Texas Police Set Up Checkpoints To Collect Blood And Saliva From 'Volunteers'

from the all-completely-voluntary,-if-you-don't-mind-playing-20-questions-with-a-cop dept

Remember that American ideal of being able to travel freely within the country without being detained or questioned by government officials? Well, the inland creep of CBP (a.k.a. border patrol) checkpoints has made traveling within certain US states without being asked about your citizenship a thing of the past. The installation of TSA agents in every airport means producing identification repeatedly and possibly enduring an awkward conversation with a Behavioral Detection Officer as he or she performs a mental coin flip.

Now, thanks to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, citizens can't even travel across a single city without being routed off the road and asked (nicely) to cough up a little DNA.

The Fort Worth Police Department (FWPD) installed the roadblock north of the city during daytime traffic. They flagged down some motorists at random and asked them to give breath, saliva, and blood samples. The FWPD claims the effort was "100 percent voluntary" and anonymous.

It acknowledges that most of the drivers had broken no law, but it said the effort was valuable to federal contractors working to complete a 3 year, $7.9M USD survey on behalf of the The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) aimed at collecting medical data for use in combating drunk driving.

The problem is, some drivers didn't get the impression this DNA sampling was voluntary.

Kim Cope contacted KXAS after she was pulled over because she said it “just doesn’t seem right that you can be forced off the road when you’re not doing anything wrong.”

But Cope questioned how it could be voluntary if uniformed officers forced her off the road.

“I gestured to the guy in front that I just wanted to go straight, but he wouldn’t let me and forced me into a parking spot,” she recalled. “They were asking for cheek swabs… They would give $10 for that. Also, if you let them take your blood, they would pay you $50 for that.”

The contractors also wanted to test her breath for the presence of alcohol, but weren’t willing to pay anything for it.

“I finally did the Breathalyzer test just because I thought that would be the easiest way to leave,” she explained.

When cops flag you down and route you toward a detainment area (like a parking spot), while using smiles and using words like "please," it still often seems to citizens like they have no choice but to comply. They do have a choice, but the cops aren't going to let them know that.

Obviously, if officers are going to pay you for a blood sample or cheek swab, then the "detainment" is obviously voluntary. Cops normally don't pay citizens for DNA they collect. But Cope's experience shows that even voluntary "surveys" seem mandatory when officers make every effort to conceal the voluntary aspects of the stop until after the citizen has already complied. These officers could have placed a sign up front stating it was a NHTSA survey and that volunteers would be paid, but that probably would have resulted in a whole lot of citizens deciding $10 or $50 just wasn't worth the hassle.

Worse yet is the fact that even if you opted out of everything including the unpaid breathalyzer test, the Ft. Worth police department was still performing one check without securing permission from any drivers.

Apparently on the consent form that officers gave "voluntary" participants, fine print informed the driver that [the police had taken] "passive alcohol sensor readings before the consent process has been completed."

It's unclear whether drivers could ask for that data to be deleted if they didn't want it to be collected, but what is clear is that most drivers did not notice the fine print or were unable to read it. As a result what the FWPD claimed was a "voluntary" scientific study became what appears to be an involuntary search of citizens who were breaking no law.

The NHTSA defended these non-stops by stating everything was "voluntary" and that law enforcement officers were only on hand for "safety" reasons. But the passive alcohol test wasn't voluntary. And the officers never bothered to point out stopping was voluntary until after the test subjects had actually stopped.

DailyTech points out the NHTSA has done this sort of testing four other times since 1973, with the last one being in 2007. But none of those utilized passive alcohol sensors to gather additional "data" without the volunteers' approval.

The Ft. Worth Police Department issued this non-apology to irritated Texans.

We apologize if any of our drivers and citizens were offended or inconvenienced by the NHTSA National Roadside Survey.

Sorry, but that's all wrong. The correct phrasing is:

We apologize for the offensive and inconvenient "survey" we participated in.

Something addressing the passive alcohol testing would have been nice to see as well.

Beyond the problematic tactics deployed and the intrusiveness of the "survey" (which is in no way mitigated by the NHTSA's offer to pay people for their bodily fluids) is the fact that voluntary stops are frequently portrayed by law enforcement officers as obligatory.

Even if you ignore all the cop talk that's deployed ("please," "could you do me a favor?" "would you mind…") to steer people towards compliance while still giving LEOs an out when it comes to accusations of wrongful detainment ("they were always free to go"), you still have a power imbalance that instantly creates a deferential attitude in most citizens. Even if one believes they are well within their rights to drive through a "voluntary" checkpoint, they often realize compliance is the path of least resistance. Why put yourself on a cop's "radar" when you can simply blow into a tube and be on your way?

This is how rights disappear. It doesn't take audacious actions to destroy civil liberties. All it takes is a small amount of force, applied frequently and repeatedly.

Filed Under: blood, checkpoints, dna, police, saliva, texas

US Court Rules Again That Natural Phenomena Cannot Be Patented, Casting Further Doubt On Gene Patents

from the keep-'em-coming dept

Back in June, Mike wrote about the important Myriad Genetics judgment from the Supreme Court, which said that naturally-occuring genetic material could not be patented. However, because of some hedging from the judges, there were concerns about how much this would block gene patents in practice. Last week we had an indication that the impact is indeed likely to be significant, as VentureBeat reports:

a District Court judge in California upheld the landmark [SCOTUS] ruling, and struck down a patent held by a San Diego-based diagnostics company called Sequenom. Sequenom offers a non-invasive genetic test for Down's Syndrome, which pregnant women can take as early as 10 weeks.

Sequenom plans to appeal the decision to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. It was highly unexpected, and has caused shockwaves of disbelief in the scientific community. The judge, Susan Illston of the United States District Court in Northern California, ruled against Sequenom after a summary judgement, citing the Supreme Court case "Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., 12-398."

In both cases, the judge ruled that a "natural phenomenon" could not be patented.

As Science magazine explained in its report on the case:

If this decision stands, "I don’t see how you can maintain a genetic diagnostic claim anymore," says Christopher Holman, a molecular biologist and professor of law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

However, that does not mean that biotech is now an area that will be abandoned by investors. As the VentureBeat story notes:

Bryan Roberts, a health-focused investment partner at Venrock, predicts that "real innovation will be patentable and rewarded" while patents on natural phenomena will not. Roberts is a leading investor in Ariosa Diagnostics, the San Jose, Calif. based company that filed suit against Sequenom in 2011.

That connection means that Roberts may be biased in his view of this particular case, but his broader analysis of the ruling's impact remains true:

The ruling "raises the bar to rely on intellectual property as a business defense," said Roberts. "It will drive prices down [and support] the product that is both high quality and efficiently priced."

What makes this latest judgement (embedded below) particularly welcome is that it joins the Myriad Genetics decision, and an earlier SCOTUS ruling that struck down a patent on basic medical diagnostics, to form part of a growing body of US case law that brings some much-needed sanity to the world of gene patents.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: biotech, dna, gene patents, patents
Companies: ariosa diagnostics, myriad genetics, sequenom

DailyDirt: Growing Superfoods

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Humans have been modifying the genes of plant and animal life for hundreds of years -- using conventional breeding techniques. Maybe you don't like the food you eat to have had its genetic material bombarded by radiation to accelerate mutations, or you don't want genes from pigs in your orange juice. But how else are farmers going to keep growing crops at ever increasing yields... or to grow superfoods that are more nutritious or make us smarter, immune to disease and better looking? Here are just a few examples of biotechnology getting into our food supply.

• No naturally occurring citrus plant appears to be immune from the dreaded "citrus greening" disease which threatens the global supply of oranges. The best solution could be a transgenic plant with DNA from other vegetables or a virus or a pig or an artificially-designed gene. (Or the world could just live without oranges for a while....) [url]
• The FDA is evaluating the impact of AquAdvantage Salmon -- a genetically engineered variety of Atlantic salmon that matures much faster than its naturally-occurring cousins. AquaBounty Technologies created this salmon with genes from the Chinook salmon and the ocean pout so that AquAdvantage Salmon produces a growth hormone all year long (instead of just during warm weather) and can be harvested in 18 months (about half the time it takes for conventional salmon). [url]
• A few Chinese officials were fired for violating laws and ethical regulations in order to allow researchers to feed genetically modified rice to about two dozen kids in a study lasting three weeks. The parents were only told that their children would be fed Golden Rice that contained β-carotene, but not that the rice was genetically modified in any way. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: aquadvantage salmon, beta-carotene, biotechnology, conventional breeding, dna, farming, food, genetic engineering, gmo, golden rice, hormone, oranges, rice, salmon, superfood
Companies: aquabounty technologies

DailyDirt: Cool Animal Research

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

While there are some people out there trying to kickstop genetically modified organisms from being created, the progress of biotechnology doesn't seem to be slowing down. Researchers are coming up with all kinds of new ways to look at mysterious biological processes, and here are just a few examples.

• Transparent brains could help neuroscientists visualize details of neurons at a molecular level. The process removes all the fat from a brain to make it transparent, and the technique could be applied to other organs as well. [url]
• Genes from jellyfish have created a bunch of glow-in-the-dark animals -- such as cats, dogs, fish, sheep, pigs, monkeys and rabbits. This research isn't just for fun (though kids might want a glow-in-the-dark pet someday) because the ability to insert genes from other species could lead to better ways to treat certain diseases, and glowing proteins give researchers an obvious way to mark genetically modified cells. [url]
• Researchers have found a way to study magnetic sensory cells in fish. These magnetic cells allow fish (and presumably similar cells in migratory birds) to navigate vast distances by sensing the Earth's magnetic field. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: animal research, biology, biotech, dna, genes, gfp, glow-in-the-dark, gmo, imaging, kickstop, magnetic sensory cells, neuroscience, protein

Supreme Court Strikes Down Gene Patents

from the good-news dept

Here's a bit of good news: the Supreme Court has effectively said you can't patent genes, though in typical Supreme Court fashion, it hedged a bit. Basically, they found that merely separating out naturally occurring DNA is not patentable, but that synthetically made "complementary DNA" or (cDNA) can be patentable. This case has been going on for quite some time, involving a company called Myriad Genetics, which isolated two genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, where mutations indicate a high likelihood of developing breast cancer. Myriad then set up a very lucrative, extremely high priced set of tests to find those mutations and argued that others testing for those genes violated its patents -- because stopping breast cancer should be prohibitively expensive, apparently.

The unanimous ruling found that merely separating out naturally occurring genes cannot be patentable, because that would be ridiculous:

It is undisputed that Myriad did not create or alter any of the genetic information encoded in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. The location and order of the nucleotides existed in nature before Myriad found them. Nor did Myriad create or alter the genetic structure of DNA. Instead, Myriad’s principal contribution was uncovering the precise location and genetic sequence of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes within chromosomes 17 and 13. The question is whether this renders the genes patentable.

And that doesn't make much sense under patent law:

Myriad’s patents would, if valid, give it the exclusive right to isolate an individual’s BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes (or any strand of 15 or more nucleotides within the genes)by breaking the covalent bonds that connect the DNA to the rest of the individual’s genome.

Myriad's main argument was that it basically had to put a lot of work into finding and isolating the genes, but the court noted that "Groundbreaking, innovative, or even brilliant discovery does not by itself satisfy [the conditions for patent eligibility]."

The court also rejects the idea that just because the US Patent Office regularly granted gene patents for years, it should be allowed to continue to do so. The court does say that complementary DNA, made by Myriad, can be patentable:

... the lab technician unquestionably creates something new when cDNA is made. cDNA retains the naturally occurring exons of DNA, but it is distinct from the DNA from which it was derived. As a result, cDNA is not a “product of nature” and is patent eligible...

The court also points out that you can still patent a form of a test for DNA, if that method is innovative, but you can't patent the underlying genetic structure if it's naturally occurring. However, Myriad's method was not new or innovative. As the court notes, it was "well understood by geneticists at the time."

On the whole this is a good ruling that will invalidate a large number of bogus gene patents. While patent extremists are complaining that this will destroy the biotech field, more reasonable minds are pointing out that it should have little effect. I'd argue that, if anything, it may drive greater efforts in biotech, since companies can now do more exploration on genes without fearing being sued by someone who discovered and isolated a particular gene first -- and this should also lead to significantly cheaper genetic testing, creating even more opportunities for biotech firms to innovate on top of widespread genetic testing.

Filed Under: biotech, dna, gene patents, isolated dna, patent eligible, patents, supreme court
Companies: myriad genetics

Horrifying Supreme Court Ruling Lets Police Collect DNA Because You Might Just Be A Horrible Criminal

from the 4th-amendment-is-dead dept

I had a busy day on Monday, so it took a bit of time for me to finally get around to reading the full Supreme Court ruling in the Maryland v. King case, in which the court ridiculously ruled that law enforcement can take DNA samples from everyone arrested for a "serious" new crime in the hopes that it might help solve old crimes. We've discussed this issue in the past, but the reasoning of the majority ruling in the Supreme Court is rather horrifying. It's interesting to see that the court did not split along its "traditional" lines. Scalia split with Alito, Thomas and Roberts -- who often form a single voting block, while Breyer also was on the other side of his more natural allies, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan. Kennedy is the usual "swing" vote, and wrote the decision here, decimating the basics of the 4th amendment. I mean absolutely decimating it.

Kennedy tries to argue that taking a DNA sample from someone arrested is a perfectly natural part of the process of identifying them, but he goes much, much further. Just the fact that he uses this line is when you know the 4th Amendment is in trouble:

To say that the Fourth Amendment applies here is the beginning point, not the end of the analysis.

In other words, I'm about to come up with a bunch of rationalizations as to why we can ignore the 4th Amendment here. The basic argument is a sort of blanket "well, the police need to identify people" argument:

The legitimate government interest served by the Maryland DNA Collection Act is one that is well established: the need for law enforcement officers in a safe and accu­rate way to process and identify the persons and possessions they must take into custody.

Yes, but that's wholly different from taking a DNA sample from them to then run through a giant database of unsolved crimes to see if you (or, in some cases, a relative) might possibly be implicated. And, then think of where this quickly gets you when the majority makes the following statement:

An individual's identity is more than just his name or Social Security number, and the government's interest in identification goes beyond ensuring that the proper name is typed on the indictment. Identity has never been considered limited to the name on the arrestee's birth certificate. In fact, a name is of little value compared to the real interest in identification at stake when an individual is brought into custody

Hmm. If an identity goes beyond just your name and basic stats info, then what might it include?

A suspect's criminal history is a critical part of his iden­tity that officers should know when processing him for detention

Yeah, but a person's hobbies, interests, writings, possessions, etc may also be a part of someone's identity, and yet those tend to be protected by the 4th Amendment. So what gives? As Julian Sanchez points out, couldn't the identical argument be used to say that any law enforcement should be able to also read an arrestee's email without a warrant? After all it would give them more "context" about his "identity."

This should be a hint: if your Supreme Court argument can be used to basically wipe out the entire 4th Amendment, it's probably not a very good argument.

In response, Scalia's dissent is well worth reading. It's blistering in its criticism of the majority opinion and very much on point.

The Fourth Amendment forbids searching a person for evidence of a crime when there is no basis for believing the person is guilty of the crime or is in possession of incriminating evidence. That prohibition is categorical and without exception; it lies at the very heart of the Fourth Amendment. Whenever this Court has allowed a suspicionless search, it has insisted upon a justifying motive apart from the investigation of crime.

It is obvious that no such noninvestigative motive exists in this case. The Court's assertion that DNA is being taken, not to solve crimes, but to identify those in the State's custody, taxes the credulity of the credulous. And the Court's comparison of Maryland's DNA searches to other techniques, such as fingerprinting, can seem apt only to those who know no more than today's opinion has chosen to tell them about how those DNA searches actually work.

Scalia points out that allowing searches unrelated to a specific crime have only been allowed in very special circumstances, and this ruling blows that out of the water. Scalia notes that the whole claim that the argument that these DNA searches are just for identifying really does rip to shreds the basics of the 4th Amendment:

If identifying someone means finding out what unsolved crimes he has committed, then identification is indistinguishable from the ordinary law enforcement aims that have never been thought to justify a suspicionless search. Searching every lawfully stopped car, for example, might turn up information about unsolved crimes the driver had committed, but no one would say that such a search was aimed at "identifying" him, and no court would hold such a search lawful.

Furthermore, Scalia points out that the "identifying" claim is completely bogus because no one was using DNA to better identify the arrestee. It looks at the specific case of King, and notes multiple ways in which the DNA testing would have obviously been done differently if the purpose had been simple identification. They made no rush to sample the DNA, and, in fact were forbidden to by law, until he was arraigned 3 days later. And then it took months for anything to actually be done with the DNA sample.

In fact, if anything was "identified" at the moment that the DNA database returned a match, it was not King—his identity was already known. (The docket for the original criminal charges lists his full name, his race, his sex, his height, his weight, his date of birth, and his address.) Rather, what the August 4 match "identified" was the previously-taken sample from the earlier crime. That sample was genuinely mysterious to Maryland; the State knew that it had probably been left by the victim's attacker, but nothing else. King was not identified by his association with the sample; rather, the sample was identified by its association with King. The Court effectively destroys its own "identification" theory when it acknowledges that the object of this search was “to see what [was] already known about [King].” King was who he was, and volumes of his biography could not make him any more or any less King. No minimally competent speaker of English would say, upon noticing a known arrestee’s similarity “to a wanted poster of a previously unidentified suspect,” ante, at 13, that the arrestee had thereby been identified. It was the previously unidentified suspect who had been identified—just as, here, it was the previously unidentified rapist.

Furthermore, Scalia quotes the actual law in question, which lists out the only reasons why DNA evidence may be collected... and "identification" is not one of them.

Instead, the law provides that DNA samples are collected and tested, as a matter of Maryland law, “as part of an official investigation into a crime.” ... (Or, as our suspicionless-search cases would put it: for ordinary law-enforcement purposes.) That is certainly how everyone has always understood the Maryland Act until today.

Scalia concludes by pointing out the worst part of all of this: once convicted, it's established that a criminal can have their DNA sampled. And thus, this really only matters for one group: those innocent of the crime they were arrested for.

All parties concede that it would have been entirely permissible, as far as the Fourth Amendment is concerned, for Maryland to take a sample of King’s DNA as a consequence of his conviction for second-degree assault. So the ironic result of the Court’s error is this: The only arrestees to whom the outcome here will ever make a difference are those who have been acquitted of the crime of arrest (so that their DNA could not have been taken upon conviction). In other words, this Act manages to burden uniquely the sole group for whom the Fourth Amendment’s protections ought to be most jealously

And, finally, Scalia points out, as we did above, that the basic logic of the majority more or less justifies almost any search.

Today’s judgment will, to be sure, have the beneficial effect of solving more crimes; then again, so would the taking of DNA samples from anyone who flies on an airplane (surely the Transportation Security Administration needs to know the “identity” of the flying public), applies for a driver’s license, or attends a public school. Perhaps the construction of such a genetic panopticon is wise. But I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.

The 4th Amendment was already on the ropes before this. It's pretty depressing to see the Supreme Court look to give it the knockout punch like that.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, constitution, dna, justice kennedy, justice scalia, privacy, supreme court

DailyDirt: Making Extinction Extinct

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Jurassic Park was just a movie -- there isn't really a practical way to pull intact dinosaur DNA from fossilized mosquitoes. But recently-extinct animal species might be cloned because we can actually gather intact DNA and cell fragments that can be manipulated more easily. Here are just a few examples of projects that could create animals that are now considered extinct.

• There are several TED talks on de-extinction, discussing cloning and various animals that could potentially be revived. We could learn a lot from figuring out how to take somewhat arbitrary DNA instructions and produce viable organisms. [url]
• Dolly the sheep was born in 1996, and in 2003, an extinct wild goat (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica) was cloned, but it died with some major genetic defects. Since then, cloning techniques have gotten better, but re-creating an extinct animal is one thing. Raising a healthy animal that was once extinct is a completely different challenge. [url]
• At the Central Veterinary Research Laboratory in Dubai, scientists have reportedly engineered a male duck to produce chicken sperm that fathered a chicken. The process of introducing chicken DNA into the reproductive organs of a male duck embryo could presumably be used in other birds (especially for other birds that may be endangered). [url]
• An extinct Australian frog species has been brought back to life (almost). Scientists cloned an extinct frog (Rheobatrachus silus) by injecting its dead cell nucleus into a fresh egg of distantly-related frog, (Mixophyes fasciolatus), and observed the embryo grow -- but it didn't survive beyond a few days. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: biology, chicken, cloning, dna, duck, extinction, frog, genes, goat, species

DailyDirt: Discovering More Life On Earth

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

While some environmentalists complain about the rate at which known species are dying, the absolute amount of biodiversity on Earth is actually not well known. There could be 100 million different species, but we've only identified about 2 million so far. Here are just a few recent developments that could help expand our databases of living species.

• James Cameron has recently donated his custom-built submarine to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (a year after his record-setting dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench). Last year, Cameron observed about 68 specimens of life on the ocean floor, and future dives could possibly turn up more discoveries. [url]
• DNA characterization techniques promise to speed up the identification of new species. Ecogenomics will be used to survey biodiversity and could lead to finding hundreds of new species in a matter of months. [url]
• The Dead Sea looks devoid of life on the surface, but biologists since the 1930s have known that the salty body of water is teeming with microbes that thrive in water that is over 8 times saltier than the ocean. More recently, life has been discovered at the bottom of the Dead Sea, about 100 feet down, where mats of bacteria survive near freshwater springs. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: biology, dead sea, dna, ecogenomics, james cameron, life, species
Companies: woods hole oceanographic institution

DailyDirt: Are You Sure You're Eating What You Think You're Eating?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

It seems like every day there's another report of problems with our food -- E. Coli in beef and packaged salads, Salmonella in canteloupe, Listeria in packaged sliced apples, etc. Worries about bacterial contamination in food is pretty common, but it seems like we should also be worrying about whether the food we're eating is really what we think it is. Recently, there was the scandal in the UK over beef products that contained horsemeat. But thanks to modern day technology, scientists are now able to test food products and determine whether they are indeed what they claim to be. Here are just a few examples.

• After that whole horsemeat scandal, Burger King has announced that it will be testing its burger patties for non-beef DNA, including horse, pork, and lamb. So far, it has been testing specifically for horse DNA and hasn't found any in its beef, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's free of other kinds of animals... [url]
• The US FDA has officially adopted DNA barcoding to detect seafood mislabeling. Think you're eating "white tuna" sushi? Maybe you're actually eating "escolar" which has been banned in Japan since 1977 because the Japanese government is concerned about its "toxicity". [url]
• A laser "isotope ratio-meter," which was originally designed to study carbon isotope levels on Mars, is now being used to test the purity of honey. This kind of laser analysis can even match the honey to the flowers of a specific geographic region. Honey is expensive, so it's often adulterated with cheaper ingredients, like sugar, malt sweeteners, corn or rice syrup, to name just a few honey substitutes. [url]

Filed Under: barcoding, beef, burgers, dna, food, horsemeat, isotope, laser, sushi
Companies: burger king

DailyDirt: Mysteries Of Aging

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The fountain of youth has been an elusive goal for centuries, and there's still no magic potion (or pharmaceutical) that can stop the aging process. But bits of progress suggest that there might be ways to extend a healthy human lifespan by a significant amount. Here are just a few more data points that could point to a future of living longer and longer.

• Brooke Greenberg is twenty years old, but she has an extremely rare disorder (she's the only person known to have Syndrome X) that hinders her growth so that she appears to be about five years old. Researchers are looking at this girl's DNA to try to figure out if there is a genetic cause and which genes may be behind this unusual aging process. [url]
• The German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg is looking at a glycoprotein called Dickkopf-1 (aka Dkk1) which seems to be involved in the cognitive abilities of elderly brains. The function of this molecule isn't entirely clear, but some researchers are trying to understand it in an effort to determine the mechanisms of declining cognitive abilities as people age. [url]
• The effects of consuming resveratrol aren't fully understood yet, but when honeybees eat this compound, they eat less and live longer. So there's a possibility that resveratrol plays a role in caloric restriction when it's associated with extending lifespans of various animals. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: aging, biology, brooke greenberg, caloric restriction, dkk1, dna, genetic disorder, lifespan, resveratrol, syndrome x