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Outreach Report: Patrick Allard

ISG faculty Patrick Allard has been engaged in outreach activities with several organizations including the Society of toxicology and Seeding Labs. Recently he combined these two interests to become SOT’s Global Toxicology Scholar of 2011/12.  As part of this program, Allard did a two week tour of three universities in three countries of Eastern Africa: Ethiopia, Djibouti and Kenya. For more information…

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Complex Behaviors Driven By Remarkably Simple Genetics

Humans engage in a lot of complex behaviors, but many of them are learned. Genetics gives us a nervous system that’s flexible enough to incorporate new behaviors, and we pick them up socially. But many animals display highly complex behavior that appears to be instinctual. Which raises the question of how these sorts of behaviors can be programmed into the…

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Scientists Link Gene Variant to Human Longevity

According to University of California in Irvine scientist, Robert Moyzis, and his collegues, a variant of the dopamine-receptor gene may be associated with longevity. Their findings, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, show that the genetic variant called the dopamine receptor 4 (DRD4) 7-repeat allele, or DRD4 7R allele for short, appears in significantly higher rates in people more than 90 years old. Sci-News covers…

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Bill Gates Invests In Cancer DNA Sequencing Firm

“Advances in understanding the human genome are having a dramatic impact on almost every area of medicine. Foundation Medicine’s approach in harnessing the power of genomic data to improve care for cancer patients could represent an extremely important step forward in improving routine cancer care. I’m happy to be supporting this quite promising approach.” With those words in a press…

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Why We Have a Right to Consumer Genetics

A reporter from the MIT Technology Review discusses her experience of consumer genetics company 23andme, and reviews the future relationship between consumer genetics and the health industry.  An excerpt follows, please click here for the full article. “For now, the biggest problem with consumer-friendly genetic products is simply that they may be medically inconclusive for most people. Indeed, I was…

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