Jonathan Jarry Profile picture
Aug 15, 2020 13 tweets 4 min read Read on X
So many people are curious about their genes. These same people might get curious about their “true biological age” and companies are happy to take their money. I just wrote about it. Here’s what I found. THREAD. Image
23andMe has become the “Kleenex” of the direct-to-consumer genetic testing world. It’s short-hand for the type of product itself. You spit and get back a report about your genetic risk for cardiovascular disease, for hating the taste of cilantro and for having a unibrow.
But there’s a new tide rising: direct-to-consumer EPIGENETIC kits. Already a few companies are offering these very expensive saliva/blood/urine kits ($300-700 US) to give you tailored reports on how your body is truly aging and what to do about it.
Is it pseudoscience? I don’t think so. There’s some real, very exciting science behind these kits. This is not flim-flam that uses the language of science to sell you plastic discs that allegedly realign your quantum chakras. The kits test for epigenetic marks on your DNA.
Epigenetics is the science of how your DNA is essentially regulated. Genes, which are specific stretches on your DNA, code for proteins, which do all sorts of wonderful things in the body. But our genes aren’t always active. Sometimes they need to be silenced
One of the main epigenetic regulations of our genes comes in the form of methylation. Imagine you are visually impaired and are reading a text in Braille. You move your fingers over patterns of dots representing letters.
But if a sentence worth of dots is obscured by adhesive putty, you can’t read it. That’s what methylation does to a gene.
These methylation patterns change due to our environment and our behaviour, and some researchers have found specific patterns in them that correlate with our age. Moreover, there’s a theory that this correlation could change in the face of disease.
You could imagine testing for the impact of smoking, drinking, not exercising using these epigenetic marks and being told you are 20 years older than you think you are, and that you need to do X, Y, and Z to turn back the clock.
But is this technology ready for prime time? That’s what I looked into in my latest article for @McGillOSS: mcgill.ca/oss/article/ps…
I’d like to thank the researchers who wrote to me and whose insight helped make the piece more accurate. @mommyphd2 @notthatdrjones @nprovencal1 & @CaulfieldTim.
Teasing apart good science from bad science is becoming more and more difficult as knowledge grows more complex and specialized. I can’t do it on my own, so thank you to those who help me along the way!
Also, I’m really proud of the title of my piece and stand by it. “Direct-to-Consumer 2: Epigenetic Boogaloo.” Go read it: mcgill.ca/oss/article/ps… #scicomm #epigenetics

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More from @crackedscience

Dec 8, 2020
I've been reading about the Pfizer clinical trial data for their COVID-19 vaccine today, so I'm gonna write a thread about what I learned.

Overall, remarkable safety and efficacy.

Here we go!
The vaccine is shipped as a multi-dose vial, frozen between -80 and -60C, and it has to be thawed and reconstituted with a sterile saline solution.

The vaccine does not have any preservative (one less topic we need to rehash with vax hesitant people....)
The most common side effects reported:
- Injection site rx (84%)
- Fatigue (63%)
- Headache (55%)
- Muscle pain (38%)
- Chills (32%)
- Joint pain (24%)
- Fever (14%)
Read 19 tweets
Dec 7, 2020
A must-read for new skeptics who see themselves as righteous warriors against the frauds of the pseudoscience world (I remember what that's like).
I read Chris' book chapter, from which he quotes in his piece, and want to share a few very interesting insights from it. Dare I say, I may have changed my mind on this topic.
"Were all who claimed psychic abilities either deliberate frauds or suffering from some sort of mental illness? This was certainly true of some claimants, but my personal view [...] is that the vast majority are neither fraudulent nor crazy."
Read 6 tweets
Nov 6, 2020
"A widely ridiculed paper about jade amulets possibly protecting against COVID-19 makes us wonder what systems are in place to review outlandish claims."

My latest for @McGillOSS w/ quotes from @NaomiOreskes @CaulfieldTim @KimmelmanJ

mcgill.ca/oss/article/co…
I felt it important to reach out to the lead author. We chatted for over an hour. A few details that didn't make it into the article to follow.
The NIH did not fund this paper. It funded other studies of his that involved rats. When some of these rats got sick, Bility tied that to his hypothesis and wrote the paper.
Read 6 tweets
Oct 29, 2020
I do not have the strength to read this paper.

"University of Pittsburgh."

Argues that amulets may prevent COVID-19.

sciencedirect.com/science/articl… Image
"We propose that the ferromagnetic-like iron stores in humans are the unifying determinant for COVID-19-induced morbidity and mortality."

Seriously, WTF? What decides if you get severe COVID and die from it is how much iron is in you because of magnetic fields??
"This work seeks to advance the science of public health, as it lays the foundation for the unification of dynamics in the ferromagnetic-like iron-containing human-biosphere and geosphere via the empirical laws and the theoretical frameworks of condensed matter physics."
Read 8 tweets
Sep 26, 2020
Dr. Andrew Kaufman made the rounds in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic by claiming the virus did not exist. Now, he tells hundreds of thousands of YouTube users that everything they know about medicine is wrong.

mcgill.ca/oss/article/co…
There was so much I didn’t have room to discuss or link to in my article, so here are some extra thoughts and links.

THREAD!
If you’re curious about the scientific link between exosomes and viruses, there’s a pretty cool piece here that I skimmed while looking into this topic: quantamagazine.org/cells-talk-in-…
Read 11 tweets
Sep 25, 2020
"But if we are all shouting into our own echo chambers about risky behaviors, shaming may better serve our own reputations than the collective welfare."

nejm.org/doi/full/10.10…
"She stressed that she trusted Weiss far more than other experts because he had an open mind & no agenda. When I asked what would increase her trust in medical expertise, she said part of the problem was that 'People think doctors know everything. But you’re just people'."
"She wished they would admit when they were wrong and more readily acknowledge uncertainty. 'I just wish the experts would say, I don’t know'."
Read 4 tweets

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