Whenever you read stories about identical twins separated at birth, they tend to follow the template set by the most remarkable of them all: the “two Jims”. James Springer and James Lewis were separated as one-month-olds, adopted by different families and reunited at age 39. When University of Minnesota psychologist Thomas Bouchard met them in 1979, he found, as a…
ISG professor, Soraya de Chadarevian, has published a paper titled “Chromosome Photography and the Human Karyotype” in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 45, No. 1 (February 2015) (pp. 115-146). Abstract: In 1956, Joe Hin Tjio and Albert Levan published a paper in which they suggested that the number of human chromosomes was 46 and not 48. The story…
To supplement the publication of ‘Antibiotic Resistance and the Biology of History’ in Body & Society, Andrea Núñez Casal, MPhil/PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London, interviews the author, historian and sociologist of science Hannah Landecker, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA. In the interview, Hannah Landecker illuminates why antibiotic resistance along with…
ISG Acting Director, Hannah Landecker, has published a paper titled “Antibiotic Resistance and the Biology of History” in Body & Society. Abstract: Beginning in the 1940s, mass production of antibiotics involved the industrial-scale growth of microorganisms to harvest their metabolic products. Unfortunately, the use of antibiotics selects for resistance at answering scale. The turn to the study of antibiotic resistance in microbiology…
You might resemble or act more like your mother, but a novel research study from UNC School of Medicine researchers reveal that mammals are genetically more like their dads. Specifically, the research shows that although we inherit equal amounts of genetic mutations from our parents – the mutations that make us who we are instead of some other person –…
The sex designation of your brain and body may not be as black and white as scientists have believed it to be. Instead gender may fall somewhere on a gray scale. Scientists are trying to unravel the complex biological breakdowns of gender, and as they learn more, it’s becoming more apparent there aren’t just men and women among us. In…