My Life on this planet.

This is an older text (from around 2013-2014) that I didn't publish earlier, among other reasons because my internet was down and afterwards the moment was gone, hence some links to older articles. But now it seems to be another moment to publish the updated article as part of my miniseries about the pharmaceutical sector to show it is much more than "only for the money" although I acknowledge there are excesses. As a reminder:  - The first article was about the obligations pharmaceutical companies have to continue to monitor the safety of their products after commercialisation and if needed companies must update the product information, a cost for the companies.  - The second article described how the product information of codeine-containing products had major updates long after it was first used because new data became available as a result of its use in clinical practice and because it can interfere with  new drugs.  -  This third article describes the pr...

Determining our destiny by changing our DNA An interesting article in New Scientist (12 October 2013, " Life's purpose ", p32-35) describes how organisms can drive their own evolution. It describes how living organisms can affect their own DNA to direct their destiny to some extend, and thus not only random changes in our DNA (mutations) direct the evolution of organisms. Indeed, living organisms need to adjust to their environment (e.g. certain animals become white during winter and thus in winter other genes are expressed than in summer) and if this only happens via random mutations then probably our ability to adapt to a changing environment is too slow. This doesn't mean animals and plants change knowingly their DNA but changes in appearance and behaviour ( phenotype ) may cause more likely changes in certain parts of the DNA ( genotype ), and the way how this may work is probably via epigenetics whereby the changes may follow some set rules that we s...