Entries by Rebecca Taylor

The deleterious effects of trisomy 21—the extra chromosome behind Down’s syndrome—can be seen across the entire genome, according to a study published today (April 16) in Nature. While studying a pair of monozygotic twins in which only one person had Down’s syndrome, a team led by Stylianos Antonarakis of the University of Geneva Medical School in Switzerland discovered that trisomy 21 can affect other chromosomes.

This rare twin pair allowed the researchers to compare the effects of Down’s syndrome on gene expression in two otherwise genetically identical individuals. The researchers found that in the twin with Down’s syndrome, genes in territories along the chromosomes that are highly expressed in people without the disorder showed reduced expression, while genes in territories that are normally suppressed were more highly expressed.

“The fact that they’ve got these really nice domain structures genome-wide further implicates the rising perception of the Down’s syndrome response as being more of a systems-level response, rather than . . . just the simplified perspective that we’ve had for a long time”—that the extra chromosome 21 is alone responsible for the symptoms of Down’s syndrome, said Robin Dowell of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who was not involved in the work.

“The mere addition of a small piece of DNA—about 30 megabases, or 1 percent of the genome—can disturb the entire transcriptome, all the genes of the genome. And not only disturb them, but disturb them in a specific and programmed way,” said Antonarakis

The Church has always been against third-party reproduction and that is because the Church has always been focused on the needs of the child and not on the wants of the parents.

Humans have a universal desire to love and be loved by our biological parents. That requires that we know and be known by our biological parents; a scenario purposefully denied those children of anonymous sperm or egg donation.

The Church knows that connection to our biological parents is part of the rights of a child. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

2376 Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple (donation of sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus), are gravely immoral. These techniques (heterologous artificial insemination and fertilization) infringe the child's right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage.

I look at history, and there are dads, I look at wildlife, there are dads, I look at society and there are dads. Dads are everywhere, maybe its media but I feel like I'm missing out. I feel like I will never know what it's like to be in the arms of a man who loves me unconditionally in a innocent non-sexual way, and who will be my other half. I will never know what it's like to bond with my other genetic parent, I will never know what it's like to look at the rest of nature and know I was conceived the way I was suppose to be...you know, outside a science lab....and not on a dish to be shoved into a refrigerator.

I have a tape of my donor's voice, answering questions. Some are deep queries about his personal beliefs, but others are trivial. Those are the ones that make me cry. Questions like 'what's your favorite movie?' He gave the same answer as me and it confused and delighted me. After hearing in him all the traits in me the rest of my family doesn't understand, I felt like i'd missed out on something spectacular, to be understood by the person partially responsible for my existence....  It seems odd and horrorible at the same time that two people who have never even laid eyes on each other have a child. I hate that my dad got paid. I hate that he was probably just some guy who was broke and needed a little bit of pocket cash. No matter how great of a guy he was, he just wanted the money. And even though I think about him all the time, he has no idea I that exist.

Without seemingly having given it much thought at all, our society now allows tens of thousands or more of men and women to create children who will never know one or sometimes both of their biological parents, because states allow these anonymous donations.  And this policy inherently presupposes that bearing children who have no opportunity to know their biological fathers or mothers does not deprive them of anything that is inherently theirs – as a fundamental human right.

I disagree.  I believe that it is morally wrong to put in place a social architecture that means millions of children will not know their biological parents.

Am I saying it would be better that these children not be born? I am.

Anonymous sperm and ova donation presupposes that the biological connection between parents and children is without much value at all – since in a wholesale (or shall I say, retail) manner, we sanction an ever-increasing number of kids being born who have no idea who their biological fathers and mothers are and can never find out, period.

Anonymous sperm and ova donation solves no problem of any child. It is a convenience to adults who are encountering fertility problems and would prefer the convenience of jettisoning part of their child's true life history in order to commandeer that child from its true biological father or mother.

While it is April Fool's Day, this is for real. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, the Orgeon scientist that last year used somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) better known as therapeutic cloning to clone human embryos AND created human embryos with three-genetic parents, has new research published in Nature that has not gotten a lot of attention, but we should be aware of it none-the-less.

Mitalipov and his team have cloned mice. So what you say? Researchers have been cloning mice for years. This is different because instead of using eggs to clone those mice like in traditional SCNT, Oregon scientists used 2-celled mouse embryos. Contained in the egg are factors that can reprogram the nucleus of an adult cell and create a new organism with the same genetic make-up; what we know as cloning. It was thought that after an egg is fertilized and the resulting embryo divides, the embryo no longer had that same reprogramming abilities as the egg. Mitalipov has shown that at the 2-celled stage of the embryo those factors are still present.

From the Oregon Health and Science University website:

An Oregon Health & Science University scientist has been able to make embryonic stem cells from adult mouse body cells using the cytoplasm of two-cell embryos that were in the "interphase" stage of the cell cycle. Scientists had previously thought the interphase stage — a later stage of the cell cycle — was incapable of converting transplanted adult cell nuclei into embryonic stem cells.

The findings by OHSU's Shoukhrat Mitalipov, Ph.D., and his team could have major implications for the science of generating patient-matched human embryonic stem cells for regenerative medicine....

Mitalipov's findings will be published March 26 in the online edition of Nature. If the new findings in mice hold true for humans, it could significantly help efforts to make rejection-proof human embryonic stem cells for regenerative therapies. That's because embryonic cells that Mitalipov's team used for reprogramming — cells in the "interphase" stage — are more accessible than the traditional egg cells that are in short supply. Scientists previously had believed embryonic stem cells were capable of being produced only using the metaphase stage of egg cytoplasm.

Embryos will be far cheaper as a raw material for research than eggs – but also far more controversial ethically.

Second, although media reports and the university press release skirted around this issue, two embryos are destroyed in the process: the “surplus” embryo from the IVF clinic, and the cloned embryo created by the researchers, which is dissected for its stem cells.

Third, although media reports tiptoed around the “c-word”, Milatipov’s process is basically an elaborate form of cloning.

Ray Kurzweil predicted in his book, The Singularity is Near, that we will be mostly non-organic beings by the 2030s. In the 2030s, I will be getting ready to retire and take care of my grandkids.  My children will be starting their families.  In other words, not in the distant future, but in this lifetime. So now is the time to take notice of emerging technologies because they will be upon us before we know it.

One of the ways that transhumanists envision that man will live forever is by interfacing the human brain with computers, uploading our consciousness into the digital realm. A new movie "Transcendence", starring Johnny Depp, will tackle this very scenario. The plot:

Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is the foremost researcher in the field of Artificial Intelligence, working to create a sentient machine that combines the collective intelligence of everything ever known with the full range of human emotions. His highly controversial experiments have made him famous, but they have also made him the prime target of anti-technology extremists who will do whatever it takes to stop him. However, in their attempt to destroy Will, they inadvertently become the catalyst for him to succeed—to be a participant in his own transcendence. For his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and best friend Max Waters (Paul Bettany), both fellow researchers, the question is not if they can…but if they should. Their worst fears are realized as Will’s thirst for knowledge evolves into a seemingly omnipresent quest for power, to what end is unknown. The only thing that is becoming terrifyingly clear is there may be no way to stop him.

“Thank you, Professor Lejeune, for what you did for my father and my mother.  Because of you, I am proud of myself.”

This brief and unplanned eulogy was given at Jérôme Lejeune’s funeral in 1994 by his patient, Bruno, whose karyotype was one of the first to reveal, in 1958, that an extra copy of the 21st chromosome caused Down syndrome.

You see, when Bruno was born it was believed that Down syndrome was due to some fault of the parent. Many believed it was caused by a venereal infection, or that it was a curse from God. And so these “mongoloid” children, as they were then called, were kept hidden because they brought shame to their families. In fact, people would even cross the street when they saw them because they feared that what they had might be contagious. When Bruno was a child, those we celebrate today on World Down Syndrome Day were an object of scorn, and a day like this day – World Down Syndrome Day - unthinkable. It was Jérôme Lejeune’s discovery, and his example of profound respect for these priceless children, that first began to move the culture toward acceptance, and, eventually, inclusion in society.

The respect that Jérôme Lejeune showed for his patients and their families was a radical departure from what had previously existed. His daughters remember riding their bikes home from school one day and seeing painted on a wall “Death to Lejeune and his little monsters!”

The oft-quoted statistics of terminations following prenatal diagnosis are tragic testimony to the lack of acceptance we still face in our modern culture of inclusion. How can we have, on one hand, sociological data that show overwhelmingly the happiness and love children with Down syndrome bring to families; and yet on the other, consuming fear and fatal rejection by a majority? Today we should not only advocate for those living with Down syndrome – but also for those who were not given a chance to live. Even more, we should insist on getting good information into the hands of mothers and fathers who face the terrible decision whether or not to terminate, and try to spare them the consequences of a choice that often brings so much sadness and despair.

The recently deceased prochoice bioethicist and disabilities rights activist, Adrienne Asch, wrote that prenatal diagnosis can provide at most a first impression of who a child will become.  But many still live in fear of what prenatal diagnosis reveals, and they act on their first impression in the most radical way, by eliminating those who evidence shows will probably bring them the greatest joy.

So, on this World Down Syndrome Day, 2014, let us commit ourselves to working toward full acceptance of ALL those living with Down syndrome - including those in the womb.

The term “totipotent” is used in the scientific literature in two radically different ways. The strict sense of totipotency refers to a one-cell embryo or zygote that is “capable of developing into a complete organism.” The second, weaker sense of totipotency refers to the ability of a cell to differentiate into any of the cells or tissues of the body, including cells of the placenta. A zygote is “totipotent” in both senses, yet pluripotent stem cells are “totipotent” only in the second sense.

In contrast, a cell that can produce but not organize all of the cells of the body (including cells found in the placenta) is not an embryo. If transferred to a uterus, it will produce a tumor, not a baby. Such cells are sometimes referred to as “totipotent” in the second, weak or cellular sense, a misuse of the term that causes great confusion for many non-scientific readers. I have proposed the term “plenipotent” (from the Latin plenus, or “full”) to distinguish such cells from pluripotent stem cells (i.e., stem cells that do not produce placental tissue) and to avoid confusing mere tumors with actual, totipotent embryos.

Totipotent zygotes are distinct from pluripotent or even plenipotent stem cells because they undergo development. The ability to both produce all cell types and to organize them into a coherent body plan is the defining feature of a totipotent human organism. And totipotency critically requires multiple factors derived from oocytes. Human embryos can be produced by fertilization or by cloning, yet both of these procedures start with and require the cytoplasmic factors contributed by a human egg. All other scientific techniques that result in embryos containing mixtures of stem cells start with an embryo produced by either fertilization or by cloning.

Although future developments may discover new ways of producing stem cells with expanded potency, unless the technique explicitly utilizes human eggs or painstakingly supplies the multiple egg-derived factors that are currently known to be required for development, such cells will not be totipotent and will not be human embryos.

Thank-you Dr. Condic for such a complete and illuminating explanation. 

Hat Tip: The Mike Janocik Show

(Image from New Scientist)

I have never worked in manufacturing but I can imagine inventory and quality control are important parts of the process. Keeping track of inventory and making sure the right parts get to where they are needed would be a priority. The barcode has surely revolutionized the manufacturing industry.

The barcode is certainly finding a home in the human manufacturing plant, also known as the IVF clinic. Scientists from Barcelona have announced in the journal, Human Reproduction, that they now can place a barcode tag directly on an embryo to make sure you end up with the right kid. Because mix-ups do happen.

Continue reading at Creative Minority Report >>

No person shall:
1. Knowingly conduct nontherapeutic research that destroys a human embryo or subjects a human embryo to substantial risk of injury or death;
2. Transfer a human embryo with the knowledge that the embryo will be subjected to nontherapeutic research; or
3. Use for research purposes cells or tissues that the person knows were obtained by performing activities in violation of this section.

My husband watches the new TV show "Intelligence" starring Josh Holloway (previously Sawyer from Lost) as Gabriel, a man with a rare genetic mutation (or some such) that allowed the U.S. government to put a chip in his brain. This chip gives Gabriel unlimited access to the Internet directly into his consciousness. As an agent for a super secret intelligence agency, that comes in super handy. Gabriel, the best of all guys, uses his enhancement only for good. He saves people and catches bad guys and he looks good doing it. Gabriel is the quintessential enhanced American hero reminiscent of Captain America, just without the tights and shield.

In a recent episode, Gabriel has to enter a middle eastern country to rescue two American journalists sentenced to death for being spies. A former U.S. president tags along to distract the middle eastern government with diplomacy while Gabriel breaks the journalists out of prison using his enhancement to hijack security cameras and pinpoint his targets' exact location.

After many twists and turns, the objective of their mission complete, the former U.S. president asks Gabriel why he would let the government put that chip in his head.

Gabriel answers, "Because I love my country."

And there it is. A good American would do anything for his country, including volunteering to be an experiment and allowing the government to violate his or her bodily integrity with a microchip in the brain.

And why not, when we ask those who serve our country to place their lives at risk? Why not ask them to alter their bodies, with possible permanent side effects, to make the job easier? Why not if it means an American victory?

Many Catholics do not see the harm in such enhancements for our soldiers and intelligence agents. In a discussion at a Catholic blog about genetically enhancing soldier's eyes to have night vision like a cat, one commenter saw no moral issue with such an intervention. Why would we not give our soldier's such an advantage?

But is that treating the soldier as a person or a means to an end? What about the possible side effects? The human brain is not wired to "see" in the dark permanently.

Why not instead equip our soldiers with the best in night vision goggles that they can take off at the end of the day and at the end of a career?

Do we really need to ask those that serve American interests to radically alter their bodies?

But I am afraid that with shows like "Intelligence", the seed had already been planted. I doubt any parent turned to their child after Gabriel announced that he loved his country and said, "This is a fun show and that was a nice sentiment, but in reality it would be immoral for a government to do that to one of its citizens."

Not everyone is buying what shows like Intelligence are selling. Here are some comments from viewers on IMDB:

my next question however is: "when will they find the unusually large mass in his brain next to that constantly radiating chip?"

in the shadow of NSA scandals and the fear of the absolute transparent citizen, this series tries to numb your concerns by showing you how well meant and helpful the absolute access to every information in the world, to one guy can be even, in the hands of an unpredictable, mischievous sawyer guy, as long as he is American.

To make the show 'better', every plot serves as a bit of pro-NSA propaganda that doesn't even bother trying to justify itself: they have the right to spy on everyone on a hunch, borders and international relations don't matter at all - as a super secret government spy agency they can do as they please all over the world. It goes without saying that being good guys, they don't need to bother with details or justification.

FDA Cellular, Tissue and Gene Therapies Advisory Committee:

As a concerned citizen of the United States, I urge you to reject attempts to allow oocyte modification, also called mitochondrial replacement or maternal spindle transfer, to advance to clinical trials.

I understand the desire for parents to have genetically-related children, but at some point we must be responsible and limit parental desires, favoring instead the health and well-being of the next generation. Mitochondrial replacement is the intentional modification of children to have the genetic material from three persons. It would also create a germ-line modification; one that would be passed on to future generations.

Many other technically-advanced countries have banned germ-line modifications for good reason. The line that prevents the experimentation on the next generation, and every generation after, without their consent should never be crossed. There are likely many medical advances we could have if we treated human subjects unethically. I believe mitochondrial replacement falls into that category.

Any girl that is conceived with this technique could not help but pass this modification onto her offspring. If there are any deleterious effects, which have been noted in animal studies, she would be placed in the very same position as her mother, struggling with a desire to have genetically-related children, but wary of passing on her modification. The difference is that she would know she was the product of germ-line experimentation sanctioned by the FDA.

Time has proven that the slippery slope in reproductive medicine is very real. IVF, a technique originally designed to help infertile couples conceive, has expanded to a billion dollar industry catering to the desires of the fertile as well, with a menu of choices including sex selection. If you allow mitochondrial replacement to proceed to the clinic, it will only be a matter of time before modifications to nuclear DNA will be attempted. With the lack of federal laws regulating the fertility industry, in a few decades, a similar menu of genetic modifications, no doubt, will be available to prospective parents.

Please keep the focus of mitochondrial disease research on treating patients and not on germ-line genetic engineering. As Americans become more wary of genetically modified organisms in their food supply, understanding that such modifications have unintended and possibly unhealthy side effects, it would be unthinkable to move forward with the genetic modification of our children and grandchildren.

Talk about speedy work. Hot on the heels of the news that simply dipping adult mouse cells in acid could turn them into cells with the potential to turn into any cell in the body, it appears that the same thing may have been done using human cells.

The picture above, given to New Scientist by Charles Vacanti at Harvard Medical School, is said to be images of the first human "STAP cell" experiments....

Now, Vacanti and his colleagues say they have taken human fibroblast cells and tested several environmental stressors on them in an attempt to recreate human STAP cells. He won't reveal what type of stressors were applied but he says the resulting cells appears similar in form to the mouse STAP cells. His team is in the process of testing to see just how stem-cell-like these cells are.

"The process was very similar to the one we used on mouse cells, but we used human dermal fibroblasts that we purchased commercially," Dr Vacanti said. "I can confirm that stem cells were made when we treated these human cells. They do the same thing [as the mouse cells].

"They revert back to stem cells, and we believe the stem cells are not a contamination in the sample that we were inadvertently sent by the company, but that they are being made, although we still have to do the final tests to prove this," he added.

"The team haven't just made pluripotent cells like embryonic stem cells," says José Silva from the University of Cambridge, "they appear to have made totipotent cells." This means the cells have been rewound to a state with even more flexibility than pluripotent cells, which means they should be easier to manipulate. The only cells known to be totipotent – able to form an embryo and a placenta – in the body are those that have only undergone the first couple of cell divisions immediately after fertilisation. "They are like precursors to embryonic stem cells," says Silva.

"The word totipotent brings up all kinds of issues," says Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology in Marlborough, Massachusetts. "If these cells are truly totipotent, and they are reproducible in humans then they can implant in a uterus and have the potential to be turned into a human being. At that point you're entering into a right-to-life quagmire"

Asked whether it would be possible in theory to follow on from the mouse research to show that skin cells could be turned into viable human embryos – effectively a clone of the donor of the skin samples – Dr Vacanti said: "This is an offshoot, an unintended consequence, so the answer is 'yes' …. This would be the natural conclusion, but I won't be the one that does it."

"The reprogramming step seems to be quite simple, it could be very inexpensive technology for reproductive medicine," agrees Lanza. "But it has more potential for abuse than iPS cells. It'll be interesting how this all plays out, but if it's possible to do this in humans, it changes everything."

Scientists in Japan have developed a way to cheaply and easily take adult cells from mice and reprogram them back to a pluripotent or embryonic-like state. They demonstrated that these cells were capable of becoming all the cells in a full grown mouse.

They call the technique “stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency” or STAP. Unlike, induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) that use viruses to reprogram a very small percentage of adult cells back to pluripotency, STAP uses stressors like acid baths or physical pressure to quickly reprogram a much larger portion of cells.

Continue reading at LifeNews >>

“You think your uterus is why you’re here, but that’s not why you’re here,” the fertility doctor said, sitting behind his desk in a crisp white lab coat, his name embroidered in bright blue thread. His smile was broad and slightly distorted. He reminded me of a car salesman.

Doc proceeded to prattle on while the clock—both proverbial and literal—was ticking. We’d paid $235 for the half-hour consult. What was that, like eight bucks a minute? I just wanted to shake him and go, “Dude, can I have a baby after 40 or not?”

Our doctor reassured us I still had a shot at IVF, even at 43, thanks to a new development in genetic testing known as Comprehensive Chromosome Screening (CCS). It would cost us an extra $5,500, but when you’re throwing down 30K for a designer baby, what’s an extra five thousand?

“That’s a small price to pay for a human life,” my Dad had said.

More than empty promises, what really drove us to keep spending was hope. Hope is like a drug that poisons the rational mind with fantasy about the future. So what if your roots are gray and you love Botox and you’re a beat away from menopause? Just let science take over where nature left off. All you have to do is put your body, your heart, and your wallet on the line....

At what point, I wondered, are doctors simply exploiting our deepest, primal longings? Is that what medicine should be?

Five days after my second and last egg retrieval, we received a call from the embryologist. All 20 of our embryos had died. That was the last time I heard from anyone at the clinic. There was no call from my doctor, or my nurses, no explanations or reassurances, no one to check in and find out how I was doing. It seemed as if I was nothing more than a bad statistic, an expelled patient who had put a ding in their precious success rates. [emphasis mine]

In 1998, researchers discovered how to derive stem cells from human embryos, and in 2006, they determined how to induce some specialized adult cells to take on the genetic characteristics of stem cells. These are called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSC.

iPSC have long been used to treat cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma — it’s what doctors are using when they do bone marrow transplants. The cells are being studied for everything from heart disease to diabetes, but it’s too soon to know if these approaches are safe or effective.

The breakthrough, published in the journal Nature Cell Biology, followed years of research and involved the transformation of human skin cells into an organoid – a functioning "mini-kidney" with a width of only a few millimetres.

A mini-kidney has been grown in an Australian laboratory from what were originally skin cells, boosting hopes for the future treatment of kidney disease.

The study adds support to a science-fiction-like goal of taking skin cells from a patient, using them to grow a kidney and then implanting it into the same patient, circumventing problems with transplant rejection....

The team manipulated skin cells that had been effectively turned into embryonic stem cells so that they began to "self-organise", arranging themselves into complex structures.

SAMANTHAH DONOVAN: The research team was led by Professor Melissa Little from the University of Queensland and also involved scientists from the Murdoch Children's Research Institute and Monash University.

Professor Little's UQ colleague, Brandon Wainwright, says the team has managed to turn an embryonic stem cell into a functioning component of the kidney.

BRANDON WAINWRIGHT: Melissa for many years has been following the natural genetic signals that occur early in embryonic development that lead to the formation of the kidney.

So they took a human embryonic stem cell and put it in a dish and then tried to teach it - based on their knowledge of many years of discovery - that they tried to teach it to become a kidney. And it seems like they succeeded.

I was wondering if you knew of any websites or resources that support people struggling after being conceived using IVF. I've been searching and searching online, and I've been unable to find a single source of advice.

I was one of three embryos created in the process, but I was the only one who survived. I mourn my siblings every single day. I can't talk about them with my parents, because bringing the subject up inevitably causes fights, and they don't feel the way I in the do. They don't regret what they did, they don't see anything wrong with IVF, and they don't count my siblings as members of the family. They never bring them up in conversation, and when I talk about them, they'll concede that they are my siblings, but it's only to make me feel better. I don't think they really believe it. If they did, they'd regret what they did. When people asked how many children they had, they'd say three. They'd talk about them as members of the family, and say how much they wished they could be there at Christmas and birthdays. My mum would light candles for them at church and have Masses said for them. But it's just me. I'm the only one who seems to care about them.

It hurts me every time I see in the news something about IVF, because the media treats it as if it's okay. There's never any mention that people die during the process. I don't even know if there's anyone else out there who feels the same way I do. If there is, I've never met them. Sometimes, I feel like a freak. The only person I've found who understands me at all is my local priest, who I've spoken to about everything, but I can't be bothering him all the time! It'd be nice to have someone else who understood.

Most of society is under the impression that human augmentation is something that our grandchildren will have to deal with. Stuff for T.V. and big screens. I have been screaming from the rooftops that this is something we need to discuss now because it is happening now.

Case in point, this crowd-funded project that is looking into augmenting human vision so that we can see in the near infrared range. Infrared light is light that has a longer wavelength than red light and so is not in the range that we call "visible light." Their goal is to use dietary restrictions and supplements to increase porphyropsin in the human eye. It is porphyropsin that would allow the eye to see wavelengths longer than the visual range. The website asks "Can we biologically extend the range of human vision into the near infrared?" and explains how they plan to proceed:

We have developed a protocol to augment human sight to see into the near infrared range through human formation of porphyropsin, the protein complex which grants infrared vision to freshwater fish.

Retinal, or Vitamin A (A1), which is found bound to opsin proteins is a keystone of the visual pathway. The cone cells are granted sharp color vision by the complex photopsin. The rod cells which provide us with night vision and recognition of movement do so utilizing rhodopsin. Both of the complexes consist of a type of protein bound to retinal. Porphyropsin differs from this in that it doesn't use retinal, but rather a derivation called 3,4-dehydroretinol, or Vitamin A2 (A2).

The human body is fully capable of metabolizing and using A2; unfortunately the proteins which allow for transport through cell membranes have nearly 4 times the affinity for A1 compared to A2. We theorize that this can be overcome through a stringent Vitamin A1 restricted diet, supplemented with Vitamin A2.

We are also hoping to use this study as a proof of concept to continue working on a more long term modification to human vision that doesn't rely on dietary restrictions / supplementation.