Rooting for Your Ancestors Doesn’t Make You Racist
Editor's Note: This op/ed is in response to our Big Question of the month: "Should shared genetics play any role in encouraging sports fans to root for a certain team?"
A soccer fan can usually explain why he chose to love his team, but there is seldom any logic to it.
If it takes a mail-order DNA test to get you into the game, then swab your cheek and join the party.
Maybe he likes the colors, or maybe his mom grew up in the city where the team plays. Maybe a certain elegant Dutchman (Marc Overmars) played for a certain London club (Arsenal) during the most impressionable years (the late '90s, roughly) in the life of a young person (me), and that poor child continued to follow that poor club decade after losing decade, even though he lived in Florida, where games were only sometimes shown on TV and he missed most of them anyway, and, besides, this was long after the Dutchman had ceased being an employee of that club to which the young Floridian had absolutely no spiritual or economic connection.
I digress.
Maybe the fan simply picked the most dominant team at the moment he discovered the sport, thereby choosing Manchester United, which is just another way of saying he gets off on the suffering of others. Or maybe he took a mail-order DNA test, found out he was 1/12 French, and decided it would be Les Bleus or bust this summer at the World Cup.
A company called 23andMe hopes that millions of American fans, casting about for a team to support since their own failed to qualify for the World Cup, will take that last path. The TV spots hawking the service are already blanketing Fox Sports. And while I happen to think that soccer is a highly interesting sport for lots of better reasons, my position is that if it takes a mail-order DNA test to get you into the game, then swab your cheek and join the party.
The point is, soccer is an exercise in the arbitrary. Your favorite player will probably miss the goal. The referee will probably make the wrong call. Your team will probably lose. You will probably get angry and then you will get sad and then, next week, you'll start the cycle again, over and over, ultimately infecting your offspring with the same illogical obsession so that you'll have someone else to be miserable with.
Choose misery with a chance of joy, I say. Choose empathy and random connection.
Maybe, because of a DNA test, you'll choose to care about the national soccer team of Egypt or Colombia or South Korea. The best that can happen is that you might plug in with a group of people who live far away in Egypt or Colombia or South Korea. You might, for a moment, share in their suffering and delight in their triumphs. You might empathize with strangers for no other reason than the fact that your great great great great great great great great great great grandmother was born in a crude hovel somewhere in the Nile Delta.
Whoa! Cool! That's the splendor of soccer… and advances in our understanding of the human genome, I suppose.
A leading bioethicist has suggested that 23andMe's campaign could inflame racial animosity, but that seems unlikely to me, because if we could alter the allegiances and behavioral patterns of actual soccer hooligans—for better or worse—by appealing to science and reason, they would already be extinct. No, the worst that could happen is that you'll waste a few hours of your life screaming at a TV show featuring two groups of men who are being paid millions of dollars to determine who is more proficient at placing a small orb between two sticks.
Choose misery with a chance of joy, I say. Choose empathy and random connection. Choose Iceland, even though it's unlikely you have any Icelandic ancestors, because it's the smallest country ever to qualify for the World Cup and what did Iceland ever do to you? Just don't choose Germany—they don't need your help.
[Ed. Note: To read the counter viewpoint, click here. Then visit leapsmag on social media to share your opinion: Who wins this debate?]
After his grandmother’s dementia diagnosis, one man invented a snack to keep her healthy and hydrated.
On a visit to his grandmother’s nursing home in 2016, college student Lewis Hornby made a shocking discovery: Dehydration is a common (and dangerous) problem among seniors—especially those that are diagnosed with dementia.
Hornby’s grandmother, Pat, had always had difficulty keeping up her water intake as she got older, a common issue with seniors. As we age, our body composition changes, and we naturally hold less water than younger adults or children, so it’s easier to become dehydrated quickly if those fluids aren’t replenished. What’s more, our thirst signals diminish naturally as we age as well—meaning our body is not as good as it once was in letting us know that we need to rehydrate. This often creates a perfect storm that commonly leads to dehydration. In Pat’s case, her dehydration was so severe she nearly died.
When Lewis Hornby visited his grandmother at her nursing home afterward, he learned that dehydration especially affects people with dementia, as they often don’t feel thirst cues at all, or may not recognize how to use cups correctly. But while dementia patients often don’t remember to drink water, it seemed to Hornby that they had less problem remembering to eat, particularly candy.
Where people with dementia often forget to drink water, they're more likely to pick up a colorful snack, Hornby found. alzheimers.org.uk
Hornby wanted to create a solution for elderly people who struggled keeping their fluid intake up. He spent the next eighteen months researching and designing a solution and securing funding for his project. In 2019, Hornby won a sizable grant from the Alzheimer’s Society, a UK-based care and research charity for people with dementia and their caregivers. Together, through the charity’s Accelerator Program, they created a bite-sized, sugar-free, edible jelly drop that looked and tasted like candy. The candy, called Jelly Drops, contained 95% water and electrolytes—important minerals that are often lost during dehydration. The final product launched in 2020—and was an immediate success. The drops were able to provide extra hydration to the elderly, as well as help keep dementia patients safe, since dehydration commonly leads to confusion, hospitalization, and sometimes even death.
Not only did Jelly Drops quickly become a favorite snack among dementia patients in the UK, but they were able to provide an additional boost of hydration to hospital workers during the pandemic. In NHS coronavirus hospital wards, patients infected with the virus were regularly given Jelly Drops to keep their fluid levels normal—and staff members snacked on them as well, since long shifts and personal protective equipment (PPE) they were required to wear often left them feeling parched.
In April 2022, Jelly Drops launched in the United States. The company continues to donate 1% of its profits to help fund Alzheimer’s research.
Last week, researchers at the University of Oxford announced that they have received funding to create a brand new way of preventing ovarian cancer: A vaccine. The vaccine, known as OvarianVax, will teach the immune system to recognize and destroy mutated cells—one of the earliest indicators of ovarian cancer.
Understanding Ovarian Cancer
Despite advancements in medical research and treatment protocols over the last few decades, ovarian cancer still poses a significant threat to women’s health. In the United States alone, more than 12,0000 women die of ovarian cancer each year, and only about half of women diagnosed with ovarian cancer survive five or more years past diagnosis. Unlike cervical cancer, there is no routine screening for ovarian cancer, so it often goes undetected until it has reached advanced stages. Additionally, the primary symptoms of ovarian cancer—frequent urination, bloating, loss of appetite, and abdominal pain—can often be mistaken for other non-cancerous conditions, delaying treatment.
An American woman has roughly a one percent chance of developing ovarian cancer throughout her lifetime. However, these odds increase significantly if she has inherited mutations in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes. Women who carry these mutations face a 46% lifetime risk for ovarian and breast cancers.
An Unlikely Solution
To address this escalating health concern, the organization Cancer Research UK has invested £600,000 over the next three years in research aimed at creating a vaccine, which would destroy cancerous cells before they have a chance to develop any further.
Researchers at the University of Oxford are at the forefront of this initiative. With funding from Cancer Research UK, scientists will use tissue samples from the ovaries and fallopian tubes of patients currently battling ovarian cancer. Using these samples, University of Oxford scientists will create a vaccine to recognize certain proteins on the surface of ovarian cancer cells known as tumor-associated antigens. The vaccine will then train that person’s immune system to recognize the cancer markers and destroy them.
The next step
Once developed, the vaccine will first be tested in patients with the disease, to see if their ovarian tumors will shrink or disappear. Then, the vaccine will be tested in women with the BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations as well as women in the general population without genetic mutations, to see whether the vaccine can prevent the cancer altogether.
While the vaccine still has “a long way to go,” according to Professor Ahmed Ahmed, Director of Oxford University’s ovarian cancer cell laboratory, he is “optimistic” about the results.
“We need better strategies to prevent ovarian cancer,” said Ahmed in a press release from the University of Oxford. “Currently, women with BRCA1/2 mutations are offered surgery which prevents cancer but robs them of the chance to have children afterward.
Teaching the immune system to recognize the very early signs of cancer is a tough challenge. But we now have highly sophisticated tools which give us real insights into how the immune system recognizes ovarian cancer. OvarianVax could offer the solution.”