Disqus - Latest Comments for NerdyChristie

Re: What’s in a name? Venoms vs. Poisons | Toxinology 101

Christie Wilcox — Sun, 31 Dec 2017 11:16:48 -0000

I know toxinologists that would say yes—and that because humans use poisons on weaponry, we are facultatively venomous.

Re: Spit Take: Surprise! Indian Monocled Cobras Can Spit Venom

Christie Wilcox — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 06:19:38 -0000

Hi Ton,
I have attempted to edit the link and fix it - it worked when I tried it after the update. Let me know if it still is giving you a weird error!
Best,
Christie

Re: Ask Professor Willowcox: Are Poison-type Pokémon Really “Poisonous”?

Christie Wilcox — Sat, 16 Jul 2016 20:38:02 -0000

It's ok — I branched out a little outside my self-described box of Go only in the post anyway :).

Re: Ask Professor Willowcox: Are Poison-type Pokémon Really “Poisonous”?

Christie Wilcox — Sat, 16 Jul 2016 20:30:48 -0000

Good catch! As a n00b to Pokémon, I don't now the ins and outs of the games... I wonder if there are abilities like this in Pokémon Go?

Re: Actually, Bats See Just Fine, Neil.

Christie Wilcox — Sat, 26 Mar 2016 01:30:49 -0000

Weird... Here's a screen grab:

Re: Arachnophobia in the Medical Literature: Are Published “Spider Bites” Reliable?

Christie Wilcox — Mon, 29 Feb 2016 11:42:25 -0000

Oops, thanks for catching that! I meant to have a longer list, then chopped it last minute, but forgot to remove the other. Fixed :)

Re: Expedition Ecstasy: Sniffing Out The Truth About Hawai‘i’s Orgasm-Inducing Mushroom

Christie Wilcox — Mon, 15 Feb 2016 23:25:00 -0000

Not deliberately misspelled! I fixed it.

Re: No, GM Mosquitoes Didn’t Start The Zika Outbreak.

Christie Wilcox — Sun, 14 Feb 2016 00:59:36 -0000

It would behoove you to read your own sources. That paper says "2010 French Polynesia: sustained release of Ae. polynesiensis males infected with a Wolbachia strain from Ae. riversi for IIT trial". IIT = Incompatible Insect Technique.

If you had read the reference linked to (which is open access), you would have discovered that the mosquitoes weren't genetically modified at all—they were infected with a bacteria which is incompatible with the wild type of mosquito, leading to death of the larvae (IIT). Here's the study explaining the French Polynesia trials: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...

And no, the bacteria aren't genetically modified, either. They're from another moqsuito. They were made by hybridization—"interspecific hybridization and introgression results in an A. polynesiensis strain (‘CP’ strain) that is stably infected with the endosymbiotic Wolbachia bacteria from Aedes riversi." http://journals.plos.org/pl...

Re: No, GM Mosquitoes Didn’t Start The Zika Outbreak.

Christie Wilcox — Mon, 08 Feb 2016 20:05:45 -0000

Retroviruses are very different than flaviviruses like Zika (or a plant like cabbage, for that matter)—putting themselves into the genome to get replicated is what they do (like HIV, for example), and they have specific proteins that aid in that efforts. Here's an overview of how they work: https://web.stanford.edu/gr...

We know that the transposon used in the GM mosquitoes does not have the genes necessary to enter the nucleus on its own. To even get it into the mosquito genome in the first place, the transposon had to be injected into fertilized eggs alongside proteins that help it insert into the genome. And even when injected directly into a cell, and when given the proteins to insert into the genome, the transfection rate is still very, very low (~1%).

But even more importantly, we know that the transposon isn't in the Zika genome, as the Zika strains in Brazil have been sequenced. So there's no chance that the transposon is hitching a ride through the virus into the cells.

Re: No, GM Mosquitoes Didn’t Start The Zika Outbreak.

Christie Wilcox — Sun, 07 Feb 2016 15:39:21 -0000

Even though you cannot provide a single shred of evidence that the GM mosquitoes are even present where the cases of microcephaly are occurring, or any biologically possible mechanism for them to cause the outbreak, or even any logical basis for your belief, you must be right. We should fire all the scientists and doctors involved in this and just hire you to be the scientific advisor in Brazil, as clearly you're the only one who knows what's going on. It's clearly not possible that they know the science better than you do, have studied biology, genetics, and medicine in more depth than you have, and know what to look for or what might cause microcephaly. Because your naturalistic fallacy makes way more sense than decades of research, lab work, and field trials. Obviously.

Re: No, GM Mosquitoes Didn’t Start The Zika Outbreak.

Christie Wilcox — Sun, 07 Feb 2016 12:24:39 -0000

I don't know what amazes me more: your complete inability to understand the science which demonstrates that your beliefs are wrong, or your audacity in presuming you know how to do science better than every expert, especially the ones in Brazil that evaluated the risks. I talked to the scientists at the University of Pernambuco, by the way; Dr. Paulo Andrade was one of those scientists you think doesn't know how to do his job. And to say that he and the other assessors were concerned about gene transfer is twisting their words. Here's what he said to me:

"Horizontal gene transfer is essentially impossible among eukaryotes and specially between a mosquito and a human being. The question, however, was asked by the public. As a risk assessor at the Brazilian National Biosafety Committee (CTNBio) I considered and eventually discarded all questions arrived from different sources, however improbable they may be. This was the case of HGT in transgenic mosquitoes, both between mosquitoes and man or mosquitoes and any other organism."

But what would he know? He's just an expert. You clearly understand genetics better than anyone else on Earth.

Furthermore, I've literally told you several times that in at least one other area where there has been an outbreak of Zika, there has been a rise in microcephaly - you just choose to ignore facts that disagree with your position. And rare complications are tough to spot - there have been tens of thousands of Zika cases, and only a couple hundred confirmed cases of microcephaly (and several hundred reported possible cases that turned out not to be).

But I'm done humoring your ego. If you refuse to examine scientific evidence and believe that you know more than the Brazilian scientists, then there's no discussion to be had. Enjoy your tin foil hat.

Re: No, GM Mosquitoes Didn’t Start The Zika Outbreak.

Christie Wilcox — Sun, 07 Feb 2016 03:01:29 -0000

Again, to answer your questions:

1 female in 3,000 males how many millions of males are released. That is thousands of mosquitoes. That is enough to cause an epidemic if they survive and bite humans if in fact there is some sort of bacterial, viral, genetic transfer of some sort.

Then how are they causing an epidemic 400 miles away, and *not* where they were released? Did all the GM mosquitoes just decide to leave at once and move? And again, you are just wrong about the facts of biology when it comes to DNA transfer. If this occurred when mosquitoes bite, then we would have mosquito genes in our DNA already. To continue to argue this isn't the case reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of genetics and how genetic modification occurs.

You are saying, they would have found a mosquito with the marker. What if the female mated with a wild male? Would the marker be present.

Yes. Because they did this. That's what it means when they do tests for Mendelian inheritance — they breed wild types with GMs, and watch where the genes go. So yes, the marker would move with the gene that is right next to it and a part of the transposon, and would be detected.

Do you think that the risk assessment was enough? for how many years?With how many scientific studies to consider all the repercussions? How many people were bitten by female GM mosquitoes and how many were pregnant?

Yes. I believe the risk assessment was more than thorough enough, and I trust in the Brazilian scientists to do what is best for their country and their people. The danger posed by all of the diseases that these animals transmit vastly overwhelms any risks posed by the animals, of which horizontal gene transfer into humans *isn't* one.

I hope you are right, and GM mosquitoes are not the problem, but theory's are the only way to test for facts. Am I right? If you don't ask questions, and think about every single possible outcome or possibility, you will never have a good study and never figure out facts. Everyone freaked out when someone suggested the earth was round too. I don't know all the answers. But, I do know enough to know my theory could be a possibility that was not studied enough. I think world governments need to come together with many nations testing something this significant. No, I don't think Brazil and FDA is enough.

Actually, what you know is enough to think you have the answer and that what you think is plausible, when biologically, it isn't. You want to believe that there is a danger from genetic modification, and you refuse to accept the evidence that you are wrong. There is not a single credible scientist on this planet who thinks that the GM mosquitoes are causing this. The epidemiologists who are studying the outbreak are looking at every credible option—do you really think that the doctors and scientists would have missed this? That they would have thrown out this hypothesis if there was any likelihood it was true? These people are working around the clock to solve this. You discredit their training and expertise by suggesting that you have the answer that they have missed.

Re: No, GM Mosquitoes Didn’t Start The Zika Outbreak.

Christie Wilcox — Sun, 07 Feb 2016 01:22:21 -0000

So how are these mosquitoes, which you say are so rare that we cannot detect them when we survey mosquito populations, possibly causing an outbreak of thousands of cases 400 miles away from where they were released? Either they reproduced enough to become a problem and be prevalent in the entire outbreak area, or they didn't. You can't have it both ways.

And what, now you're saying the Brazilians have to have the U.S. FDA review and make their decisions for them? Because the Brazilian regulatory authorities already did a risk assessment, and found

"Risk assessment is a robust process and leads to consistent results, both for GM plants and for other GMOs

The RIDL OX513A Aedes aegypti strain does not pose significant risk for the environment or for human/animal health in Brazil"

You can also read the entire risk assessment yourself: https://bch.cbd.int/databas.... Apparently you think that other countries can't make their own decisions?

Re: No, GM Mosquitoes Didn’t Start The Zika Outbreak.

Christie Wilcox — Sun, 07 Feb 2016 00:32:40 -0000

Citing a widely discredited conspiracy site does not make your argument stronger. There is a reason that her hypotheses have not passed peer review.

Also, she herself has outright stated that she does not make any claims about the GM mosquito causing microcephaly. A direct quote: "I have no hypothesis myself regarding the zika virus, transgenic mosquito and microcephaly."

Re: No, GM Mosquitoes Didn’t Start The Zika Outbreak.

Christie Wilcox — Sun, 07 Feb 2016 00:25:44 -0000

Now you're changing your argument. If the mosquitoes had to be released as females, didn't breed, and then died, then they're long dead — mosquitoes, even GM ones, only live a matter of weeks. So there's no way there would be females around to bite pregnant women now. And if they did breed, then they would be able to detect those larvae in the population when they survey the mosquito larvae for the fluorescent protein.

As for what I think: I think that the Zika virus, like other flaviviruses, causes neurological complications on rare occasions. I think the Brazilian population has not experienced this pathogen before, and thus pregnant women are experiencing Zika infections and some of them—a small proportion, compared to the number of people infected with the virus—are experiencing rare complications. The current outbreak and the microcephaly associated is simply a result of a relatively newly discovered virus introduced into a new population where there is no resistance to it. This would explain the microcephaly seen in the French Polynesia Zika outbreak, where there are no GM mosquitoes, as well as the lack of microcephaly in the other areas the GM mosquitoes were released.

Re: No, GM Mosquitoes Didn’t Start The Zika Outbreak.

Christie Wilcox — Sat, 06 Feb 2016 23:44:09 -0000

You do not seem to have included a link. And, for the record, Popular Science is not a peer-reviewed journal. And the kind of arms races you are talking about take millions of years of evolution, not the blink of an eye.

If the GM mosquitoes breed, then only 3% of their offspring will survive (doesn't matter if the transposon comes from a GM male and a regular female, or a GM female and a wild male). And so on. But more importantly, they monitored the mosquito populations before and after the release, and quickly after the release was complete, there was no trace of the GM mosquitoes in the population. That's what the fluorescent protein is for — so they can track if the mosquitoes survive, so we know they didn't.

And again, we know that horizontal gene transfer doesn't occur between insects. So there is no chance that the transposon with the lethal gene could make its way into other insects. Period.

Re: No, GM Mosquitoes Didn’t Start The Zika Outbreak.

Christie Wilcox — Sat, 06 Feb 2016 23:25:49 -0000

I'm afraid you have to provide some kind of citation for whatever you are talking about with the University of Pernambuco — I have not seen anything from them about this. And why didn't the same mosquitoes cause microcephaly in the other locations they were tested, if they are the cause? This isn't the first field trial of these animals.

Re: No, GM Mosquitoes Didn’t Start The Zika Outbreak.

Christie Wilcox — Sat, 06 Feb 2016 22:49:27 -0000

If mosquitoes inject DNA into our blood, they all do it every day. So there are insect genes injected into our blood all the time, and not once has that DNA made its way into our genome. For that matter, bacterial genes end up in our blood all the time too—bacteria on our skin get into our blood stream whenever we cut ourselves. And viruses are in there all the time! And those genes simply don't "jump" into our genomes. I said that what you are claiming—that animal genes injected into our blood make their way into our genome—has never happened, and it still hasn't.

And for that matter, the genes themselves don't kill—the protein produced does. So the genes can't do anything until they make their way into our genome to be translated into proteins, and as I have now explained in depth, we know that doesn't happen, hasn't happened, and cannot happen. Genetic modification isn't new territory. We've been modifying bacteria and animals for decades, and we can track how the genes act. These mosquitoes have been bred in every way possible and it has been demonstrated that the transposon inserted is passed in a Mendelian manner; that means it doesn't move within the mosquito genome, let alone out of it.

Re: No, GM Mosquitoes Didn’t Start The Zika Outbreak.

Christie Wilcox — Sat, 06 Feb 2016 22:29:31 -0000

Actually, we do. We know what the genes do — they code for proteins, and we know what those proteins do. We also know how genes are passed from generation to generation. We can predict these patterns. We know how to add genes to and from bacteria; all the insulin that diabetics use and have used for decades comes from genetically modified organisms. Everything that you have just said is well known science that you can learn in a Genetics class. I recommend you take a few more biology courses before assuming that we know nothing about genetics.

Re: No, GM Mosquitoes Didn’t Start The Zika Outbreak.

Christie Wilcox — Sat, 06 Feb 2016 22:17:52 -0000

Um... I don't know about you, but I don't have any cabbage genes in my genome. Or E. coli genes, for that matter. Or herpes genes. None of those have ever horizontally transferred into a human genome. Herpes is a virus which steals our cellular machinery to replicate, but it can only do so with the entire herpes genome — a single herpes gene wouldn't be able to initiate replication. And to get into our cells in the first place, the herpes virus requires its viral packaging — the virion — which the transposon in GM mosquitoes doesn't have.

Re: No, GM Mosquitoes Didn’t Start The Zika Outbreak.

Christie Wilcox — Sat, 06 Feb 2016 22:00:24 -0000

And even if you're right, and somehow this GM transposon is hopping into babies by the thousands, then you are also saying the transposon is landing somewhere where it is expressed so that it causes harm by making the killer protein. And if that were the case, then all of the babies would also express the marker for the transposon, because the transposon contains a fluorescent protein gene. So not only have all of the doctors and scientists studying these cases missed the fact that the children have mosquito genes, they have also missed the fact that the babies fluoresce?

Re: No, GM Mosquitoes Didn’t Start The Zika Outbreak.

Christie Wilcox — Sat, 06 Feb 2016 21:52:30 -0000

Yes. Do you? Can you describe how it occurs? Or how often it has occurred between insects and humans? Or how often it as occurred between humans and any other animals? Do you have any examples of horizontal gene transfer from an animal into the human genome in the past century? How about thousand years? In fact, there has never been a case of an animal gene transferring into our genome.

Some scientists have claimed there are examples — from long, long long ago — of bacterial genes, but even that claim has been refuted by other scientists. So if I'm understanding your argument, you believe that the first ever case of gene transfer from an animal into a human has not only occurred once, but thousands of times, over and over in each pregnant woman, to cause microcephaly? That this is spontaneously happening at an unprecedented rate, and somehow, all of the epidemiologists studying the microcephaly have missed this fact?

Re: No, GM Mosquitoes Didn’t Start The Zika Outbreak.

Christie Wilcox — Sat, 06 Feb 2016 21:02:17 -0000

If DNA transfer occurred when mosquitoes bite, and that DNA could make its way into our cells, then non-GM mosquitoes would mutate us every day. The mosquito genome is 47% transposons—why have those genes never jumped into our cells? For that matter, why haven't the genes of all the bacteria on our skin whenever we get a cut? Why don't you get vegetable genes in your body when you cut yourself chopping food? The answer is because that's just not how it works. Our cells don't just soak up genes from DNA that gets into our bodies, even if it's injected into our blood. And the concentration of the protein by itself wouldn't be anywhere near enough to cause damage. As I explained in my post from last year:

Because of this, some seem to be arguing that if, and it’s a big if, people were to start getting bitten by mutant mosquitoes, horrible things would happen because there are “unknown dangers” posed by this foreign DNA. “These females can and do bite, potentially inserting their modified DNA into people,” says The Atlantic. I can only assume they are talking about one of two possibilities: that the proteins the synthetic DNA creates are potential allergens, or that the DNA might somehow cause unforeseen genetic changes in people.

The first is highly unlikely. Oxitec isn’t stupid: if they released a mosquito that was producing a new allergen in its saliva, the backlash would be intense and potentially bankrupting. So they’ve checked. They’ve included their investigation into the allergenicity potential of the larvae-killing protein—tTAV—in their technical releases. The officials which conducted the risk assessment for the release of GM mosquitoes in Brazil said that Oxitec has completed “a thorough study” and that they “rightly concluded that protein fails to exhibit allergenic potential.” They went on to say that “though there is a small probability of an individual being repeatedly bitten by female GM mosquitoes, the protein is not allergenic and the damage is null.”

As for the second potential danger, let me be unequivocal: there’s simply no way that even if you were bitten by a GM mosquito, any DNA from the mosquito would alter your DNA in any way or otherwise cause you harm. That’s simply not how biology works.

It’s not easy to make a genetically modified organism. Cells don’t just “pick up” DNA willy-nilly and insert it into their genomes for fun. If they did, all of us would be hodgepodges of the genes from everything around us. All things that are or were alive contain DNA, which means all of our foods, from corn to chicken, are chock-full of genes—and yet, we manage to eat them every day and our genomes remain intact. When you cut your finger chopping onions, you introduce onion DNA directly into your bloodstream—yet no one would be concerned about potential mutagenic effects. You don’t have to worry about how much DNA you breath in on pollen grains, or whether your yogurt will force yeast genes into your stomach cells, because DNA that enters your body is readily chopped up by enzymes. It does not infect your cells. End of story.

To modify an organisms’ genome, scientists have had to come up with all sorts of ways to make cells permeable to the DNA they want them to take in. There are a myriad of methods, from heat-shock to nanoparticles. Oxitec literally injects the DNA they want expressed into mosquito eggs alongside other things that are designed to help with insertion into the genome, then they heat-shock them, and even after all that they readily admit that their transformation success rate is low (about 1%). And that’s how unlikely it is when the DNA is directly injected into the cell. Think for a second about how a mosquito bites—its proboscis is far too large to inject anything into that small a target. And even if a mosquito were to inject its DNA into one of your cells when it bit (and somehow not cause the cell to explode from the volume), the odds that the tiny piece of synthetic DNA, out of all the genes in mosquito’s genome, would be incorporated into that cell are unfathomably low, and even then it wouldn’t matter: blood cells are final products of our bodies. They don’t split to produce new cells. So if you impossibly got the modified mosquito DNA injected into a blood cell, and it incorporated into the genes of that cell, which is indescribably unlikely, the cell would do one of two things: either the DNA would land somewhere where it isn’t expressed and be completely ignored for the remainder of the cell’s lifespan (less than a month, for a white blood cell), or it would cause the cell to stop working correctly, and the cell would explode, trigger a self-destructive cascade, or be terminated on the spot by immune cells. Either way, the foreign DNA would be chopped up into nucleotides never to be seen again. There’s absolutely no chance that you’ll be transformed or mutated. None.

Re: No, GM Mosquitoes Didn’t Start The Zika Outbreak.

Christie Wilcox — Sat, 06 Feb 2016 18:05:30 -0000

Nice try, but describing that map as the "epicenter" was done by the conspiracy theorists (it's right there in the tweet with the maps) - I just combined the maps to show that they aren't the same location. Have you got a mechanism by which GM mosquitoes cause Zika to cause microcephaly? I'm waiting for the evidence of your theory.

Re: No, GM Mosquitoes Didn’t Start The Zika Outbreak.

Christie Wilcox — Sat, 06 Feb 2016 11:43:07 -0000

If the only argument you have is that everyone who posts on here is paid, then you have no argument. Here's the crux of it all: even if they are paid, why can't you demonstrate they're wrong? If the arguments you disagree with are so flimsy and only exist because someone threw them a few bucks, then why can't you actually construct an argument which addresses either the points of this article or of their comments? Why would it even matter if they're paid if they're right? Your attempt to ad hominem attack everyone who disagrees with you belies the weakness of your position. And frankly, I'm tired of your lack of substantative comments. You're welcome to disagree and engage in rational discussions about the content of the post. But consider yourself warned; either start making actual arguments rather than ad hominem attacks, or lose your commenting privileges.