Today you’ll learn about how researchers have been able to grow embryos that have three genetic parents, how European moles can shrink down to a tenth of their size during winter, and whether or not being kind to narcissists makes any difference in their behavior.
Today you’ll learn about how researchers have been able to grow embryos that have three genetic parents, how European moles can shrink down to a tenth of their size during winter, and whether or not being kind to narcissists makes any difference in their behavior.
3-Parent Babies
Shrinking Moles
“European moles can shrink by a tenth in winter to save energy” By James Ashworth
“Winter conditions, not resource availability alone, may drive reversible seasonal skull size changes in moles” by Lucie Nováková, Javier Lázaro, Marion Muturi, Christian Dullin and Dina K. N. Dechmann
Being Kind to Narcissists
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/3-parent-babies-shrinking-moles-being-kind-to-narcissists
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back!
NATE: Today you’ll learn about how researchers have been able to grow embryos that have three genetic parents, how European moles can shrink a tenth of their size during winter, and whether or not being kind to diagnosed narcissists makes any changes in their behavior.
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Calli, did you know that making children with THREE parents is not only possible, but it's actually already been done? And the results were pretty surprising.
CALLI: Yeah, I’d be a little bit surprised too if it took three people to make a baby. I’m just saying! That’s not something you can normally do. Do we need to have a conversation about the birds and the bees or…?
NATE: I think I get how it normally works, yeah. That’s not the issue here. Because of questions like that these experiments are really controversial, and they’re actually illegal in a lot of countries around the world. But researchers have recently shown that, not only is it possible, children with genetic material from three parents seem to actually develop supremely similarly to children with two parents.
CALLI: Okay, I’m absolutely hooked. You have to tell me how they did this.
NATE: Well this first happened in 2016 thanks to a technique called Mitochondrial Replacement Therapy, or MRT. Scientists took an egg from one woman, and separated out the mitochondria, part of the cellular structure, from the DNA. They then put this altered DNA into another egg from a female donor, so now it’s taking DNA from one egg and putting it in another so that it contains genetic material from two women. That altered egg is then fertilized by the father, and, there you go, you have a child born from three parents: The father, the mother with the majority of her DNA, and the donor woman with the egg and her mitochondria. One child, genetic material from three parents!
CALLI: Okay so, what is the purpose of pulling the mitochondria out at all? Why not use just the donor egg? That happens all the time.
NATE: Right. Well the first time this happened, the woman who was pursuing the treatment had a neurological disorder that came from mutation in her DNA. Unfortunately, in her situation having kids meant that she would pass that disorder on, and the kids would only live for a few years. And after she unfortunately lost two of her children, she was looking for a solution to this. And this process of altering the DNA of her future children offered her that solution.
CALLI: Okay, I see two sides to this. Because I’m really glad she was able to have a child and not pass her disease on, that’s a breakthrough! But that's when you use this technology for good moral reasons but what happens if you use it for….I mean I’m gonna come right out here and say it, this sounds like eugenics?
NATE: Yeah, you’re right. That’s absolutely one of the big concerns. Most doctors and researchers not only consider this kind of procedure unsafe…they also consider it to be immoral. Being able to swap DNA is just a short leap from creating so-called “designer babies,” a term that wreaks of eugenics. Eugenics, if you’re not familiar, is a sort of “planned breeding” or “selective breeding” that’s been used historically to get rid of traits that were deemed, “undesirable,” and that was almost always driven by racism, sexism, or ablism.
CALLI: Okay so, a new strategy for an old concept. Here’s what’s really confusing me: you said this happened successfully in 2016, so why are we talking about it now with all these ethical implications? I kind of surprised researchers are still pursuing it.
NATE: Researchers just finished a study looking at embryos that underwent the same three parent procedure to see how they develop compared to standard two-parent embryos. Specifically they looked at blastocysts.
CALLI: That doesn’t sound like something having to do with the human body. What’s a blastocyst?
NATE: That’s the stage of an embryo when it’s about five days after being fertilized. It’s when the embryo starts rapidly dividing its cells in order to grow into a functioning baby. When they looked at the embryos from MRT, researchers noticed that the embryo was developing in almost the exact same way as a regular embryo. And this wasn’t just one, it was dozens of them!
CALLI: So, seemingly, you’re saying that we didn't mess anything up too badly when we started swapping parts of the DNA and adding a third parent?
NATE: Yeah, so far that’s right, it looks like MRT, whether or not it’s a good idea or a viable way to create human life…with the genetic material of three different parents.
CALLI: So, we can do it technically….but will we? There’s so much to unpack here, like, is this going to be commonplace soon for people with problems with childbirth? Is this something that we’ll be seeing in the future?
NATE: Not anytime soon. So, researchers only looked at these MRT embryos at the blastocyst stage, like I said that’s about five days into fertilization. There is a lot more of the gestation process, and the human life process, to look at when it comes to deciding if MRT is safe and viable.
CALLI: Not to mention if it’s moral or ethical…
NATE: Absolutely, which is maybe even the bigger question. And when it comes to those questions, the answers need to come from within, but also outside, the lab. Either way, even though it is possible, we have a long way to go when it comes to seeing MRT being used regularly, if it ever happens at all.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Something actually a lot of people know about me is that I am NOT a fan of winter. My electric bill is always way too high because I swear I’m cold-blooded and I cannot stay warm enough. But you know who doesn’t have a problem conserving energy? The European mole, who a recent study has revealed can shrink itself by nearly 11% to conserve energy in the brutal winter months.
NATE: Just a beautiful segue.
CALLI: It was a little clunky I know!
NATE: From one thing to another. Alright, European mole shrinks 11%. How did they discover this? Are there scientists running around with callipers running like chasing the moles like, “Come back here! How big are you?!”
CALLI: Do you think you’re kidding?
NATE: A little!
CALLI: K well, the shrinking mole phenomenon was discovered back in 1949 by a Polish scientist named Dr. August Dehnel, who noticed that shrew’s skull sizes varied drastically from time to time. We’re talking you know an actual noticeable difference in the size of them. After Dehnel’s Phenomenon, other scientists began to notice it in a couple other species of animals as well, including, most recently, the European mole.
NATE: Alright I gotta say the idea of animals just shrinking when it benefits them is a little bit strange. But, if there are these people, if there are these scientists, these calliper-wielding, skull-measuring scientists out there and that’s just something they’re doing, I feel like in that situation, seasonal shrinking might actually be obvious. Like, you would notice it if you’re regularly measuring these moles.
CALLI: Do I need to make a joke about it being obvious that there’s shrinkage in the cold?
NATE: It’s a family podcast, Calli. But my question is, like, how did they just discover this in the European mole if, like I’m saying, you’d think they’d notice this if they were the type of person regularly measuring these animals.
CALLI: Sure! So, for a long time it was believed that shrinking was seasonally related due to lack of food options during colder winter months. But the thing is that most animals who do this weird shrinking trick are energetic and don’t hibernate. It wasn’t until a recent experiment became specifically focused on the phenomenon by supplying European moles with a consistent food source that they realised these animals were still shrinking.
NATE: Okay so they did know that they shrank. They just assumed the reason was food and only thought to test that. So, does the shrinking allow these animals to conserve more energy?
CALLI: That is exactly what it does. But there’s a little bit of a catch. So for these shrews, it wasn’t just the bodies that shrunk, the skulls shrunk by nearly 20% during these months. Now, most of these creatures’ affected skulls never actually grow back to a normal size. That’s kind of a big deal because even though it conserves the energy, it left permanent cognitive damage to the creatures.
NATE: I don’t feel like moles have a lot of spare cognitive ability?
CALLI: So, this was shrews.
NATE: Well, I don’t feel like shrews have a ton of spare cognitive ability either. I gotta say, I’m not sure that I think that’s worth it? I suppose if the only other option is you die because you can’t conserve enough energy then yeah, but that’s quite a trade off. Permanent cognitive damage for a little bit more energy.
CALLI: Yes, but there is a little bit of hope. See, many of them have evolved to actually expand the skulls when it warms up again as well. This phenomenon opened the doors for even more exciting research, like how skeletons grow and how tissues can still alter themselves after a creature is fully grown.
NATE: Alright so, skeletons and tissues growing and altering after a creature is fully grown. This sounds like this can be applied to maybe more than tiny ground rodents. Is this something that can apply to human physiology somehow?
CALLI: Yes, exactly. And even though we don’t always need it to apply to, you know, humans, there is some benefits here. Researchers are hoping that this will open the door to developing new medical treatments for conditions that affect the growth of human bones and organs, specifically mostly the brain and spine.
NATE: Alright so, back to the little voles… moles… shrews, whatever these tiny little mammals we’re talking about, if this affects like a lot of different mammals, including the shrews, why are they looking into European moles?
CALLI: That is a fantastic question. Other than being one of the most recent discoveries of this phenomenon, it’s because their life cycle is actually longer than the shrew’s. So a shrews lives for about a year on average, which makes it a horrible example for trying to study this, you know when we’re talking about seasonal changes. The European mole lives for about three times as long, about three years on average which gives us a much bigger window for a chance to study the creature.
NATE: Alright so moles live longer, that’s good. But why the European mole versus, say, a nice American mole, the Atlanta, Georgia mole?
CALLI: The Atlanta, Georgia mole!
NATE: I’m assuming that… I don’t know if there’s such a thing, throwing that out there.
CALLI: Now, I’m gonna look it up.
NATE: But why the European mole?
CALLI: Kay, glad you asked, because the experiment was actually a compare and contrast, Nate. Researchers borrowed European mole skulls from across two years from a university. They also borrowed skulls of Spanish moles, but these moles lived in WILDLY different climates, obviously. You know, one’s very warm, one’s very cold. Their hypothesis was that the Spanish mole would shrink during the summer, and the European mole would shrink during the winter.
NATE: Well, first off, European mole skulls is a great band name, we’ve had several good ideas for that so throw that on the list.
CALLI: We have a lot of bands at this point.
NATE: We really should learn to play instruments. Okay, so what was the verdict with these moles, did the Spanish moles and the European moles shrink as expected?
CALLI: See, that’s the fascinating part! Remember how I said that this doesn’t happen to a lot of creatures? The European moles, as expected, shrunk by 11%, then regrew by 4% in the spring. This actually repeated the following winter as well. So again, great that they were studying moles and not shrews because they had a second winter to look at. The Spanish mole, though? No significant changes. Not even during a scarcity of food and resources.
NATE: Does that mean this is about evolutionary necessity? Like, it’s something that has to be a part of them genetically? Versus, just a lack of food? It’s not them starving and shrinking?
CALLI: Yeah, no, exactly. And now, the researchers want to observe the phenomenon in living creatures to figure out HOW this evolutionary, basically a hack, occurred. As I said earlier, future research could even find a way to harness that energy saving into experiments for humans to figure out a way to save energy too!
NATE: Alright, well that’s my plan for the winter. If it starts getting too cold I’m gonna just shrink down to 5 foot 4.
CALLI: We’ll see what it does to your cognitive abilities.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: So I don’t know about you but I think most people can say that they’ve come across a narcissist once or twice in their lives. It’s definitely an interesting topic and recent research suggests that there might be a better way to manage interactions with narcissists than previously known.
CALLI: You’re right, that's really fascinating. How do researchers say we should deal with narcissists?
NATE: Basically it comes down to compassion: showing kindness to yourself and others.
CALLI: Doesn’t that seem a bit counter-productive - don’t narcissists already love themselves?
NATE: Yes, but there’s a difference between being compassionate to yourself and loving yourself. Let me explain: the study defines narcissism as having two unique styles of behavior. One is “grandiose” narcissism, which is when somebody is arrogant, and acts superior to others, maybe even exploiting them. To make this easy, let’s call our grandiose narcissist Karen. But, there’s another kind. There’s “vulnerable” narcissism, which is when people are really sensitive to others judging them, because they lack self esteem and showcase neurotic tendencies, so we are gonna call them Ricky.
CALLI: Ohhhh, I get it. So being self-centered isn’t always being mean, and it doesn’t always involve loving yourself. Sometimes it’s like being a Ricky when you’re hyper-fixated on how others perceive you.
NATE: Exactly. And the researchers wanted to see if either of these traits could be eliminated by making subjects be compassionate, not only to themselves, but to others.
CALLI: Cool! So um… how would you go about even getting narcissists to be kind to others?
NATE: Well, the researchers gathered 230 Western European subjects, most of whom were female students. Each was coached to think a specific way for a short amount of time. First, they were told to be “self-compassionate,” where they had to think about a difficult or painful situation in their lives. Then, they wrote about this situation while being told to focus on mindful and kind language.
CALLI: Okay, mindful and kind language? I’m familiar with this concept when it comes to therapy but I’d love to learn more about it.
NATE: The same kind of language somebody should be using when they’re happy with themselves. So for example, if I look in the mirror when I’m happy and say “you’re the coolest, Nate,” I should keep that same energy alive when I’m sad or angry, too.
CALLI: So much easier said than done! What did they find?
NATE: Well, this is where the study gets a little complex because the researchers made four hypotheses for the study, and each was incorrect to some extent. Hypothesis number one: they guessed that self-compassion scores would go up for anybody who had high scores as a Karen in grandiose narcissism and were exposed to the self-compassion exercise. Surprisingly, this wasn’t the case.
CALLI: Wait, really? Okay, so how so?
NATE: There was no change in their self compassion. Meaning there was no link found between being nice to yourself and being a Karen. Hypothesis number two guessed that subjects with grandiose narcissism would have trouble showing compassion for others, especially after exposure to self-compassion. This… was only partially true.
CALLI: How?!
NATE: Well, first, I want to point out the other end of the spectrum of compassion, which is what the researchers call “other compassion,” or OC. It’s the same rule of thumb, except you treat others with mindfulness and kindness when you’re upset, and for the study, you wrote about someone else’s painful situation. Whichever assessment was being tested, the subject had to write around 200 words.
CALLI: You’d think that would be a difficult task for a narcissist, right?
NATE: Yep. And even then, it was only for those who scored high in what the researchers called the “exploitative-entitled sub-component” to grandiose narcissism. This is the sub-group of people who are more likely to exploit somebody for their personal gain. For everybody else, “other compassion” actually increased!
CALLI: That’s… not what I expected. So you’re telling me that only the worst kinds of narcissists lack empathy for other people?
NATE: According to this study, at least! The other two hypotheses were related to the vulnerable narcissists or Rickys, as we’re calling them. Researchers believed that self-compassion would improve after being exposed to self-compassion. This ended up being correct, just not as overwhelmingly as they thought.
CALLI: And what’s the final hypothesis?
NATE: The final hypothesis was that vulnerable narcissists exposed to self-compassion AND “other compassion” wouldn’t be more compassionate to others.
CALLI: Let me guess: they were actually more compassionate?
NATE: Nope! The hypothesis was proven true with anybody considered a Ricky or a “high functioning vulnerable narcissist.” It was only false for anybody showing low levels of vulnerable narcissism.
CALLI: Let me just wipe this egg off my face real quick. So let me see if I got this right: Karens are capable of being more empathetic to other people, unless they’re exploitative jerks. Rickys are NOT capable of being more empathetic, though. What does all of this mean?
NATE: It means that the people we perceive as narcissists, aka grandiose narcissists, are actually capable of meaningful change when surrounded by compassionate people and behavior. This is a good thing because grandiose narcissistic traits are thought to be devastating to your relationships to yourself and those around you. Unfortunately, so are vulnerable narcissistic traits, and the team seems to have shown that compassion won’t heal someone’s lack of self esteem.
CALLI: So basically, if we are kind to Karens, they are capable of change?! Might be a tough task out in the wild but it’s definitely an idea worth holding on to!
NATE: Exactly!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. A new study shows that it is not only possible to create a child with three parents, but their embryos develop much like regular embryos do. While it gives hope for those afraid of passing down a genetic condition, it raises a lot of sticky moral questions.
CALLI: If you’re in Europe and the moles look a lot smaller during the winter, that’s not your mind playing tricks on you. Scientists have discovered that certain species of mole are able to shrink their body mass by up to 11% to conserve energy during the winter. Future experiments could even unlock why this occurs evolutionarily - and maybe, a way for humans to conserve energy in a similar way!
NATE: New research shows that the easiest way to fight narcissism is with a little good old fashioned KINDNESS. Most “grandiose narcissists” were found to show more empathy for other people when introduced to compassionate language. Unfortunately, “vulnerable narcissists” might need to find help another way, since the study found no difference whatsoever to the addition of compassion for them!