Sunday, July 27, 2008

Better Sex Selection Through Chemicals

OK, that's not what these study results (found linked on Broadsheet) are promising. At all.

Research on populations in Greenland and the Russian Arctic suggests that more girls than boys are being born, correlating with the levels of POPs (persistent organic pollutants, like PCBs) in the mother's blood.

You apparently get more boys than girls at a certain (high) level, but then more girls than boys once levels get even higher. I'm imagining this as some sort of weird selling point: "Sure your blood is packed with pollutants, but we've pinpointed the optimum level for son/daughter production!"

We don't really understand the details of how this works, possibly by chemicals mimicking the effects of natural hormones in the blood, but needless to say it has the potential to really throw off some established social and biological balances.

Not covered in the research, presumably because it's too early to tell, is long-term health effects on those children.

Definitely some further evidence of how incompletely we understand human systems, environmental systems, and all kinds of complex, groovy systems that we're not understanding here on the bench...




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