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The 1997 resurrection of a snippet of Neandertal mitochondrial DNA electrified human paleontology and attracted wide media attention.1 By comparing the number of base changes in that Neandertal sample to variability in modern humans, scientists concluded that a common African ancestor existed about 600,000 years ago, far earlier than the generally accepted origin of modern humans about 150,000 years ago. And while Neandertals were still around as late as 30,000 years ago, it's unlikely that mod

if (n == null) The Scientist - Are We There Yet? Researchers Differ on When a Genome Sequence Is 'Complete' The Scientist 13[15]:12, Jul. 19, 1999 News Are We There Yet? Researchers Differ on When a Genome Sequence Is Complete By: Karen Hopkin A great deal of fanfare and much celebration greeted the publication of the C. elegans sequence in Science this past December.1,2 "Caenorhabditis elegans made it big today as Human Genome Project researchers in

if (n == null) The Scientist - Promise and Problems Loom for Stem Cell Gene Therapy The Scientist 13[15]:0, Jul. 19, 1999 News Promise and Problems Loom for Stem Cell Gene Therapy By Paul Smaglik Photo courtesy of Harry Malech A network of gas-permeable plastic bags connected by tubing helps make ex vivo stem cell gene therapy more feasible. The insides of the bags are coated with recombinant human fibronectin fragments. That protein helps more r

If the size of a society provides a reading of the health of a field, gene therapy may be heading for a fruitful stretch. The American Society of Gene Therapy (ASGT) attracted 600 abstracts and 1,700 participants to its inaugural meeting in Seattle last year, compared to 1,000 abstracts and 2,100 participants to its second annual meeting in Washington, D.C., last month. In a conversation with News Editor Paul Smaglik, James Wilson, ASGT president and director of the University of Pennsylvania's

ALZHEIMER'S VACCINE It's the classic vaccine approach: Get protection against a disease by training the body's immune system, using a bit of the disease itself, to respond to infection in force. Typically applied to infectious diseases such as smallpox or polio, immune system-boosting treatments have more recently been aimed at cancerous tumors. Now a recent paper suggests that Alzheimer's disease (AD) might be effectively treated by priming the immune system with a form of the damaging, neuro

Steps in positional cloning. Positioning of disease loci to chromosomal regions requires multidisciplinary collaborations. "You have a clinician out in Israel gathering patients, a medical geneticist doing genetic mapping, my lab doing physical mapping, and Washington University sequencing. All these things come together and, boom, in record time you have this gene," says Green. Green goes on to point out that this is a classic example of finding a gene from sequences the Human Genome P

Technological developments helped make single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) databases possible. But further innovations will be necessary to make those records of thousands of genetic variations useful. Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, remembers a swell of developments that crested in 1996. "The technology for finding SNPs seemed to be moving along pretty well," he recalls. "You could imagine getting a pretty good set." Enabling technologies included

The SNP Consortium collaboration of 10 pharmaceutical companies and the Wellcome Trust will spend $45 million over two years to identify and map about 300,000 randomly generated SNPs. The industry partners are AstraZeneca (London); Bayer (Pittsburgh, Pa.); Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (New York); F. Hoffmann-LaRoche (Nutley, N.J.); Glaxo Wellcome (Research Triangle Park, N.C.); Hoechst Marion Roussel (Kansas City, Mo.); Novartis (Basel, Switzerland); Pfizer (New York); Searle (Skokie, Ill.); and S

1982 The Human Polymorphism Study Center, the first academic institution to propose the systematic study of polymorphisms, is founded in Paris. Its primary objective: to make an inventory of all possible polymorphisms in the human population and associate them with diseases. However, the technology to take on such a project would not be advanced enough for more than a decade. 1995 An initiative led by the Wellcome Trust, of Cambridge, England, to form a consortium of pharmaceutical companies,

Sometimes it seems as if genome projects are cropping up everywhere.1 But until costs come down, limited resources are being largely concentrated into what Joseph Nadeau, professor of genetics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, calls "the genome seven," an apples-and-oranges list of viruses, bacteria, fungi, Arabidopsis thaliana, Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans, and mouse, with Homo sapiens in its own category.2 Researchers widely acknowledge that in the rod

Global warming has a strong effect on butterfly populations. Camille Parmesan , assistant professor of integrative biology at the University of Texas in Austin, cares about butterflies, so she's concerned: Global warming is bugging her beloved insects. Three years ago, Parmesan reported that Edith's checkerspot butterfly had moved northward along the west coast of North America over the past century.1 Specifically, local populations were four times more likely to go extinct in Mexico, at the

Hemophilia is an ideal model for gene therapy, speaker after speaker repeated during the American Society for Gene Therapy's (ASGT) June meeting in Washington, D.C. Successfully providing a single protein a few times should, in theory, cure the disease, they stated. And once introduced via vector, a therapeutic clotting protein need not be continuously produced or regulated, they added. What they did not mention--at least not as openly--was the double-edged nature of that "ideal" status. In oth