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Thank you to Alyssa Friedland from Genetic Alliance for this press release - a momentous occasion in the field of genetics. I have decided to issue the press release in its entire form. You may think me biased but the arguments put forward in the statement are cogent, well thought out and they echo my own […]
The Washington Post featured a series of thought-provoking articles in ‘The Science Century’ section of the newspaper.
Here are some of my favourites:
The Post’s Joel Achenbach writes about how “the most important things
happening in the world today…[will] be happening in laboratories — out
of sight, inscrutable and unhyped until the very moment when they change
life as we […]
Geneticist Craig Venter has announced that he is creating a life form that feeds on climate-ruining carbon dioxide to produce fuel. He disclosed his potentially world-changing “fourth-generation fuel” project at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in California. Among the audience were Al Gore and Google co-founder Larry Page.
Biofuel alternatives to oil are third-generation. […]
It is universally accepted that genetic testing is here to stay and will play a major role in health management. Common sense dictates that it is good health management to understand what diseases an individual is susceptible to, so that steps can be taken, by that individual, if they so wish, to minimize the chance of developing a particular disease or diseases. […]
Leon Kass served as chairman of the bioethics council charged with advising US President George W. Bush on many “hot” bioscience issues such as stem cell research and cloning.
Noted for his frankness and pretty much misogynistic ideals, once you cut through all this, his arguments do make some sense. For example:
“There’s a large cultural bias toward progress, […]
‘Junk DNA’ could hold the key to the evolution of complex organisms . Vertebrates, animals that possess a backbone, are the most anatomically and genetically complex of all organisms, but explaining how they achieved this complexity has perplexed scientists since the conception of evolutionary theory.
A study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,USA, claims to […]
Nature constantly ”shuffles” our genes around in our genome, creating a genetic cocktail of human chromosomes and trying out different changes as it does so. Some of these changes represent neither a positive nor a negative mutation or a competitive advantage. One such ’shuffle’ is eye color.
Originally we all had brown eyes. Then about 6-10,000 years […]
Scientists from deCODE genetics have reported the discovery of two common, single-letter variants in the sequence of the human genome (SNPs) that regulate one of the principle motors of evolution. Versions of the two SNPs, located on chromosome 4p16, have a genome-wide impact on the rate of recombination - the reshuffling of the genome that […]
New research has shown evidence that genes have the ability to recognize similarities in each other from a distance, without any proteins or other biological molecules aiding the process. This discovery could explain how similar genes find each other and group together in order to perform key processes involved in the evolution of species.
According to […]
Micrograph images of synthetic Mycoplasma genitalium
J Craig Venter and his team at the J Craig Venter Institute Rockville, Md. Venter continue to expand our horizons of what constitutes life. They have built, from scratch, a synthetic chromosome containing all the genetic material needed to produce a primitive bacterium - this is considered a giant step toward the creation […]
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