Winter Life

When we moved to England in 1992, we quickly realized that the British Islands are very distinct in terms of their nature. Nowhere else we have seen before trees full of blossoms in early January. At least till today I was convinced that this must have to do with the rather mild winter in the southern counties of the UK, like Kent, Sussex or Surrey, where we lived. Today I found the exact same tree on a cemetry in Munich, and became interested in its history and how it became so resistant to cold weather.

Bodnant viburnum, on Daglfing cementry, December 28th 2013

The name of this tree is Bodnant viburnum (Duft-Schneeball in German), and it is actually a product of man made plant breeding. The cross of Viburnum farreri (formerly V. fragrans) and V. grandiflorum was originally made by Charles Lamont, the Assistant Curator at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh in 1933, and I guess this is the reason why it became first popular in gardens and parks in Brittan, and only later was imported to other European countries.

So this tree is unique for showing its real beauty only in winter time, when (at least in Germany) most other plants lost their leaves and look pretty sad. I don't really know why all around the world people warship so much the Christmas tree. I think they are pretty boring, and except for their wood have no use at all. Their needles are a pest once you have them on your carpet, and if you have them in your garden, they poison all other plants (by producing humic acid). Their roots destroy the foundations of buildings, inhibit the growth of grass and promote growth of moss. If you have some spruce or fir in your garden, you can be sure that after a while the garden looks like a dark forest. we have three of them in our garden, and I plan to cut them all this year to heat our oven with their wood. But even for heating, they are no good choice, since their resin causes a lot of soot which contaminates the chimney.

I would therefore opt to replace the fir (christmas tree) as symbol of life in hard winter times with Bodnant viburnum. It is an elegant and beautiful three, and it permits the few rays of winter sun to reach us, whereas pines and firs are like black spots which block the sun.

By the way, there are other plant species which resist the winter cold. I also like a lot the winter-hard cereals like rhy or barley, which look freshly green even at the strongest frost.

Winter rhy, near Munich-Daglfing, December 2013

When I saw these tiny young shouts now in December, I was happy to know that next year we will have again fields full of golden rhy with its tentalizing odor in summer.

Intelligent Food Design

Hello Michael, So you think that posting photographs of food, half-eaten dishes from restaurants and so on blogs or FB (like I used to do) shows a lack of creativity, intellectual retardation and a developmental arrest at the oral stage ?  I have to admit, yes , I often post pictures of food to my PB pages, but usually they are either not yet touched (still in a perfect designed stage) or they are just decoration of a nice social company. You also had a recent picture with your colleagues in a restaurant, but this was either before you were served the food or you were there just drinking tea. 

I'd like to show you an example that pictures made during lunch not always have to do with a "..retardation at the oral developmental phase", but that they can also be the demonstration of a intellectual dispute. Today, for instance we had "baked Salmon with boiled potatoes and salad" for lunch in our institutes canteen. When I was about to dissect the fish on my plate I suddenly discovered that it did not contain any fish-bones !!!!  (see attached photo).

 In the concept of darwinian evolution, the appearance of the skeletton was a major leap. And as we all know, Fish were considered the first species belonging to the group of vertebrates.   

So how can it be that suddenly I catch an "invertebral salmon" on my plate ???  Could it be that this is a fake salmon, made by casting pangasius meat paste into a form that only looks
like a salmon ?

No, it is obvious, all vertrebrate fish are laboratory artifacts produced by pro-evolution scientist, whereas the one on my plate is a representative of natural fish.  Invertebrate Fish shows that darwinian evolution was never even a concept, but a product of a conspiracy.





Don't you think I'm right ?  
Take Care
/ghazal

Iranian Nose Jobs can sabotage Eugenics

Dear Michael,

It is no secret that many Iranian woman do not value their impressive, arian noses very high. In contrast, they tend to follow a very questionable beauty picture that more and more seems to be coined by the Japanese manga figures. For them, a nose is merely anything more than a small ridge to hide the nostrils.
The historical form of Iranian noses, however, is impressive, and if an ancient myth is true that the nose is the main location of human character, than Iranians must have a lot of it (which I believe many of them will agree).

The more I regret that low self-esteem of Iranians when it comes to the shape of their facial “center of gravity”. Iranian woman try to raise their competetiveness when hunting for a good match on the vanity fair, and the men, beeing either the driving force behind this or the obidient donkey, really fall for this.

Here I will explaine to you (based on what I feel as a young woman and what I learned as a young geneticist) the short and the long term consequences of this:

1) In the short term, there will be a constant drop of beauty among Iranian woman, because more and more collect or borrow money to afford a “Nose Job”. So very soon, you will see less and less Iranian ladies whom their strong and proud character is logically located in an equally strong, sharp and expressive nose. We might be confused soon, that Iranians with strong self-esteem decline to western beauty standard, have their face irreversibly damaged only to fill the pockets of those medics, who as all their colleagues from other disciplines agree, are the least qualified ones to distinguish between health and disease, let alone to cure any real sick patient.

The Iranian woman who lost this attribute of an ancient, devine beauty, however, will in fact have better chances to catch a husband and have more children. That is what we know from natural selection of the fittest, which if we like or dislike, becomes the natural selection for the most attractive in the human population.

But, thanks to genetic laws, there is not only hope in sight, as I will explaine in the following, but in the long term these “Iranian Nose Jobs” even have the potential to rescue the Iranian Nose from becomming extinct by natural selection.

2)  Because on the long term,  of course, no plastic surgery can change the genetic code, that over hundreds of generations insured that Iranians, sometimes synonymously with the original Arian nation, where characterized by nice, sharp, impressive noses. No ordinary medic, let alone the half-educted plastic surgeons, have any clue where in the Iranian genome the key for nose shape is hidden, or how this could be manipulated.  So with the current genetic knowledge and the status-quo of molecular technologies, the real treasure of the Iranian nose is still hidden and safely deposited deep in our genome.  So even if all Iranians have their “noses done”, the next and all following generations still carry the fertile seeds to grow proper Iranian noses again.

But this is only half of the truths, the real excitement comes here:  Without plastic surgery, large Iranian noses could in fact become extinct due to genetic admixture from (Iranian x Non-Iranian) partnerships (introgressing the Small-Nose-Gene-Variant from East-Asian or US or Latin-Americans) followed by preferential marriages between the descendents inheriting the Small-Nose-Genes (and consequently growing these dwarf nose variants reminiscent of a Hobbit face). Over just a few generations, there would indeed undergo a natiural selection for the Small-Nose-Gene-Variants, resulting in irreversible loss of the Iranian noses.  But this, in fact, does not happen, thanks to the plastic surgeons and their messing up with the natural link between beauty, genes, and attractiveness.  By virtually “hiding” the real heritable Iranian Nose variant behind a fake, non-heritable small nose, natural selection can not take place any more.

So in the long term, nose jobs to Iranian woman might ensure that the real traditional Iranian nose shape with its distinct and impressive sharpness will always reappear in every new generation. In other words, the plastic surgeons who make money from nose-reducing operations to Iranians on the assembly line, carry out in fact a very efficient sabotage operation against eugenics.

Skilled Angels Hand

Ghazal Dear,

I guess that must be your handwriting, that I found on a plastic envelope containing EtBr stained agarose-gels. I asked a friend at the Avicenna Bookstore here in Munich, to translate it into Persian, and she proposed that "24 wells" is " 24 خوب ".

If the date is right, than they were lying in the cool-room since two and half years. I thought to give them a trial electrophoresis with some fresh DNA samples we had for sequencing. And what a miracle: they are still giving excellent DNA patters. It must be your angel fingers while casting the gels that made them last forever.

Take Care my Dear Michael

----------------------------------------------------------------- Hello Michael, Yes this is my handwriting! So the gels are still there? Your friends translation was a bit misleading. She obviously just used a dictonary. "well" is "khob - خوب" yes its correct. but in english well is good and also what we use it in gels (like a slot or a hole. so "khob" means "good", but not "hole". And "24" in persian would be ۲۴ Don't forget, Persia was once leading in Mathematics, with men such as Al-Khwarizmi or Omar Khayyam. If you want to practise more, you can go here. So far, Take Care. Ghazal

Accelerating Evolution on Mars

Hello Michael, 

You have probably heard that last week a new mars rover landed succesfully on Mars surface, and how this event was enthusiastically wellcomed by NASA and the entire scientific community. It follows a long series of less brilliant failures to get a working mars robot up there, one that could produce more than just pretty pictures. This new mission of an explorer vehicle called "Couriosity" is officially intended to test the existence of lower forms of life on our neighbor planet. For this purpose, "Couriosity" carries on board a couple of sophisticated devices, some that can take samples from mars' surface or from deeper layers of the ground in order to apply sensitive detection methods for organic molecules, considered to be exclusively produced by living organisms. I am wondering if they are looking there for a sort of blood stains, or some traces of blond hair or spit-out chewing gum.

What makes this new Mars exploration so special (for me as a radiation biologist) is the fact, that the rovers energy supply comes from about 5 kg of plutonium 235, providing 120 W electric energy for at least five years. Thats fine, I would say from an engineers point of view, and I would also like to drive my old Benz with this sort of low-emission, low-cost and low-maintenace type of fuel.

But the radiation-biologist in me (and I hope you agree somehow) has to wonder about the long term consequences of 5 kg plutonium, a potent alpha emitter, if it comes to its mutatgenic effects on living organisms. Assuming the plutonium is accidentally released from the mars rover and evenly spread over the hypothetical mars ecosphere,  it would cause a tremendous rise of the mutation rate in all cells, whether low prokaryotes or in higher and multi-cellular creatures like plants or animals or anything else in between. This means the 5 years mission of the man-made Mars rover will not only explore the presence of live on Mars, but if there is any, it will also drive evolution by increasing the number of new mutants. So scientists will not only be the silent observers, but active players of an extra-terrestrial evolution of life.

I am afraid, that with this man-made mutation burden, the mars creatures will indeed soon look like those in Tim Burtons "Mars Attacks". But for this, we have to blame nobody else than ourself.

I am more than worried now looking up the sky at night. There are not only beautiful meteor showers and the romantic moon, but from now on there might also be a laboratory of accelerated evolution on mars.

Take Care, yours sincerely
/ghazal

To 'think outside the box,' think outside the box

Dear Michael,

I finally gave the talk about my MSc project at an institutes seminar, about genetic factors associated with radio-iodine uptake in mice. People immediately became interested in the link between radioiodine uptake and retention in the fetal thyroid gland, and thje later risk to develop thyroid cancer.

I had to tell them that at least in the mouse model that we studied together in your lab, there was not such a simple link. Radioiodine uptake and pharmacokinetic are determined by genetic factors, but the long term cancer risk is obvsiouly governed by other genes. And the subtle differences between different mouse strains in their isotope retention in thyroid seems to be only a minor determinant in cancer risk. Other genes or their variants are obviously more important, but we have not found them yet.

Most colleagues assumed that there must be a direct linear connection between isotope uptake or thyroid dose and cancer risk. Only a professor from human genetics department told people they should start to "think outside their box". I did not knew this phrase before, therefore I checked it in Google. And I came across an interesting research paper in a psychological journal. The authors of the new paper were inspired by metaphors about creativity found in boardrooms to movie studios to scientific laboratories around the world and previous linkages established between mind and body.

Want to think outside the box? Try actually thinking outside of a box. In a study to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers had students think up solutions to problems while acting out various metaphors about creative thinking and found that the instructions actually worked.

Enjoy your day, and remember there are not only cages that restrict our physical freedom, but also boxes which keep our inspiration and phantasy down.

Take Care

/ghazal

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ghazal my Dear,

Thanks for the nice thoughts. I printed out this last sentence from you and sticked it on my memory board. It is there together now with a sentence by Oscar Wilde: "We are all living in cages, but there are only a few of us who see the stars". Of course you are one of these few.

Take Care, my Dear

Michael

Sunlight and the genetics of skin-pigmentation

Dear Ghazal,

Do you remember that we once talked about UV-exposure and skin pigmentation ? Last year in July you send some papers about it, and how this is regulated during tanning after sun exposure.
There is an other aspect, and this relates more to inherited differences  in skin-pigmentation (i.e. a problem that is similar to your MSc project and the search for genetic variations). Recently I found an interesting article that came up with a nice explanation for the reduction of the skin pigmentation during the migration of humankind to the northern hemisphere (from their origin in Africa about 100 000 years ago).

The reason is that UV-radiation has not only a detrimental effect (by damaging the DNA and potentially causing skin cancer, as you perhaps know better than anybody else), but it is also essential for the production of vitamin D in our body (important for skelettal development and other biological processes).
If humans during their migration from africa to the north would have kept their dark skin, the lower UVB level in europe would have caused a severe vitamine D deficiency. Therefore, reducing skin pigmentation genetically gained a survival benefit (since with less dark skin, more UVB reaches the dermis and more vitamine D can be produced).
Therefore, if dark coloured people move to the northern hemisphere for longer time, they might start to suffer from vitamine D deficiency. There is only one exception, and these are the inuit living in northern Canada and Greenland. They have relatively dark skin, but live with low UVB level. Their only way to get sufficient vitamine D is by eating raw meat from seals (in particular their liver is full of vitamine D).

The full paper about this is here:

I hope, Ghazal, you will have a sunny weekend, so you get enough UV to produce vitamine D.
You are lucky anyhow, since your light skin is the best condition to live in the north and stay healthy.

Take Care, Enjoy everything

Michael

PS: Have I already wrote you "Thanks" for the Nowruz power-point presentation that you send ? I think I forgot, sorry for this.

PPS: There is an iranian movie in the cinema here, called "Darbareye Ely". I will probably go and watch. Have you seen it or heard about ?

The genealogy of mice (part 2)

Hi michael,

While searching for a paper that Matts recommended me to read about UV-repair, I found an article reporting a new study about the migration of house-mice throughout europe during the last 10 000 years. I remember you once wrote me a story about the colonialization of europe by the two mouse species M.musculus musculus (eastern-mouse) and M.musculus domesticus (western-mouse). Interestingly, this new paper shows that the western house-mouse travelled like a blind passenger together with the civilisations that managed to grow and store grains. And this started (you guess it) in Iran (and probably further east on the indian sub-continent).

So you see, whithout the ancient agricultural developments in Iran, the progress in experimental genetics (including my MSc-project !!) which is so much based on M.musculus domesticus would not be possible. House-mice were known in Iran already 13 000 years ago. They arrived in Germany (including Neuherberg) only 3 000 years ago. Do you know, if the two strains that I studied in my MSc project  (the albino FVB and the spotted JF1) belong to M.musculus domesticus ?  Would be so nice for me to know, whether they are also descendents from the iranian mouse population.

Enjoy the winter time
TAKE CArE
/ghazal

PS: If you write about going-swimming these days, I assume you discovered a hot spring somewhere around Munich ?


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi Ghazal, I very much admire that you spend some of the holidays to learn for your PhD project and - what is even more unusual - that you still find something exciting related to your MSc project (like the mouse colonialization paper that you mention above). It is interesting, indeed, not just from a genetics point of view, but also considering the house-mouse as a companion to the civilized men, that populated the world together. Have you seen the dotted line on the map, that runs north to south across europe ? This line as I wrote before separates the western mouse (M.m.domesticus) from the eastern mouse (M.m.musculus) world. We believe, it coincides with the cold-war demarcation line between the "socialist" eastern-europe and the "free" western-europe. How this co-incidence happened, nobody knows. Obviously, the mice were there much earlier (according to the study at iron-age), wheres human did the east-west-separation just 60 years ago (and it lasted only for 40 years).
The separation line between M.m.domesticus and M.m.musculus runs also along the Isar-river here in Munich. So during your staying in Unterschleissheim, you have been surrounded by the house-mouse, which as you mentioned above originated from Persia. What is a pitty, I think, that in Stockholm you are clearly east of the separation line, i.e. you now live in the world of M.m.musculus, which originated from central Asia (I guess mongolia).
These mice are known to be much more wild in their behaviour, unlike the FVB or JF1
that you worked with in your MSc project. Therefore, if you meet one in your house in Sweden or in the field, be careful. They wont let you do tail-clipping, ear-marking or measuring incorporated Iodine-activity as you did in your MSc project. They tend to have a much stronger self-defence instinct than FVB or JF1. Both are, by the way not pure M.m.domesticus strains. FVB/N is a laboratory inbred strain derived from hybrids between M.m.domesticus and M.m.musculus and contains alleles from both. JF1 was bred in Japan by fancy breeders (just as a hobby) and goes back to the mixed line of M. molossinus, which developed my matings of M.m.muscullus and M.m.castaneous.

Hope you are fine, Ghazal

Take Care, Michael

PS: I have not discovered a hot spring here in Munich. Therefore, I go for swimming in the little river next to our house. But it has a constant temperature of 8 degrees celsius, which as compared to the outside -10 degrees appeares quite warm.

The Genealogy of Mice

Hello Ghazal, my dear,

I interprete the missing answer to my last e-mail as a sign, that you got cought so much by Lee Silvers book on "Mouse Genetics". I hope that you find it not just scientifically interesting, but also entertaining.
To be honest, I always have problems seeing a lot of heroic activity in observations on how cells after irradiation battle to repair their DNA or commit suicide for the sake of the entire organism. It is either just a matter of adaptation, or opportunism as we would call in humans, or a battle between two armies fighting with unequal weapons (physical radiation and biological enzymes). Both, opportunism as well as stupid heroism in a war was definitely not what contributed a lot to progress during human evolution.
In case of the mouse genetics and antropology, however, the question which physiological and behavioural properties drive the development is realy fascinating. Did you red about the two dominant mouse sub-species (M.m.domesticus, or the west-european house-mouse and M.m.musculus or the eastern field-mouse). Most of the mice strains we keep in the laboratory world-wide are genetic recombinats between these two.

Now comes the exciting interrelation of the two sub-species: domesticus established its dominant area in south-western europe, from the mediterranean countries up to Germany. M.m.musculus, in contrast populated the old-world from central Germany further east (Poland, Czech, Russia, China to the Pacific ocean). Believe it or not, the boundary between the eastern and the western Mouse Hemisphere went from northern Germany down to the south at the Alp mountains, first along the river Elbe and then along the river Isar. Some even believe, that Neuherberg is located right on this very tiny zone where occasionally the eastern M.m.muscullus and the western M.m.domsticus encounter (B.t.w., if the whole mapping is 100% precise with the Isar-river representing the border-line, we here in Daglfing would belong to the M.m.musculus world, whereas you in Unterschleissheim would already live in M.m.domesticus hemisphere).
The small border stripe where animals of the both sub-species occupy a common area, occasionally see genetic mixing of the two. They can form hybrids, and in the laboratory it was shown that the hybridn offspring between musculus and domesticus are also fertile, i.e. in theory they could give rise to next generations and a whole new sub-specie. In nature, however, the occasional happening of matings between the two give rise to hybrid offspring, that seem to have a selective disadvantage. They are less fit and never increased in population size. So the mixing area remained restricted to this small stripe in central germany (good for science, of course, since therefor we got the relatively homogenous animals for laboratory strains).

What also gave me a shiver when I red this is the funny co-incidence of the above mentioned "demarcation line" between eastern M.m.musculus and western M.m.domesticus with the former iron curtain that devided the eastern, socialist part of Europe from the western, capitalist world. This iron curtain also run north to south along the river Elbe.
Could it be that this artifical devision into an eastern and an western world during the second half of the 20th century was already planned early in evolution. Strange idea, I must admit, but sometime we are much less self-determined as we always like to show, in particular if it is in politics and military activities, in which people sometimes follow instincts like an animal.

The connection between the geographic distribution of M.m.domesticus and M.m.musculus with human history has another, more peaceful aspect. The new world, i.e. North and South America, did not had mouse at all before the european occupation in the 15th century began. Mice were brought over to the new continent on board the ships of the conquerers. Since most of these ships came from western europe (Spain, Portugal, France, England), they importet M.m.domsticus in Amerika, where still today it is the dominant mouse. Only a very tine stripe along the pacific coast (California) was first occupied by settlers from asia (Russia, later Chinese and Japanese), which brought there M.m.musculus. Again, like in Europe, the geographic distribution of the two sub-species remains there very separated.

I hope you are well, and I hope you don"t mind getting e-mails from me.
(sorry, I don"t have a mailing list on which your address is just one among another million, and from which I could easily remove yours. The e-mails are always personally just for you. So if you find them boring or otherways annoying, you have to delete them right away. I will keep them anyhow in my outbox, they are like a diary).

Have a nice and sunny day

Michael

PS: You have not suggested a time to visit the castle Oberschleissheim today or tomorrow. In case I don"t hear from you I"ll come tomorrow afternoon.