Vatican whitepaper on bioethics

I have just read the instruction "Dignitas Personae" written by The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Just out of curiosity - to check if the aspects of bioethics mentioned there may be relevant to my daily work. 

To tell the truth, I have not found anything shocking there. The Catholic Church recognizes some principles such as the dignity of every human life and tries to stick to it using logical reasoning.  The life is given by God and we, humans, do not have right to end it by our decisions. Full stop. To make sure that the human life is protected from its start until the natural death - it is condemned as immoral and illicit to kill any human being - even in the form of an embryo, exactly from the point of fertilization. I also understand that the Church requires the fertilization to be natural (ie. by a sexual act) although I know that it may frustrate some people who want their own children and it is possible only by in vitro fertilization. In such cases the Instruction suggests adoption. 

In fact, I was surprised twice reading the Instruction. First time, when it described as illicit the freezing of oocytes. Second time - in a different way- when I read that it is moral to obtain stem cells from the foetuses of children that died naturally. It shows how delicate is the borderline of what is justified - and the changes in the research horizon also constantly discover new limits for the morality.   

To make things clear the Instruction explains that it is acceptable to do eg. treatment of infertility that does not include in-vitro fertilization or to use stem cell therapies when the cells are obtained from the human tissues without any harm to the life. 

In the conclusion the Instruction states that "the Church's teaching is based on the recognition and promotion of all the gifts which the Creator has bestowed on man: such as life, knowledge, freedom and love." So - it is not like many leftist commentators would like to see - that the Church is just a "forbidding machine". It is about life, love and the knowledge guys... Seriously. 

Neurex in Basel

So I am back from the Neurex meeting in Basel. My story was on the side of gene expression, but most of the talk's contents were orbiting around genome-wide association studies, what means mainly applying SNP microarrays to explain psychical disorders. It was interesting to learn for how much of psychical qualities we may blame genes. For instance, a longitudinal study on Dutch twins shown that behavioral disorders may be explain up to 70% by genes in 5 year old children, but then, the influence of education and environment decreases it to some 40% in 18 year old people. Another interesting thing was that the borderline personality correlates between spouses as much as between siblings. And other phenomena such as depression, bipolar disease and even the agreeability is greatly determined by genes - and we start to discover specific markers. 

Everyone was staying silent about the next-generation sequencing, so I started this topic by the end of the whole meeting, although it turned out to be highly controversial, especially knowing that the lunch was sponsored by our friends from Affymetrix. 

The experimental proof of proteome splice variants

It turns out that still there are some common intuitions that has not been proven experimentally. The paper by Tress et al in Genome Biology shows that there are splicing variants on the level of proteome - namely the bits of a proteine may be deleted, shuffled or duplicated according to the patern of exons in the gene. For me it seemed to be obvious, but perhaps I am too deep in my world of genes and mRNA splice variants. Some may call it a low hanging fruit - but often is not that obvious to pick it...

Linkage disequlibrium leads to negative results in genetics?

Linkage disequilibrium is a method used to discover associations between alleles. It seems to be based upon simple difference between the probability of a combination alleles and the probability under independence assumption. So - some researchers took their favourite alleles, found associated ones and... got nothing. But it seems to be still enough to publish:

We did not find the deletion or any
of the STR alleles to be in linkage disequilibrium with the 2-marker haplotype,
which was associated with dyslexia in our sample.

The polymorphisms of GRIN2B gene analysed in this study are not likely to be associated with bipolar disorder.

Both negative, both in psychiatry journal. Perhaps a coincidence... Next month
I'll go to a neuroscience-related event (the last speaker's name looks strangely familiar...) maybe I'll learn more.

Still, there is a Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine . It even navigates towards having an impact factor. I need to redirect some of my users there :)