Genetics

Editors’ Note: The following blog post originally appeared on Oxford University Press’s Academic Insights for the Thinking World blog. Exactly who are we anyway? Over the last generation, population genetics has emerged as a science that has made the discovery of human origins, relatedness, and diversity knowable in a way that is simply not possible from studying texts Read more

Like many teenage boys growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, I was a Kurt Vonnegut nut. I read, reread and re-reread everything he wrote, and no doubt his humorously cynical take on the human condition played a big role in forming my sensibilities. I particularly loved his short stories, of which “Harrison Bergeron” may Read more

Arno Motulsky, one of the founders of human medical genetics, died on January 17, 2018, at the age of 94 in Seattle (New York Times obituary, 1/29/18). I doubt his name is familiar to any of our current medical or graduate students, yet he pioneered studies of the genetics of heart disease, blood disorders, infections Read more

In late October 1980, Dear Abby published a letter from “Desperate in NY.” Desperate wrote about terrible changes in her 50-year-old husband: he had lost his memory and lost his job. He couldn’t drive and couldn’t be left alone in the house. They’d just been told he had something called Alzheimer’s disease, but they’d never Read more

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) recently issued a consensus report, “Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance,” on editing the human genome using a powerful technique called CRISPR/Cas9. This technique enables changes to be made not only to an individual’s genetic makeup, but also to the human Read more