The US adolescents who signed up for the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) in the 1970s were the smartest of the smart, with mathematical and verbal-reasoning skills within the top 1% of the population. Now, researchers at BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute) in Shenzhen, China, the largest gene-sequencing facility in the world, are searching for the quirks of…
An international team of genetic scientists has completed the genomic sequence of the Tibetan antelope (Pantholops hodgsonii), a native of the high mountain steppes and semi-desert areas of the Tibetan plateau. The scientists have decoded the genome of Tibetan antelope and studied the underlying genetic mechanism of high-altitude adaptations (it can live at elevations of 2.5 – 3.1 miles). “The…
[Plenary Lecture given on *May 27, 2012* at the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine Annual Conference, University of Waterloo] Monica Green, an Arizona State University professor known as “the foremost authority on medicine in the Middle Ages,” examines how her field has changed in recent years. In 2001, two genetic breakthroughs were made – the entire genomes for both plague…
ISG professors Dr. Hannah Landecker and Dr. Aaron Panofsky have published a paper titled “From Social Structure to Gene Regulation, and Back: A Critical Introduction to Environmental Epigenetics for Sociology” in the Annual Review of Sociology. Abstract: Epigenetics is a burgeoning area of biomedical research into the mechanisms by which genes are regulated—how the activity of producing proteins is controlled. Although molecular epigenetic…
The use of genome-wide analysis (GWA), where the entirety of an individual’s DNA is examined to look for the genomic mutations or variants which can cause health problems is a massively useful technology for diagnosing disease. However, it can also pose major ethical problems if used incorrectly, say new recommendations from the European Society of Human Genetics (ESHG) published on…
Albert Erives, associate professor in the University of Iowa Department of Biology, and his graduate student, Justin Crocker, currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Janelia Farm Research Campus, have conducted a study that reveals important and useful insights into how and why developmental genes often take inputs from two independent “morphogen concentration gradients.” Using the…