DNA: Freeing the Innocent

What if you were wrongly accused of something you didn’t do? Not anything small like stealing from a store, but something huge like raping and murdering someone. Would you give up thinking there would never be a chance to prove your innocence now that you are stuck in jail? Or would you do anything to prove your innocence? Sometimes proving your innocence is as simple as getting your DNA tested again and putting that before a court again.

A podcast originally aired on April 19, 2002 called “210: Perfect Evidence” talked about how DNA has been helping free wrongly convicted prisoners. One of the cases they talked about which they called “Hawks and Rabbits.” In this case a few teenagers were convicted for raping and murdering a girl in 1986. She was found near the railroad tracks with her head bashed in by a rock. No arrests were made for quite some time, this led to the community becoming restless and the police becoming pressured. Eventually the police made an arrest, 16-year-old Larry Ollins. The officers interrogated him but were unable to get a confession so they turned to his friend, Marcellius Bradford and his 14-year-old cousin, Calvin. The officers beat up Marcellius until he gave in and signed the confession. They lied to Calvin saying that he could go as soon as he signed a confession, instead they locked him up along with Larry. While locked up Larry heard the news on TV and they were telling people what had happened at the crime scene, which later they found out was completely bogus. The police officers brought in Omar Saunders and told him that he was to say that he was breaking into some railroad cars when he heard a scream and decided to investigate, he was to say that he saw four black guys and a white. When Omar refused they charged him with murder along with Larry and Calvin. At their trials they all were convicted and were sent off to jail. They wrote many appeals but none of them were ever accepted. In the 1990’s Larry was hopeful that DNA would help exonerate them. Omar told Larry that at his trial the prosecutor said that the blood type in the semen matched everybody but himself. Larry then told Omar that the prosecutor said that the blood type matched everybody but himself. Omar realized that this meant that the prosecutor gave conflicting testimony.  After getting all of them to sign a paper verifying their blood types they still had a hard time getting the judge to review their case. Omar eventually found a magazine profile about a lawyer named Kathleen Zellner. Zellner was known for helping free wrongly convicted prisoners usually by using DNA. She spent 800 hours off the clock and spent $50,000 of her own money to ensure that their case would get back into court. Along the way she had an independent lab test the men’s’ DNA which they found out did not match any of the DNA found at the crime scene. The men were exonerated 15 years after they had been wrongly convicted.

I am surprised at how out of hand this case got, the police were desperate to convict someone for the atrocious murder, and they didn’t care if the evidence matched up or not. They just wanted to solve the case and put it behind them. I am happy that they finally did get released but at the same time I am disappointed that they were convicted in the first place. DNA testing in my opinion is something that should be tested for every crime possible.

Eat to Starve Cancer

Eat to starve cancer it’s a simple as that. Just changing your diet could actually help stop, reduce, and prevent cancer from ever forming. Some of the foods are in our daily lives already; strawberries, pineapples, artichokes, even dark chocolate. All these foods have a single thing in common that helps prevent cancer. That thing is called antiangiogenesis.

     In the TED talk that we watched William Li explained the root cause of many diseases that inflict our body. From arthritis to obesity to cancer; they are all caused by too much angiogenesis. Angiogenesis is the process of building blood vessels. Most angiogenesis happens when are children and only happens in a few cases when we are adults. When cancer first forms it is microscopic and cannot grow any larger because it is not getting any type of blood supply. The danger is when the cancer mutates and sends out signals for the angiogenic process to begin there by recruiting its own blood supply allowing it to grow. A new cancer has been on the rise. Antiangiogenic therapy which is in a way better than chemo therapy because it selectively targets the weaker blood vessels of the tumor. By destroying the weaker blood vessels of cancer we can effectively starve cancer of its required nutrients. After William Li explained the idea of using angiogenesis to treat cancer he went further and explained that it might be possible to prevent cancer from ever forming blood vessels. Our diets account for 30-35% of the environmental factors that cause cancer. Usually this means that food are taken out of our daily diets to prevent cancer but William Li took a different idea. He wondered what could actually be added into our diets. Antiangiogenic components are naturally found in a variety of food at different levels of potency. To think just eating everyday foods can help prevent cancer.

     This was really interesting to learn. I really enjoy the idea of being able to just eat foods that will help prevent cancer, I already enjoy quite a few of the foods on the list. In my opinion it would be a great idea to spread this information around the world as fast as possible. It may not be an absolute way to prevent cancer but it is taking a step closer. Not only we need to cure cancer we also need to find a way to prevent cancer and with each scientific advancement we are getting a step closer.

Lucy The Chimpanzee

     Chimpanzees are known to be our closest living relative. But what does that mean? It means that we share over 90% of our genes with chimpanzees. Is that enough for them to be raised as humans? That is what Maurice Temerlin and his wife Jane wanted to find out.
     After acquiring Lucy when she was just a day old Maurice and Jane raised her as a human. She learned how to hold a bottle and eventually how to eat using silverware. Lucy learned how to dress herself and how to talk using sign language. Eventually though Lucy became too strong and began destroying everything. Maurice and Jane made the decision to send Lucy back to the wild. They sent Lucy to Gambia where she was admitted into a rehabilitation center. She did not do well there so Janis Carter  took Lucy and the other chimpanzees to a deserted island in hopes that they will adjust better there. While the other chimps adjusted and soon left Janis alone, Lucy refused to leave Janis. Whenever Lucy saw that Janis was looking in her direction she would sign "hurt" as in her feeling were hurt.
      Janis stayed for many years trying to get Lucy to adjust. Lucy finally began to act more like a chimp and Janis finally was able to leave the island. Janis did not stop foot on the island until a year later when could no longer resist checking up on the chimps. When she arrived on the island Lucy came up and gave her a hug, but soon left with the other chimps, without looking back, a sign that she no longer needed Janis to survive. A year later Janis came back and found Lucy's decomposed skeleton with the head and hands detached, they assumed that Lucy was poached.
     Lucy taught me that chimpanzees, when raised as a human, can be very human-like in most aspects. Lucy taught me that being human is not just about our DNA or the way we look, it is also how we are raised. For years I have known that chimpanzees are our closest living relative but I never realized how close they actually were until I heard about Lucy, now I know that being our closest living relative does mean something. To me the experiment was worthwhile, it gave us a better understanding of Chimps, but that does not mean there was a downside. The downside was that since Lucy was so acclimated to humans and had never seen a reason to be afraid of them. This meant that when people came to the island Lucy would approach them without fear, somebody probably took advantage of this and decided to poach her. To me that is the greatest reminder of why it is best for wild animals to not be near us without caution or fear.

Think Like a Mountain by Aldo Leopold......

     The natural selection is an important thing. When an animal is lost with in their order the whole system has been lost. That is the idea in the article Think Like a Mountain by Aldo Leopold.

     In this article Leopold begins by talking about how every living and dead thing knows the howl of a wolf and what it meant to them. For a coyote it's a promise of leftover meat soon to come, for a hunter it's a challenge of bullet against fang. Later on he describes how when he saw the wolf he killed die, he saw the the fire in her eyes fade. He then realized that for each wolf he killed, he was also destroying the mountain. The wolves help keep the deer population under control, too many deer means that the the sides of the mountains are slowly picked clean of vegetation leaving it vulnerable to erosion. Not only do wolves protect the mountain, they also protect the fields. When they kill and eat cows they are controlling how many cows deplete the ground of its dirt-holding-grass, taking out the excess cows helps prevent dust bowls.

   To me this reminds me not to think only as a human and how animals harm us but to also think as an animal and how a human harms our natural system of selection.

TED Talk: How I Fell in Love With a Fish

Fish, an enjoyable meal, has become harder and harder to get without impacting our environment. Farm-raised fish is a good option to help with the environmental impact. However they do pollute and are not very sustainable. The average food consumption ratio is 15:1. Which means it takes 15lbs of wild fish to give us 1lb of farmed tuna. That is not very sustainable. Dan Barber, a chef, thought he had found this great company for farming fish.  They farmed so far out in the ocean that the waste from the fish gets distributed instead of concentrated which equals less pollution. Their food ratio was only 2.5:1, for every 1lb of fish there was 2.5lbs of sustainable protein which consisted of algae, fish meals, and chicken pellets (feathers, skin, and bone marrow). 30% of their sustainable protein was the chicken pellets. Needless to say Dan soon fell out of love with that fish.

 Then in Spain he found this new glorious fish. The chef had really overcooked but surprisingly it still tasted really good. This chef was also a biologist who had gotten this fish from a fish farm in southern western corner of Spain. This farm was like no other, it was originally meant to raise beef in the swamp land. To do this they pushed they water out of the land, which caused major ecological impacts. Not long afterwards it was converted into a fish farm and they began to push water into the area and flooded the canals creating a 27,000 acre fish farm with various fish including bass, eel, and shrimp. This farm had such a rich system that the fish were eating the same thing as they would in the wild. It is a self-sustaining farm; there is actually an over-abundance of fish. There is enough fish to feed thousands of birds and still have plenty of fish leftover. Some of the birds fly 150,000 miles each way just to feed at the farm. . The fish farm is a natural purification plant. The water comes from the canal is then purified by the ecosystem itself and dumped out into the Atlantic ocean giving us slightly less pollution in the ocean.

My reaction to this is amazed. I am surprised how a somewhat simple idea of flooding the canals led to such an amazing ecosystem. Providing enough fish for the fish farm to also be a bird sanctuary, cleaning the water as it comes into the canals and then placing that clean water into the Atlantic Ocean, and enabling the fish to eat the same things it would in the wild leaving practically no environmental impact. I wish there were more farms like this in the world and fewer farms that feed chicken to the fish. Our meals would probably taste better and there would be definitely less of an environmental impact.  This fish farm became its own ecosystem with little help from people. I am impressed with the fish farm they were able to create.

Hello people of the world.
This is my Biology Blog for my sophomore year at Animas High School. In case you didn't know Animas is a high school located in the lovely town of Durango, CO. This blog is where I will be posting all my thoughts on articles and videos for my biology class this year. Come back often for new posts!