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Medical Scribblings - Wednesday, 26 July 2006

Being a grandfather you have time to observe children as they grow up at arms length so to speak. With your own offspring you are up to the armpits trying to keep them fed, watered and sanitised. They are fascinating to watch with all their personal foibles and characteristics. Even from birth they are quite different and of course boys and girls behave very differently. Girls like pink fluffy things and boys seem to be very interested in guns, fast cars and football.

Throughout their lives boys seem to be more likely to die from a variety of causes than girls. Maybe that is why there are normally more boys born than girls. When you go round the old folks homes men are much in demand as they are scarce beasts. We don’t really understand why boys should be at this disadvantage.

One theory is that males have only one X chromosome whilst females have two. This is where you need a bit of GCSE Biology. Having the two means that if you have a bit of faulty DNA on one it is compensated by the good DNA on the other X chromosome. The result of this is that there are a whole host of diseases in boys that do no occur in girls. I guess the best known is Haemophilia, a bleeding disorder which was passed from Queen Victoria to her descendants and may well have caused the downfall of the Russian Romanoffs in 1917.

There are problems however to being a lady as many of them remind me frequently. Their excess of X chromosomes has to be controlled by switching one off. Thus you can get two groups of cells in the body that use different x chromosomes. This could well be the cause of what we call ‘auto immune diseases’ where the body attacks itself, and are much commoner in women. It’s all very interesting stuff and may one day open the way to new treatments that will control these effects.

To come back to sex, its interesting that our physical appearance and our feeling of sexual attraction do not always coincide. At one time this was not accepted in society and people suffered badly as a result. There appears to be an area in the brain that controls this, but how it is decided what sex we view ourselves as, we still have no idea. There are several clues however, as I mentioned at the start chidren appear to know exactly how they feel from a very early age. It would suggest that the system is in place well before birth. Another interesting fact is that the chance of being homosexual depends on the number of boy children that a mother has. This would point again to an increasing immune reaction by the mother before the baby is born.

The big questions then are not medical at all but social and moral as to how far we should interfer in these life processes. The technology to do clever things with our DNA and development are likely to hit us far sooner than our society is able to decide what is right for us.

A big problem!

John Schofield