Monthly Archives: June 2020

Did lockdowns really save 3 million COVID-19 deaths, as Flaxman et al. claim? Posted on June 21, 2020 By Nic Lewis Key points about the recent Nature paper by Flaxman and other Imperial College modellers 1) The transition from rising … Continue reading →

Glyphosate is a famous phosphonomethyl amino acid herbicide used extensively throughout the world in weed control; its fame lies in the quantity of hysterical claims about how carcinogenic it is vs alternative claims that it does not cause cancer. The … Continue reading →

This article just came out on MedScape. Ed Calabrese has been talking about this lately. This article should make him happy. 😊 Hormesis is defined as “any process in a cell or organism that exhibits a biphasic response to exposure, … Continue reading →

Despite more than a century of intensive research, including the “great gains” promised by the “War on Cancer” (in 1971), our understanding of the fundamental etiology of this complex disease is still incomplete. Authors [see attached essay] analyze the “lack … Continue reading →

Olfactory receptors (ORs) are G-protein-coupled receptors which are used for odor detection. Being the largest gene family in vertebrates, a typical mammalian genome harbors ~1000 OR genes and pseudogenes. However, the numbers of functional OR genes vary enormously among genomes … Continue reading →

Are Patients Dying ‘from’ COVID or ‘with’ COVID? George D. Lundberg, MD June 05, 2020 Death is usually fairly easy to diagnose; cause of death, not so much. In fact, death certificates in the United States and around the world … Continue reading →

As these GEITP pages often discuss, every trait (phenotype) represents the contribution of genetics (DNA sequence) epigenetic factors (DNA methylation, RNA interference, histone modifications, chromatin remodeling), environmental effects (diet, lifestyle, smoking), endogenous influences (cardiopulmonary disease, renal status), and each person’s … Continue reading →

Sugar is a fundamental source of energy for all animals and, correspondingly, most species have evolved dedicated brain circuits to seek, recognize and motivate consumption of sugar. In humans, recruitment of these circuits for reward and pleasure — rather than … Continue reading →

As these GEITP pages have often discussed, there are relatively simple monogenic (Mendelian) traits — in which one or only a few genes contribute to the phenotype (trait) — and multifactorial traits (e.g. human complex diseases and quantitative traits such … Continue reading →

This fascinating topic fits perfectly the theme of gene-environment interactions. The environmental “signal” is severe stress, and the response by the genome of some (but not all) individuals is to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In the early 1990s, “a … Continue reading →