Laurel Hubbard, Transgender

Transgender Weightlifter Laurel Hubbard

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New Zealand’s Olympic weightlifter Laurel Hubbard was in the news daily this past week. She made history by becoming the first openly transgender athlete to compete in an individual event at the 2021 Tokyo Summer Olympics.

Ms. Hubbard’s participation in the +87 kg class competition caused much controversy. This will now subside after her failure to progress and win any medal.

Testosterone Rules in the Tokyo Olympics

On a related note, there is yet another controversy in regards to two Nambian female sprinters with male-like levels of testosterone. These runners (Beatrice Masilingi and Silver medalist Christine Mboma) have high testosterone levels and are classified as intersex.

The official term to describe such athletes (who have XY sex chromosomes) is Differences of Sexual Development (DSD). The most famous such Olympian is South Africa’s Caster Semenya.

Laurel Hubbard’s Transition at Age 35

Laurel Hubbard Before
Laurel Hubbard before transitioning. Her balding father on the left is Auckland Mayor Richard Hubbard.

I have covered scalp hair growth in Male-To-Female (MTF) transgender persons in detail on this blog. Laurel Hubbard is especially interesting because she transitioned at the late age of 35 (she is currently age 43). It is hard to regrow scalp hair if you transition to female at a later age after years of balding.

Per wikipedia, Ms. Hubbard’s height is a robust 6 feet and 1 inches. In the image on the right (from Daily Mail), Ms. Hubbard clearly has a thinning hairline prior to her transition. And her father, Auckland Mayor Richard “Dick” Hubbard, has major hair loss.

Note: One transgender commentator said that the acronym “MTF” is nowadays obsolete since the female was always female in the brain (but just male in the body). For the purposes of this blog, however, I need to use the acronym so as to emphasize the hormonal changes involved in going from biological male to biological female. With subsequent hair regrowth in those who are lucky.

Laurel Hubbard’s Hair Regrowth

In recent images and videos of Laurel Hubbard, it is clear that she has regrown a decent amount of hair in the frontal scalp region. More impressively, her hair at the back and sides of the scalp is thick and long, typical of many females.

In most men, even the so-called “permanent hair” in the rear donor zone rarely grows too long. Even worse, in many men, this area thins to the point of no hair (i.e., Norwood 7). Moreover, in most men with early onset androgenetic alopecia, the hair above the ears becomes thin, wispy and a nuisance.

It is therefore encouraging to see the improvement in Ms. Hubbard’s scalp hair despite a late transition. Is is very hard to regrow hair in fully bald areas. Make sure to also see my post on famous transgender Bruce (now Caitlyn) Jenner and her hair growth.

AlphaFold, AlphaFold 2, DeepMind

DeepMind’s AlphaFold Protein Structure Database

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Several days ago, DeepMind (sister company of Google) released its much awaited AlphaFold 2 protein structure database. To be accurate, the project was in partnership with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL).

The original AlphaFold project commenced in December 2018. The Nature article provides a full summary of this latest breakthrough. DeepMind’s CEO and founder is Dr. Demis Hassabis.

The British company became renowned due to its AlphaGo and AlphaZero programs. These programs taught themselves Go, Chess and Shogi through playing themselves over several days. They were then able to defeat the world’s best human and supercomputer players of those games.

I am very surprised that this groundbreaking development was not mentioned by any readers. It will likely have positive implications for future hair loss treatments. Interestingly, reader “Quentin” recently made a very useful comment about amino acids, which are closely related to proteins.

AlphaFold 2 Highlights

Among the highlights of this open access online freely available AlphaFold database:

“This will be one of the most important datasets since the mapping of the Human Genome.” — Dr. Ewan Birney (EMBL-EBI Director).

  • DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 AI tool has given 3-D structure to 350,000 proteins.
  • This includes a map of the roughly 20,000 proteins expressed by the human genome. Also known as the proteome.
  • AlphaFold is already helping scientists accelerate drug discovery.
  • Over the coming months. DeepMind plans to vastly expand the coverage to almost every sequenced protein known to science (over 100 million structures in the UniProt database).
  • This computational work represents a stunning advance in the 50-year old protein-folding problem in biology.
  • It will change everything (?).

“With this resource freely and openly available, the scientific community will be able to draw on collective knowledge to accelerate discovery, ushering in a new era for AI-enabled biology.” — Dr. Paul Nurse (Director of the Francis Crick Institute).

Hair Loss Proteins

It seems like this technology is ripe for helping speed up the development of hair loss treatments. And helping understand the reasons for androgenetic alopecia.

For a long time, many people have suggested that a hair loss cure does not have to entail just complete annihilation of (DHT). For example, see my post on the Krox20 (EGR2) protein.

Just for the heck of it, I did a search for “hair” in the database. It came up with 175 results:

AlphaFold 2 Search
AlphaFold 2 Protein Search Results.

Other Open Source Resources

We are increasingly seeing free online databases and open access resources that benefit hair loss researchers. In addition to the general DeepMind/AlphaFold GitHub, we also have hair specific ones such as the BiernaskieLab GitHHub.

You also have resources such as Driskell Lab’s skinregeneration.org where you can search for large datasets related to scarring and regenerative tissues. See my related post on skin regeneration, wound healing and hair growth.