What the *hell*?

[kickaha]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/227013_toxics03.html

This is going to have to rattle around in my brain a bit before the dust clears.

Comments

[flinx.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a biologist... duh. Something that's been pretty obvious for a long time, really, when you look back at the data. Take the DES story, for example (diethylstilbesterol, a hormone-analog used an awful lot in the late '60's), which is just as wierd.

Mom takes DES to fight off chances of miscarriage and other pregnancy problems (doesn't work in humans). Mom suffers no significant ill effects (slight increase in breast cancer odds). Daughters have insanely higher risk for an extremely rare form of extremely aggressive cervical cancer (something like a change from 1/(1 x 10^8) down to 1/1000). Sons have no apparent problems (though they're now showing up with some consistent, non-lethal conditions). Grandsons have significant increases in specific defects. All without germline mutation.

It's something that I'm constantly coming up against--if there's a way for biology to do something in a wholly novel way, it will. Not only are biological organisms evolving, biological mechanisms are evolving in their own ways. We humans just think we're so smart and know everything. There will be surprises like this for the next century, is my guess.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

I can't say I'm *surprised* there's something new to find out about (hell, I'd be extremely disappointed if there weren't), this just wasn't a mechanism I had any idea existed.

It's like meta-genetics. Mechanisms that control the mechanisms that alter the runtime of the code, of the...

Um.

Excuse me, I just had a thought on my own research, time to go scribble.

Hmm.

[jason0x21.livejournal.com]

Damnit, and you were almost through!

Anyway, it's not just the raw information, but how it's read, presented, stored, etc. There are so many non-biological examples of this (Didn't Stalin say something about the people counting the votes being more important than the people casting them? Or was that Jeb Bush?), that a biological one seems overdue.

And they just sold the Crusoe processor technology.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Heh, no, this will truly be under the Future Work chapter... which at this rate will be > 50% of the entire dissertation. (I've got a neat methodology for showing that design patterns are successful because they adhere to a minimum description length principle from information theory, and an approach to optimize an architecture automatically (with automated refactoring step generation) but on a global basis instead of a local minima... that alone is going to take a few pages.)

The detail I'm trying to wrap my brain around is the multiple generational effect.

Meta-control for genetic processes have been identified for years (protein folding, anyone?), but this is the first time I've heard of one propagating to subsequent generations that were never exposed to the original toxin, nor in utero at the time of exposure of the mother. That's just wacky. I can more easily understand cascading effects ala flinx's example, but the *same* effect propagating?? *twitch*