Francis Collins Preaches to the Choir Since the staged June 26 unveiling of the "working draft" of the human genome sequence, National Human Genome Research Institute director Francis Collins has hit the meeting circuit, not to hype what was, but to get people thinking about where it is all headed. He spoke to a packed audience at the National Association of Biology Teachers annual conference in Orlando Oct. 25-28 on "the golden path"--the search among the 3 billion bases to distinguish protei

Human prenatal development can be viewed as a program of genetic switches that turn on, in a highly regulated manner, at specific places and times. But a body of evidence is emerging that paints a less hardwired picture, one of responses to environmental challenges fostering changes early on that reverberate decades later, in the guise of cardiovascular disease and diabetes. A symposium at the American Society of Human Genetics annual meeting, held in Philadelphia Oct. 3-7, addressed the fetal o

Courtesy of PPL TherapeuticsA new generation of pigs. Headlines in late summer 2000 introduced long-awaited reports on pig cloning and retroviral transmission to mice, pig cells healing rat spinal cords, and a gaff by Dolly dad Ian Wilmut erroneously heralding halt of xenograft work at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Scotland. So it seemed that the question of whether pigs can pass their retroviruses to humans might finally be on the road to resolution. Not quite. Pigs, as the purveyors o

The language of a DNA sequence is more than meets the eye. A string of A, C, T, and G can indeed encode a string of amino acids. At a higher level, however, nuances of sequence may impart evolutionary information, because variants accumulate over time. Single nucleotide polymorphisms--SNPs--for example, are scattered throughout the human genome on average about one every 500 to 1,000 DNA bases. But they are not distributed evenly, and their clustering or paucity may hold clues to the past. A te

Infection" is usually associated with an oozing sore, a bout with the flu, or an outbreak in some exotic place. But infectious organisms lie behind many chronic illnesses too, and an increasingly molecular approach to diagnosis is clarifying some of these relationships. An invited panel discussed "The Infectious Etiology of Chronic Diseases" at the second International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases, held in Atlanta July 16-19. Chronic diseases take a huge toll. "In the [United St

Graphic: Cathleen Heard A week after the controversial XIII International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, a much smaller gathering in Atlanta took a broader view of the current emergence and reemergence of many infectious diseases. The International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases 2000, held July 16-19, attracted more than 2,000 attendees representing 35 nations. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the American Society for Microbiology, the Council of State

The bacterium that causes cholera has joined the elite club of organisms whose genomes have been sequenced. Since 1817, seven pandemics of cholera have left millions dead from the dehydration caused by relentless diarrhea. But the disease has been noted for at least 1,000 years. "Cholera is one of the most ancient diseases we know about. Its home is the Ganges delta in India and Bangladesh; it has a long history there. It became a worldwide disease in 1817, when the first pandemic started

Elusive "Pingelapese Blindness" Gene Identified Before there was Survivor, the hit summer TV show, there was Pingelapese blindness, a classic example of a population bottleneck. In 1775, a typhoon devastated Pengelap, a coral atoll in the Eastern Caroline Islands in Micronesia. Of the 20 survivors, one male passed along a recessive gene for achromatopsia, and four generations later, the condition began to appear, thanks to two centuries of isolation and inevitable inbreeding. In the condition,

Illustration: A. Canamucio I knew, back in March, that I was taking a gamble. The fourth edition of my human genetics textbook would be published in July, and judging from the rate of genomes being sequenced, it looked like Homo sapiens might join the list come summer. Unless the new edition assumed that the project was completed, my book would be obsolete before it was printed. So I E-mailed the great and powerful J. Craig Venter, president of Celera Genomics Group in Rockville, Md., to ask ab

Bovine Hemoglobin Makes a Spectacular Save Time was running out for the 21-year-old whose immune system was inexplicably and relentlessly destroying her red blood cells. After 45 days, with her organs failing, physicians from Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash., and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., tried a last resort: bovine hemoglobin. And it worked (J. Mullon et al., "Transfusions of polymerized bovine hemoglobin in a patient with severe auto

Graphic: Cathleen Heard Results of two studies from the Johns Hopkins Children's Center challenge accepted medical practice of "sex reassignment"--surgically converting XY males with absent or minuscule penises into anatomical females, then raising them as girls. The investigations, which are the first to go beyond individual case reports, reveal outcomes that are remarkably consistent with rare instances of infants who lost their penises in accidents and who were reassigned as females. Both cli

For this article, Ricki Lewis interviewed Polly Matzinger, section head for T-cell tolerance and memory at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, William Heath, senior research fellow in the immunology division of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, and Stephen P. Schoenberger, assistant member in the division of immune regulation at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology. Data from the Web of Science (ISI, Philadelphia) show that