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.

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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.

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COPENHAGEN — As a boy growing up in Denmark, Eske Willerslev could not wait to leave Gentofte, his suburban hometown. As soon as he was old enough, he would strike out for the Arctic wilderness.

His twin brother, Rane, shared his obsession. On vacations, they retreated to the woods to teach themselves survival skills. Their first journey would be to Siberia, the Willerslev twins decided. They would make contact with a mysterious group of people called the Yukaghir, who supposedly lived on nothing but elk and moose.

When the Willerslev twins reached 18, they made good on their promise. They were soon paddling a canoe up remote Siberian rivers.

Continue reading “Eske Willerslev Is Rewriting History With DNA” →