Greetings–
Here are a couple items for your long-holiday reading list.
The New York Times, June 3, 2016
Just a few years ago, Crispr was a cipher — something that sounded to most ears like a device for keeping lettuce fresh. Today, Crispr-Cas9 is widely known as a powerful way to edit genes. Scientists are deploying it in promising experiments, and a number of companies are already using it to develop drugs to treat conditions ranging from cancer to sickle-cell anemia.
Yet there is still a lot of misunderstanding around it. Crispr describes a series of DNA sequences discovered in microbes, part of a system to defend against attacking viruses.
Continue reading “Scientists Find Form of Crispr Gene Editing With New Capabilities”
The New York Times, May 27, 2016
The history of African-Americans has been shaped in part by two great journeys.
The first brought hundreds of thousands of Africans to the southern United States as slaves. The second, the Great Migration, began around 1910 and sent six million African-Americans from the South to New York, Chicago and other cities across the country.
In a study published on Friday, a team of geneticists sought evidence for this history in the DNA of living African-Americans. The findings, published in PLOS Genetics, provide a map of African-American genetic diversity, shedding light on both their history and their health.
Continue reading “Tales of African-American History Found in DNA”
STAT, May 26, 2016
At the American Museum of Natural History, the venerable Science Talent Search announced Thursday that it was changing sponsors for the second time in its 74-year history.
In 1942 Westinghouse became the corporate partner for the nation’s largest research competition for high school students. In 1998, Intel took over as a sponsor for the next 18 years. Now it’s handing off to Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.
That’s a telling sequence — one that speaks to how science fairs have been a microcosm for how we look to science to help our country thrive, and how we’ve looked to different kinds of science along the way.
Greetings–
In previous issues of Friday’s Elk, I’ve shared a number of stories about ancient DNA and what it’s telling us about our history. This week, I wrote a long profile for the New York Times about one of the most intriguing figures in this exploding discipline, a geneticist named Eske Willerslev. His story conveys not only the excitement of this field, but the powerful, complex resonance that ancient DNA has for today’s world. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, May 20, 2016”