thanks to kiwiko for sponsoring today's
video us redheads account for one to two
percent of the population but the lore
around us seems a lot bigger than that
assuming we have sharp tempers or that
people with red hair get mad easily none
of this is founded in scientific
research i never get pissed off but i do
have a hard time feeling any physical
pain and new scientific research
explains why us redheads have a
distorted perception of pain each of
your roughly 30 to 37 trillion human
cells have genes tightly wound up in the
nucleus where proteins called histones
keep those genes tightly packed in fact
if unraveled the dna in each of your
human cells would stretch to around two
meters meaning that if
end to end
all of your dna could travel to the moon
and back over 150 000 times i had to
keep verifying this research because
it's like how that possible the histone
proteins carefully unravel the genes in
specific ways to be read by proteins
that create more proteins that control
every aspect of your life you can now
understand how complex these genes are
in relation to our lives but in 2003
when we sequenced the human genome we
entered a new era of genetic research
some of the research that i'm obsessed
with are genome-wide association studies
where they look at large swaths of genes
and then they start to be able to link
them to things like depression and
aggression and even being gay more info
by clicking the card here we made a
video on it gay rights because red hair
is something that we can see physically
we can study it much more easily there
are still many complicated genes that
control red hair but the gene that we're
going to be talking about today is the
mc1r gene which also relates to how
weirdly we feel
pain the mc1r gene is a recessive gene
which means you need two copies of the
gene for it to be expressed physically
for example you inherited two gene
copies of any given trait from your
birth parents one inherited from whoever
birthed you from their vagina and one
inherited from whoever put their semen
in that vagina these are known as
maternal alleles and paternal alleles
and how they interact make the unique
characteristics of you a dominant allele
is one that always determines the
phenotype or physical expression when
present on the other hand a recessive
allele like red hair is one that is not
expressed when it's paired with an
allele that is dominant recessive
alleles only express themselves
physically when you have two recessive
alleles from your parents so redheads
need to have two recessive alleles to
have red hair and now it's punnett
square time
punnett square time if one of your
parents is a redhead and the other has
black hair but is a carrier there's a 50
chance you will have red hair if both of
your parents have black hair but are
carriers there is a 25 chance you could
have red hair my mom has red hair my dad
has dark brown hair so he must have been
a carrier for me to have red hair if he
wasn't then i wouldn't have ended up
with this red beard that kind of turns
blonde when i bleach it in the sun and
sometimes i even put lemon in it to make
it blonde don't tell anyone speaking of
my family before we get to the
scientific truth about gingers and pain
we need to talk about today's sponsor
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now back to how the mc1r variant affects
ginger's ability to feel pain when you
have red hair you have the mc1r gene
variant and this variant leads to an
abnormal
in quotes melanocortin-1 receptor
protein on the surface of your
melanocytes which controls the color of
your hair and skin your melanocytes are
in the basal membrane of your skin and
produce two kinds of melanin pheomelanin
and eu melanin eu melanin is more
prominent in people with darker skin but
the abnormal red hair mcr1 protein
releases mostly pheomelanin this causes
you to grow red hair have freckles and
be fair skin slash more sensitive to
skin cancer it is this specific mc1r
gene that links directly to why us
redheads have distorted perceptions of
pain and why we're freaks of nature edit
that out get that in edit that out don't
tell anyone what i was going on youtube
oh when researchers induced the mc1r
gene in mice they found that when
prodding the mice the control group felt
significantly more pain than the ones
with the modified redhead mc1r gene they
felt less pain another study found that
mc1r mutant redhead mice were less
sensitive to poisonous stings the
biochemical reason for this is that the
mc1r redhead gene variant created
melanocytes that secrete lower levels of
the protein called proprio melanocortin
pomc for short pomc is cut up to create
hormones that increase pain perception
and also affects the mc4r proteins which
increase pain tolerance overall but with
science it's not always that simple and
there's a couple of wrenches that have
been thrown into this for example it has
been found that redheads have more
sensitivity to thermal pain when
exposing brown-haired women and red
haired women to extreme cold or hot
temperatures the redheads seem to feel
it more this study relied on subjective
responses to women being put in painful
situations but there are a few other
studies that back up this research that
redheads are more sensitive to hot and
cold the reason this information is
medically important is that some doctors
think we need to look at redheads
differently when we're giving anesthesia
also maybe with crispr cast 9 gene
editing i can get my little redhead kids
to have a bit more pain perception
because sometimes my legs freaking
bleeding i look down i haven't even
noticed it's like maybe i needed to get
a band-aid on that before i was infected
also sometimes when i'm making jokes
with my friends i'm like shut up and i
like punch them and they're like ow and
i'm like oh that hurt because like when
people punch me i'm just like oh that
felt kind of good i'm happy to be alive
in 2021 a time where we can understand
this complex genetic science and link it
to my physiological experience because 6
000 years ago it was thought that
redheads were witches if it was live
then i would be a redhead who was gay
and i would definitely have been burned
at the stake thank you so much for
watching and we'll see you next week for
a new science video