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…
“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…
ISG is proud to announce that one of our Human, Biology & Society major students, Alexa Golden(’13), has been awarded the Distinguished Senior Award by the UCLA Alumni Association. These awards recognize leadership, involvement and service to the UCLA community as well as academic excellence.
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…
Former ISG Postdoctoral Fellow, Ruha Benjamin, has recently published a book called “People’s Science: bodies and rights on the stem cell frontier”(Stanford University Press). Benjamin is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology and African American studies at Boston University and an American Council of Learned Societies fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Science, Technology, and Society Program. Book…
A research team, led by the Institute of Zoology of Chinese Academy of Sciences and BGI Shenzhen presented the most complete reconstruction of the giant panda’s genetic history to date in the journal Nature Genetics. The whole genome resequencing of 34 wild giant pandas produced genetic evidence of the previous resistance of panda ancestors to climate variations and indicates that human encroachment and genetic adaptation have played the majority…