Intelligence quotient

• Wahpeton Family Dentistry of Wahpeton, ND is proud to announce the launch of its new mobile-friendly website, located at: https://www.wahpetonfamilydentistry.com .
• WAHPETON, N.D., Nov. 28, 2023 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Wahpeton Family Dentistry of Wahpeton, ND is proud to announce the launch of its new mobile-friendly website, located at: https://www.wahpetonfamilydentistry.com .
• Wahpeton Family Dentistry is led by Dr. Mason Haley, a highly qualified and accomplished dentist who is committed to continuing education in order to provide an advanced level of care.
• Wahpeton Family Dentistry provides routine dental cleanings and exams, as well as a wide variety of advanced procedures designed to improve the health and appearance of patients' smiles in Wahpeton and surrounding areas.

• Candidates sparred over the idea of a federal abortion ban during the Aug. 23, 2023, Republican presidential debate.
• And abortion is likely to figure prominently in the November 2023 contest for a seat on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
• White men controlled people’s reproductive rights during the 20th century, too, with the American eugenics movement.
• As a researcher who specializes in the history of race and racism in the U.S., I study historical issues related to race, gender and social justice.

Enslaved women forced to reproduce

• With this shift, enslavers stepped up the forced breeding of enslaved women.
• White men raped the Black women andgirls they enslaved, and then enslaved the children born from those rapes.
• Because the Black midwives and enslaved women often were blamed for or suspected of using birth control and abortions to resist forced pregnancy and the enslavement of their offspring, enslavers turned increasingly away from midwives and to white male doctors to figure out why nearly half of enslaved infants were stillborn or died within their first year of life and why so many enslaved women were infertile.
• The forced breeding of these enslaved women was linked to the profitability of southern economies.

Eugenics and control over women’s bodies

• Thirty-two states, between 1907 and 1937, enacted forced sterilization mandates to prevent births by people eugenicists considered socially inadequate.
• For example, in North Carolina, which had the country’s third-highest sterilization rate, far more women than men were forcibly sterilized.
• Between 1930 and 1970, close to 33% of the women in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, were forcibly sterilized.
• In California, between 1997 and 2003, 1,400 female inmates, mostly Black, were forcibly sterilized.

The post-Dobbs era

• The Census Bureau projects that in the 2040s, non-Hispanic white people will no longer make up a majority of the U.S. population.
• Black women represent 39% of the country’s abortion patients, but many live in communities that have limited access to family planning clinics.
• As a result, Black women - who experience higher maternal complications and mortality rates - will be forced to give birth to more babies.
• This is another period in the country in which the reproductive health decisions made by mostly white men will harm Black women.

• In a recent article from Nature Genetics_, scientists raise concerns over the social impacts of recent advances in genomics - i.e.
• the study of genomes, or in other words, the genetic material of an individual or species.
• In passages bringing to mind the dystopian sci-fi film Gattaca, they describe a near future in which one’s DNA could foretell one’s physical and intellectual abilities and near-perfect children be conceived in vitro.

What is a GWAS?

• The markers can be considered as small flags planted along the genome, each flag having two possible colours (the alleles).
• The idea behind GWAS is that an association between a marker and a trait allows for the detection of genetic factors independently of environmental factors.

A new market

• 23andMe managed to keep its doors open by changing its approach and collecting DNA to map out the geographical origins of people’s ancestors.
• An important part of these DNAs has been made available to scientific teams, allowing them to perform and publish GWAS on huge samples.
• Four years later, a study based on 3 million individuals found the number of genetic factors multiplied by 4.

The mistaken assumptions behind Polygenic Risk Scores

• The problem is that these conclusions are based on erroneous assumptions and misinterpretation of associations between the traits to be predicted and genetic markers.
• Indeed, Polygenic Risk Scores are specifically based on assumptions put forward in 1965 by Douglas Scott Falconer.

Misinterpretations of the GWAS studies

• Another problem is that Polygenic Risk Scores are based on a flawed interpretation of the GWAS studies.
• For if the link between a trait and genetic marker could indeed indicate a genetic factor, this remains to be confirmed by subsequent family and functional studies.
• For example, a GWAS study comparing people in France who consume salted butter with those who consume unsalted butter would show a large number of genetic markers associated with this trait.

Sociological consequences

• The IQ variable was originally thought out as a tool to measure the adequacy of a child to a given school programme.
• It is not a universal and timeless measure of cognitive abilities, or even of intelligence.

Ethical implications

• In his presidential address to the American Society of Human Genetics in 2015 [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26942276/ref], geneticist Neil Risch mischievously commented the approach and conclusions.
• He calculated the scores of Craig Venter (pioneer of human genome sequencing) and James Watson (co-discoverer of the DNA structure).
• Risch humorously concluded that a below-average score was enough to land a Nobel Prize or the Medal of Science.

A flawed genetic model

• But they merely raise ethical issues, failing to stress, in the process, that the root of the problem remains an inappropriate genetic model and the misinterpretation of associations with genetic markers.
• Yet to deny the validity of genetic predictions of complex traits is not to deny the effect of genetic factors on these traits.

• The "Biden-Harris Get the Lead Out Partnership," announced today at the White House by Vice President Kamala Harris, is intended to foster collaboration to accelerate lead service line replacement across the United States and enable rapid progress toward the Administration's goal of replacing all remaining lead service lines within the next decade.
• Many of the estimated 6 to 10 million remaining lead service lines in the United States are located in basin cities.
• In addition to joining the "Biden-Harris Get the Lead Out Partnership," the Cities Initiative has endorsed the White House Lead Service Line Principles.
• These principles call for prioritizing lead remediation in underserved communities, replacing the entire lead service line without imposing financial burdens on residents and leveraging the full range of funding available to expedite lead service line replacement.