Geoff Mogil
speaker
25 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Geoff Mogil’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So the MC1R gene is the gene that codes for, that provides the instructions for the creation of a protein known as the melanocortin-1 receptor.
And the melanocortin-1 receptor has a number of roles, but its most well-known is its involvement in producing melanin, which is the pigment that makes skin and hair turn different colors.
And redheads, essentially, are those who have inherited variants of that gene such that the protein, once it's made, doesn't work.
And so melanocortin-1 doesn't do what it's supposed to do.
And so instead of having brown hair like you're supposed to and somewhat darker skin, you end up having red hair and somewhat lighter skin, which is usually prone to freckling.
My lab showed that redheaded mice were more sensitive to a particular class of opioid drugs called kappa opioid drugs.
And we found this completely by accident.
We were not interested in redheads.
We were not interested in redheaded mice.
We were trying to find what the gene was that was responsible for how much kappa opioid analgesia mice would have.
We eventually found the gene, and the gene happened to be MC1R, and that's when we said to ourselves, oh, hmm, we could do this same experiment in humans because we can go get redheaded women that are very likely to have these variants of MC1R.
And indeed, we showed that redheads were more sensitive to the drug as well.
So in this study, we gave them electrical current to their arm.
The intensity of that electrical current was slowly increased until they said, stop.
I've had enough.
The non-redheads said stop when the electric current was up to 16 milliampères.
And the redheads didn't say stop until it was up to 21 milliampères.
So that's a difference of 5 out of 16.
So yeah, about 25%.
It turns out that the melanocortin-1 receptor accounts for about 75 or 80% of redheads, but not all.
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