Category Archives: Transhuman News

NEW ORLEANS

Damon Thibodeaux received the ovation you'd expect of a man who's just been exonerated of a crime he didn't commit.

WGNO News Reporter Darian Trotter asked, "How do you feel now? Free, Thibodeaux replied."

Damon Thibodeaux has been on death row in Louisiana since October, 1997.

He was convicted of the murder and rape of his 14-year old step-cousin, Crystal Champagne.

It was a crime for which he had been coerced into falsely confessing.

But DNA and other evidence have proven his innocence.

It took seven years and hundreds of thousands of dollars of DNA testing for the Innocence Project and Jefferson Parish prosecutors to exonerate Thibodeaux.

"When you think you have an innocent man and people on both sides can get together and really share evidence and conduct an investigation into the search for the truth that's what's important. So we are tremendously indebted to Paul Connick and his team for the cooperation and the integrity with which they went about this process," Innocence Project Co-Director Barry Scheck said.

Thibodeaux makes the 300th person to be exonerated by DNA evidence in the U.S. And the 18th who served time on death row.

Link:
DNA Clears Death Row Inmate

VANCOUVER - RCMP scientists will continue to resubmit DNA to Interpol after announcing this week the process confirmed a dead U.S. convict killed at least one of the 18 victims on B.C.'s so-called Highway of Tears, an investigator said Thursday.

Staff Sgt. Wayne Clary said samples of genetic material submitted to the international law enforcement agency have to meet standards, which could mean having to isolate the suspects DNA from other contaminants, including blood from the victim.

That was the case in victim Colleen MacMillens murder: her blood was mixed with that of her presumed killer, Bobby Jack Fowler. (Fowlers guilt is not proven in a court of law because of his passing in 2006 in an Oregon prison.)

A previous attempt five years ago to separate Fowlers blood was unsuccessful, but new technology made it possible this year. That meant the isolated Fowler DNA was now acceptable for comparison with international police records.

Were very cognizant of advances in DNA and we would resubmit when we can, Clary told QMI Agency. In particular, when there are older cases that have already gone through (our system) once.

The investigator said police have also traced four additional British Columbian male suspects -- two living and two dead -- related to the missing and murdered women.

One of the suspects continues to be sought in connection to Maureen Mosies death. The 33-year-old was last seen alive in Salmon Arm on May 8, 1981. The next day, her remains were located 100 kilometres west, near Kamloops.

Mounties still seek witnesses who saw a two-door compact car with an Alberta plate driven by a man with a dark beard.

We think whoever drove that car killed Maureen Mosie.

Though no names were released, Clary said the two dead suspects linked to two separate killings perished before the Highway of Tears task force launched in 2005.

Continued here:
DNA remains focus in Highway of Tears cases

27 September 2012 Last updated at 13:20 ET

Police forces in England and Wales have begun a large-scale operation to collect DNA samples from about 12,000 serious offenders who are not on the national DNA database.

Operation Nutmeg will see officers collect swabs from sex offenders and murderers living in the community.

Criminals are often not on the database if they were convicted before 1994, when sample-taking became routine.

The scheme has been launched after a successful pilot exercise in Hampshire.

Police hope the collection of thousands of new samples could help to solve so-called cold-cases, where a new sample is linked to a past crime.

Speaking at a briefing on Thursday, Amanda Cooper, director of information, science and technology at Thames Valley Police, said officers would approach individuals between now and next summer to collect the samples.

Police forces have been given lists of offenders living in their areas and will work though them to collect the samples.

The lists have been drawn up based on information from the Police National Computer, which was first used in the 1970s.

Alex Marshall, the chief constable of Hampshire police, said 167 samples were taken from a list of 471 convicted criminals during the pilot operation.

Continued here:
New drive to take criminals' DNA

By Melissa Lee Phillips, ScienceNOW

Giving a whole new meaning to pregnancy brain, a new study shows that male DNA likely left over from pregnancy with a male fetus can persist in a womans brain throughout her life. Although the biological impact of this foreign DNA is unclear, the study also found that women with more male DNA in their brains were less likely to have suffered from Alzheimers disease hinting that the male DNA could help protect the mothers from the disease, the researchers say.

During mammalian pregnancy, the mother and fetus exchange DNA and cells. Previous work has shown that fetal cells can linger in the mothers blood and bone for decades, a condition researchers call fetal microchimerism. The lingering of the fetal DNA, research suggests, may be a mixed blessing for a mom: The cells may benefit the mothers health by promoting tissue repair and improving the immune system but may also cause adverse effects, such as autoimmune reactions.

One question is how leftover fetal cells affect the brain. Researchers have shown that fetal microchimerism occurs in mouse brains, but they had not shown this in humans. So a team led by autoimmunity researcher and rheumatologist J. Lee Nelson of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, took samples from autopsied brains of 59 women who died between the ages of 32 and 101. By testing for a gene specific to the Y chromosome, they found evidence of male DNA in the brains of 63 percent of the women. (The researchers did not have the history of the womens pregnancies.) The male DNA was scattered across multiple brain regions, the team reports online today in PLoS ONE.

Because some studies have suggested that the risk of Alzheimers disease (A.D.) increases with an increasing number of pregnancies, the team also examined the brains for signs of the disease, allowing them to determine whether A.D. correlated with the observed microchimerism. Of the 59 women, 33 had A.D. but contrary to the teams expectation, the women with A.D. had significantly less male DNA in their brains than did the 26 women who did not have A.D..

Whether that correlation means that fetal male DNA helps protect women against A.D. is unclear, however. To me, this suggests that the presence of fetal cells in the female brain prevents disease, says cardiologist Hina Chaudhry of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

In a study published online in Circulation Research late last year, Chaudhry and colleagues found that fetal cells in mice migrated to the mothers heart, differentiated into functioning cardiac cells, and accelerated repair to damaged heart tissue. So, Chaudhry says, a similar thing could be happening when fetal cells migrate to the brain. I would bet these cells are getting into the maternal brain and are able to differentiate into neurons.

A 2010 study in Stem Cells and Development showed that fetal cells can migrate to the brain of a mother mouse and mature into neurons, Nelson says. But, she adds, it remains unclear if something similar is happening in humans and its also difficult to reach any firm conclusions about a potential link between microchimerism and A.D. Part of the problem is that her team had little information about the pregnancy histories of the women in their study. We have to say we really dont know, she says. I hope that kind of work can be done in the future, but its very difficult to do with human samples.

This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.

Excerpt from:
Bearing Sons Leaves Male DNA Traces in Mom's Brain