This was a controlled study. They were comparing eating patterns between two otherwise identical groups where one was "threatened" and the other not.

My T2D wasn't nearly as bad as your wifes however. For type I diabetics and severe type II requiring insulin a paleo diet seems to make controlling glucose much easier, but I doubt it will actually be a cure. Everyone whom I know of (including myself) whom seems to have actually cured T2D was right on the edge of T2D vs pre-diabetes or pre-diabetic.

No problem. Here's a clinical trial of the paleo diet for treating type II diabetes:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17583796
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00435240
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19604407


Some practical advice (books/blogs) you can follow to get you started:
http://thehealthyskeptic.org/diabesity
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/search/label/diabetes
http://perfecthealthdiet.com/
http://thepaleodiet.com/
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/

I wish your wife luck. Definitely read as much as you can before trying this. The links above will just get you started.

You are incorrect, gradually rising blood glucose as pregnancy progresses is a normal physiological response to pregnancy and likely helps to nourish the baby by ensuring sufficient glucose. Normal healthy pregnancies involve glucose levels that would be considered pre-diabetic or even diabetic in non-pregnant women. Gestational diabetes is likely the combination of this natural effect with already pre-existing insulin resistance pushing glucose up into ranges where diabetes symptoms appear.

The reasoning here is deeply flawed- catching things earlier in a preventative phase is healthier, more effective, and cheaper. Even a fasting blood glucose of 130 mg/dL (actually it's 126) as a threshold for diabetes is way way too high. Lowering it more I think would actually reduce health care costs, because at levels lower than this diabetes can be reversed by simple dietary measures like reducing carbohydrates (especially fructose). Fasting glucose gradually progresses over a lifespan as people become diabetic and the earlier you work to correct this the more effective and easier it is. Studies show serious health problems including progressively increasing risk of heart disease in men with levels above 85 mg/dL, as compared to those with levels of 81 mg/dL or lower (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16207847).

I had type II diabetes and it *was* actually reversed with one year on a low-carb paleo diet. My FBG is now under 100mg/dL and I can actually eat an occasional high-carb meal and my post-meal blood sugar stays in the range of a normal, metabolically healthy person. I think the reason people think diet can't actually cure type II diabetes is that the typical diet advice for diabetics (low fat, lots of whole grains) is extremely wrong. This is high-carb which continues to cause high blood sugar damage and progress insulin resistance, plus immunological reactions to compounds in wheat (gluten and lectins) may actually be responsible for many cases of diabetes in the first place.

Current existing Illumina IIG sequencing technology, which is widely used can re-sequence the human genome cheaply and easily with short read fragments (36-76 base pairs long). These short reads are more than sufficient to resequence a human genome. As I see it, the major advantage of this nanopore sequencing isn't cheaper resequencing- but longer reads, which will make it easier to assemble the genomes of new organisms that haven't already been sequenced.

When did economic growth become more important than human lives? Money is a tool that humans invented to serve them, not the other way around. In fact, I think that the merits of continuous growth should be called into question. No rate of growth can be sustained forever. Here is an article from Physics Today that shows the mathematics of why growth cannot be sustained: http://fire.pppl.gov/energy_population_pt_0704.pdf

If economic growth will end eventually, and doesn't really increase our happiness why has it become a goal worth killing for?