These are the people who ‘believe in Science’

It certainly passeth my understanding why the travel ban on flights from Africa to the USA is to begin 2 days from (27 November)  now on Monday (29 November) rather than immediately.   This is from the ‘adults in the room’ running our country who supposedly ‘believe in science’.

“Sixty-one people who arrived in Amsterdam on two flights from South Africa have tested positive for Covid-19, Dutch officials say.

They have been placed in isolation at a hotel near Schiphol airport.

They were among some 600 passengers held for several hours after arrival while they were tested for the virus.”  — source — https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59442149.

The new bug (omicron variant to avoid using nu for confusion with new and xi for confusion with you know who (these were the next letters in the Greek alphabet)) is clearly incredibly infectious, based on 10% of the passengers in two flights being positive for a coronavirus.

The time to ban flights from southern Africa is now, not two days from now as have the European Union and many other countries have done.   Perhaps the President didn’t want to be accused of racism, the way he accused President Trump when he did the same thing in 2020.

Now a bit abut the omicron virus itself and why it is of such concern.  The protein of the virus which gloms on to our cells is the spike protein which is large (over 1,000 amino acids).  300 of them are involved is actually binding to a receptor (ACE2) on our cells.

Omicron has changed (mutated) some 30 of them, many more mutations than most viral variants contain.  Remember it just took one mutation of one amino acid  of beta globin to cause Sickle Cell Anemia.  Some of these mutations have been found in other SARS-CoV-2 variants, and these were associated with (1) increased infectivity (2) ability to evade existing antibodies to the virus.   So far there is no evidence that the omicron variant is associated with more lethal disease, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

It is important to remember that all information about omicron does not come from peer – reviewed journal articles — it’s just too early, as the first mention of the virus was 14 November, so all of this may change.  Reports from the battlefield are always fragmentary and inaccurate.

 

 

Ashkenazi Jews are extremely inbred

Neurologists are inherently interested in  psychosis, not least because too much dopamine in the form of L-DOPA can trigger it.  I’ve always found it remarkable that dopamine blocking agents (phenothiazines, and most antipsychotics) can attack psychotic thought itself.  This is much more impressive to me than the ability of other drugs (alcohol, coffee, marijuana, cocaine) to affect mood.

So it’s always worthwhile to read another paper about the genetics of schizophrenia, a very hereditary disease.  All the risk factors we’ve found by GWAS (Genome Wide Association Studies) account for at most of 1/3 of genetic risk in schizophrenia.  For details please see https://luysii.wordpress.com/2014/08/24/tolstoy-rides-again-schizophrenia/.

So I was interested in another crack at finding more genetic causes of schizophrenia  [ Neuron 109, 1465–1478, May 5, 2021 ].  As often happens, the most interesting thing in the paper was something totally tangential  to my original interest in it. 

Here it is —   ”  For example, the Ashkenazi Jewish (AJ) population, currently numbering >10 million individuals world- wide, effectively derives from a mere 300 founders 750 years ago ” (Carmi et al., 2014;Nat. Commun. volume 5, 4835.).  

I find this assertion incredible.  But, as explained below, there is pretty good evidence (although subtle and quite technical) that it’s correct.

Ashkenazi Jews are those previously found only in Europe and the Americas, as opposed to Sephardic Jews, previously found only in the mideast and Africa.  Both are now found in Israel.  Ashkenazi Jews were chosen for the study because any deleterious genes producing schizophrenia  present in the original 300 wouldn’t have been washed out by natural selection in just 30 generations in 750 years. 

The Ashkenazim make the inbreeding among French Canadians look like pikers — a population of 2 million derived from a founder population of 9000 people over the next 170 years — for details please see https://luysii.wordpress.com/2019/07/17/the-wages-of-inbreeding/.  Note that neither population tried to inbreed, it’s just that there was no one else geographically available to breed with for the French Canadians, and no one else culturally available for the Ashkenazi’s.  

At least with the French Canadians we have immigration records to tell us how large the founder population was.  How sure are we about the 300 strong founder population of present day Ashkenazi Jews?  We’re not and I’m not even though it was published in a peer reviewed reputable journal.  There is a lot of guesswork in figuring out just how large a genetic bottleneck is.  It all depends on the model used, and I don’t trust models in general.  I’ve seen too many crash and burn. (For details — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2019/03/03/i-mistrust-models-2/)

However, the Neuron paper contains a reference to another paper which provides excellent empiric evidence for a small founder population, (PLoS Genet. 14, e1007329. 2018).  Here’s a direct quote.  It’s quite a mouthful; I’ll try to explain below the quote what the terms mean, because I think many nonscientific types are likely to be interested in the idea that Ashkenazi Jews are that inbred. 

Just skip the paragraph if it’s incomprehensible, go to *** and read the explanatory material, and then read the paragraph again. 

“We estimate that 34% of protein-coding alleles present in the Ashkenazi Jewish population at frequencies greater than 0.2% are significantly more frequent (mean 15-fold) than their maximum frequency observed in other reference populations. Arising via a well-described founder effect approximately 30 generations ago, this catalog of enriched alleles can contribute to differences in genetic risk and overall prevalence of diseases between populations.”

****

Explanatory material.

Our genetic material (DNA) is made of 4 different compounds A, T, G, C (called nucleotides) which are linked together in chromosomes.  The order is crucial, just as the order of letters in a word is crucial for meaning (consider united and untied).  So how many slots for the nucleotides are there in our genome ? Just 3,200,000,000.  Just as combinations of dots and dashes code for letters in Morse code, combinations of  3 nucleotides code for the 20 amino acids that make up proteins. 

Proteins are big.  For instance, the protein  (beta-globin)mutated in sickle cell anemia contains 146 amino acids, and all it takes to produce the disease is a switch from one amino acid to another at position six.  The other 145 amino acids in the chain are unchanged. So sickle cell beta globin with a change in its nucleotide sequence is an allele (alternate form) of normal beta globin.  

Every population of people contains alleles of every protein.  Some are common (over 5% of the population showing them), but most are rare.The PLoS paper looked at  73,228 alleles of all 20,000 or so proteins that we have in our genome (yes technology now can do these sorts of things) in the general population.  The authors looked at the alleles in the Ashkenazi population which were present at greater than 1/500 (.2%).  Then they looked at the frequency of the same allele in several other non-Ashkenazi population (about 5000 each of non-Finnish Europeans, African Blacks and Latinos), and found that these alleles occurred15 times less frequently (on average).   So Ashkenazi’s have alleles that are lots more common than in other populations.  Actually it’s more than some, because about 1/3 of the alleles they studied are an average of 15 times as common.

What does this mean?  It means that when a small founder population with a rare allele becomes ‘fruitful and multiplies’, the rare allele will multiply right along with it and not be lost by outbreeding (which was certainly true of the Ashkenazis for 600 of the last 750 years).

Now read the paragraph in bold above again. 

This is the evidence that current day Ashkenazi’s come from a very small founder population.  It’s pretty good.  I hope that I’ve made this somewhat comprehensible;  if not, please write a comment.

Virus 1 Astra Zenica vaccine 0

It’s already happened. A mutated pandemic virus has rendered a vaccine useless. This is serious — the game of cat and mouse with the mutating pandemic virus (otherwise known as natural selection) has begun. You can read all about it here

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/south-africa-suspends-use-astrazenecas-covid-19-vaccine-after-it-fails-clearly-stop?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=6ada806177-briefing-dy-20210208&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-6ada806177-46043190

For a leisurely stroll through the background needed to understand the Science and Nature articles I’m going to essentially republish (and refurbish) a very recent  post — trying to make things as accessible as possible. 

The human species as a culture medium for the pandemic virus

Creationists or not, we are all about to get an unwanted lesson in natural selection and evolution, courtesy of the current pandemic virus (SARS-CoV-2).  This is going to be a long post, which will contain an incredible case of meningitis, thoughts on selfish genes in viruses, evolution, natural selection and why we’re in for a very, very long haul with the pandemic virus.

As you probably know, mutant pandemic viruses (all different) have emerged (in England, South Africa, Brazil).  Even worse they appear to be more infectious, and some are more resistant to our vaccines (all of which were made before they appeared).  

Here is lesson #1 in natural selection.  Viruses have no brains, they barely have a genome.  The human genome contains 3 billion positions, the pandemic virus 30,000.  So we have 100,000 times more information in our genome than the virus does. 100,000 is about the number of inches in a mile and half.  

So how is the virus outsmarting us?  Simply by reproducing like mad.  The molecular machines that copy our genome are very accurate, making about 1 mistake per 100,000,000 positions copied — that’s still enough for the average newborn to have 30 new mutations (more if the parents are older).  The viral machine is much less accurate.  So lots of genome mutations are made (meaning that the viral proteins made from the genome change slightly).  Those that elude the vaccines and antibodies we’re throwing at them survive and reproduce, most don’t.  This is natural selection in action. Survival of the fittest.  Darwin wasn’t kidding.

What is so remarkable about the British and the South African variants, is that they contain multiple mutations (23 in the British variant, at least 3 in the South African variant).  Usually its just one or two.

 You’ve probably heard about the mutation changing just one of the 147 amino acids  in hemoglobin to cause sickle cell anemia. Here’s another.  APOE is a 299 amino acid protein.  It comes in 3 variants  — due to changes at 2 positions.  One variant greatly increases the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, another decreases it.  So even single mutations can be quite powerful. 

So how did these multiple mutations come about?  We likely now have an answer due to one very well studied case [ Cell vol. 183 pp. 1901 – 1912 ’20 ] in an immunocompromised patient with chronic lymphatic leukemia (CLL). She shed the virus for 70 days.  Even so, she wasn’t symptomatic, but because the patient had enough immune system to fight the virus to a draw, it persisted, and so its genome was always changing.  The authors were smart enough to continually sequence the viral genome throughout the clinical course and watch it change.  So that’s very likely how the virus accumulates mutations, it lived for a long time in a patient who lived a long time with a weakened immune system allowing the virus to merrily mutate without being killed and allowing the weakened immune system to effectively select viruses it can’t kill. 

Could this happen again? Of course.   There are some 60,000 new cases of CLL each year in the USA.  Many of them have abnormal immune systems even before chemotherapy begins.

Here is an example from my own practice. The patient was a 40 year old high school teacher who presented with severe headache, stiff neck and drowsiness.  I did a spinal tap to get cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) for culture so we could find the best possible antibiotic to treat the organism.  This was 30+ years ago, and we had no DNA testing to tell us immediately what to do.  We had to wait 24 hours  while the bugs grew in culture to form enough that we could identify the species and determine  the antibiotics it was sensitive to. . 

As the fluid came out, I had a sinking feeling; as it was cloudy, implying lots of white cells fighting the infection. Enough white cells to make CSF cloudy (it normally looks like water) is a very bad sign. So after starting the standard antibiotic to be used in the first 24 hours before the cultures came back, I called the lab for the cell count.  They said there weren’t any.  I thought they’d seriously screwed up maybe losing what I’d sent or mislabeling it and looking at the wrong sample, and I unpleasantly stormed down to the lab (as only an angry physician can do) to see the spinal fluid.  They were right.  The cloudiness of the CSF was produced by hordes of bacteria not white cells.  This was even worse as clearly the bacteria were winning and the patient’s immune system was losing, and I never expected the patient to survive.  But survive he did and even left the hospital.  

Unfortunately, the meningitis turned out to be  the first symptom of an abnormal immune system due to a blood malignancy — multiple myeloma. 

****

Addendum 2 February — I sent this post to an old friend and college classmate who is now a hematology professor at a major med school.  He saw a similar case —

“When I was a medical student I saw a pediatric sickle anemia patient (asplenic) with fever and obtundation. When I looked at the methylene-blue stained CSF, I thought that stain had precipitated. So I obtained a fresh bottle of stain and it looked the same. Only this time, I looked more closely and what I thought was precipitated stain were TNTC pneumococci.

I urge all my immunosuppressed patient to get vaccinated for covid-19. I worry that if many people don’t get vaccinated,  those who do will not be that better off.”

Addendum 3 February– I asked him if his patient had survived like mine —

answer 

“Unfortunately, no. With the pneumococcus, If antibiotics are not started within 4 hours after recognition, the train has left the station.”

 

****

So there are millions of active cases of the pandemic, and tons of people with medical conditions (leukemia, multiple myeloma, chemotherapy for other cancer) with abnormal immune systems, just waiting for the pandemic virus to find a home and proliferate for days to weeks.  Literally these people are culture media for the virus. Not all of them have been identified, so don’t try to prevent this by withholding vaccination from the immunocompromised — they’re the ones who need it the most. 

I think we’re in for a very long haul with the pandemic.  We’re just gearing up to stay on top of the viral sequence du jour.   Genome sequencing is not routine (it should be).  The South African and British mutations were picked up because a spike in cases led people to sequence the virus from these patients.  Viral genome sequencing and surveillance should be routine in most countries and should not wait for an infection spike to occur. 

You may come across the terms B.1.351 and  507Y.V2 — they are different names for the South African virus which beat Astra Zenica.  The British variant is also called B.1.1.7

The human species as a culture medium for the pandemic virus

Creationists or not, we are all about to get an unwanted lesson in natural selection and evolution, courtesy of the current pandemic virus (SARS-CoV-2).  This is going to be a long post, which will contain an incredible case of meningitis, thoughts on selfish genes in viruses, evolution, natural selection and why we’re in for a very, very long haul with the pandemic virus.

As you probably know, mutant pandemic viruses (all different) have emerged (in England, South Africa, Brazil).  Even worse they appear to be more infectious, and some are more resistant to our vaccines (all of which were made before they appeared).  

Here is lesson #1 in natural selection.  Viruses have no brains, they barely have a genome.  The human genome contains 3 billion positions, the pandemic virus 30,000.  So we have 100,000 times more information in our genome than the virus does. 100,000 is about the number of inches in a mile and half.  

So how is the virus outsmarting us?  Simply by reproducing like mad.  The molecular machines that copy our genome are very accurate, making about 1 mistake per 100,000,000 positions copied — that’s still enough for the average newborn to have 30 new mutations (more if the parents are older).  The viral machine is much less accurate.  So lots of genome mutations are made (meaning that the viral proteins made from the genome change slightly).  Those that elude the vaccines and antibodies we’re throwing at them survive and reproduce, most don’t.  This is natural selection in action. Survival of the fittest.  Darwin wasn’t kidding.

What is so remarkable about the British and the South African variants, is that they contain multiple mutations (23 in the British variant).  Usually its just one or two.

 You’ve probably heard about the mutation changing just one of the 147 amino acids  in hemoglobin to cause sickle cell anemia. Here’s another.  APOE is a 299 amino acid protein.  It comes in 3 variants  — due to changes at 2 positions.  One variant greatly increases the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, another decreases it.  So even single mutations can be quite powerful. 

So how did these multiple mutations come about?  We likely now have an answer due to one very well studied case [ Cell vol. 183 pp. 1901 – 1912 ’20 ] in an immunocompromised patient with chronic lymphatic leukemia (CLL). She shed the virus for 70 days.  Even so, she wasn’t symptomatic, but because the patient had enough immune system to fight the virus to a draw, it persisted, and so its genome was always changing.  The authors were smart enough to continually sequence the viral genome throughout the clinical course and watch it change. 

Could this happen again.  Of course?   There are some 60,000 new cases of CLL each year in the USA.  Many of them have abnormal immune systems even before chemotherapy begins.

Here is an example from my own practice. The patient was a 40 year old high school teacher who presented with severe headache, stiff neck and drowsiness.  I did a spinal tap to get cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) for culture so we could find the best possible antibiotic to treat the organism.  This was 30+ years ago, and we had no DNA testing to tell us immediately what to do.  We had to wait 24 hours  while the bugs grew in culture to form enough that we could identify the species and determine  the antibiotics it was sensitive to. . 

As the fluid came out, I had a sinking feeling; as it was cloudy, implying lots of white cells fighting the infection. Enough white cells to make CSF cloudy (it normally looks like water) is a very bad sign. So after starting the standard antibiotic to be used in the first 24 hours before the cultures came back, I called the lab for the cell count.  They said there weren’t any.  I thought they’d seriously screwed up maybe losing what I’d sent or mislabeling it and looking at the wrong sample, and I unpleasantly stormed down to the lab (as only an angry physician can do) to see the spinal fluid.  They were right.  The cloudiness of the CSF was produced by hordes of bacteria not white cells.  This was even worse as clearly the bacteria were winning and the patient’s immune system was losing, and I never expected the patient to survive.  But survive he did and even left the hospital.  

Unfortunately, the meningitis turned out to be  the first symptom of an abnormal immune system due to a blood malignancy — multiple myeloma. 

****

Addendum 2 February — I sent this post to an old friend and college classmate who is now a hematology professor at a major med school.  He saw a similar case —

“When I was a medical student I saw a pediatric sickle anemia patient (asplenic) with fever and obtundation. When I looked at the methylene-blue stained CSF, I thought that stain had precipitated. So I obtained a fresh bottle of stain and it looked the same. Only this time, I looked more closely and what I thought was precipitated stain were TNTC pneumococci.

I urge all my immunosuppressed patient to get vaccinated for covid-19. I worry that if many people don’t get vaccinated,  those who do will not be that better off.”

Addendum 3 February– I asked him if his patient had survived like mine —

answer 

“Unfortunately, no. With the pneumococcus, If antibiotics are not started within 4 hours after recognition, the train has left the station.”

 

****

So there are millions of active cases of the pandemic, and tons of people with medical conditions (leukemia, multiple myeloma, chemotherapy for other cancer) with abnormal immune systems, just waiting for the pandemic virus to find a home and proliferate for days to weeks.  Literally these people are culture media for the virus. Not all of them have been identified, so don’t try to prevent this by withholding vaccination from the immunocompromised — they’re the ones who need it the most. 

I think we’re in for a very long haul with the pandemic.  We’re just gearing up to stay on top of the viral sequence du jour.   Genome sequencing is not routine (it should be).  The South African and British mutations were picked up because a spike in cases led people to sequence the virus from these patients.  Viral genome sequencing and surveillance should be routine in most countries  — not waiting on an infection spike. 

 

 

The wages of inbreeding

Saguenay Lac St. Jean is a beautiful region of Quebec. It’s fairly isolated. Once you get to the top of the lake there is no way that you can drive farther north (no road).  We spent part of our 25th anniversary there.  The population bears a heavy load of genetic disease (through no fault of their own).

The reason is historical. Only 8,000 people emigrated from France to Quebec between 1608 and 1763. After the English victory that year  only 1,000 emigrated in the next 90 years.  In 1992, the population of the Saguenay  region was around 300,000 and Quebec itself 2,000,000.

This means that once the population began expanding with relatively little outside input, recessive genes began to meet each other, as in a large population there are so many more ways to make this happen than in a small one.

To keep the the nonBiologists reading this aboard, here is what recessive means. Our genome has 46 chromosomes.  We all have two sex chromosomes (either X and Y or X and X).  The other 44 chromosomes come in pairs.  This gives you two copies of each gene.  The classic recessive gene is that for sickle cell anemia.  If just one of the pair has the Sickle trait you are OK, if both have it, you have sickle cell anemia (which you definitely don’t want to have).  Actually if you live in Africa it is better if you have one gene with the trait as it makes you more resistant to Malaria.  This is why the trait became so common in Africans.  It’s natural selection in action (and in a human population to boot).  Just one good sickle gene (not carrying the trait) is enough to mask the effects of the bad gene, so the carrier is normal.   This is why sickle cell trait is called a recessive gene.

Here is one example.  The incidence of a muscle disease (myotonic dystrophy) worldwide is 2 – 14/100,000.  In the Saguenay region it is 189/100,000.

Even 20 years ago, the carrier frequency of many genetic disorders up there was quite high [ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 95 pp. 15140 – 15144 ’98 ]

Spastic ataxia 1/21

Type I tyrosinemia 1/22

Sensorimotor polyneuropathy 1/23

Pseudovitamin D deficient rickets 1/26

Cytochrome C oxidase deficiency 1/26

Cystinosis 1/39

Histidase 1/32

Lipoprotein lipase 1/43

Pyruvic kinase 1/64

Then again, there are all sorts of genetic diseases found only in this region.

Similar conditions may apply to the ancestors of today’s native Americans — for details see the previous post — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2019/07/16/the-initial-native-americans-were-quite-inbred/.  Incredible as it may sound, the rape and pillage of the conquistadores may have actually been good from a genetic point of view.  Similar considerations may apply to any pair of populations meeting each other for the first time.  Hard stuff indeed, but you can’t repeal biology.

So, from a genetic point of view, it’s good if you reproduce with someone from a different group.  It’s why I’m glad to have a Chinese daughter in law, 2 grand-nephews whose father is Hindu, and a Russian woman about to marry our nephew.

 

 

How Badly Are Thy Genomes, Oh Humanity

With apologies to Numbers 24:5, “How goodly are thy tents, Oh Jacob” —  a recent paper shows how shockingly error ridden our genomes actually are [ Science vol. 337 pp. 64 – 69 ’12 ].  The authors sequenced roughly three quarters of the genes coding for proteins in some 2,439 people — e.g. 15,585 protein coding genes.  This left 98% of the genome untouched, primarily because we really don’t know what it does or how it does it, despite the fact that it controls, when, where and how much of each protein is made.  So they basically looked at the bricks from which we are built (the proteins) and not the plans (the 98%).

The news is not very good.  The subjects came from two groups: 1,351 Europeans and 1,088 Africans (the latter, because genetic diversity is far higher among Africans as that’s where humanity arose, and where mutations have had the longest time to accumulate).

The news is not very good. First, some background.

Recall that each nucleotide is one of four possibilities (A, T, G, C), and that each 3 nucleotides therefore has 4^3 = 64 possibilities.  61/64 combinations code for amino acids which, since we have only 20 gives a certain redundancy of the famed genetic code.   The other 3 combinations code for no amino acid (usually) and tell the machinery making proteins to stop.  Although crucial to our existence, these are called nonsense codons.

The genetic code is therefore 3fold degenerate (on average).  However, some amino acids are coded for by just 1 combination of 3 nucleotides while others are coded by as many as 6.  So some single nucleotide variants (SNVs) leave the amino acid coded for the same (these are the synonymous SNVs), while others change the amino acid (nonSynonymous SNVs), and possibly protein function.

Ask some one with sickle cell anemia how much trouble just one nonSynonymous SNV can cause — it’s only 1 amino acid out of 147.  Even worse, ask someone with cystic fibrosis where just one of 1,480 amino acids is missing.

Here’s the bad news.  In the population as a whole, they found 500,000 single nucleotide variants (SNVs).  If you’re still not sure what is meant by this, the 5 articles in https://luysii.wordpress.com/category/molecular-biology-survival-guide/ should be all the background you need.

More than 400,000 of the variants were previously unknown.  Also more than 400,000 of them were found either in Africans or Europeans but not both.  If you divide 500,000 by 2,439 you get 205 variants per person.  However, SNVs are far more common than that, and each individual contains an average of 14,000.

Well, how many of the 500,000 or so SNVs they found are nonSynonymous? One would think about 1/3 statistically.  However, They found more than half 292,125/500,000 — nearly 60% — were nonSynonymous.

It gets worse: 6,165 of the nonSynonymous variants are nonSense codons.  This means that the protein coded for by such a gene, terminates prematurely, meaning that it can terminate anywhere.  On average one would expect that half of these nonsense codons result in a protein of less than half the normal length.   This would very likely obliterate whatever function the protein had.

Obviously, they couldn’t test all 500,000 SNVs to see how they affected protein function (and we really only have a decent idea of what half our 20,000 or so proteins are doing).  They had to guess.  They came up with a figure of 2 – 4% of the 14,000 SNVs being functionally significant — That’s 280 – 560 significant mutations per individual.

Clearly, despite the horrible examples of cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia above, most of these can’t be doing very much, because these were normal people being studied.

There are all sorts of implications of this work.  One is the subject of a future post — how hard this diversity makes drug discovery.  Another reiterates the Tolstoy theme mentioned earlier about the genetic defects causing schizophrenia and autism — ““Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”.  Thus beginneth Anna Karenina.

For details please see https://luysii.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/tolstoy-was-right-about-hereditary-diseases-imagine-that/  and  https://luysii.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/tolstoy-rides-again-autism-spectrum-disorder/

A third is that this shows that the 1000 fold expansion of the human population has pretty much obviated much natural selection eliminating these variants.  I’ll leave it to the geneticists to figure out what this means for the eventual survival of the species, as these mutants continue to accumulate.

The paper is fascinating, and sure to change our conception of what a ‘normal’ genome actually is.  Nonetheless, all they did was follow Yogi Berra’s dictum — “You can observe a lot by watching.”   It certainly wasn’t creative or ingenious in any sense.  Sometimes grunt work like this wins the day.  I’ll leave this to Ashutosh to write about its philosophical implications for research.