we know it would - but you wouldn't feel good afterwards. Cognitive dissonance from lying to yourself, etc.


My question is, is there any possibility that there's a way to foster/cultivate this sort of....internal mechanism that we're discussing....without the pain/guilt/dishonesty of lying to yourself?

The placebo effect, with all the benefits...but without the hangover...

I don't think it's impossible. I think it exists.

[hoarder]

If it's a placebo, it does nothing. If we think it does and feel better because of it, then it's purely psychological. It is possible that such a psychological "high" could benefit our health, but I think if it did, it would do so at the expense of giving up some of our intellect.
The kind of person who might benefit from the notion that a placebo is helping them is the kind of person easily falls into the denial river.
There have been some studies about the correlation between health and happiness and a book that claimed that "Laughter is the Best Medicine". I recall the author was a Jew so I took it with a grain of salt.

[willie pete]

I do believe somethings are psychosomatic, but things like BP, Atherosclerosis, Diabetes, RF....those are physical mallities, you'd have to be one hell of a guru to control those.... :D

[Glass]

Lying to yourself does work. Just ask any american if they live in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

[k-os]

We all know the placebo effect works. But then, in the next breath, we say it's fake.

My question to all of you is: if we know the placebo works....why don't we embrace this? If we can alter blood pressure, reduce fear, and bring on other internal changes via the placebo effect, why is that not something you'd want to foster? Something to cultivate and make stronger?

Sometimes, I don't ask how it works. Sometimes, I just ask, "Does it work?"


I love listening to medical and science radio shows, and the placebo effect comes up quite often. I find it fascinating that if you tell someone that a sugar pill is supposed to make them happy, then a certain percentage of them (usually between 15-35 percent) believe they are happy. For some people, just being told that they "should" feel something is enough. What's funny about these studies is that the people in the studies would also experience the side effects of the supposed drug if they were advised of them before hand. They even occasionally even invented their own side effects, while they had been given a placebo.

I dated a guy who took prescription Naproxen for back pain. He was certain that they were muscle relaxers and that they "knocked him out". Nope. They were simply Aleve (at that time, newly available over the counter anti-inflammatory in a slightly lower dose). He was a reasonably smart guy, with a degree in micro-biology, so I am not talking about a moron here. I never told him that his pills were useless for sedation, because I figured . . . what they heck, he's getting an added benefit from them.

[uranian]

nocturnal, i agree about the placebo effect, but i'm not so sure it works with mice. the research that's been done here is to look at individual genes, apply various botanics to them, and check the effects (using a gene chip (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_microarray)); painstaking research that has taken many years, they've worked with the guy who has been investigating calorific reduction as an anti-aging process for 30 years and thus have access to his 30 years of data. it's taken many years for it to reach the level where they've released a product. it is based on botanics, mushrooms, ginseng and pomegranite. it's just because they've done so much research about what specifically works for particular genes to reset themselves to youthful expression that they've been able to make a product from it. having seen some of their beauty products, i have seen that they aren't full of sh*t, and if half of the claims for ageloc are true, it'll be an amazing thing. i'll update as i go, i should have it within a month, and there are many reports of affects (increased mental acuity, libido, stamina etc.) within a couple of weeks. certainly i'd like to be the mouse in the right!

mostly my point was though is it not interesting that we have reached the stage where science is proving that the idea that genes determine your wellbeing and health is wrong (specially where race is such an issue for people)? we've been working with that paradigm since darwin. lipton took some identical cells, put them in different environments (different nutrient baths), and they became bone or muscle dependent on their environment. scale that up and there is evidence that your very belief system affects your genetic expression.

[uranian]

vid (http://player.vimeo.com/video/15798204) about the science behind this.

[hoarder]

I love listening to medical and science radio shows, and the placebo effect comes up quite often. I find it fascinating that if you tell someone that a sugar pill is supposed to make them happy, then a certain percentage of them (usually between 15-35 percent) believe they are happy. For some people, just being told that they "should" feel something is enough. What's funny about these studies is that the people in the studies would also experience the side effects of the supposed drug if they were advised of them before hand. They even occasionally even invented their own side effects, while they had been given a placebo. This is what I call the power of suggestion. Once you understand how powerful it is, you'll have good reason to stop watching teevee and listening to radio shows. ;)

[Filthy Keynes]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlMBs_HUcxQ

[uranian]

perhaps you prefer some mainstream media, then?

Why Your DNA Isn't Your Destiny (http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1951968,00.html)


The remote, snow-swept expanses of northern Sweden are an unlikely place to begin a story about cutting-edge genetic science. The kingdom's northernmost county, Norrbotten, is nearly free of human life; an average of just six people live in each square mile. And yet this tiny population can reveal a lot about how genes work in our everyday lives.

Norrbotten is so isolated that in the 19th century, if the harvest was bad, people starved. The starving years were all the crueler for their unpredictability. For instance, 1800, 1812, 1821, 1836 and 1856 were years of total crop failure and extreme suffering. But in 1801, 1822, 1828, 1844 and 1863, the land spilled forth such abundance that the same people who had gone hungry in previous winters were able to gorge themselves for months. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2009.)

In the 1980s, Dr. Lars Olov Bygren, a preventive-health specialist who is now at the prestigious Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, began to wonder what long-term effects the feast and famine years might have had on children growing up in Norrbotten in the 19th century — and not just on them but on their kids and grandkids as well. So he drew a random sample of 99 individuals born in the Overkalix parish of Norrbotten in 1905 and used historical records to trace their parents and grandparents back to birth. By analyzing meticulous agricultural records, Bygren and two colleagues determined how much food had been available to the parents and grandparents when they were young.

Around the time he started collecting the data, Bygren had become fascinated with research showing that conditions in the womb could affect your health not only when you were a fetus but well into adulthood. In 1986, for example, the Lancet published the first of two groundbreaking papers showing that if a pregnant woman ate poorly, her child would be at significantly higher than average risk for cardiovascular disease as an adult. Bygren wondered whether that effect could start even before pregnancy: Could parents' experiences early in their lives somehow change the traits they passed to their offspring?

It was a heretical idea. After all, we have had a long-standing deal with biology: whatever choices we make during our lives might ruin our short-term memory or make us fat or hasten death, but they won't change our genes — our actual DNA. Which meant that when we had kids of our own, the genetic slate would be wiped clean.

What's more, any such effects of nurture (environment) on a species' nature (genes) were not supposed to happen so quickly. Charles Darwin, whose On the Origin of Species celebrated its 150th anniversary in November, taught us that evolutionary changes take place over many generations and through millions of years of natural selection. But Bygren and other scientists have now amassed historical evidence suggesting that powerful environmental conditions (near death from starvation, for instance) can somehow leave an imprint on the genetic material in eggs and sperm. These genetic imprints can short-circuit evolution and pass along new traits in a single generation. (See TIME's photo-essay on Charles Darwin.)

For instance, Bygren's research showed that in Overkalix, boys who enjoyed those rare overabundant winters — kids who went from normal eating to gluttony in a single season — produced sons and grandsons who lived shorter lives. Far shorter: in the first paper Bygren wrote about Norrbotten, which was published in 2001 in the Dutch journal Acta Biotheoretica, he showed that the grandsons of Overkalix boys who had overeaten died an average of six years earlier than the grandsons of those who had endured a poor harvest. Once Bygren and his team controlled for certain socioeconomic variations, the difference in longevity jumped to an astonishing 32 years. Later papers using different Norrbotten cohorts also found significant drops in life span and discovered that they applied along the female line as well, meaning that the daughters and granddaughters of girls who had gone from normal to gluttonous diets also lived shorter lives. To put it simply, the data suggested that a single winter of overeating as a youngster could initiate a biological chain of events that would lead one's grandchildren to die decades earlier than their peers did. How could this be possible?

Meet the Epigenome

The answer lies beyond both nature and nurture. Bygren's data — along with those of many other scientists working separately over the past 20 years — have given birth to a new science called epigenetics. At its most basic, epigenetics is the study of changes in gene activity that do not involve alterations to the genetic code but still get passed down to at least one successive generation. These patterns of gene expression are governed by the cellular material — the epigenome — that sits on top of the genome, just outside it (hence the prefix epi-, which means above). It is these epigenetic "marks" that tell your genes to switch on or off, to speak loudly or whisper. It is through epigenetic marks that environmental factors like diet, stress and prenatal nutrition can make an imprint on genes that is passed from one generation to the next.

Remember the Human Genome Project? Completed in March 2000, the project found that the human genome contains something like 25,000 genes; it took $3 billion to map them all. The human epigenome contains an as yet unknowable number of patterns of epigenetic marks, a number so big that Ecker won't even speculate on it. The number is certainly in the millions. A full epigenome map will require major advances in computing power. When completed, the Human Epigenome Project (already under way in Europe) will make the Human Genome Project look like homework that 15th century kids did with an abacus.

But the potential is staggering. For decades, we have stumbled around massive Darwinian roadblocks. DNA, we thought, was an ironclad code that we and our children and their children had to live by. Now we can imagine a world in which we can tinker with DNA, bend it to our will. It will take geneticists and ethicists many years to work out all the implications, but be assured: the age of epigenetics has arrived.

if you take the time to watch the video, you'll see there are now many experiments proving that the "primacy of DNA" is simply wrong, and that it is the cell's environment which determines its wellbeing. given that the darwinian worldview has dominated for over a century, it's significant that we're beginning to understand that much of it is at best deeply flawed, from the survival of the fittest to macroevolution.

[uranian]

In February 2009, the Journal of Neuroscience published a paper (http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/29/5/1496) showing that even memory — a wildly complex biological and psychological process — can be improved from one generation to the next via epigenetics. The paper described an experiment with mice led by Larry Feig, a Tufts University biochemist. Feig's team exposed mice with genetic memory problems to an environment rich with toys, exercise and extra attention. These mice showed significant improvement in long-term potentiation (LTP), a form of neural transmission that is key to memory formation. Surprisingly, their offspring also showed LTP improvement, even when the offspring got no extra attention.

i've been aware of epigenetics since watching lipton's work on conscious parenting, and it is indeed a fascinating science, and reflection upon the state of our consciousness as a species. that the science is being engineered to provide health benefits seems good to me, as opposed to something to just immediately and without thought dismiss.

[Book]

...the "primacy of DNA" is simply wrong, and that it is the cell's environment which determines its wellbeing...



http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=regulating-evolution

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