Genes for Skin Color Rebut Dated Notions of Race, Researchers Say - Sensationalist Headlines

[quote]For centuries, skin color has held powerful social meaning — a defining characteristic of race, and a starting point for racism. “If you ask somebody on the street, ‘What are the main differences between races?,’ they’re going to say skin color,” said Sarah A. Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania. On Thursday, Dr. Tishkoff and her colleagues showed this to be a profound error. In the journal Science, the researchers published the first large-scale study of [URL="http://science.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aan8433"]the genetics of skin color in Africans[/URL]. [/quote] [url]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/science/skin-color-race.html[/url]

AT LAST With CRISPR, we are going to make everyone green! So no more skin based discrimination. But then...eh, we'll have to deal with the height, eye color, nationality, voice tone...

[QUOTE=Cutthecrap;52776768]AT LAST With CRISPR, we are going to make everyone green! So no more skin based discrimination. But then...eh, we'll have to deal with the height, eye color, nationality, voice tone...[/QUOTE] CRISPR is the most misunderstood scientific discovery of the 21st century, and I shake my head every time I see a post like this.

[QUOTE=Headhumpy;52776787]CRISPR is the most misunderstood scientific discovery of the 21st century, and I shake my head every time I see a post like this.[/QUOTE] Don't bother explaining how it's wrong, just shake your head and feel superior

Delete the gene, delete race. It's that simple!

I'm not getting that quote. The abstract seems to just be saying that they found some of the genetic loci where skin color resides and compared them between different people groups. How does this have anything to do with proving people wrong who say that skin color is a difference between 'races?' I've never heard anyone, even the most racist people, say that the skin color of white and black people come from different genetic loci or are made up of totally different genes sites.

[QUOTE=SIRIUS;52776799]Don't bother explaining how it's wrong, just shake your head and feel superior[/QUOTE] CRISPR is great and gets used in certain labs all the time now for various experiments. But there's some pretty big problems stopping it from being used in humans any time soon like pop science people imply it will. Mostly targeting, delivery (e.g. to a whole organism/large region,) and unexpected off-target mutations. That's sidestepping any other current knowledge gaps too. This applies to p. much any other type of editing we have as well.

[QUOTE=thelurker1234;52776880]CRISPR is great and gets used in certain labs all the time now for various experiments. But there's some pretty big problems stopping it from being used in humans any time soon like pop science people imply it will. Mostly targeting, delivery (e.g. to a whole organism/large region,) and unexpected off-target mutations. That's sidestepping any other current knowledge gaps too. This applies to p. much any other type of editing we have as well.[/QUOTE] So... it's not ready yet... no shit. How does that disprove what he said?

what next they're going to disprove the gay gene? [sp]sarcasm alert[/sp]

[QUOTE=SIRIUS;52776891]So... it's not ready yet... no shit. How does that disprove what he said?[/QUOTE] "Just do it better" isn't an argument as to how something can overcome certain limitations. And of course to be clear, I'm not saying editing like he posited will never happen. But it's doubtful that CRISPR will give us that, especially anytime soon.

[QUOTE=SIRIUS;52776891]So... it's not ready yet... no shit. How does that disprove what he said?[/QUOTE] CRISPR/Cas9 is a great development in the field of genetics, but it's nowhere near as powerful as the media has hyped it up to be. We've had the ability to edit genomes for quite a while now, using tools like zinc finger nucleases and TALENs. What CRISPR/Cas9 does is allow us to target specific sequences far more conveniently, quickly, and cheaply. It has far more uses than simply gene therapy, and gene therapy itself has way more hurdles to overcome than simply "how do we induce a double-strand break at the specific site we want?"

[QUOTE=Headhumpy;52776955]CRISPR/Cas9 is a great development in the field of genetics, but it's nowhere near as powerful as the media has hyped it up to be. We've had the ability to edit genomes for quite a while now, using tools like zinc finger nucleases and TALENs. What CRISPR/Cas9 does is allow us to target specific sequences far more conveniently, quickly, and cheaply. It has far more uses than simply gene therapy, and gene therapy itself has way more hurdles to overcome than simply "how do we induce a double-strand break at the specific site we want?"[/QUOTE] Doesn't it also allow for editing of dna of live cells rather than having to wait for cell reproduction?

[QUOTE=SIRIUS;52776966]Doesn't it also allow for editing of dna of live cells rather than having to wait for cell reproduction?[/QUOTE] The technology we know as CRISPR is a combination of a DNA endonuclease known as Cas9, and a short RNA sequence known as a single guide RNA (sgRNA). Like all other genome editing tools, it works by first recognising a specific sequence of DNA complementary to the sgRNA, and then cutting it at that sequence. That's all it does. The advantage it has over ZFNs and TALENs is that you don't have to make a new construct for every sequence that you are targeting, you can just synthesise a different sgRNA sequence and chuck it in a cell alongside Cas9. ZFNs and TALENs, on the other hand, obtain their sequence specificity from a variable DNA-binding domain that is fused to a DNA-cleavage domain. In order to target a specific sequence, you effectively have to engineer a new enzyme each time, which takes a lot more time and money. What the cell does after the enzyme cuts the DNA depends on what else you introduce to the cell. In the absence of any DNA with homologous sequences flanking the restriction site, non-homologous end joining is used to repair the double strand break, a process that typically introduces insertion/deletion or frameshift mutations that give rise to a non-functional gene product, thus inactivating the gene. This is very useful for generating knockout organisms with a single gene inactivated, allowing us to study the role of that gene. If an appropriate sequence of DNA (containing homologous sequences flanking the restriction site) is introduced along with Cas9 and the sgRNA, the cell will undergo homology-directed repair, leading to the incorporation of the modified DNA sequence into the genome. This is what people are referring to when they talk about gene therapy. My point is this: CRISPR is revolutionary, but not in the way most people seem to think it is. Overhyping it, like what has happened with countless other scientific developments, is what leads to the public being disappointed and asking stupid questions like "why haven't we cured cancer yet?!"

[QUOTE=Alxnotorious;52776813]Delete the gene, delete race. It's that simple![/QUOTE] Just splice people with octopus color changing already

[QUOTE=AkujiTheSniper;52777183]Just splice people with octopus color changing already[/QUOTE] I want to be the OctoCamo suit from MGS4.

[QUOTE=sgman91;52776834]I'm not getting that quote. The abstract seems to just be saying that they found some of the genetic loci where skin color resides and compared them between different people groups. How does this have anything to do with proving people wrong who say that skin color is a difference between 'races?' I've never heard anyone, even the most racist people, say that the skin color of white and black people come from different genetic loci or are made up of totally different genes sites.[/QUOTE] If the genes for skin color are relatively small and localized, it would mean that skin color is only a weak indicator of race, as children would inherit less even amounts from mixed-race parents (eg. one child might be very light-skinned and another very dark-skinned), and the odds of a random mutation affecting it would be much higher. It would also be more likely that skin-color genes don't affect anything else, that they code specifically for skin pigment. If, however, the genes for skin color are numerous and all over the place, any given mutation would have only a small effect, and mixed children would end up about halfway between their parents, assuming nothing's on the Y chromosome. It also would mean that more skin-color genes would have other effects (pleiotropy) - like how a single gene mutation can cause changes to body shape, cardiovascular problems, vision problems, and skeletal abnormalities. It's not entirely unexpected - hair and eye color are similarly controlled by fairly small amounts of genes, in the low double digits. But there's also been phenotype-based evidence the other way - albinism and phenylketonuria both cause skin pigmentation changes but also have effects such as eye misalignment and mental handicap, respectively. And mixed-race children do tend to have moderate skin tone. As for how it "proves" races don't exist genetically, it seems to be more about disproving "black" and "white" as races, whereas more specific groups like "Western European" or "East African" might be more evidence-based.

[QUOTE=sgman91;52776834]I'm not getting that quote. The abstract seems to just be saying that they found some of the genetic loci where skin color resides and compared them between different people groups. How does this have anything to do with proving people wrong who say that skin color is a difference between 'races?' I've never heard anyone, even the most racist people, say that the skin color of white and black people come from different genetic loci or are made up of totally different genes sites.[/QUOTE] [QUOTE=gman003-main;52777367]If the genes for skin color are relatively small and localized, it would mean that skin color is only a weak indicator of race, as children would inherit less even amounts from mixed-race parents (eg. one child might be very light-skinned and another very dark-skinned), and the odds of a random mutation affecting it would be much higher. It would also be more likely that skin-color genes don't affect anything else, that they code specifically for skin pigment. If, however, the genes for skin color are numerous and all over the place, any given mutation would have only a small effect, and mixed children would end up about halfway between their parents, assuming nothing's on the Y chromosome. It also would mean that more skin-color genes would have other effects (pleiotropy) - like how a single gene mutation can cause changes to body shape, cardiovascular problems, vision problems, and skeletal abnormalities. It's not entirely unexpected - hair and eye color are similarly controlled by fairly small amounts of genes, in the low double digits. But there's also been phenotype-based evidence the other way - albinism and phenylketonuria both cause skin pigmentation changes but also have effects such as eye misalignment and mental handicap, respectively. And mixed-race children do tend to have moderate skin tone. As for how it "proves" races don't exist genetically, it seems to be more about disproving "black" and "white" as races, whereas more specific groups like "Western European" or "East African" might be more evidence-based.[/QUOTE] From what I can understand from reading the article, what they are saying is that it disproves the idea that people who emigrated from Africa to other parts of the world became lighter in skin tone as a result of some sort of process of speciation, which is usually the basis for many ideas of [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism#After_1945]Scientific Racism[/url], often refered to as race realism or racialism, which attempt to group parts of humanities into outdated and unscientific racial categories such as Caucasian, Mongoloid and Negroid based on skin color and thereby associate other characteristics, such as intelligence, to these categories. [QUOTE=article]These genes are shared across the globe, it turns out; one of them, for example, lightens skin in both Europeans and hunter-gatherers in Botswana. The gene variants were present in humanity’s distant ancestors, even before our species evolved in Africa 300,000 years ago. The widespread distribution of these genes and their persistence over millenniums show that the old color lines are essentially meaningless, the scientists said. The research “dispels a biological concept of race,” Dr. Tishkoff said.[/QUOTE] What the study shows is that the genes for lighter and darker skin tones already existed in all humans prior to the migration out of Africa, meaning that skin color is not a 'racial' trait.

Between easy DNA testing from 28 and Me and similar revealing traces of African heritage, and this study that shows that skin colour is just a genetic dice roll that's as meaningful as eye colour or earlobe length to determining other "racial" traits (though coming from a certain concentrated genetic background, as some populations do, will have a noticeable effect, but that's not the same thing), I can understand why white supremacists are getting more aggressive and angry. Their entire worldview's constructed on a lie that was never true in the first place, and their war of attrition against the inevitable truth is becoming more desperate. I can't say I'd expected to ever empathize with a Neo-Nazi, but "Jews/you will not replace us" is a lot more understandable a fear when you realize that someone's worldview is tied to a state of genetic purity that, as it turns out, never existed. And when an ideology is based so feverently on insecurity and hate for The Other, backing down from that viewpoint because science says it's invalid, without any sort of concession to "ensure" the desired security from the insecure bigot, is an unacceptable form of total surrender that immediately invokes a self-validating conspiracy theory that the science isn't real and it's all a jew/black/bigoted-slur-for-minority-here plot to purge the "Aryan bloodline". It's a really fucked, fearful world in there. We need to evolve a solution to tribalism. We don't need that reflex anymore, we have more sophisticated social constructs that do a better job, like reciprocal benevolence.

[QUOTE=sgman91;52776834]I'm not getting that quote. The abstract seems to just be saying that they found some of the genetic loci where skin color resides and compared them between different people groups. How does this have anything to do with proving people wrong who say that skin color is a difference between 'races?' I've never heard anyone, even the most racist people, say that the skin color of white and black people come from different genetic loci or are made up of totally different genes sites.[/QUOTE] I mean, to hear that kind of talk from "the most racist people" implies that they would be smart enough to know all of that, so...

[QUOTE=Zero-Point;52778192]I mean, to hear that kind of talk from "the most racist people" implies that they would be smart enough to know all of that, so...[/QUOTE] That's kind of what I mean. The author of this study seems to think that their research is at all relevant to the thought process of racists... when racists aren't nearly at that level of thought in the first place. I guess there were some eugenists-esque people from the 1930s who might have been swayed, but that's about it. With that said, the original quote still doesn't make any sense. Even if the specific genetic components are common amongst all races of people, it would still make sense to say that skin color (as in the phenotypic expression) is an obvious difference.

[QUOTE=Headhumpy;52777067]The technology we know as CRISPR is a combination of a DNA endonuclease known as Cas9, and a short RNA sequence known as a single guide RNA (sgRNA). Like all other genome editing tools, it works by first recognising a specific sequence of DNA complementary to the sgRNA, and then cutting it at that sequence. That's all it does. The advantage it has over ZFNs and TALENs is that you don't have to make a new construct for every sequence that you are targeting, you can just synthesise a different sgRNA sequence and chuck it in a cell alongside Cas9. ZFNs and TALENs, on the other hand, obtain their sequence specificity from a variable DNA-binding domain that is fused to a DNA-cleavage domain. In order to target a specific sequence, you effectively have to engineer a new enzyme each time, which takes a lot more time and money. What the cell does after the enzyme cuts the DNA depends on what else you introduce to the cell. In the absence of any DNA with homologous sequences flanking the restriction site, non-homologous end joining is used to repair the double strand break, a process that typically introduces insertion/deletion or frameshift mutations that give rise to a non-functional gene product, thus inactivating the gene. This is very useful for generating knockout organisms with a single gene inactivated, allowing us to study the role of that gene. If an appropriate sequence of DNA (containing homologous sequences flanking the restriction site) is introduced along with Cas9 and the sgRNA, the cell will undergo homology-directed repair, leading to the incorporation of the modified DNA sequence into the genome. This is what people are referring to when they talk about gene therapy. My point is this: CRISPR is revolutionary, but not in the way most people seem to think it is. Overhyping it, like what has happened with countless other scientific developments, is what leads to the public being disappointed and asking stupid questions like "why haven't we cured cancer yet?!"[/QUOTE] Not to mention that to actually use restriction enzymes on bacterial DNA, you've got to lyse the cells and purify them using silica washes or something, then restrict them, then purify them, and if you're doing cloning, then there's ligation to do, inducing competency, transformation, plating, screening and plasmid minipreps. CRISPR is revolutionary in the field of plant sciences though, it's pretty much unmatched with existing methods of gene editing in plants. It's much easier to give a seedling a CRIPSR treatment than fucking around with a gene gun or Agrobacterium tumefaciens.

Everyone can be like you, open up photoshop and fuck with the hue.

[QUOTE=The Aussie;52778346]Not to mention that to actually use restriction enzymes on bacterial DNA, you've got to lyse the cells and purify them using silica washes or something, then restrict them, then purify them, and if you're doing cloning, then there's ligation to do, inducing competency, transformation, plating, screening and plasmid minipreps. CRISPR is revolutionary in the field of plant sciences though, it's pretty much unmatched with existing methods of gene editing in plants. It's much easier to give a seedling a CRIPSR treatment than fucking around with a gene gun or Agrobacterium tumefaciens.[/QUOTE] CRISPR/Cas9 was in fact used twice in the study cited by the OP article, to knock out genes in zebrafish and mice and study their effects. [I]That[/I] is what people should be getting excited about, rather than real life cat girls and furries.