Monday, May 15, 2006
You'd Better Work (Together).
A longitudinal study of women has found that career moms in stable relationships seem to be healthier than women who aren't juggling all three roles. This is interesting to me not only on the surface, but because of the follow-up questions. What factors are really involved? How do motherhood, partnership, and work interact for health effects? How can they be increased and achieved by women who, say, don't want kids or a husband/wife*?
Working cooperatively not only allowed quick discovery of the first new primate genus in eighty-some years, but also taught the researchers involved all about how well things work when you play nice. I actually laughed out loud at that bit of the article.
And a warning: before you go stopping a gene product from doing its work, understand all of what it does first. C-myc is generally known as an oncogene - that is, a gene that goes haywire and causes cancer - but a separate line of basic research suggests that its proper role is to regulate memory T cell homeostasis. So, if you block c-myc to treat cancer, you will knock out a good bit of the patient's immune system. Which would be a Bad Thing.
* I'm not really concerned about women who have it easy enough that they don't have to work...lucky bizzatches.
Working cooperatively not only allowed quick discovery of the first new primate genus in eighty-some years, but also taught the researchers involved all about how well things work when you play nice. I actually laughed out loud at that bit of the article.
And a warning: before you go stopping a gene product from doing its work, understand all of what it does first. C-myc is generally known as an oncogene - that is, a gene that goes haywire and causes cancer - but a separate line of basic research suggests that its proper role is to regulate memory T cell homeostasis. So, if you block c-myc to treat cancer, you will knock out a good bit of the patient's immune system. Which would be a Bad Thing.
* I'm not really concerned about women who have it easy enough that they don't have to work...lucky bizzatches.
