Increased Education for Women NOT Delaying First Child Birth in Malawi

The age at first birth in Malawi has remained constant from 1992 to 2010, despite expanded access to education for girls. Social demographer Monica Grant explores this finding in a new Population Development and Review paper, noting that it does not imply that women would have been better off in the absence of recent education policies.

Dr. Grant notes that young women in Malawi will hopefully be able to translate their expanded educational opportunities into improved health and well-being for their children, even without a rise in the age at first birth.

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Autism and a Ted Talk

Human Brain Metabolic Requirements Linked to Extended Childhood?

Why does it take so long for human children to grow up? A male chimp and male human, for example, both end up with the same body weight but they grow very differently: at year one the human weighs twice that of the chimp but at eight the chimp is twice that of the human. The chimp then gains its adult weight by 12 – six years before the human. A male gorilla is also a faster growing primate – a 330-pound male gorilla weighs 110 pounds by its fifth birthday and 265 pounds by its tenth.

Clues to the answer can be found in the young human brain’s need for energy. Radioactive tracers allow scientists to measure the glucose used in different areas of the brain but this procedure is only used rarely when it is justified by investigating neurological problems. However, the few cases we do have reveal how radically different the childhood brain is from that in adults or infants.

From about the age of four to puberty, the young brain guzzles glucose – the cerebral cortex, its largest part, uses nearly (or more than) double that used earlier or later in life. This creates a problem. A child’s body is a third of the size of an adult but its brain is nearly adult-sized. Calculated as a share, a child’s takes up half of all the energy used by a child.

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Autism is Tied to Parental Age, Especially Maternal Age

Older parents are more likely to have a child who develops an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) than are younger parents. A recent study from researchers from the Drexel University School of Public Health in Philadelphia and Karolinska Institute in Sweden provides more insight into how the risk associated with parental age varies between mothers' and fathers' ages, and found that the risk of having a child with both ASD and intellectual disability is larger for older parents.

In the study, published in the February 2014 issue of the International Journal of Epidemiology, researchers report that fathers' and mothers advancing ages have different impacts on their child's risk. The rise in ASD risk with parental age was greater for older mothers as compared to older fathers.

"The open question at hand really is, what biological mechanisms underlie these age effects?" said Brian K. Lee, PhD, an assistant professor in the Drexel University School of Public Health and research fellow of the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute, and senior author of the study. The observed differences in risk based on mothers' and fathers' ages point to a need to continue investigating underlying mechanisms of ASD that may be influenced by a mother's age, Lee said, even though much recent discussion has focused on fathers' and even grandfathers' ages.

The risk of having a child with ASD had a more complicated relationship to age in women than in men – whose risk of fathering a child with ASD increased linearly with age across their lifespan. Among women giving birth before the age of 30, the risk of ASD in the child showed no association with age -- it was simply very low. But for babies born to mothers aged 30 and older, the chance of developing ASD rose rapidly with the mother's age.

Lee noted that the non-linear maternal age effect that is relatively stronger than the paternal age effect on ASD risk has been observed in previous studies, but has not received much attention.

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23andme's Patent: Are My Children the Last Generation Not to be "Genetically" Engineered?

As described in a patent recently granted by the United States Patent Office, consumer genomics company 23andMe has developed a system for helping prospective parents choose the traits of their offspring, from disease risk to hair color. Put another way, it’s a designer baby-making system.

The company says it does not intend to use the technology this way. “When we originally introduced the tool and filed the patent there was some thinking the feature could have applications for fertility clinics,” said Catherine Afarian, a 23andMe spokeswoman. “But we’ve never pursued the idea, and have no plans to do so.”

Filed in December 2008, the patent — number 8543339, “Gamete donor selection based on genetic calculations” — sounds like something out of Gattaca, the 1997 movie that came to symbolize tensions between self-determination and biologically ordained fate.

The patent describes a technology that would take a customer’s preferences for a child’s traits, compute the likely genomic outcomes of combinations between a customer’s sperm or egg and other people’s sex cells, and describe which potential reproductive matches would most likely produce the desired baby.

Among the traits listed in the application as examples of possible choice are: height, weight, hair color, risks of colorectal cancer and congenital heart defects, expected life span, expected lifetime health care costs, and athleticism. The company, which has about 400,000 customers, offers genomic analysis of more than 240 traits altogether, from Alzheimer’s disease risk to breast shape and memory. Additional traits from this longer list could presumably be used the same way.

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I am actually not against genetically engineering our offspring.  There are NUMEROUS defects which could be edited out relatively easily if caught early on (cystic fibrosis, anyone?).  However, the difficulties and dangers need to be approached carefully for traits which are multigene.  Those have complications past a single trait.