Sick of people commenting on ds ginger hair

[woodpops]

I am sick to death of total strangers coming up to me and commenting on my sons ginger hair. Especially if dh (who's also ginger) isn't with me. THey're always asking where the ginger comes from ................ like it's any of their business. I don't want my ds to grow up thinking he's different because of these stupid peoples comments. His hair is beautiful just like him and I wouldn't have him any other way. People don't comment on my dd blonde hair so what gives them the right to comment on my ds????

Still doesn't make it true though, prettycandles; it can occur because of inbreeding but that doesn't mean it invariably has, even in a population where red hair is unusual.

Yikes, a barage of questions. Elliott, you can have any one of many mutations in the gene; the mutations just inactivate the gene, and this can happen in many different ways, so you and your dh can easily have different mutations. Your ds just has two inactive genes, doesn't matter how they've been inactivated. As to whether your ds2 is a carrier, it depends- do you and your dh both have non-red hair? If so your ds2 has a 67% chance of being a carrier and 33% chance of not being one (I'm assuming he's not red-haired here, cos I guess you'd have mentioned )

Zebra (hello by the way ), I don't know I'm afraid. I know a man who does though and I'll ask him next week when he's back. Up here in the enlightened North we do have CF carrier screening. It's done as part of routine booking-in stuff for pregnant women.

Can I go and watch Gordon Ramsey now?

Oops, missed that one janh- gene frequency is higher in Celtic populations, so I guess that has something to do with it.

NO YOU F*ING CAN'T!!!!!!!

No - this is far more interesting!

What about blue birthmarks? DS has one, and none of either family have any knowledge of them occuring in the past. I blame Attila the Hun - or was it Genghis Khan?

I knew a dog (realated to the dulux dog) and she had one blue and one brown eye. She was female (obviously) so it could work by X inactivation.

Actually the most recent thing I found on eye colour said it wasn't properly understood yet (although that was in a text book so could be out of date). So i just used to tell them that- then suggest they did a PhD in it

Yep there is mt DNA in RBC I think! My lab used to do a lot of work using mtDNA and I'm sure some of them used blood samples occasionally (toe nail clippings more commonly!) I know there would be other cells as blood as well but surely quite a lot of RBC iyswim.

I still haven't done yesterday's dishes, so really ought to go now. Thanks for the interesting genetics lesson - hope it continues tomorrow!

Goodnight.

Ner ner ne ner ner, hmb I did see him so there. AND I'm going back in a minute to see who gets thrown out (pleeease pleeease let it be Edwina).

Thanks for settling that jimjams, I couldn't see any reason why they wouldn't have mitochondria (and lots of reasons why they would!). You should have added the dog to the "who do you know who's famous" thread

Sleep well, prettycandles

And had lunch with John krebs? (yuck). I do have a couple of famous stories but I'm not telling....

Not sure I settled it though- bit of a guess.

Ah, go on go on go on. Please tell?

Nah they're not very exciting but they are relations of friends and I used to go and stay with them so it would be a bit odd iyswim.

John Krebs though And I offended him

What's wrong with John Krebs? always seemed OK to me. Not that I know him or anything, just my company does lots of work with FSA and no-one has ever had a real go about him. And he sat with the ordinary people, not the VIPs, at an event I attended recently. Not sure if he was just lost, though!

Thanks tamum. didn't realise it was a 'switching off' thing. Yes, me and dh and ds2 all have non-red hair. So presumably the genes that determine our hair colour are nothing to do with the gene which has been inactivated in ds1?
Which part of the North are you in - I know clinical geneticists in Leeds and Newcastle (but we don't have CF screening locally so you can't be round here!)

I used to worked with people who (merciliously) slagged off Krebs for incompetence, too. This was related to his ideas about how to implement & management of the the badgers-TB link studies. I was shocked, tbh. He's such a God to my little prole brain. I've no idea of the truth of it.

Prettycandles: we get that'Blue Spot' in our family, too. A peadiatrician (I think, after a mw said something very unacceptable to my SIL)explained that it is probably a result of my grandmothers romany background, originating in India via Moorish Africa and then through Spain. Do you or DH have dark hair? Or olivey skin?

Hi Elliott. I don't think anything much is known about other hair colours other than that many genes influence brown and black. There's a bit done on blondness, but I can't remember the conclusions I'm afraid. Absence of the melanocortin 1 receptor gives you red hair whatever other gene variants you have, but clearly the degree of redness must be influenced by other geneic factors. There's basically far more work done on red hair because it also confers extra risk for melanoma (because red heads burn more easily), so it's easier to justify medically (and thus get funds).

I'm in Edinburgh, so further North again, but I do know a couple of people in Newcastle, and know lots by name (can't think who's red headed though!)

Krebs badgers TB stuff was pretty incompetent.

I didn't like him because he asked me a question- I gave an honest answer (which he didn't like) and so he refused to talk to me any more!

The conversation was quite boring- about postdoc funding- but he was head of NERC at the time so had real power to improve things. I wasn't rude- just explained why I wouldn't be staying in Science post PhD but he wasn't interested.

To be fair to him though, he did look fairly repulsed by the worst case of brown nosing I have ever seen

Blu, I have dark hair but fairly 'ginger' skin (burn easily and take a long time to tan); dh is chestnutty with 'blond' skin (tans well but not deeply). The blue spot is unknown in either my or dh's families. Apparently it is more common in the Far East to have a blue spot on your bum than not to have one, hence the name Mongolian Blue. And that's why I blame one of the barbarian hordes. Genghis or Attila, I forget which, got as far as...mmmm...Austria? The gates of some famous city anyway. And along the way probably did something nasty to one of my Polish ancestresses.

Do you mind if I ask what the 'unacceptable thing' was?

She said 'aha, your ancestors shagged Ghengis Khan'
No, it was something along the lines of 'ooh someone's been at it with a black man' as if that was dodgy, or in such a way that my brother, if of questionable perceptive powers, could have thought SIL had been unfaithful!
But that's interesting, cos my nephews spot is just above his bum.

Tamum, any illumination?

I had completely forgotten - I got that comment too! Oh I was so offended! So what if the baby's father or my father or whoever's father was black? A stupid racist comment IMO. And it implies infidelity as well, so personally insulting too.

Extraordinary! Which hospital, or area are you in Prettycandles? SURELY midwives are nice lovely tactful people and not many can be roaming the country coming out with this sort of stuff!

To be honest I had more-or-less wiped the memory from my mind so I don't remember!

No, I'm not quite as memory-stricken as that! I'm in Brent, and ds was born at UCH.

SIL was in Norwich - so probably not the same midwife - if it was the midwife that said it to you.

Interesting about the Mongolian Blue mark as dd2 had one. When researching my dad's family history I discovered that a Great-Great-etc (not sure how many!!) Mother of his was Bengali but I hadn't connected that with the MB spot until this thread. But my mum had a Portugese ancestor so I suppose it could derive from there, too.