Twins have sometimes no resemblance to each other. – Aristotle, The History of Animals A much-discussed new paper from Nicholas Roberts, Bert Vogelstein, and colleagues…
“If you come to any more conclusions about polymorphism, I shd [sic] be very glad to hear the result: it is delightful to have many…
We’re now ready to ask — and answer — the question: how much polymorphism is to be found in a given population? Remember that ‘polymorphism’…
The last post hinted at how useful it is to compare the amount of genetic variation found in one population to that found in another….
New Scientist has some intriguing recent stories on particular fronts of research, including a discussion of the search for so-called ‘shadow life‘ — meaning, essentially,…
When I was growing up, my family would occasionally get a piece of junk mail inviting us to send off fifty bucks or so for…
In an insightful essay (published in an excellent anthology edited by Martha Nussbaum and Cass Sunstein, which also includes other sources cited in this series…
On 9 March, President Obama issued an executive order to lift hobbling restrictions on embryonic stem cell research imposed by his predecessor, George Bush. In…
Two years before Obama’s executive order to rescind limits on stem cell research, Senator Orrin Hatch introduced bill S.812, the ‘Human Cloning Ban and Stem…
The trouble started back in December 2002, when the BBC aired a documentary film that openly probed the tenets of a popular sect. The day…