Commonplace Corporate Genetic Testing of Employees Harbingers Back to Sci-Fi Flick GATTACA

""In the 1997 science fiction film GATTACA, society is dominated by a system of eugenics, where potential children are conceived through genetic manipulation. The main character, Vincent Freeman, is conceived outside the eugenics system and fights to overcome genetic discrimination in a society that engineers humans to possess the best hereditary traits of their parents.

Nearly 20 years after the film debuted, corporations today are starting to head in the same direction as GATTACA. Eugenics programs could be the way of the future as employers start separating acceptable employees from genetic "invalids" using new genetic testing procedures.

In fact, corporations are looking to new genetic testing programs to see if they can predict the probability of disease in future employees. The technology is said to help companies avoid hiring employees who take extra sick time and is supposed to help the companies cut down health expenses altogether.

Alternatively, the technology could be used to predict when an employee is diagnosed with heart disease or diabetes before the conditions develop. In this way, wellness programs can be adapted to help companies coach employees into nutrition and exercise prevention strategies before the conditions show up.

Important questions concerning the validity and ethics of genetic testing

However well intentioned, could these genetic testing programs actually be the beginning of eugenics programs where valid human workers are separated from "invalids" as seen in the movie GATTACA?

Is genetic testing even a legitimate model for predicting metabolic conditions like diabetes and heart disease anyway?

Since genes are influenced by so many environmental factors throughout one's life, how can one's DNA at birth or at any time during their life be the ultimate deciding factor for their disease risk factor the rest of their life?

Shouldn't wellness programs look at environmental exposures and employee habits before they rely on genetic testing as the excuse for the health problems?

How can we rely on the validity and wherewithal of genetic testing alone if the average infant's genes are influenced by multiple injections of toxins like mercury preservative and aluminum adjuvant from vaccines?

If the study of epigenetics shows that these toxic elements influence a person's DNA, then how can we blame heredity on any kind of disease that shows up in a person's life?

Six large companies about to begin genetic testing of employees

Genetic testing of employees has other hurdles to cross as well. Will employees want to share sensitive heredity and health information with their employer? Everyone has a right to their own privacy. Will privacy be neglected as medical research prepares the population for soft core eugenics programs?

Health insurer Aetna and Newtopia from Canada are already taking strides to create personalized health improvement programs that require physicals and blood tests to determine an employee's risk for certain metabolic syndromes. While the programs aim to eliminate heart disease, stroke and diabetes, they are now incorporating genetic testing into the mix. The tests attempt to analyze bands of genes that may express an employee's likelihood to eat compulsively or whether their body is able to process carbohydrates or fats.

Is genetic testing useful and helpful for individuals or is it just a way to micromanage who is worthy to work in a perfect society and who is not fit or "invalid?"""

http://www.naturalnews.com/049690_genetic_testing_disease_prevention_corporations.html

Himalayan Yeti a Distant Relative of the Polar Bear?

""A Venezuelan evolutionary biologist and a US zoologist state that they have refuted, through mitochondrial DNA sequencing, a recent claim, also based on such sequencing, that unknown type of bear must exist. in the Himalayas and that it may be, at least in part, the source of yeti legends. Their study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

Last year, B. Sykes and co-authors, in the course of mitochondrial DNA sequencing identification of hair samples that had been attributed to "anomalous primates" (yetis, bigfoots, and others), claimed to have found that two samples said to have come from the Himalayas had a 100% match with DNA recovered from a fossil Polar Bear from over 40,000 years ago. On this basis, they concluded that a currently unknown type of bear must inhabit that portion of Asia.""

""The results were partly in agreement with past studies but were also showing some new insights. The data set resulting from studying this part of the bears' genomes seems to be insufficient to make any definitive decisions as to what are the existing relationships on the basis of it alone. In combination with the results of other studies, however, it may very well prove quite useful in making such decisions.

Interestingly, it was found that one sequence from an Asian Black Bear from Japan indicated that it was not closely related to the mainland members of that species. This unexpected large evolutionary distance between these two geographic groups of the Asian Black Bear probably deserves further study.

"In fact, a study looking at the genetic and morphological variability of Asian Black Bear populations throughout the geographic distribution of the species is yet to be conducted, and it would surely yield exciting results," Gutiérrez said.""

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-03/pp-ylp031215.php

Human Designated Cognitive Mystery Gene Touted as Genetic Trait for Brain Size Modifier in DNA

""Led by Wieland Huttner, director of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, the researchers said the brain's neocortex gets a neuron boost to fuel functions such as reasoning, language and sensory perception. These traits are what make the human brain the most complex in the animal kingdom.

"Our ultimate goal has always been to identify the changes in the genome that were responsible for us humans having larger brains than other primates," Huttner told the Guardian. "What we now have is a gene that is characteristic of a 1.3 liter to 1.4 liter brain, and that makes it very exciting."

For their study, the researchers injected the gene into mouse embryos, which in turn caused their brains to grow larger and develop wrinkles known to fit more tissue in the skull.

"Will they learn better, or have better memories? That's hard to say. But we should know that later this year," Huttner said. "We saw cortical folding in half of the mice. So the gene is sufficient to do that, but it won't necessarily do it every time."

But Huttner and his team will have to wait for the mice to grow older so their brains can develop. Afterward, the researchers will see if the gene also increases the mice's cognitive abilities.""

http://www.universityherald.com/articles/16325/20150227/human-specific-gene-regulates-brain-size-various-cognitive-abilities.htm

Twin Astronauts Spend 1 Year and 200 Miles Apart From March 2015 to March 2016 - 1 on Earth, 1 on Station

""Astronaut Scott Kelly has a body double, his identical twin brother, retired astronaut Mark Kelly. And while Scott is making history over the next year — living on the International Space Station longer than any other American astronaut — Mark will be down here on Earth, being poked and prodded to determine how his brother is faring in space.

In March, NASA will send Scott Kelly on a yearlong mission to ISS, where he will live and work alongside Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko on as many as 500 experiments. Because the typical trip in space is some six months, the Kelly brothers will, in essence, be an experiment themselves, giving NASA a better understanding of how long stints in space affect astronauts — in preparation for an eventual human mission to Mars.

“This will give us our first glimpse of what happens to their bodies from six to 12 months,” NASA’s space station program scientist Julie Robinson said, according to the Houston Chronicle. “We want to find what risks might lurk there.”

Long-term space travel can do strange things to a person. Bones get weaker. Muscles lose mass. And the near zero-gravity can even make a man taller — a temporary side-effect that amused Scott Kelly when he returned from a mission in 2011 and noticed he was taller than his twin.

“It did last long enough that I could stand next to my brother and look down at him a little bit,” he told the Houston Chronicle.

The brothers are part of NASA’s “Twins Study,” which will look at how twins in radically different environments change over time. Researchers will compare the brothers’ immune systems, reaction time, vision and heart health, among other things, using blood and urine samples as well as other measurements. This will tell them how Scott Kelly’s DNA might have changed in space.

“From bone loss and muscle loss to effects on our immune system, vision, vestibular system and radiation,” Kelly told KPRC‑TV. “You do get a lot of radiation in space, and we know what radiation can do to people. So that is a concern.”

NASA is waiting to launch long-term space travel — including trips to the Red Planet — until it learns how the human form can handle it.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Russia sent four cosmonauts to the Mir Space Station for a year or more, but their health was monitored at only an elementary level, according to news reports.

Mark Kelly, the husband of former House member Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), volunteered for the study to do his part from home. But Robinson told reporters two test subjects are not enough, which is why NASA and its partners — Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada — are considering up to a dozen year-long test subjects at the space station, Associated Pressreported.""

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/01/16/astronaut-scott-kelly-will-spend-a-year-in-space-while-scientists-study-his-twin-here-on-earth/

Vegetable Corn Domestication Evolves in the Span of Ten Millennia Producing the Modern Varieties We See Today

""The United States is a country of corn. But 4000 years ago, the crop was an import, spreading up from Mexico and taking hold in the American Southwest. New research retraces the route the crop may have traveled and reconstructs the genetic changes it went through on the way to becoming modern maize.

The wild ancestor of maize is teosinte, a species of grass that grows in warm, damp environments of central Mexico, where it was first domesticated sometime between 6000 and 10,000 years ago. About 4000 years ago, maize started showing up in what is now the southwestern United States. Scientists have two main ideas about how it made the trip: It might have spread up the Pacific coast of Mexico, or it might have moved first into the cooler, drier highlands of central Mexico before eventually being planted in the American Southwest.

The wild ancestor of maize is teosinte, a species of grass that grows in warm, damp environments of central Mexico, where it was first domesticated sometime between 6000 and 10,000 years ago. About 4000 years ago, maize started showing up in what is now the southwestern United States. Scientists have two main ideas about how it made the trip: It might have spread up the Pacific coast of Mexico, or it might have moved first into the cooler, drier highlands of central Mexico before eventually being planted in the American Southwest.

To help figure out which route maize traveled, M. Thomas Gilbert, who studies paleogenomics at the University of Copenhagen, and colleagues compared the DNA of 32 ancient corn cobs, some from Mexico and some from the U.S. Southwest. They discovered that the oldest maize samples from the southwestern United States—dating to more than 3000 years ago—are more genetically similar to maize from Mexico’s highlands than to varieties that grew along the coast, the team reports today in Nature Plants.

The younger the samples get, however, the more genes they share with coastal varieties. That suggests that maize “initially went up the highland route,” Gilbert says. But the crop, which was still in its early stages of domestication, probably wasn’t thriving at high altitudes or in the dry American Southwest. As the centuries passed, Gilbert says, farmers “were crossing in varieties from elsewhere to keep improving it through time.”

Gilbert’s team was able to reconstruct the directed evolution of modern maize. The first trait the farmers bred out of the crop was shattering, a process by which wild plants scatter their seeds in all directions—a “very, very irritating feature” if you want to collect seeds to plant the next season, Gilbert says. Then, over the course of several centuries, the farmers bred drought-tolerant maize, which allowed the plant to thrive in the dry conditions of the American Southwest""

See The Full Story and Information Here:

http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/01/how-corn-became-corn

Scientist Prove DNA Can Be Reprogrammed by Words and Frequencies: Esoteric and Spiritual Teachers Have Known For Ages

THE HUMAN DNA IS A BIOLOGICAL INTERNET and superior in many aspects to the artificial one. Russian scientific research directly or indirectly explains phenomena such as clairvoyance, intuition, spontaneous and remote acts of healing, self healing, affirmation techniques, unusual light/auras around people (namely spiritual masters), mind’s influence on weather patterns and much more. In addition, there is evidence for a whole new type of medicine in which DNA can be influenced and reprogrammed by words and frequencies WITHOUT cutting out and replacing single genes.

 

Only 10% of our DNA is being used for building proteins. It is this subset of DNA that is of interest to western researchers and is being examined and categorized. The other 90% are considered “junk DNA.” The Russian researchers, however, convinced that nature was not dumb, joined linguists and geneticists in a venture to explore those 90% of “junk DNA.” Their results, findings and conclusions are simply revolutionary! According to them, our DNA is not only responsible for the construction of our body but also serves as data storage and in communication. The Russian linguists found that the genetic code, especially in the apparently useless 90%, follows the same rules as all our human languages. To this end they compared the rules of syntax (the way in which words are put together to form phrases and sentences), semantics (the study of meaning in language forms) and the basic rules of grammar. They found that the alkalines of our DNA follow a regular grammar and do have set rules just like our languages. So human languages did not appear coincidentally but are a reflection of our inherent DNA.

http://wakeup-world.com/2011/07/12/scientist-prove-dna-can-be-reprogrammed-by-words-frequencies/