September 2008

The first review is in and it’s from Bitch Magazine. I am thrilled to bits they decided to review it and really pleased that Summer Wood, the reviewer, noted that “Karkazis never loses sight of the authentic lived experiences of intersexed people and their families. . . . Fixing Sex . . . offers a compassionately written discussion of interest to anyone concerned with gender and sexuality, health activism, and human rights.” Really, that was the point of writing the book. I was never interested in adding to some academic debate about gender and intersex. Rather, I was interested in the lives of people and I wanted to see if I could add something to the debates that would help to improve treatment. The funny thing about writing a book is that you have all kinds of ideas about what you want to accomplish with the book and how you want to sound (I suppose writerly folks call this voice). I worked on so many drafts for so long I had no idea if I had come anywhere near accomplishing what I set out to do so it’s interesting finally to hear others’ takes on the book. Anyway, if you want to read the review, it’s here.

A new study in Science shows cancer is much more complicated than previously thought, which is going to make developing treatments after a tumor has spread a greater challenge. Some researchers looked at every gene in pancreatic and brain tumors—two of the hardest-to-treat cancers. Apparently new therapies such as Novartis’ Gleevec target one gene, but cancer is actually caused by dozens of mutated genes (at least 60 in these two types of cancer).

Instead of targeting genetic mutations, they argue a better approach is to try to develop drugs that target common pathways (such as the process by which abnormal cells self-destruct) that are abnormal in tumors (this number was closer to a dozen in the study).

The good news is that they seem to have found that it is possible to detect mutations outside of cells, for example in blood, when tumors are still early in their development leading to a much better prognosis for some patients.

Every week the media seem to grossly oversimplify the results of some study making claims that are just over the top. It seems high time to chronicle these. I’ll post the better ones as I find them. Here, my friends, is the cause of marital discord, covered in the esteemed Washington Post: Study Links Gene Variant in Men to Marital Discord.

Men are more likely to be devoted and loyal husbands when they lack a
particular variant of a gene that influences brain activity,
researchers announced yesterday — the first time that science has
shown a direct link between a man’s genes and his aptitude for monogamy.

There’s no time to let these results sit idly by when we can test for the so-called divorce gene:

The finding set off a debate about whether people should conduct
genetic tests to find out whether potential mates are bad marriage
prospects. Several independent scientists called the discovery
remarkable and elegant but disagreed over whether such information
ought to be used in making personal decisions about love and marriage.

Leading our race for over-interpretation is HealthDay News, which claimed “Whether a man has one type of gene versus another could help decide whether he’s good ‘husband material.’”

Heck, why stop at testing when you can move on treatment? This research, the Telegraph notes, “raises the highly speculative possibility that scientists could one day develop drugs to  target the gene in an attempt to prevent marriages from falling apart.” Speculative indeed, but that doesn’t stop them from mentioning it.

As the Brandon Keim notes over at Wired:

…the coverage isn’t just superficially faulty: it’s a fundamental misinterpretation of the findings. There’s a strong link between a gene and a social outcome, but the gene is only marginally interesting; what matters, according to the researchers themselves, are the neural networks implicated by the gene. That’s much less glamorous than blaming marital discord on a  single genetic flaw, but it’s accurate.