Wrongful Convictions

Wrongful convictions are a huge problem for many people in the united states. The justice system will send people away to jail for their whole lives and ruin their lives based on little evidence. Imagine if you are 18 and are framed for a rape by the police and sent away to jail for 15 years before you can finally prove that the prosecutor lied in court about the DNA evidence they had. Because a similar story happened to four boys 1986.

In 1986, Omar, Larry, and Calvin were four African American teenagers in Chicago. A white female medical student was raped and murdered in their neighborhood and it became huge on the news. Because of the media the police felt the need to catch somebody soon so they don't receive a bunch of shit and look bad. So the police took in those boys and interrogated them and held them in there until one of them signed a confession paper because they said if he did they would let them go. They all had to go to court and the prosecutor straight up lied about evidence they had on the boys and so they were all convicted and tried as adults and sent to jail. They were held in prison until they were in their 30s and a women spent $50,000 of her own money and countless hours of time to get the case back up and prove that the semen sample from the murder did not match any of the boys, and the actual committees of the crime confessed. Finally they were set free but half their lives were still taken away by the justice system.

This story is really sad because it is actually very common. Many people's lives have been ruined by wrongful convictions. It really actually makes me angry because the justice system is extremely flawed, there are many corrupt police/prosecutors out there, and how racist our society is, that minorities are targeted for crimes like this. Another thing that we didn't learn but that I know is true is that many prisons are privately owned and the owners get money from the government by having prisoners, so they profit off of people going to prison and being held there for longer than they should. So yeah this story and many others like it are really disturbing and just make me lose respect for our justice system.

Vikram Patel: Mental health for all by all

This TED talk was by Vikram Patel, on mental illnesses in the world and how they are not treated enough so Patel has developed a new approach. Vikram Patel helps bring better mental health care to low resource communities by teaching ordinary people to deliver basic psychiatric services.

Nearly 450 million people are affected by mental illness worldwide. In wealthy nations, just half receive appropriate care, but in developing countries, close to 90 percent go untreated because psychiatrists are in such short supply. Vikram Patel has outlined a highly promising  that he learned from observing how normal people can learn to treat ammonia and deliver babies. So now what he is doing is he is training members of communities to give mental health interventions, empowering ordinary people to care for others.

This is really interesting to me because i had no idea that so many people were affected by mental illness. I could have guessed by myself that the leading illness was depression but it is really astonishing and sad that people with mental illnesses are not treated in most parts of the world. That would suck to just be trapped there and not have any medical care for a condition. I think its a great thing that Vikram is training normal people in those places to help others because it is very affective and it probably just brings people together as a community.

The Story of Lucy

How human can a chimpanzee be? In 1964 Lucy, a female chimpanzee, was born. Lucy was part of an experiment to raise her as a human to see how human she could become. She was raised with a family and loved as a daughter. Lucy was taught sign language to communicate.  The results of this experiment were very positive and Lucy was actually very human. She would combine words to create new words for things that didn't have a name. Like she called watermelon candydrink. She could do a lot of things that humans do. When guests would come over she would make tea on the stove, She could make herself gin and tonic, and many other similar things. But when she got older she would tear everything apart and break everything because she became mature and really strong. So her family sent her back to the wild. It was really hard for Lucy to adjust to the wild and after she was in the wild for 2 years she was killed poachers. This was a really sad and interesting story and we learned a lot from it and realized how close we are to our chimpanzee brothers.

Is Disease "Inheritance" More Random than Once Thought?

This article from 2007 talked about new research that shows cells often deactivate a pair of gene copies from either the mom or the dad. This is really interesting because it helps explain why some children inherit diseases and disorders while some don't, which is what we have been working on and trying to learn this week. One example of an interesting thing that I learned is when these alterations happen it unfortunately helps Alzheimer's disease manifest itself. Cells inactivating alleles actually happens so often that it can be just as big if not more of a part in human diseases developing in individuals than DNA mutation, or at least than we previously believed. This research also stated that so far, no genes seem to be immune to this, which is pretty scary but when you think about it its not because this has been happening all along we just didn't know it was going on, this new information is just expanding our knowledge on cell activity and gene inheritance. I am taking away some knowledge from this and am going to apply it, at least by talking to my mom because she is into biology and probably didn't know this when she was in college. I don't think I can apply this in class because we have been working on how genes directly translate to the parents' offspring and most kids are already confused and adding a 5-10% chance (or something similar) to those sheets or those kids knowledge could just confuse the crap out of everybody, but I am glad that I have learned this knowledge and was intrigued by this article.

Forks Over Knives

Americans are getting fatter and sicker mostly do to our western diet of animal based foods. In Biology over the last 2 days we watched a movie called "Forks over Knives". It was a documentary and the narrator was one of the main characters, he was not very healthy and had high blood pressure and cholesterol as well as some other health problems. So he went to a new doctor that makes his patients change their diet as part of there treatment. This movie followed three other people in the same situation as the narrator and how they got better and fixed most of their health problems by switching to a whole natural plant based diet. In the end all of them fixed their health problems and could stop taking the medicine that had to take before they changed their diet. Two doctors in this movie were shown and talked about a lot and their studies in this field and gave a lot of evidence and statistics to why your diet causes these health problems and how what most Americans believe to be healthy or good for you really isn't, like dairy and meat. Here are some of the things that the doctors studies and what they have learned over the years. We have over doubled our meat,sugar,and dairy intake over the last century. We are one of if not the worst country when it comes to cancer and heart disease. Kenya, Japan, China, and many other countries have almost no cancer compared to America. Another interesting key statistic is that in an experiment, rats eating 20% of a certain kind of animal protein started to get liver cancer, and then rats eating only 5% were completely healthy. When the 20% rats would be switched to be fed 5% their cancer stopped growing. The biggest thing that I am going to take out of this movie is that we should watch our diet by limiting our intake of highly processed foods and animal based foods. Basically, natural is better, and everything should be taken in moderation, except for maybe veggies because that is what you should eat most, whole plant based foods.