A Wrongly Convicted Subspect and His Exonaration

After spending 21 and a half years in an Louisiana State prison, Calvin Willis was released in September of 2003. He was wrongfully convicted for Aggravated Rape.
As of April 5th, the organization "The Innocence Project" exonerated 305 men and women that were convicted for crimes they did not commit.
Exonerated means that a person os freed from jail, after being imprisoned for something he/she did not do.
Most of the suspects were put into jail because of misidentification of an eyewhitness. Often times whitnesses think that they have to choose a person from the line- up because the police didn't tell them that the suspect might not be in the line. The eye- whitness then chooses the person that looks most like the person they saw.
Sometimes, the police is even guilty of putting an innocent person into jail because of methods they used.
In class, we listened to a story of a young boy, 14 years old, that was put in jail for killing his sister because he signed a confession after the police interrogated him for 11 hours. He finally signed the contract, even though he didn't do it, because he thought he would be able to go home. Instead, he was locked up in prison.

Back to Calvin Willis's case:
In June 1981, an intruder entered a house in Shreveport, Louisiana where 3 girls had fallen asleep after playing dress- up. Their mother was not home, but when she came home the next morning, she found the evidence of the rape. One of her daughters also had her head being banged against a wall, as well as being kicked in the stomach which caused her to lose consciousness.
She was taken to hospital where a rape kit, such as evidence from fingernails, was taken. The bedspread was also examined.
She described the man as a black man with cowboy boots and a cowboy hat.

Calvin Willis visited the neighborhood before because he used to live nearby and still had friends in the area. The girls had seen him before and also spoken to him.

Police reports of interviews with one of the girls differed.
When the trial happened, she identified Calvin Willis as the intruder. She identified him by his cowboy boots, even though they differed from what she described earlier during interrogations.

Seminal stains were found on the nightgown and identified as stains from blood 0 markers. Calvin Willis also has blood group 0. Blood was found on the boxer shorts that could not exclude the victim. No seminal fluid was detected on the vaginal swab. The boxer shorts must have been the intruder's and were size 40.

As soon as Willis was arrested, he said that he did not commit the crime.
His wife testified that he came home shortly before midnight the night of the crime, while the crime was most- likely committed after 12 am.
She also testified that Willis wore his boxer shorts this night which are size 29!

Willis himself testified that he dropped off a friend and returned home before midnight. His description of the clothes he was wearing that night did not match those described by any of the three girls. In the past, he said, he had been to the house where the crime occurred and all three girls had seen him several times.

The jury did not believe Willis’s alibi so he was convicted in February 1982 of rape and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

In 1998, Willis' case was accepted by the organization "The Innocence Project". The DNA from the victim's fingernailes matched the DNA of the seminal fluid in the boxershorts but Calvin Willis was excluded from being the contributer of any of the samples!

On September 18th, 2003, Willis was released from jail, after spending more than 21 years of his life for a brutal rape he did not commit.
While Willis was in jail, he gave his friend Rickey Johnson, also locked up for rape, the address of the Innocence Project. They also investigated his case and it turned out that Rickie Johnson was also wrongfully convicted and finally exonerated in 2008- after spending more than 25 years in prison!

I am glad that we are doing this unit in Biology to learn more about the topic. It also reveals how easy it can be to be locked up forever if the a whitness identifies you as the perpetrator of a crime, on purpose or not. It also shows how messed up the Judiciary system can be!


See Calvin Willis's case on the Innocence Project's website here: Click.

Women's Biggest Health Issue

Today I watched a TED Talk in which Noel Bairey Merz talks about the biggest health problem women face.

One out of two women will be impacted by cardiovascular disease in their lifetime. This disease is the leading killer of women, even more than breast cancer! Cardiovascular disease kills more women at every age than breast cancer and it is a secret.
Since 1984, more women in the US than men die of heart disease! Heart disease was often thought of as a men's problem during the 1950s and 60s- but that was never true, in fact, it is actually a women's disease!
Diagnostic and therapeutic strateies that have been invented by men, for men do nor work for women.
There needs to be a campaign for heart disease in women as strong as the breast cancer campaign, Merz suggests.
Most of the people don't know about cardiovascular disease, but do know about breast cancer because breast cancer kills people, no matter if men or women, slowly but in 50% of cardiovascular disease cases, it leads to a direct sudden death.
There are 3 times more women dying of heart disease than men because their heart disease does not look like a men's heart disease: The medicine that was researched about for 50 years only works for men, women don't get the benefit of the modern research. When men have heart attacks, "it explodes", in women it "erodes", it doesn't completely fill the clot, EKG findings are different in female patterns.
There is now a possibility to look into women's bodies and hearts without radiation
What is the difference between men and women physiologically?
The answer is stem cells. Female stem cells, when even put into male bodies, are better at repairing the body than male stem cells! 
Understandig cardiovascular disease in women will then automatically help not only women, but also men.


Source:
http://www.ted.com/talks/noel_bairey_merz_the_single_biggest_health_threat_women_face.html

Is Disease Inheritance More Random than Once Thought?

This new (2007) finding might change scientists' view on illnesses such as Alzheimer's disease:

Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston found out that cells often randomly deactivate of alleles.

Alleles are gene copies- every human gets one from their mom and one from dad.

This new developmet might explain why some children in a family may have certain heritage disorders, while others do not. This disruption might take place in as many as over 1,000 of our genes (except from sex cells) which leads to different structures and levels in the proteins that are coded by these genes.

Researchers do not know the mechanism by which alleles are silenced yet but the discovery that these events (called random monoallelic expression) occur so frequently suggests that epigenetic effects may play a much more significant role in the development of some human diseases than believed before (Epigenetic Effects are influences on the activity of a gene that are not due directly to DNA mutations).

The research team looked at the activity of certain gene variants in human B lymphocytes which are white blood cells that fight infections. The especially focused on a sample of almost 4,000 genes and found out that nearly 400 of those genes undergo monoallelic expression. A several of those 400 genes that have been found, such as APP, were being linked to human disorders such as Alzheimer's. APP is a gene that is believed to increase the risk of getting Alzheimer's.

Source:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-disease-inheritance-more-random&page=1

Forks over Knives

"Forks Over Knives" is the title of a documentary we recently watched in Biology.

The movie is really eye- opening and is about the food that we eat everyday and how it affects our body.

The food that we eat changed over the years and is now more based on animal products than ever before.

In the beginning of the 20th century, the people at an average of 120 pounds meat per year, by 2007 it has risen to 222 pounds per year. 

The movie also shows many shocking facts, for example nutrients from animal foods increase a chance of cancer while plant foods decrease the chance.

As a human, we want to eat a diet thatincludes everything the body needs: Carbs, Proteins, Fats... and all that in a balanced way. Many people still think that meat and fish are necessary sources of protein and that we can't be healthy without them but in the movie, a Kickbox Fighter talked about how he was convinced by that at first, too, until a doctor showed him the truth. Now he is a vegetarian and feels stronger than never before. Beans, nuts, spinach, and broccoli are better sources of protein than meat, for example.

A study said that when the Nazi German army arrived in Norway in World War 2 and took over the country, they also took away the cows from the people and the ammount of people being killed by cancer decreased in that time. When the German army left Norway in 1945, the ammount began to rise again.

Another mythos is that we have to drink at least one glass of milk per day in order to have stabilized bones but it would be better to leave any milk products behind and get the nutrients we need from other sources.

In addition to the documentary, we watched a Youtube- Video and the woman who talked in it said, that it would be better for your body to eat a SNICKERS bar instead of a bowl of Cereal and Milk as a breakfast!

Most American people are uninformed about what their body needs and about the food they are eating.

This fact made the USA the country with the highest risk of obesity, diabetes, heart attacks, and stroke among the population.

A study was released that in 1958, 18 people died of cancer in Japan while the USA lost 14,000 people dying of cancer. This is because of the food difference between those two countries. While the people in Japan ate food based on an Asian diet, the American people ate based  on the Western diet. The Asian diet is balanced and made out of what the body needs while the Western diet just claims to fill stomaches, no matter how high the cost is.

One out of 5 children in the USA are concidered overweigh, with chances increasing.

Obesity, diabetes and other sicknesses, caused by bad food choices can be eliminated so easily:

Being physically active, knowing about the body and its needs, knowing about the food and what it is made of.

Coming back to the Japanese- USA study:

The Asian countries seem to go the same track as the US did: The people are getting less informed, getting lazy, and the Fast Food Industry begins to boom in Asian countries, too. Soon the obesity and diabetes rates will go up in Japan, China and other countries, too.

Fact is that I will be more curious about food choices and I hope you guys will, too.

You can watch the documentary online, on Netflix.

Lucy the Human Chimpanzee

Thursday last week, we learned about Lucy, a chimpanzee that was raised by humans and became more and more human over the time she stayed at that house. 

Lucy was born in 1964 and was a test chimpanzee for the Institute of Primate Studies in Oklahoma. 

She was given to the Temerlin Family and raised by them as she was human. She was taught sign language and was able to sign about 140 signs. She invented words in sign language to describe things she didn't know by combining words she knew. Every time Lucy felt that her "parents" were sad, she went to them and laid her arms around them. Every time, Mr. Temerlin returned home, Lucy gave him a hug, and made tea. Lucy was also able to lie, one time she lied to Mrs. Temerlin about poop she had found. 

Lucy became famous for drinking gin, and masturbating to pictures of human males in a magazine with a vacuum cleaner. To test, if she was still attracted to chimpanzees, she met a male chimpanzee, but she was not able to relate to him at all. This was the time, that the Temerlins realized that Lucy was more a human than a chimpanzee. When Lucy turned 12, she became really strong and destroyed furniture in the house. The Temerlins decided that they would give Lucy away so she was brought to a chimpanzee rehabilitation center in Gambia, accompanied by Janis Carter, a graduate student. Janis was only supposed to stay a couple of weeks but months and years went by and Lucy was still not able to live with other chimpanzees. Janis finally left Lucy alone in the Center. One year after that, she returned to the Center with a couple of Lucy's belongings. When she arrived, she was greeted by Lucy; she took her things and left without looking back. Janis realized that Lucy became a chimpanzee again. One year later, when Janis returned, she found Lucy's skeleton lying on the island, her hands were missing and her head was separated from the rest of the skeleton. There was no sign of skin or hair. Lucy was 23 when she died, it was the year 1987. She lived most of her life like a human and the rest she tried to be a chimpanzee again.

This experiment shows that chimpanzees are closely related to humans and that they can become almost human- like when they live in a human environment. I think it is important that this experiment was made to find out more about the relationship between our species and chimpanzees.

Sources:

Lucy Wikipedia Article

RadioLab Episode