An adoption issue that seems to never go away, from the Philly Inquirer: "For adoptees, racial divide still wide: Families may be colorblind, but the world is not" (Via Negrophile)
Adoption today is a rainbow of color and country; thousands of multiracial families are created in the United States each year by the arrival of children from countries such as China, Guatemala, India and Liberia.Yet it's the pairing of African American children and white parents that stokes the transracial debate and sometimes provokes legal battles, most recently in Chester County.
Why? The answer, experts say, is slavery, the country's primal wound, the issue that has tormented black-white relations for more than three centuries.
Though white people might view interracial adoption as evidence of societal progress, experts say, for many black people it is a painful harkening back to a time when their ancestors were treated as property - and proof that the child-welfare system discourages African American adopters.
Winner of the Lost-in-Translation Headline for Science Research Award*, "X-Men may be closer than you think" (Via Genetics and Health)
Small damages to sequences in the human genome are causing evolutionary changes in our DNA, according to a group of Japanese geneticists.Their recent findings prove that a common form of DNA damage caused by oxidation (called 8-oxoG) is a primary cause of mutagenesis, damage to DNA during the genome replication process that causes mutations in the resulting DNA molecules.
Succinctly, the human race is genetically mutating, and we now may know how and why--at least in part.
Japanese geneticist Yusaku Nakabeppu of Kyushu University and his team released their findings Monday in Genome Research.
"Our findings suggest that 8-oxoG is one of the main causes of frequent recombinations and SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) in the human genome, which largely contribute to the genomic diversity in human beings," the researchers concluded in their Genome Research journal article.
(*Compare the news headline with the journal article one: "A Genome-Wide Distribution of 8-Oxoguanine Correlates with the Preferred Regions for Recombination and Single Nucleotide Polymorphism in the Human Genome.")
And just in case you thought the baby-buying/adoption disruption/immigrant-as-surrogate storyline on Desperate Housewives was 100% fiction: "Wombs for rent in India" from the Toronto Star. (Via Family Law Prof Blog)
ANAND, INDIA—As temp jobs go, Saroj Mehli has landed what she feels is a pretty sweet deal. It's a nine-month gig, no special skills needed and the only real labour comes at the end — when she gives birth.Posted by perry032 at May 9, 2006 10:45 AMIf everything goes according to plan, Mehli, 32, will deliver a healthy baby early next year. But rather than join her other three children, the newborn will be handed over to a U.S. couple who are unable to bear a child on their own and are hiring Mehli to do it for them.
She'll be paid about $5,000 (U.S.) for acting as a surrogate mother, a bonanza that would take her more than six years to earn on her salary as a schoolteacher in a village near here.