ARE SOME PEOPLE TOO MUCH TROUBLE?

The earliest days of gestation

This is a quote from the website of TransOva, which moves the little conception starts of a new creature at the 7th day of development, out of one womb into another.  “Embryo Transfer (ET) is an advanced reproductive technology and a progressive tool that can help you produce more offspring from an elite cow and can extend the impact of outstanding cattle genetics. . .

“Conventional (in vivo) ET involves specific hormonal treatment (with follicle stimulating hormone) of donor cows and heifers to cause multiple follicles to ovulate. The donors are bred using artificial insemination (AI) following this superovulation regime and estrus or standing heat.  Approximately seven days after insemination, embryos are non-surgically collected or “flushed” from the donor’s uterus and transferred fresh into synchronous recipients who will serve as surrogate mothers. The embryos may also be cryopreserved or frozen to be transferred at a later point in time.  The frozen embryos will be maintained in liquid nitrogen storage vessels until they are thawed and transferred.” 

Fisting a cow to transfer an embryo

The process is the same for all mammals.  The relevant practice for humans is called surrogate pregnancy.  It’s quite common for humans and very ordinary on modern ranches.  A ranch here in Valier ships frozen cattle embryos around the planet.    

In the natural world, no one knows how many morulas and blastocysts don’t survive.  It turns out that the uterus is not very pleased to shelter a new being of a different genome. Some morning sickness is partly the result of the uterus thinking there’s a germ or foreign object to get rid of, while the developing embryo claims its right to exist and grow into a real baby.  There’s a certain amount of grappling that goes on and sometimes the embryo loses.  This kind of loss is usually early in the first trimester.

The eight cell stage

Recent thinking about humans is that there are three trimesters IN the uterus and a “fourth trimester” of development, actual gestation, OUTSIDE the mother but as close as possible to the mother (or a clever imitation of her, an incubator).  It is during this fourth three-month trimester that the most human parts of “human” are completed.  None of the great apes have a fourth trimester, because they don’t need it.  Their heads never get that big.  (Go ahead, make a joke.)

Beginning the fourth trimester.

I’ve ordered this book since it hints at how all the mind-boggling bits come together.  How New Humans Are Made: Cells and Embryos, Twins and Chimeras, Left and Right, Mind/self, Soul, Sex, and Schizophrenia  By Charles E. Boklage.  The tiniest dropped stitch, misfolded molecule, varied isotope of an element, and the consequences could be death, malfunction for life, or something new that opens up potential.  Like a gene that confers immunity or at least resistance to HIV.  Pygmies have several of these immunities because over the aeons they’ve endured waves of different strains of HIV.  Many deaths mean tough survivors.

Genetic instructions and their consequences must always grapple with the circumstances of the moment, physical, emotional, geographical, situational.  The mother is a buffer until the “fourth trimester” when the world outside her body, possibly outside her control, get access to the infant at the most vulnerable time of its life.  Many die.  At that point men may be saviors or killers or merely torturers.  Hard to think about.  Often in the newspaper.

Benjamin C. Campbell

A professor requested an article of mine published on paper in the Journal of Pastoral Care and Counselling, which made me curious about his work.  His name is Benjamin C. Campbell and he works at the University of Wisconsin.  His specialty is “The 7R Polymorphism in the Dopamine Receptor D4 Gene (DRD4)” and its consequences in terms of the behavior of men, particularly financial risk-taking, impulsivity, sensation seeking, and some others.  The idea is that particular variations of this gene set produce more testosterone than the average and that the increase endows them with more boldness, willingness to move away and explore, aversion to child-raising, and so on.  All the things we associate with testosterone because it is a politicized hormone, accused of violence.  Many are interested in which components of sexuality can be inherited.

I got these papers off of “Researchgate,” one of several websites that publish academic papers.  They are not easy to read.  Campbell’s studies are very specific about what tests they used: simple “buccal swabbing” which is the q-tip to the inside of the cheek seen on crime shows that reveals DNA, plus a test for testosterone in saliva, which is a fairly stable indicator of testosterone in the whole system.  They (there are several authors for each paper) never make definitive declarations about what testosterone does — it is not established in terms of personality, but that’s why they’re doing the research.  It’s a reality check.  What they found was not either/or results, but rather subtle tilts of a scale.

This is my hand.  What do you think?

Some tests were physical.  It’s proposed that a test for exposure to testosterone in the womb, mostly coming from the mother being under stress and therefore producing adrenaline which converts to testosterone, is that the infant’s index finger will be shorter than the ring finger.  It’s still controversial — far from being a fact — but I’m interested because this is true of my fingers.  My mother is dead, but I think it was probably true of her as well.  And one aunt.  But the three of us had quite different lives, depending on the circumstances, opportunities, educations, and vicissitudes of our times.  None of us had mothers who were safely protected.  My aunt was an army nurse in WWII in London and Rheims.  My mother lived in a neighborhood that became a ghetto.

Among the other tests, which were physical, was one paper and pencil instrument, a Sensation Seeking Survey.  You can take a sample test at http://hsperson.com/test/high-sensation-seeking-test/  It’s speculative.  You might like Myers-Briggs or even a Tarot deck better.  But it’s a good conversation starter. Another test was for markers of masculinity on a full-frontal scan of the face: heaviness of bone around the eyes, size of jaw, beard and so on.   The more like Arnold Schwartzenegger, the more testosterone.

Arnold Schwartzenegger

There was no test for being gay.  Gay includes a broad span of types of men.  There IS no genetic test for desire.  What arouses desire, what the dimensions and intensity of it might be, what kind of person — not just what gender — triggers attachment and loyalty, all of that is ground for exploration.  Simple lust, the kind of thing testosterone is supposed to impel, can make a person with a penis fuck a watermelon, regardless of its gender.  But this is not the kind of desire that leads to love attachment.

What Campbell was testing was “the 7 R (I think that means there are 7 repeats — genes often repeat) Polymorphism" (that means many forms) in the "Dopamine Receptor D4 Gene (DRD4)."  We have to pause to say that dopamine is a molecule that carries messages through the neurological system.  It works, like most of the loops in the body, by going and coming, rising and falling, and in reciprocity with an opposite, and affecting other molecular pathways.  As with the familiar phenomenon of diabetes when a cell's receptors won't let insulin into the cell, what Campbell et al are studying is not testosterone itself, but the number of receptors in the cells.  I don't quite get this, but I think they are not looking at the generation of testosterone, but rather the ability to use it in cells.  This is something like measuring antibodies (a response) to determine infection.  

Dopamine is one of the most important circuits, but more than that, it has been implicated in reward and motivation, sexual and pair-bonding behavior.  Long alleles (an allele is a section of genes along the chromosome) of these specific genes that seem to affect behavior are DRD4 and DRD2.  (I haven’t decoded them yet.  They’re about location.)  They seem to influence the desire for sexual novelty, early first intercourse, and some confusing variations in the number of children produced: fewer for some ethnic groups and more for others.

Prairie Voles in Love

We’ve all been fascinated by the two kinds of prairie voles which are either faithful to one partner for their whole lives and dependably help to raise the children if they live on the flats and the opposite if they live in the mountains.  It is genetically controlled: the epigenome has shut off genes in one or the other.  But so far the experiments I’ve seen only deal with vasopressin and oxytocin rather than dopamine.  The idea is that the difference arose because of different chemical systems, like the testosterone tilts that make some people more up for adventure and exploring.  Those voles went uphill and in the process lost the loop for loving family.  Some suggest that American pioneers did that as well, making them poor husbands and fathers, even dangerous for fourth trimester infants.

These dopamine alleles might have originated -- and been positively selected for -- between 40 and 50 thousand years ago, about the time Neanderthals began to die out.  These alleles might key into the great migrations of people across the Eurasian and African continents, but would also be affected by the climate of the times — temperature, water levels, and so on.  I’ll keep thinking about it.  I think some boys who are now discarded by our society as too rowdy, too inclined to trouble, too sexy, might be exactly the people we need and who will survive the terrifying migrations we are witnessing in our own times.

 Homo ergaster boy found at Koobi Fora (died at 12)

SEROTONIN AND ITS AGONISTS (ahem)

Sometimes I wish I’d taken organic chemistry back there somewhere.  I wish that for about three minutes.  Then I get busy to try to figure out this stuff without tinkertoy diagrams of what’s connected to what.  The main interacting three I have trouble figuring out are serotonin, dopamine and epinephrine/norepinephrine.  The figure above means nothing to me so far.   I don't think it's a VENN diagram.  I do know that the three are monoamines.  Thus:  "Monoamines are any of a class of compounds derived from ammonia by replacement of one or more hydrogen atoms with organic groups." "Organic chemistry involves the scientific study of the structure, properties, and reactions of organic compounds and organic materials, i.e., matter in its various forms that contain carbon atoms."  This is why smart alec college students taking organic chemistry refer to their parents as "carbon units."

I’ll use the rest of this post on serotonin and put the other two off to the future.  I’ll cherry pick some characteristics, but they are much complicated by the context, because what an increase or decrease “does” depends on what all the other molecules are doing and how much of them is present.  At animal control we knew that an out-of-control horse that had to be darted with tranquilizer would react one way before it was really full of adrenaline, and the opposite way if it had been thoroughly terrified and driven.  Making the judgment on the state of a horse is no easier than making the same judgement about a street person on the rampage.  The consequences can be fatal.  So sometimes "control" means just "give it time and space to calm down."  (Tell the cops.)

Serotonin is one of the molecules that make the synapses between neurons work. 

Serotonin is chemically derived from tryptophan and is primarily found in the guts, platelets (the little blood cell entities that control clotting) and and the brains and spines of animals, including humans. It is popularly thought to be a contributor to feelings of well-being and happiness. 

Approximately 90% of the human body’s total serotonin is located in the epithelial (skin)-derived cells that line the GI tract, where the molecule regulates intestinal movements.   If it detects toxins and sometimes other dangers, it empties the gut fast.  These interact with -- but do not have the same origin as -- the enteric nerve cell network embedded in the gut walls that connects to the autonomic nervous pathways. These include the regulation of mood, appetite, and sleep.  Infant stuff: eat, sleep, cry, babble, the foundation of everything else.

It is claimed that serotonin has some kind of interaction with the social order -- that it keeps subordinates from running away while encourages flight in isolates and alphas.  Alpha male macaque monkeys have twice the level of serotonin in the brain than that found in subordinate males and females. Dominance and high levels of cerebro-serotonon levels seem to go hand in hand.  But not in dominant females.  No one knows  why.  

The vagus nerve (a big part of the enteric autonomic nerve system) sends information directly from the gut to the brain, but if it is cut, the guts go on working.  No one knows what this means, but it seems like a good thing.

Molecular action in the brain (and in the rest of the body) is a matter of emitting and receiving.  The number and willingness of receivers has as much to do with what happens as does the amount and timing of the emissions.  For instance, this ominous sentence:  “In humans, levels of 5-HT_1A receptor activation in the brain show negative correlation with aggression, and a mutation in the gene that codes for the 5-HT_2A receptor may double the risk of suicide for those with that genotype.”  In ordinary English, I take this to mean that if one kind of serotonin receivers are taking in the hormone, the person will calm down, but if another kind of receptor is mutated (no indication whether that would mean taking in more or less) then the withdrawal will become aggression turned against the self or even the ultimate withdrawal of suicide, depending upon how you interpret the act and its circumstantial causes.  Suicide can be lashing out as well as simple departure. 

psilocybin mushrooms

“The psychedelic drugs psilocin/psilocybin, DMT, mescaline, phencyclidine and LSD are agonists, primarily at 5HT_2A/2C receptors. . . .  ⁽Agonist: A substance that acts like another substance and therefore stimulates an action. Agonist is the opposite of antagonist.  Antagonists and agonists are key players in the chemistry of the human body and in pharmacology.”)  So the psychedelic molecules are not primary substances, but intensify the main hormones by the action of “agonists” or allies at the receptors. 

“The empathogen-entactogen MDMA releases serotonin from synaptic vesicles of neurons.”  Once again, this is the ground of controversy.  The effect of the popular drug seems to be peace, harmony, sympathy and a kind of hypnotic susceptibility to suggestion.  But some object that patients will resist anything called an “empathogen” because they won’t connect it to “empathy” but rather to “pathology.”  Maybe since the effect is sort of beatific, they would accept the term “entheogen,” meaning a drug that connects one to God.  What’s in a name?  Opinion.

And then there’s the idea that maybe the therapist should be the one to take a bit of this in order to better to respond to his or her clients, remaining calm though horrific narratives.  But what if the alpha therapist taking serotonin releasers loses his place in the pecking order and flees the room?  Should all therapists be female (esp. if they are macque monkeys) so they will not be susceptible to this effect?  What if the effect on the client is to over-empower him or her?  Therapists are not exactly safe in there alone with someone unstable.  Some of them have an alarm buzzer that rings to bring help, like the ones at the bank teller wickets in case of a holdup.

All this stuff (meaning molecules) is interactive, partly produced by the body and affected by emotion (yes, even “empathic” emotion from someone else’s experience) as well as present in such unsuspected “health food” sources as St. John’s Wort and ginseng.  It’s not impossible for interactions to trigger “serotonin overload” which includes all the basic generalized stress symptoms like confusion, agitation or restlessness, dilated pupils, headache, changes in blood pressure and/or temperature, nausea and/or vomiting, diarrhea, rapid heart rate, tremor, loss of muscle coordination or twitching muscles, shivering and goose bumps, heavy sweating.  In short, it would be tough to tell whether the victim were suffering from alcohol poisoning, electric shock or Ebola unless there were clues in the situation. 

The Borgias

My better judgment being undermined due to a shortage of streaming BBC Masterpiece Theatre series, I’ve been watching “The Borgias.”   Since the terms of drama are protagonist and antagonist, It could be called “the story of Pope Serotonin,” all about pecking order, kings as "agonists", the Vatican as an enteric nerve/mucous membrane digester of strategy, and whether it would be better to survive through retreat or by empathogens that really ARE pathological.  All those toxic chemicals sneaking around in food and drink!  The essentials of Communion reverting to carnivory and agony!  The longing for MDMA becoming mammary, for the women are not so much the victims of serotonin pecking order and are often soothers.

A Borg, surely a Puritan

This is all pretty imaginary, which is a precursor of science, but not science until it’s tested and the causal links are found.  Whether it is sparing us from Borgians or Borgs is a different question.  But image is an agonist for inspiration.