I first read The Selfish Gene in the 1980s, as a graduate student in neurobiology and animal behaviour. I admired the clarity with which biologist Richard Dawkins distilled mid-twentieth-century work in evolutionary biology. The idea at the core of the book, published in 1976, was thrillingly simple: that a living organism is just a gene’s
Credit: Prudence Cuming Associates/The Royal Society Robert (Bob) Williamson was a geneticist who dedicated his career to the identification of disease-linked genes and the diagnosis and treatment of single-gene disorders. He was concerned about the ethical implications of population-wide genetic screening and using stem cells in research. Williamson was one of the first to use
Conventional cereals and grains could be grown alongside gene-edited crops under amended EU rules.Credit: Joe Klamar/AFP via Getty In June, the European Union overturned its strict limits on the cultivation of gene-edited crops. The change comes in the wake of growing criticism that Europe lags behind other regions when it comes to adopting innovative plant
One hundred years ago, on 23 September 1926, zoologist Paul Kammerer shot himself on Hochschneeberg, a mountain plateau southwest of Vienna. He was discovered slumped against a rock by a retired railway worker who had followed the barking of the dogs Kammerer had taken with him on his final walk. Shock at the zoologist’s death
The human genome is made up of roughly 3 billion bases, or letters, of DNA.Credit: Yuichiro Chino/Getty The human genome is an easy place to get lost. Only 2% of its 3 billion letters encode proteins and the rest is diabolically hard to decipher. An AI-generated ‘atlas’ of the human genome unveiled1 today by Google
On a Tuesday in mid-April, the UK Biobank — one of the largest and most comprehensive health-tracking studies in the world — received a troubling e-mail from an anonymous researcher. The sender had discovered what appeared to be sensitive information from hundreds of thousands of the study’s participants for sale on Xianyu, an e-commerce website
