John Hemming's Web Log

As I biohacker I do quite a bit of self-experimentation. There is an interesting ethical question about self-experimentation. Obviously people have the right to make their own decisions. Self Experimentation has a long history in Medicine and at least five Nobel Prize winners have won a prize following self experimentation. However, it is potentially dangerous and people have died. The ethical question is whether researchers should be penalised by being unwilling to self-experiment. To that extent some US ethics committee argue against the academic publishing system accepting the results of self-experimentation. I personally, unsurprisingly, think that is wrong. There should not be a condition of employment that people self-experiment, but it cannot be right to exclude the results. We also need to recognise that there are serious problems with animal experiments. Everything Wrong with Mouse Studies (Kinda) subtitled: Odors, magnetic fields, and even a mouse's siblin...

Professor Thomas Seyfried and the Question: Is Cancer Primarily Nuclear DNA or Mitochondrial DNA? Professor Thomas Seyfried argues that cancer is mainly mitochondrial rather than purely nuclear/genetic. Below are the key experiments supporting the view that cytoplasmic/mitochondrial factors, rather than nuclear mutations alone, drive the malignant phenotype. Nuclear Transfer Experiments (Cancer Nuclei → Normal Cytoplasm) McKinnell, R.G., Deggins, B.A., Labat, D.D. (1969) Transplantation of pluripotential nuclei from triploid frog tumors Science, 165(3891):394-6 Summary: Nuclei from frog renal tumor cells transplanted into enucleated eggs developed into normal swimming tadpoles, demonstrating that cancer nuclei retained developmental pluripotency when placed in normal cytoplasm. McKinnell, R.G. (1979) The pluripotential genome of the frog renal tumor cell as revealed by nuclear transplantation International Review of Cytology Supplemen...

Analysis: mRNA Splicing & Childhood Development This analysis evaluates the role of mRNA splicing in human childhood development, distinguishing between splicing as a primary driver of developmental milestones versus a secondary consequence or fine-tuning mechanism. Executive Summary The evidence indicates that mRNA splicing is a critical functional driver of specific developmental phases in childhood, particularly in brain maturation (synaptic plasticity) and musculoskeletal adaptation . While transcriptional changes (turning genes on/off) generally drive early fetal cell fate , alternative splicing takes over in the postnatal/childhood period to drive cellular maturation . Therefore, splicing is likely a primary driver of functional specialization . 1. The Case for Splicing as a Driver of Childhood Development In this context, "driving" means that the developmental change would not occur—or would occ...