Consider the relationship between an air traffic controller and a pilot. The pilot gets the passengers to their destination, but the air traffic controller decides when the plane can take off and when it must wait. The same relationship plays out at the cellular level in animals, including humans. A region of an animal’s genome – the controller – directs…
His office is filled with all sorts of bird books, but Duke neuroscientist Erich Jarvis didn’t become an expert on the avian family tree because of any particular interest in our feathered friends. Rather, it was his fascination with how the human brain understands and reproduces speech that brought him to the birds. “We’ve known for many years that the…
A study published this week in Genetics in Medicine is the first to explore new parents’ attitudes toward newborn genomic testing. The findings suggest that if newborn genomic testing becomes available, there would be robust interest among new parents, regardless of their demographic background. “Several other studies have measured parents’ interest in newborn genomic screening, but none focused on new…
Researchers at North Carolina State University have for the first time mapped human disease-causing pathogens, dividing the world into a number of regions where similar diseases occur. The findings show that the world can be separated into seven regions for vectored human diseases – diseases that are spread by pests, like mosquito-borne malaria – and five regions for non-vectored diseases,…
The Institute for Public Knowledge invites you to join us for a conversation with Aaron Panofsky, Ann Morning, and Dalton Conley on Panofsky’s new book, Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics. Behavior genetics has always been a breeding ground for controversies. From the “criminal chromosome” to the “gay gene,” claims about the influence of genes like these have led to often vitriolic…
ISG professor, Soraya de Chadarevian, recently co-edited “Heredity and The Study of Human Populations After 1945” in the Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. Abstract: The essays in this issue look at the contested history of human heredity after 1945 from a new analytical angle, that of populations…