The family seemed to defy the rules of genetics.

When Meriel M. McEntagart, a geneticist at St. George’s University of London, met the family in May 2012, she suspected that three of the children had a rare genetic disorder called Smith-Magenis syndrome. They had many of the symptoms of the disease, such as trouble sleeping through the night. Dr. McEntagart confirmed that diagnosis with a genetic test. The children were all missing an identical chunk of a gene known as RAI1.

One of the children had a different father from the other two, and so the mother could be the only source of their altered gene.

Continue reading “Having More Than One Set of DNA Carries Legacy of Risk” →

As we pour heat-trapping gases into the air, we’re running an experiment. We’re going to see what a rapidly changing climate does to the world’s biodiversity — how many species shift to new ranges, how many adapt to their new environment and how many become extinct.

We don’t have a very good idea of how the experiment will turn out. Scientists are coming to appreciate that there’s a lot about how climate affects life that they still don’t understand. That’s true, it turns out, even for species that scientists have been studying carefully for years.

Continue reading “Study Gives Hope of Adaptation to Climate Change” →

One day in 1988, a college dropout named Jonathan Stanley was visiting New York City when he became convinced that government agents were closing in on him.

He bolted, and for three days and nights raced through the city streets and subway tunnels. His flight ended in a deli, where he climbed a plastic crate and stripped off his clothes. The police took him to a hospital, and he finally received effective treatment two years after getting a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

“My son’s life was saved,” his father, Ted Stanley, said recently. When he himself was in college, he added, “those drugs didn’t exist; I would have had a nonfunctioning brain all the rest of my life.”

Continue reading “Spark for a Stagnant Search” →

Every year, malaria-carrying mosquitoes kill more than 600,000 people, most of them children. Over the centuries, people have battled those mosquitoes in numerous ways, like draining swamps, spraying insecticides and distributing millions of bed nets. And yet malaria remains a menace across much of the world.

In papers published Thursday in the journals Science and eLife, scientists and policy experts propose fighting malaria in a new way: by genetically engineering the mosquitoes themselves.

A new technology for editing DNA may allow scientists to render the insects resistant to the malaria parasite, the authors contend. Or it might be possible to engineer infertility into mosquito DNA, driving their populations into oblivion.

Continue reading “A Call to Fight Malaria One Mosquito at a Time by Altering DNA” →