Category Archives: Video

Fearless – the story of Alex Honnold

The NYT has a disturbing story about Alex Honnold. What if he falls?

Alex Honnold, 33, is the world’s foremost free soloist. To “free solo” means to climb without ropes or any safety gear. Mr. Honnold began climbing without ropes as a teenager. As he got better at climbing on his own, his aspirations and goals grew bigger. For years, he had his eye on free soloing the 3,000-foot peak of Yosemite’s El Capitan. In 2017, he decided to go for it, a superhuman accomplishment that makes up the arc of our new feature film, “Free Solo.”

How free solo looks like

and Honnold’s comments

What is the difference between the average attention seeker and Honnold? nautil.us/issue/39/ has an answer showing results of a MRI scan

Purl scrolls down, down, through the Rorschach topography of Honnold’s brain, until, with the suddenness of a photo bomb, a pair of almond-shaped nodes materialize out of the morass. “He has one!” says Joseph, and Purl laughs. […]
Inside the tube, Honnold is looking at a series of about 200 images that flick past at the speed of channel surfing. The photographs are meant to disturb or excite. “At least in non-Alex people, these would evoke a strong response in the amygdala,” says Joseph. “I can’t bear to look at some of them, to be honest.” […] “Nowhere, at a decent threshold, was there amygdala activation”

After having watched  nowthe excellent National Geographic documentary, I do not believe so much in an anatomical curiosity. As his father was suffering to Asperger (according to his mother in the movie) I think the key is more with some unsual development combined with some excellent extrapyramidal reactions.

Where have all the flowers gone?

Here is some background information of my forthcoming talk.

Congress: European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology
Congress: 2018 Munich
Session number: OAS 03
Session title: Pan-omics in respiratory and skin disorders
Session date: Sunday, 27 May 2018
Session time: 10:30 – 12:00
Session room: Hall C
Abstract number: 0012

 

Background: In the pre-GWAS era (1993-2007) numerous association studies have been published in renowned journals including The Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Immunology, Science and Human Molecular Genetics. They all showed an association of allergy related traits while these results have not been systematically matched with results from current GWAS studies.
Method: We are now following up several prominent associations by comparing the previously published results with currently deposited data at the NHGRI-EBI Catalog of published genome-wide association studies http://www.ebi.ac.uk/gwas NHGRI-EBI listed phenotypes were only selected if they are not suffering themselves from serious problems like unstandardized outcomes. Also the SNP marker set should have a good coverage of the region of interest.
Results: In total 26 allergy associated genes could be reanalyzed. The initial association could not be confirmed for CD14, ADRB2, TNF, MS4A2, ADAM33, GSTM1, IL10, CTLA4, SPINK5, LTC4S, LTA, NPSR1, NOD1, SCGB1A1, GSTP1, NOS1, CCL5, TBXA2R, and TGFB1. Some genes showed borderline significant results like IL4 and IL4R while only IL13, HLA-DRB1, HLA-DQB1, IL1 cluster and STAT6 were clearly associated also in recent GWAS studies.
Conclusion: Most of the early SNP association studies could not be replicated which has also been described in other disease areas (“non- replication crisis”). Assumed reasons range from insuffficient editorial oversight, poor review, phenotyping or genotyping errors, selective reporting or intentional fraud. In addition there are numerous study inherent problems like population stratification or wrong significance thresholds that may have led to largely irreproducible results.