In shaa'Allah

So I was having beer and pizza with a friend and we go up to pay. The guy who works there (a Muslim immigrant to Belgium who speaks better Dutch than English) says "that was two pizzas and two beers, right?". I reply, "no, seven beers".

"Seven beers!" he exclaims with a smile. "Wow". *

"Next time we'll make it ten", I reply.

"Ten beers! In shaa'Allah!".

So, I repeat this exchange for two reasons:

1) I find it amusing that he thinks James and I need the aid of a sky god to finish ten beers together.

2) It is a nice example of how religion has been moderated in secular countries. In countries where religion still has real power, whether it is Islam, Christianity or Judaism, they ram their "morals' down the throats of everyone else. In countries where they have been pushed out of power, many religious people punish themselves with silly rules, but if you want to drink ten beers - In shaa'Allah. **

As far as I am concerned, the religious can do whatever they want to themselves, no harm to me. *** We just need to remember what they do when they are in power, and be careful to keep the law absolutely secular with religion a free choice for only those who want it.

---

* I don't see how this earned a wow, they were just small cans of the weak stuff by Belgian standards

** If Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali was dead he would have rolled over in his grave

*** Unfortunately there appears to be a direct relationship between how religious a person is, and how much they need other people to obey their religion.

Brussels at night

The town with two countries

Last weekend we took JT to visit Baarle Hertog / Baarle Nassau. This is a wonderful little Belgian/Dutch town, with the world's most complex international border.

 Which meant that Hayden could stand in two countries at the same time:

Generation of a family-specific virus through repeated human passage

Generation of a family-specific virus through repeated human passage

Hayden A M Liston¹, Lydia E Makaroff¹ and Adrian Liston ^1,2*
1 Sleepytown University, Brussels 1060, Belgium
² VIB, Leuven 3000, Belgium
*send correspondance to adrian.liston@gmail.com

Nature Junior. 8(2) 103-7 

Background. Effective control over viral infection relies on the host carrying appropriate HLA alleles for viral antigen presentation. The explosive expansion of viruses like small-pox into previously isolated human populations demonstrates the potential for certain viral strains to have a disproportionate effect on particular racial groups. As yet, however, a virus with pathogenic potential restricted to the family level has not been identified. Objective. To generate a family-specific virus in an experimental setting, in order to test the feasibility of this occurrence in nature. Methods. A common cold virus was repeatedly passaged between two related individuals for six months. Mechanisms of transmission included frequent kisses, the placement of hands and feet into the mouth and in one instance direct vomiting into the mouth. Results. A single viral strain was propagated with the capacity to chronically infect both members of this family, while having seemingly non-pathological consequences upon exposure to unrelated individuals. The pathogenic loci are predicted to be a dominant HLA carried by both family members, as the experimental inoculation of a third individual, related to one family member but not the other, did not result in pathology. Conclusions. Generation of a family-specific virus is feasible through repeated experimental transfer between family members. A natural situation analogous to the experimental set-up used here would be the transmission that can occur between parents and young children with low levels of personal hygiene. The dominant activity of the HLA cluster in this infection suggests the generation of a regulatory T cell population which inhibits effective immunity against the family-specific virus.

Key Words: virus, horizontal transfer, HLA, human genetics, regulatory T cell.

Actors and sausages

"Consider Uggie" is a petition to allow Uggie the Dog to compete at the Oscars under best actor. I haven't seen any of Uggie's six movies, although in general I approve of Leonardo DiCaprio being beaten by a dog.

"Consider Uggie" has now also been extended to the BAFTAs. Like the Oscars, the  BAFTAs are rejecting Uggie's nomination. What is really unusual is the reason they give:

"Regretfully, we must advise that as he is not a human being and as his unique motivation as an actor was sausages, Uggie is not qualified to compete for the Bafta in this category."

So any actor who is doing it for the sausages is ineligible for a BAFTA?

Airlines are putting infants at risk

Dear Airline,

While I have had my differences with airports in the past, actually travelling in a plane has always been the least offensive part of the flying ordeal. Oh sure, you have your silly quirks, like telling us that using our electronic devices will cause the plane to crash (as if you would leave anything with that terrorist potential to an honour system), but until an instant transporter is invented I'm willing to go along.

However this month you really irritated me by putting my infant son at increased risk for absolutely no reason. We would get onto the plane with my son strapped into a Baby Bjorn. You know, those Swedish design baby carriers? The ones with five safety straps and full head-neck-back support for the baby? And then you would demand that we take him out of the Baby Bjorn and instead use a flimsy airline seat belt that in the best-case scenario would fall off, and in the worst case scenario snap an infant in two. 

I didn't understand why. You told me it was for his safety, but you had no response when I pointed out that the Baby Bjorn actually has more safety features that your silly seat belt. Then you told me it was for my safety, because if I had to exacuate I would be strapped to my child. Again, you had no rejoiner when I told you that I had no intention on leaving my infant son on the plane if I was evacuating, and it seemed like it would be better for me to have him securely in a Baby Bjorn where I would have the free use of both my arms, rather than having to undo his seat belt and then carry a screaming wriggling baby down a narrow corridor full of panicking idiots.

Finally you told me that it was the Rule. Fine, this I can accept. It is your rule, so I'll obey it - but don't pretend that it is for my safety or my son's safety. But why not change the rule to actually make us safer? Even your own staff acknowledge that the rule is stupid. Some let us ignore it, because they felt the Baby Bjorn was better, while some let us put on the seat-belt around the Baby Bjorn. But as long as the Rule is in place, we are at the mercy of those tyrants who insist on us taking him out of the safe environment of Baby Bjorn just to obey some ill-thought-out directive.

How about we make a deal? You promise to rewrite the infant safety rules allowing certified baby carriers to be used in lieu of infant seatbelts, and I'll actually pay attention to your silly repetitive safety seminar at the start of every flight.

Regards,

Adrian.

Promoting universal human rights is not cultural imperialism

In the past few months have heralded a titanic shift in international gay rights. In October, advancing international gay rights was a topic of conversation at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, with UK Prime Minister David Cameron stating that gay rights in Africa is a major concern, and that respect for gay rights should influence foreign aid decisions. Then in December the US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a statement indicating a similar shift in US foreign policy, that the US would use all of the tools of American foreign diplomacy to promote international gay rights and fight criminalisation of sexuality. 

These statements were aimed squarely at Africa, where gay rights have lagged behind the rest of the world, and in particular countries like Uganda, where gay rights are actively being destroyed. In Uganda there has been a major backlash in response to these comments, such as from John Nagenda, a senior Presidental advisor, who said in response "Homosexuality here is taboo, it’s something anathema to Africans, and I can say that this idea of Clinton’s, of Obama’s, is something that will be seen as abhorrent in every country on the continent that I can think of.” One Ugandan commentator summed up the response: "It is unfortunate that Uganda is now being judged on the actions of opportunists whose ideas are based on violence and blackmail and even worse, on the actions of aid attached strings. It is regrettable that government is pretentiously expected to observe their 'human rights', yet, by their own actions, they have surrendered their right to human rights."

Persecutors of homosexuality, both in Africa and in developed nations, commonly shout "cultural imperalism" or "ex-colonial mentality" to defend their "right" to kill gays. Cultural imperalism is a major problem, and leaders like David Cameron do show signs of a deep-seated racism in their policy decisions. However defending gay rights in Africa does not met any of the criteria for cultural imperalism, for three reasons.

Firstly, universal human rights is not a "Western construct". It is too easy for non-Western governments to claim that the human rights agenda is simply an import of Western values. This is a cop-out, and disgracefully ignores the non-Western contribution to the concept of human rights. To understand the basis of universal human rights we need to accept the contribution of multiple historical strands, which independently derived universal rights and built on each other. Ancient Greek philosophy, Zen Buddhism and Confusionism all sewed the seeds for individual rights. Early Islamic scholarship, the European enlightenment, the American Revolution and the labour movement all built on these foundations. The leading figures in the modern human rights movement were global - from Gandhi in India, Mandela in Africa, and Martin Luther King in America. Today if you are looking for beacons of gay rights you can include countries from South Africa to Argentina to Nepal. In fact, only half of the people who live in countries allowing gay marriage are in Europe or North America; universal rights has been a global collaborative venture. 

Secondly, African homophobia is actually the cultural import. Ironically, those people who scream "cultural imperalism" when they are asked not to kill gays in Africa are actually defending a cultural import. The virulent anti-gay culture is based on the British import of Christianity and the recent evangelical campaign from America. In fact, African leaders such as Nelson Mandela have been among the bravest politicians in the world in standing up for gay rights. In short, there is nothing authentically "African" about wanting to kill gays. 

Thirdly, Gay rights is (sadly) not "Western culture". Western countries do not have a long history of accepting homosexuality. As previously mentioned, they actively exported homophobia; sexuality equality is a recent development that has grown from the concept of universal human rights. In the case of Uganda, the two main imperial players have been the UK and America. Both have a long history of persecuting people based on their sexuality. Removal of persecuation of homosexuality started in 1967 in the UK, with equal sexual rights only achieved in 2003. The US was even worse, with laws against homosexuality standing until 2003 and discrimination laws still in place in parts of the country today. Neither country today provides for full equity. 

When conservative thugs try to excuse their thuggery by citing "culture" it is tempting to simply echo the sentiment of Charles Napier, the British General who stopped the practice of suttee in India: "Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs." With both telling and pithy, we can come up with a better attack than this. Mrs Clinton is exactly right when she argues that gay rights are like other universal human rights, transending cultural, religious and national boundaries. Afterall, "universal" does not mean "everyone but the gays".

Most people would argue that the right to maintain your culture is also a universal right. This I would agree with, and for example I have actively defended the right of Islamic women to wear the headscarf or burqa, even though I disagree with the practice. So how is wearing a burqa different from imprisoning gays? Quite simply, the right to maintain your culture is a personal right. If you want to wear a burqa or a kippah based on your culture, go ahead. If you want to hate gays or women based on your religion, that is your right. But, and this is a big but, everyone else also has the right to maintain their own personal culture and rights. Cultural rights do not only go to straight male bigots. Women have the right to wear a burqa if they chose; no-one has the right to force them to wear a burqa against their will. A gay evangelical can chose to punish himself for violating his own religion, or even seek out punishment from his church, or he can chose to accept his sexuality - it is a personal decision.

Conservative thugs always invoke their culture or tradition when defending their right to persecute others. Whether it is slave owners invoking culture for keeping slaves, men invoking culture for dominating women or heterosexuals invoking culture for persecuting homosexuals, we can't let them get away with it. Their personal right to culture and tradition does not over-ride everyone else's rights to their own free choice in culture and tradition. If an Islamic woman wants to say that she is making a cultural choice to wear a mini-skirt, or a Ugandan woman decides to live openly as a lesbian, then that is her choice, and her choice alone. We are ethically bound to support those choices.

Republicans are economic hypocrites

We all know where Democrats and Republicans stand on welfare, right? Democrats believe in the government redistributing wealth as a helping hand to those in need, while Republicans believe in economic independence where everyone deserves what they can get in the free market. At least, that is the official line. 

I was interested to see how this stacks up in a State-by-State analysis of Federal Aid. What I have done here is taken the IRS official Federal Tax reciepts by state, the US Federal Government official spending by state and the census for state population (all figures from 2007, the latest I could get). I then calculated the net taxation as a simple subtraction of the amount of taxation a state pays minus the amount of expenditure a state receives. So a positive number means the state is a net tax payer (pays more than it receives), while a negative number means the state is a net welfare receipient (pays less than it receives). The Blue-Red colour coding then represents Democratic or Republican states, respectively, based on Presidential voting in the 2008 elections.

The results will be surprising to Republicans. The five states that pay the most in net Federal tax are New York, New Jersey, California, Texas and Illinois. In other words, of the five states that prop up the rest of the country, four are Democratic states. Conversely, the five states that receive the most in net Federal funding are Virginia, Alabama, Washington DC, Mississippi and South Carolina - three of which are Republican states.

Of course, this is not an entirely fair comparison. Afterall, Democratic states have a larger population, so we need to look at the net taxation on a per capita basis. If you do this, the results are even more striking - 8/10 of the highest net supporting states are Democratic, and only four Republican states pay more to the Federal government than they receive. In the language used by Republicans, Republican states are welfare slobs, sponging off the hard-working tax-paying Democratic states.

Rather than look at long lists, here is a simple table which just takes the sum of all Democratic and Republican states.

The results are as clear as daylight - Democratic states are financially supporting Republican states. The average Democratic state resident is paying $1076 each year to the Federal government more than they get returned in federal government spending. The average resident of Republican states, by contrast, is paying $766 less in federal tax than they get returned in federal government spending. In other words, Democratic states are staying true to the Demcratic principle of redistributing wealth according to need. Republican states, by contrast, are economic hypocrites, complaining about high taxes even while they suck out federal welfare from the democratic states.

New Year's Resolution Myth: Being Fat is not about having low Will Power

It is New Years Day, and around the world millions of over-weight people are making the resolution to lose weight. Popular culture harasses us with the myth that our weight is caused by our weak will power, if only we would eat less and exercise more then we would be skinny and beautiful like the good people.

The good news to the overweight is that you are not fat because you have weak will power. Your will power is no different from that of anyone else. The despicable treatment you receive from society is scientifically and statistically not your fault. The bad news to you dieters is that the science is pretty clear: you have very little chance of having any long-term weight loss. About the best that a typical overweight person can hope to achieve is to work harder than everyone else to stop becoming more overweight.

So why is there this myth that being fat comes from having low will power? It comes from the discredited idea of the human body as a consistent machine, where food going in and output by exercise has the same effect on everyone. This is not true. Each person has a different response to food and a different response to exercise, and these responses dictate their "set-point" weight.

It is in your genes

Geneticists are able to directly measure the component of any trait that is genetic through comparing the shared variability in genetically identical twins versus "normal" (genetically different) twins. The advantage of this approach is that it is able to take into account the shared environmental influence from conception, and so measures the pure genetic component of any trait. A disease such as Multiple Sclerosis has a genetic component of around 25%, and is considered to be a genetic disease even through largely unknown environmental factors dictate ~75% of the risk. For weight, the genetic component is ~60%. So the difference between you and that super-model is 60% due to the genes you inherited.

If you are among the most obese, or have been obese from a very young age (under 10), then the genetic component of your obesity is often 100%. At these extremes many people have simple inheritable defects which will cause severe obesity, guaranteed. The best known examples of this are mutations in the leptin and leptin receptor genes. Leptin is a hormone that is secreted by fat cells after you eat and travels to the brain where it suppresses your appetite. People with mutations in leptin or the leptin receptor simply never feel "full" after eating, regardless of how much they eat they feel like they are starving. Resisting over-eating for an hour is heroic, for a day it is impossible. We can mutate the same genes in mice and see the 100% heritability of obesity. 

It is from your early childhood

So 60% of your weigh is programmed in your genes. Well, you can still control the other 40%, right? Wrong. Another 25% is the variability is set from the early childhood experience. That is 85% of the variability locked in by the time you can make your own food choices. To put that in context, the genetic component of height is 80%.

And when scientists say early childhood, they mean early. One of the most powerful influences over weight is maternal imprinting during foetal development. Obesity rates in the Netherlands are quite low, except among the cohort of people conceived during the Dutch Famine of 1944. In these people, the uterine environment reprogrammed their genes for famine mode, in a process known as epigenetics. This "epigenetic" modification does not change the sequence of the gene, but changes the function for the life-time of the individual, while being (mostly) reset in the next generation. The effect of the epigenetic change is that the person's metabolism is wired for famine for the rest of their life, always hording calories as fat. When a person conceived in famine then goes on to live in famine this is an advantage, but when there is a mismatch between the food availability of the mother and the food availability of the offspring, the epigenetic imprinting results in obesity. Experiments in rats show that this is not just a famine-related phenomenon - simply giving rats a normal diet during pregnancy predisposes the young to obesity if they have a high-fat diet after weaning. 

It is in your intestines

Another way your childhood environment programs your future weight is through changing the bacterial colonies that live in your gut. It has been shown that obese people and mice both have a higher proportion of Firmicute species bacteria compared to Bacteroidetes species bacteria in their gut. Firmicutes are much better at breaking down roughage into digestible food, so having more Firmicutes means you get more calories from the same amount of food. Experimentally, you can make a skinny mouse overweight simply by transferring gut bacteria into it from an obese mouse - nothing has changed about the diet or the genetics, but the mouse starts to put on weight. 

That last 15%...

Well, I can still control 15% of my weight, right? No. What the data says is that 15% of the variation in weight is controlled by adult environmental factors. So 15% of the difference between your weight and the average weight is affected by everything some from your diet, exercise, stress, smoking, infections and every other non-genetic influence you can think of. 

Despite this, overweight people can lose weight. Semi-starvation diets, strict exercise programs and surgical intervention can have an effect, and even quite dramatic changes in weight can occur. We should be clear though, this is not just a matter of adopting the lifestyle of a skinny person. For an obese person to lose weight they need to exercise much more than a skinny person and eat much less, and the whole time an obese person will feel hungrier and tireder, in fact demonstrating much more "will power" than a "naturally" skinny person. Again, this is scientific observation, based on measuring hormones levels rather than just asking people how hungry they are - obese people produce lower levels of leptin from the same meal, so chemically they feel the effects of starvation on a diet that naturally skinny people enjoy.

So weight loss can happen. But then something quite unexpected takes place - the weight starts to go back on, a kilo here and a kilo there until you are back to your own weight. This will happen despite having an identical lifestyle to a naturally skinny person. The reasons for this are complex, but it appears that being overweight leaves a permanent alteration on your body. If you do lose weight your body desperately attempts to put it back on. Hormonal changes mean you crave more food than someone naturally at your weight, by contrast your body becomes more efficient at scavenging calories so you need to eat 10% less than someone naturally at your same weight. How long does this effect last? Well, we don't really know, since the studies haven't gone out long enough. We do know that the effects last at least 6 years after you lose weight, and they may be permanent. A series of studies done on those rare few who manage to keep their weight down long-term show common characteristics: obsessive OCD-levels of calorie counting, constant feelings of hunger and permanent semi-starvation diets.

Your body has a natural weight 

The final verdict is that your body has a natural weight. The skinny person next to you has no right to look down their nose at you, your will-power is the equal to theirs, it is your body that is different. That is not to say you should just give up. If your body is prone to weight gain, just maintaining your current weight over the years is a major challenge, and losing 1-2 kg over the span of a year is a major achievement (and may be easier to maintain than large weight drops). These achievements will result in real health benefits so they are worth striving for, the problem is that they are psychologically unsatisfactory. To be fat, work hard all year to lose 1-2 kg that no one notices and still be seen as fat by your colleagues and friends is devastating. Overweight people need to spend more effort on their body than the naturally skinny, and still get derided for it. Unfortunately, we just need to suck it up, be mentally stronger than the skinny people who never had to fight their body, and battle to keep our weight down one kilo at a time. 

The light at the end of the tunnel

For those who are overweight today, we know there will be a life-long battle with no silver bullet. There is, however, a light at the end of the tunnel for future generations. The more we know about obesity the better we can limit it. People think that "genetic" means unchangeable, bar genetic engineering. This is not so. Any figure for genetic contribution is limited to the particular environment that the measurements were done in. So today 85% of our weight may be programmed through genes and early environment, but by changing the environment the genetic effect could be reduced or even eliminated. Particular additives that trigger cravings in people genetically prone to weight gain can be banned from common foods, removing the genetic effect. Early intervention programs could prevent the epigenetic reprogramming that leads to later weight gain. Think of it this way, a genetic susceptibility to alcoholism has a huge effect when alcohol is everywhere, but no effect if alcohol is absent. The same is true for our genetic programming to be overweight. Careful research and well-designed public health policies altering food regulation and activity levels could dramatically reduce the obesity levels in future generations. I, for one, sincerely hope that our children will not have to suffer through year after year of broken New Year's Resolutions.

Images of Singapore