Wednesday, April 06, 2005
'Indians vulnerable to HIV/Aids'
BBC News
Indians infected with the Aids virus are more likely to contract the disease than people in the west, a new study has found. Scientists say that Indians have lower immunity to the virus because they have genes that hasten the disease.
India says more than five million of its citizens are infected with the HIV virus, second only to South Africa.
Scientists at India's premier medical school, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), studied 200 people with HIV infection and 2000 healthy people over two years for the study. They found that the HLA-B*35-Px gene linked to rapid progression from HIV infection to Aids is "two-and-a-half times" more common in Indians than a protective gene called HLA-B*35-Py.
They also found that that a "protective variant" of chemokines - intracellular messenger molecules whose major function is to attract immune cells to sites of infection - was not present among Indians....
........
Indians infected with the Aids virus are more likely to contract the disease than people in the west, a new study has found. Scientists say that Indians have lower immunity to the virus because they have genes that hasten the disease.
India says more than five million of its citizens are infected with the HIV virus, second only to South Africa.
Scientists at India's premier medical school, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), studied 200 people with HIV infection and 2000 healthy people over two years for the study. They found that the HLA-B*35-Px gene linked to rapid progression from HIV infection to Aids is "two-and-a-half times" more common in Indians than a protective gene called HLA-B*35-Py.
They also found that that a "protective variant" of chemokines - intracellular messenger molecules whose major function is to attract immune cells to sites of infection - was not present among Indians....
........
Friday, April 01, 2005
X-celling over men
OP-ED COLUMNIST
By MAUREEN DOWD
Men are always telling me not to generalize about them.
But a startling new study shows that science is backing me up here.
Research published last week in the journal Nature reveals that women are genetically more complex than scientists ever imagined, while men remain the simple creatures they appear.
"Alas," said one of the authors of the study, the Duke University genome expert Huntington Willard, "genetically speaking, if you've met one man, you've met them all. We are, I hate to say it, predictable. You can't say that about women. Men and women are farther apart than we ever knew. It's not Mars or Venus. It's Mars or Venus, Pluto, Jupiter and who knows what other planets."
Women are not only more different from men than we knew. Women are more different from each other than we knew - creatures of "infinite variety," as Shakespeare wrote.
"We poor men only have 45 chromosomes to do our work with because our 46th is the pathetic Y that has only a few genes which operate below the waist and above the knees," Dr. Willard observed. "In contrast, we now know that women have the full 46 chromosomes that they're getting work from and the 46th is a second X that is working at levels greater than we knew."
Dr. Willard and his co-author, Laura Carrel, a molecular biologist at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, think that their discovery may help explain why the behavior and traits of men and women are so different; they may be hard-wired in the brain, in addition to being hormonal or cultural........
.....................
By MAUREEN DOWD
Men are always telling me not to generalize about them.
But a startling new study shows that science is backing me up here.
Research published last week in the journal Nature reveals that women are genetically more complex than scientists ever imagined, while men remain the simple creatures they appear.
"Alas," said one of the authors of the study, the Duke University genome expert Huntington Willard, "genetically speaking, if you've met one man, you've met them all. We are, I hate to say it, predictable. You can't say that about women. Men and women are farther apart than we ever knew. It's not Mars or Venus. It's Mars or Venus, Pluto, Jupiter and who knows what other planets."
Women are not only more different from men than we knew. Women are more different from each other than we knew - creatures of "infinite variety," as Shakespeare wrote.
"We poor men only have 45 chromosomes to do our work with because our 46th is the pathetic Y that has only a few genes which operate below the waist and above the knees," Dr. Willard observed. "In contrast, we now know that women have the full 46 chromosomes that they're getting work from and the 46th is a second X that is working at levels greater than we knew."
Dr. Willard and his co-author, Laura Carrel, a molecular biologist at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, think that their discovery may help explain why the behavior and traits of men and women are so different; they may be hard-wired in the brain, in addition to being hormonal or cultural........
.....................
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