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Preparing doctors for the genomic tsunami

Mark Henderson has a great piece in the Times exploring the impact of personal genomics on the practice of medicine. The basic theme should be familiar to anyone who has been following the emergence of the personal genomics industry: doctors are currently almost completely unprepared for the onslaught of genetic information they are about to experience. Here's the situation: At present, genetic training focuses on Mendelian diseases - rare mutations in single genes, which usually have severe effects. People who inherit the Huntington's mutation, for example, will invariably develop the…

Studying whale behavior from Davey Jones locker

Story by Michelle Kinzel, OSU How do you study the sperm whale, Physeter catadon, when they dive up to 3 km (1.9 miles) to the bottom of the ocean floor and stay submerged up to 90 minutes? Sperm whales reach lengths of 18 m (60 ft) and possess blood volumes up to 3 tonnes. The blood stores oxygen that enables the whale to dive to great depths to the ocean floor. Dives more than 2 miles deep are possible for sperm whales, but more typical dives are 30 minutes long and 300 to 400 m depth. The elusive behemoths spend a significant amount of time in the deep sea. Spatial technologies,…

The Laelaps Movie of the Week: Raptor Island

What do you get when you put dinosaurs, terrorists, and Navy SEALs all in one place? The answer in "A mess," and in this case such a disaster carries the title Raptor Island. Starring Lorenzo Lamas, the film continues the long standing tradition of putting guns and monsters in the same place in the hopes that something good will come out on film. Indeed, it seems that more effort is required to serve up a plate of Hamburger Helper than was put into the story and dialog of this slice of movie cheese, and its painfully apparent from the very first scene. We meet our hero, "Hack" (Lamas) and his…

How to Eat Cheap

For the last few weeks and over the next month, attention to hunger will be at its annual peak. People will donate turkeys, time and checks, canned goods and garden produce to food pantries. Many of us will find ourselves thinking of those in need in this season. We'll dish out cranberry sauce and decorate cookies, volunteer at the food pantry or in the shelter kitchen, and focus on making sure that the season of lights and joy is also one where people aren't forgotten. This is a very good thing. It is also important to remember that most of the regularly hungry or food insecure people in…

Why I Hate Earth Day

I wrote this a few years ago for Earth Day's 40th anniversary, and frankly, I haven't changed my mind.   I bloody hate Earth Day. No offense to those of you who love it, and I know there are some awesome Earth Day programs out there, but by the time we get there, I'm spending my days hiding under the covers, because every freakin' time I open my email inbox a wave of the most nauseating spew of greenwashing comes flowing out. Guess what? A major department store chain, nearly in bankruptcy, is now selling the eco-tote, made from organic sheepskin, embossed with "Think Global, Act Local" to…

An unexpected analogy

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 5, 2006. Remember how I said yesterday that I was going to post something today that I had been planning since…

Fire him. Right Now.

As some of you have already seen at Pharyngula, Dispatches, and the Lippard Blog, a New Jersey public high school teacher was caught on tape teaching religion instead of history. One of the audio recordings is available online. The quality is poor, but a with a little bit of equalizer work it is mostly understandable. The material that is on it is absolutely and completely outrageous. Things were said that don't belong within ten city blocks of a public school classroom, and it's a damn shame that the worst than can be done to the teacher is terminating his employment. Some of the things said…

Breast Cancer Crankery From Mike Adams

The latest crankery from Adams is the evil male-chauvinist conspiracy to perpetuate breast cancer for fun and profit being led by none other than those dastardly villains of the American Cancer Society. With his stunning report and links to the thinkbeforeyoupink campaign, he rails against the ribbons that are a "symbol of male-dominated control over women", and exposes the insidious lies of those who spend their lives looking for cures for this deadly disease. In this report, you'll learn how the cancer industry -- which is dominated by powerful men -- uses the same tactics today to…

A Christmas public health hazard

I am not a Christian (not now, not ever) but I have always liked Christmas. It's my favorite (secular) holiday and when the time comes (Christmas Eve or Christmas Day) we Reveres will likely write our traditional Christmas post explaining just why we aren't the obligatory curmudgeons on the issue. But that's for then. There is something I really hate about Christmas, although it's not really about Christmas specifically. It is a public health problem and it's probably worse on Christmas Day than any other day of the year. It's clamshell packaging. I thought about it (for the umpteenth time)…

Gallagher gets it?

The name "Richard Gallagher" may be familiar to some readers. Gallagher is the editor of The Scientist, and last year, somewhat naively suggested that the evolution/creation "debate" was actually a good thing (you can find the text of his editorial at this site). Both PZ and Jason Rosenhouse took him to task for the editorial (and Gallagher replied, and PZ shot back). The next month, The Scientist then published a number of letters responding to the editorial, and Gallagher also wrote a reply (republished here by the Discovery Institute). Gallagher ended that piece with this quote:…

A man after my own heart at Iowa State

Oh, dear. John West of the Disco Institute is in a furious snit because, after refusing to grant tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez, Iowa State University did promote Hector Avalos, of the Religious Studies department, to full professor. You can just tell that West is spitting mad that Iowa would dare to keep Avalos around, and thinks it a grave injustice that one scholar would be accepted, while their pet astronomer gets the axe. So now they're going to do a hatchet job on Avalos. Never mind that the two are in completely different departments, with very different standards. Never mind that the…

Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, and Amos Lee

The title sounds like the opening to a really odd joke, but in fact it was the concert bill last night in Albany. Bob Dylan is touring as always, and Elvis Costello is along doing a solo set, with Amos Lee opening for both. Kate and I went to the show, and it was... unusual. I'll put most of the review comments below the fold, just to avoid cluttering the front page more than it already is. I think the key realization of the evening, though, was that at age 66, Dylan has decided that he wants to be Johnny Cash circa 1968. What with one thing and another, we were a little late getting there,…

Hidden beliefs in science stereotypes predict size of gender gap across 34 countries

Think of a scientist - not anyone in particular, just a random individual working in the field. Got one? Did you picture a man or a woman? If it's the former, you're probably not alone. There have been a few times when I've only ever known a scientist through their surname on a citation and automatically assumed that they were a man, only to learn, to my chagrin, that they're actually a woman. It's always a galling reminder of how pervasive the stereotype of science as a male endeavour can be, even at an unconscious level. Now, Brian Nosek from the University of Virgina, together with…

Sunday Iconoclasm Blogging

Some irreverent souls have taken to Sunday blogging on a freethinking themes.  I choose to Ozymandize* that which we worship the most: our economic system. That plant in the middle is href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2009/07/color_of_the_year_mimosa.php">my mimosa ( href="http://plants.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=ALJU">Albizia julibrissin) tree, the one I am growing from seed.  It is, literally, a green shoot (although the leaves close and droop at night). style="display: inline;"> "They" say that green shoots are everywhere these days.  Do we believe "them"? href…

Just Remember, Parsons: Elephants Never Forget (And Neither Will I)

GoDaddy.com Chief Executive Bob Parsons feels absolutely no remorse for his choice to engage in elephant hunts in Zimbabwe. He posted this boastful video saying it's one of the most 'rewarding' things he does (warning - strong stomach required), and continues to defend it even after coming under fire for his actions. Parsons had this to say about his hunts (this wasn't his first): I spend a few weeks in Zimbabwe each year helping the farmers deal with problem elephants. The people there have very little, many die each year from starvation and one of the problems they have is the elephants, of…

Is Bill Maher really that ignorant?

Work and a conference intervene to prevent a fresh dose of Respectful Insolence today. Fortunately, there's still classic Insolence from the archives that hasn't been moved over to the new blog. This one originally appeared on March 7, 2005. The short answer is: Yes. The long answer is below. When I first posted on this yesterday, I had hoped things weren't as they appeared. Although representing himself as a free-thinking skeptic who proudly trumpets his atheism and calls religion a "neurologic disorder," Bill Maher has, sadly, apparently officially passed from the realm of "smug but…

RP 4: More on the movie Up! (or Upper)

So, analysis of the movie Up is pretty popular in the blogosphere. Figure I might as well surf the popularity wave. So, I have a couple more questions. The most important thing to estimate is the mass of the house. I am going to completely ignore the buoyancy of the house. I figure this will be insignificant next to the buoyancy needed. Anyway, let me go ahead and recap what has already been done on this in the blogosphere. Wired Science - How Pixar's Up House Could Really Fly - from that post: First, they calculated (seemingly correct) that the buoyancy of helium is 0.067 pounds per…

More on the movie Up! (or Upper)

So, analysis of the movie Up is pretty popular in the blogosphere. Figure I might as well surf the popularity wave. So, I have a couple more questions. The most important thing to estimate is the mass of the house. I am going to completely ignore the buoyancy of the house. I figure this will be insignificant next to the buoyancy needed. Anyway, let me go ahead and recap what has already been done on this in the blogosphere. Wired Science - How Pixar's Up House Could Really Fly - from that post: First, they calculated (seemingly correct) that the buoyancy of helium is 0.067 pounds per…

Test essay 9: Forces acting on scientists to share and not to share

This is the final in my practice essays before taking the real comps test in the end of July.  I need to correct the record, though. Apparently although all of these questions came from my advisor, he didn't write them all. These were ones proposed by committee members and rejected for inclusion in the exam. (the gap in numbers you see are two essays that didn't go well). This particular question might be by my advisor with an ok from the two STS committee members. I didn't have any STS questions to practice with so he came up with this one - which I think is an excellent question. question:…

The E-Cigarette: A Bad Moon Rising?

I think it was around Christmastime last year, while frantically traipsing through the mall in search of bargains, that an over-eager kiosk salesperson stepped into my path.  Wonderful, I thought.  Another person trying to sell me overpriced hand cream. I tried to go around her, hoping sheâd get the hintâto no avail.  Oddly, instead of launching into a speech about my unhealthy cuticles, she asked me if I was a smoker. And thatâs when I noticed she was selling e-cigarettes:  plastic cigarettes that look almost exactly like the real deal. (They even puff out odorless vapor that looks…

Perennial Plants from Seed

Note: This is a repost from ye olde blogge (which, I am informed by the kind gentleman who is helping me debut it will be back to function by early next week - thank you all for your patience!). Aaron Newton and I are starting up our farm and garden design class today, and we'll be posting a lot of material on growing of all sorts for the next six weeks. I've got a post about winter sowing and stratification coming up next, but thought I would preceed it, since so many people don't realize this, with the observation that you can actually start an astonishing number of woody and herbaceous…

Seven Questions....with Yours Truly

Last week, my SciBling Jason Goldman interviewed me for his blog. The questions were not so much about blogging, journalism, Open Access and PLoS (except a little bit at the end) but more about science - how I got into it, what are my grad school experiences, what I think about doing research on animals, and such stuff. Jason posted the interview here, on his blog, on Friday, and he also let me repost it here on my blog as well, under the fold: Here at Thoughtful Animal headquarters, we're starting a new series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal…

7 Questions with... Bora Zivkovic

Here at Thoughtful Animal headquarters, we're starting a new series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal research of all kinds - biomedical, behavioral, cognitive, and so forth. Interested in how animal research is conducted, or why animal research is important? Think you might want to do some animal research of your own someday? This is the interview series for you. I've asked friend, scibling, and trusted advisor Bora Zivkovic (twitter, blog) if he would be our inaugural interviewee. In addition to his extensive blogging here at Scienceblogs, covering…

Old school versus new school in the lab

I was perusing the feeds of my fellow ScienceBloggers the other night when I came across a post by ERV that really resonated with me. In it, she expounds on the benefits of doing things "old school" in the lab, specifically with respect to having hard evidence to defend oneself if ever accused of scientific misconduct. She has a point, but that's not why the post caught my attention. I've actually been struggling with the conflict between "old school" and "new school" recently. You see, I've recently been in the position where I've had to add people to my lab, and in fact the entire staff of…

"Right to try" goes federal, thus far unsuccessfully

It's been nearly two weeks since a new "right to try" bill (AB 1668) passed the California legislature with overwhelming support and was sent to Governor Jerry Brown's desk to be signed. Thus far, he has not signed it, which is good, but neither have I seen a story that he has vetoed it either. In the meantime I learned some more about a federal version of the bill, which I will discuss after a brief recap of why right-to-try is such bad policy, which will lead into a discussion of the federal bill. For those unfamiliar with right-to-try, such bills claim to allow terminally ill (or, in some…

On the Nature of PLoS....

I know that you know that I work for PLoS. So, I know that a lot of you are waiting for me to respond, in some way, to the hatchet-job article by Declan Bucler published in Nature yesterday. Yes, Nature and PLoS are competitors in some sense of the word (though most individual people employed by the two organizations are friendly with each other, and even good personal friends), and this article is a salvo from one side aimed at another. Due to my own conflict of interest, and as PLoS has no intention to in any official way acknowledge the existence of this article (according to the old…

The Tripoli 6 and new scientific evidence: urgent call to the science blogosphere

We are asking the scienceblogging community once again to rally on behalf of our colleagues on trial for their lives in Libya. They have been accused of infecting over 400 children with HIV (see previous posts, here, here, here, here, here and here). When last we made an appeal (here) the response was extraordinary and spread quickly to the blogosphere on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum. The campaign to save the six health workers began with a strongly worded editorial in Nature and spread via the science blogosphere to the wider science and human rights organizations…

Another vaccine story

There's a report on the wires that scientists at the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) at U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have developed a DNA vaccine that protects mice against the reconstructed 1918 virus. The paper just appeared online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS, also known as "penis" in the trade). At this point the paper is more important for what it reveals about how the mouse immune system protects against this notorious virus than as a demonstration of a vaccine technology for use in people. That is much further down the road.…

Reading Diary: Bold Scientists: Dispatches From The Battle For Honest Science by Michael Riordan

The default mode, politically-speaking, for most scientists seems to be professionally neutral. In other words, most scientists would tend to see their personal political beliefs as more or less completely separate from their work as scientists. Even for politically sensitive topics like climate change, the tendency is to focus on the the best available evidence rather than commenting more directly on the potential policy implications of that evidence. Only by maintaining that politcal neutrality with scientists will be able to maintain their surface veneer of objectivity. If you're too…

Science and the anthrax case: not enough

Not many scientists were convinced the FBI had a solid science case against accused anthrax attacker Dr. Bruce Ivins. So the FBI held a telephone conference call between journalists and their scientific back-up to answer outstanding questions. Some questions were answered by promising the science would be submitted for peer review to the scientific literature but many others remain, some scientific but mostly about how the science fits in to what would have had to have been "evidence beyond a reasonable doubt" in what the FBI says would have been a death penalty case. An Editorial and…

Tar Heel Tavern #84

Wow, it's been a while since I last hosted the Tar Heel Tavern. This will be the first time since Erin took over the reins of this carnival and the first time since I moved my blog here to Seed's ScienceBlogs (please look around and check out my SciBlings while you are here). In the meantime, Erin has performed a nice makeover of the carnival's homepage and archives so go take a look. I am happy to see a number of great entries this week. Still, I added a couple of "Editor's Choices" at the end. Let's start... For the geeks out there, Melissa of Mel's Kitchen has discovered a cookbook…

New science in the Tripoli 6 case: urgent appeal

by Revere and cross-posted at Effect Measure We are asking the scienceblogging community once again to rally on behalf of our colleagues on trial for their lives in Libya. They have been accused of infecting over 400 children with HIV (see previous posts, here, here, here, here, here and here). When last we made an appeal (here) the response was extraordinary and spread quickly to the blogosphere on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum. The campaign to save the six health workers began with a strongly worded editorial in Nature and spread via the science blogosphere to the…

Dishonest Dembski:the Universal Probability Bound

Dishonest Dembski:the Universal Probability Bound One of the dishonest things that Dembski frequently does that really bugs me is take bogus arguments, and dress them up using mathematical terminology and verbosity to make them look more credible. An example of this is Dembski's *universal probability bound*. Dembski's definition of the UPB from the [ICSID online encyclopedia][upb-icsid] is: >A degree of improbability below which a specified event of that probability >cannot reasonably be attributed to chance regardless of whatever >probabilitistic resources from the known universe…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Sheep's Sex Determined By Diet Prior To Pregnancy: Maternal diet influences the chances of having male or female offspring. New research has demonstrated that ewes fed a diet enriched with polyunsaturated fats for one month prior to conception have a significantly higher chance of giving birth to male offspring. Fossilized Burrows 245 Million Years Old Suggest Lizard-like Creatures In Antarctica: For the first time paleontologists have found fossilized burrows of tetrapods -- any land vertebrates with four legs or leglike appendages -- in Antarctica dating from the Early Triassic epoch, about…

Why Grandmothers?

tags: researchblogging.org, Seychelles warbler, Acrocephalus sechellensis, birds, evolution, social behavior, helping behavior, grandmothers Seychelles warbler, Acrocephalus sechellensis. Image: J. Komdeur. When talking about evolution, some people have wondered aloud about why grandmothers exist in human society since they clearly are no longer able to reproduce. However, these people are conveniently overlooking the fact that grandmothers perform a valuable service; they help their relatives, often their own children, raise their offspring -- offspring that are genetically related to…

At All Scales, Global Warming Is Real

Large ponderous entities like the IPCC or government agencies like NOAA take forever to make basic statements about climate change, for a variety of reasons. They are going to have to speed up their process or risk losing some relevance. Among the coming problems we anticipate with global warming will be events that have huge, widespread effects and that happen in time scales of weeks or months, or a season, and having a nice governmental report about it two years later isn't going to do anybody any good. So let's see to that problem, please (looking sternly at IPCC and NOAA). But that's…

The Wisdom of a Crowded Individuals

A lot of people have read The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. In the book, he gives an example of a group of people forced to estimate the weight of a cow. (This was actually an experiment that geneticist Franics Galton attempted.) When you do this, you find that the accuracy of the average response from the group is much greater than the accuracy of each individual estimate. This is the so-called wisdom of crowds. The assumption with experiments like this is that each individual will make the best guess they can and this guess will be stable over time -- minus any new information…

ResearchBlogging.org: Successes and ... er ... opportunities for improvement

Less than a week after its official launch, ResearchBlogging.org now has 78 active, registered users. We're already bigger than ScienceBlogs.com! Of course, many of our users are ScienceBloggers -- these projects can definitely work together. We can also get much bigger. Over 200 bloggers have used our icon, and we need to get them signed up for the new aggregation site. There's the potential to enroll literally hundreds more bloggers from all parts of the research community -- not just scientists. All in all the launch has gone amazingly smoothly. As far as I know, the site never went down,…

Reading graphs: How we do it, and what it tells us about making better ones

Take a look at this graph showing population distribution by county in a fictional U.S. state: How do you read such a graph? Is this the ideal way to depict this sort of information? If you wanted to know which part of the state was most populous, how would you go about figuring it out? Researchers have developed conflicting models to explain how it's done. One model suggests that people reading this kind of graph must cycle between the different parts in order to understand it. This makes some sense: to answer our question about population, you'd have to look back and forth between the…

Do people's memories about their life history follow a predictable pattern?

What you remember about your life is almost certainly not accurate. Adults have very few memories before age five, and there is a systematic bias to the memories most people have for the rest of their lives. We are more likely to remember details about positive events like marriage and having children than we are to remember negative events like hospital stays or the death of a loved one. Many studies have found that people appear to remember much more from their teens and 20s than the rest of their lives. A fifty-year-old might remember more about her 20s than her 30s, even though the events…

New project: The Ethics of Vaccines

Since I've found myself drawn into blogging about vaccines and the antivaccination movement so much, I was interested to learn of a new project dedicated to discussing the ethical issues involved with vaccination being launched at the University of Pennsylvania: The Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine announced the beginning of an 18 month project to examine the field of vaccine development and use. Plans call for providing an ethical framework to help guide researchers, pharmaceutical companies, public-health agencies, health-care providers, and…

Links for 4-3-2009

Scads of stuff I don't have time to blog adequately... Johns Hopkins Provost Kristina Johnson was nominated by President Obama to be under secretary of the Department of Energy in mid-March. From the email press release: She is a distinguished researcher, best known for pioneering work -- with widespread scientific and commercial application -- in the field of "smart pixel arrays." Last year, she was awarded the John Fritz Medal, widely considered the highest award in engineering and previously given to Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, George Westinghouse and Orville Wright. She is an…

An HIV/AIDS "skeptic" questions my honesty and decency...

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on November 21, 2005 and is the first of a two-part discussion of what has come to be known as the Al-Bayati Report. Part 2…

Giant club-winged pigeons and ninja ibises: clubs, spurs, spikes and claws on the hands of birds (part III)

Time to finish one of those long-running series of Tet Zoo articles: at last, the long-awaited, much anticipated third and final instalment in the series on the clubs, spurs, spikes and claws present on the hands of numerous neornithine bird species. If you haven't done so already, do check out the previous parts here (on hand claws in general, and carpal spurs and knobs in waterfowl) and here (on carpal spurs in charadriiforms). Those previous instalments looked at claws (widely present in modern birds: far from unique to the Hoatzin Opisthocomus hoazin) and at keratin-sheathed bony knobs…

Freeing the flu sequences: one step forward

The journal Science has just published an important letter from veterinary pathologist Dr. Ilaria Capua of the Istituto Zooprofilattico delle Venezie and her colleagues in national veterinary laboratories in the UK, Australia and the US pledging to deposit avian influenza gene sequences into the publicly available online depository, GenBank, as soon as they are determined. This is an important breakthrough in a controversy that roiled the world of flu virologists for almost a year (see posts here, here, here and here). But there is still some way to go. Capua was among the first scientists to…

Promising Embryonic Stem Cell News

This new paper from Stem Cells is a wonderful example of the potential of human embryonic stem cells (hESC) to treat diseases like Type I diabetes. The reason type I diabetes is such an obvious target for hESC therapy get a little complicated, but I'll walk you guys through this paper, and recent results in islet cell transplantation to give you an idea why this result is very promising. Type I diabetes results from the destruction of the pancreatic islet cells, or specifically the beta cells in the islets which are responsible for insulin production in response to rising blood sugar. As a…

New study on obesity genetics

An interesting new paper has come out recently, reviving discussion of the effects of "nature" versus "nurture" in the development of obesity. Certainly everyone knows someone--or perhaps, is that someone, who can sit down and finish off an entire pizza without gaining an ounce, while others of us tend to gain weight just from looking at food. How much of our weight is due to our eating and exercise habits, and what's due to our genetics? Anyone who even browses the health section of their local paper or online news source (or really, anyone who's not been living in a cave for much of the…

The Time for Mars is Now

By Dr. Adrian Brown Planetary physicist at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute, and Gail Jacobs When most people look at photos of the Martian landscape, they see the kind of dry topography that, while attractive, shows only that at first glance Mars resembles many of the desert areas of Earth. By analyzing spectroscopic data gathered by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, however, SETI Institute planetary scientist Dr. Adrian Brown sees clues to where liquid water might once have puddled and pooled on the Red Planet, and possibly spawned life. Adrian is…

From Farm to Table: A new model for growing food fairly and safely

By Elizabeth Grossman “If we could get growers to comply with the law, that would revolutionize agriculture in this country,” said United Farm Workers (UFW) national vice president Erik Nicholson  explaining the circumstances that led to the creation of the Equitable Food Initiative. As Nicholson describes it, despite Americans’ intense interest in food and concern for their families’ health, most don’t think much – if at all – about the people who grow, pick and bring this food to market. And while most people not closely involved with agriculture assume that food is grown here under fair…

Gee, Let's Definitely Protect Kids Without Families from Getting One

As Arizona ramps up its attempt to win national "America's stupidest laws" competition (hotly contested, admittedly) by prioritizing heterosexual married couples over gay people and singles for adoption, there's a lovely story about two gay fathers and their 12 children adopted from foster care: These are all your kids? Oh, my gosh. Their poor mother. Where is she? I have to congratulate her." "I am their mother - and their father," Steven said. Then, reaching out to shake her hand, he introduced himself, and then Roger, and each of the kids as they loaded into two cars and buckled in. The…