(no subject)

[labellementeuse]

Hey Kiwis! Check out the cover for North & South magazine this month, headline: Test-tube babies: A NEW SPECIES?

Not only is this hilariously tabloid, it directly contradicts a quote within the mag. A study has recently been performed on a limited sample of IVF babies (140 participants, half IVF half not, only fresh not frozen, no premature births, no multiple births - which is about half of all IVF births - kids only between 5 and 11) and found that IVF babies are slightly taller, slimmer, and have basically better cholesterol than all of y'all normals. One of the guys who did the study said that he specifically didn't want to be frightening with talk of a new species or whatever - so naturally that's what North and South did on the cover.

I actually would be interested in reading the study, if only to find out whether or not this shit is adjusted for variables like wealth and so forth. It's all very well to invent some explanation about environments outside the womb, but IVF is 1. expensive unless you got it funded 2. difficult. This implies things like, for example, IVF births are not likely to be accidental births. IVF parents are going to be very prepared for pregnancy and are going to have spent a lot of time on their environment (physical, i.e. folic acid, especially) to prove that. IVF parents are probably wealthier than other parents. etc. So I would like to know if this study corrects for that or not.

I am an IVF baby, BTW, which is why I find this interesting.

Comments

[semiramis.livejournal.com]

[singing] Correlation~ does not imply causation~~

...but yeah, lol that's why I don't like science in the media. I remember this one time, my research methods professor, who specializes in auditory language processing, was talking about how she used to like to watch science shorts on national news networks until the one time she caught a section on her area of focus, at which point she was like "...uhhhhh" xD like, even if the science is sound, the news people will blow it all out of proportion to make a story out of it.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

For reals! Yeah, it was hard to tell from the article whether or not the science was sound and because I would never ever pay money for this rag mag, but it did look a lot like the latest PhD comic. (http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174)

[chattycheese.livejournal.com]

I swear, I read that headline and was instantly transported back to Te Putaiao. Particularly the lecture we spent half the hour debating whether or not you had to whakapapa back to a pig if you received a pig organ (xenotransplantation, which seemed to be a huge issue with the lecturer but isn't really done that often at all.)

Fascinating study though. It'd be interesting to see the data behind it.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Your icon is gorgeous!

North & South, just for the record, isn't a Maori magazine at all - I know Maori have cultural concerns with xenotransplantation (just like a tonne of other cultures and religions!) but yeah, North & South is whitebred idiocy.

Yeah, I'd like to see the actual study too.

[amarynth.livejournal.com]

North & South has always been a fairly alarmist magazine in my experience.

It would be amusing if they followed through and found out that the upper middle class in general were a separate species due to their greater height, lower weight, lower cholesterol etc.

[sixth-light.livejournal.com]

Pretty much every North & South cover I've seen has been about a) getting your child into a good educational institution, b) CRIME! and c) house prices. It's like the Listener without the TV listings (i.e. the useful bits.)

[amarynth.livejournal.com]

Yea, it's definitely the journal of middle class anxiety.

Although you know I remember a day when the Listener was actually fairly progressive... and it was basically the only left-leaning mainstream media outlet in the country. I think the change in editors in 2005 was pretty decisive for its politics.

[sixth-light.livejournal.com]

That sounds about right; I remember very much liking the Listener's current affairs coverage when I lived with my parents, didn't read it for a year in the Halls of Residence, and then was very disappointed in it when Tui and I went flatting and she had a subscription. That was 2004-2006, and it's never been the same since.

I remember someone on the Public Address forums concluding that the ideal Listener cover nowadays would be "Does My House Price Look Fat In This?", with a smaller feature on "NCEA: Failing Our Children, or Crippling Them?". It'd be funny if it hadn't once been a decent read.

[amarynth.livejournal.com]

Well I guess I hold out hope that with another change of editors it might swing back left. But I probably wouldn't go back to reading it anyway. We were doing media in politics in tutorials this week and it was pretty depressing to see that almost all of New Zealand's mainstream media tend to the right. (And a fair bit of its non-mainstream media, too)

[blythely.livejournal.com]

Wow, this totally distresses me to hear about the Listener! I haven't read it since I left NZ in ~2001 but it had some pretty leftcore undercurrents for most of the time I read it in my formative years. And Dylan Horrocks, man! Also a terrific crossword.

[aleph-naught.livejournal.com]

Aye, I pretty much grew up with the Listener and it definitely went well downhill in my last few years of reading it.

Interestingly, the conservative swing pretty much exactly coincided with my parents' post-50 conservative swing (they're still Labour supporters, but a lot more angsty about things like crime than they once were, as seems to be common in their age group). I almost wonder if they were intentionally trying to move with an aging audience.

[amarynth.livejournal.com]

It may simply be that people of that generation simply got senior enough within the Listener organisation.

Come to think of it I did really enjoy their cover story on the current recession three weeks ago, but that might be an exception.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

I think the change in editors in 2005 was pretty decisive for its politics.

Agreed. It was a fairly obvious and dramatic change, actually.

[amarynth.livejournal.com]

I wasn't reading it at the time but one of their photographers told me that she was pretty upset about it. Apparently they had started sharing office space with the Herald and she felt that there was a bit of culture creep going on. I think she's since quit.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I used to lol at the NCEA covers and of course I would never buy it - I still remember Asian Angst (http://www.tzemingmok.com/asian_angst/asianangst_archives.html) (randomly: god I miss Tze Ming Mok.)

Someone down below made the good point that the test of seperate species is whether it's duplicated in offspring, so...

[amarynth.livejournal.com]

Another good test is whether the hypothetical 'species' can only produce fertile offspring by mating with other members of its own 'species'.

[sixth-light.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that IVF is expensive and time-consuming even if you *do* get it funded. Added to that, the poor are far more likely have children earlier - delaying childbirth 'till your thirties or forties, an important cause of IVF, is a very middle/upper class deal. I just don't see *how* they could have corrected for socioeconomic status, really. Or, as you mentioned, all the preparation stuff - which is definitely correlated to factors like adult weight.

OTOH, it would be pretty bad science if they hadn't thought about that stuff - shockingly so - so I'd have to read the paper before passing judgement there. I just had a look on Scopus and I can't find it, but then, I have no idea what the search terms should be, so. Any info on author/journal of publication?

[clockworkflight.livejournal.com]

If they wanted to actually look at whether they were a different species (which clearly isn't a series hypothesis but whatevs) it would have been more useful to look at the children of IVF babies. The other interesting thing, though I've no idea if they could get a big enough sample size, would be to look at children born to same couple, one with IVF and one without.

But yeah. North and South kind of fails.

[morbane.livejournal.com]

It would be interesting to look at children of IVF children. Sadly, that might have to wait a little while, because the oldest IVF child in the country is only 24.

[clockworkflight.livejournal.com]

Oh, I didn't realise - I had it in my head that it was around thirty, though that might be in the world perhaps. In any case, yeah, not a big enough sample size now but something that could be done in the not too distant future.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Louise Brown, the oldest IVF baby in the world, was born in the late 70s. (Just wiki'd - 1978. She's turning 31 this July.) So, yeah, there aren't a big number to play with, especially because the way IVF is done now is so different to the way it was done in 1978 - or 1987 (my birth year), even. That's why they had such a narrow sample range in this particular study, I believe - which I'm gonna have to check N&S for the author name, I think.

[disturbed-kiwi.livejournal.com]

OMG ur a nu SPECIES no wai!


It is dissapointing to look at the media isn't it?

[blythely.livejournal.com]

Do you have any details about the study authors, journal published in etc? And does North & SOuth really not have a website?

[one-2-3-4.livejournal.com]

I would really like to read this study and see a long term version of it - tracing the children from, say, 5 to 21 or something, just to give it real substance. It would be interesting to see if the factors they uncover actually withstand the test of time.

Also, IVF babies is a very broad term, even with the characteristics you mentioned. IVF pertains to both those of the parents in question and from egg/sperm donors. I'd be interested to read the full parameters. *scours journal data bases*