Lonely, oh so lonely
September 13th, 2007 by SecureCare“…”The differences we observed were independent of other known risk factors for inflammation, such as health status, age, weight, and medication use. The changes were even independent of the objective size of a person’s social network. What counts, at the level of gene expression, is not how many people you know, it’s how many you feel really close to over time.”…” Full Slice
September 14th, 2007 at 7:19 am
It seems we are a product of our genes and very little of our environment. Studies such as these make me think that in 150 or 200 years we’ll have a problem with mono-cropped homo sapiens. People of today will be “heritage humans”.
September 14th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
Supposedly, if you look at twin studies, about 50% of our behavioral variation is genetic. The rest of it is environmental.
However, not having read beyond the link into the literature (not at work!), nor checked up on the references in The Blank Slate (for sentence 1), I nevertheless offer caveats.
1. From the article, we can’t tell whether they studied individual cells, or populations of cells. If they studied populations, another interpretation is that there is no change in expression, merely a change in the population distribution of different types of cells.
2. It appears that they did not analyze gene expression both before and after the subjects achieved their state. It is an assumption that there was a change in expression, not a conclusion.
3. n=15. WTF? Address 1 and 2 sufficiently (maybe they did in the actual paper), and this result does becomes intriguing.