Svante Pääbo receives 2022 award in physiology or medicine for genome discoveries including Neanderthals
A Swedish geneticist has been awarded the 2022 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine.
Svante Pääbo won the 10m Swedish kronor (£867,000) prize announced on Monday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
Continue reading...Biobank urged to review transfer of information for medical research
Rising political and security tensions between Beijing and the west have prompted calls for a review of the transfer of genetic data to China from a biomedical database containing the DNA of half a million UK citizens.
The UK Biobank said it had about 300 projects under which researchers in China were accessing “detailed genetic information” or other health data on volunteers.
Continue reading...DNA analysis of 164 individuals from 2,800 to 300 years ago shows men would move to be with their wives
The world’s earliest seafarers who set out to colonise remote Pacific islands nearly 3,000 years ago were a matrilocal society with communities organised around the female lineage, analysis of ancient DNA suggests.
The research, based on genetic sequencing of 164 ancient individuals from 2,800 to 300 years ago, suggested that some of the earliest inhabitants of islands in Oceania had population structures in which women almost always remained in their communities after marriage, while men left their mother’s community to live with that of their wife. This pattern is strikingly different from that of patrilocal societies, which appeared to be the norm in ancient populations in Europe and Africa.
Continue reading...Prospect of medical therapies that rewind clock for humans edges a little closer
The prospect of medical therapies that rewind the clock on the ageing process has edged a little closer after scientists safely rejuvenated tissues in middle-aged mice.
Researchers in the US treated healthy animals with a form of gene therapy that refreshed older cells, making the animals more youthful according to biological markers that are used to measure the effects of ageing.
Continue reading...Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel are pouring huge sums into startups aiming to keep us all young – or even cheat death. And the science isn’t as far-fetched as you might think
In the summer of 2019, months before the word “coronavirus” entered the daily discourse, Diljeet Gill was double-checking data from his latest experiment. He was investigating what happens when old human skin cells are “reprogrammed” – a process used in labs around the world to turn adult cells (heart, brain, muscle and the like) – into stem cells, the body’s equivalent of a blank slate.
Gill, a PhD student at the Babraham Institute near Cambridge, had stopped the reprogramming process midway to see how the cells responded. Sure of his findings, he took them to his supervisor, Wolf Reik, a leading authority in epigenetics. What Gill’s work showed was remarkable: the aged skin had become more youthful – and by no small margin. Tests found that the cells behaved as if they were 25 years younger. “That was the real wow moment for me,” says Reik. “I fell off my chair three times.”
Continue reading...As a kid, Concetta Antico was always ‘a bit out of the box’, but it took decades for her to discover just how differently she was seeing the world
It would be easy to look at the vivid array of colour contained in the paintings of artist Concetta Antico and assume she is using artistic licence. The trunks of her eucalyptus trees are hued with violet and mauve; the yellow crest on her cockatoo has hints of green and blue; the hypercolour of a garden landscape looks almost psychedelic.
“It’s not just an affectation and it’s not artistic licence,” says Antico. “I’m actually painting exactly what I see. If it’s a pink flower and then all of a sudden you see a bit of lilac or blue, I actually saw that.”
Continue reading...Analysis: As doctors monitor world’s first human recipient of pig heart, safety and ethical concerns remain
The world’s first transplant of a genetically altered pig heart into an ailing human is a landmark for medical science, but the operation, and the approach more broadly, raise substantial safety and ethical concerns.
Surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center spent eight hours on Friday evening transplanting the heart from the pig into 57-year-old David Bennett, who had been in hospital for more than a month with terminal heart failure.
Continue reading...New DNA research by London-based scientists hopes to find cure for rapidly spreading conditions
More and more people around the world are suffering because their immune systems can no longer tell the difference between healthy cells and invading micro-organisms. Disease defences that once protected them are instead attacking their tissue and organs.
Major international research efforts are being made to fight this trend – including an initiative at London’s Francis Crick Institute, where two world experts, James Lee and Carola Vinuesa, have set up separate research groups to help pinpoint the precise causes of autoimmune disease, as these conditions are known.
Continue reading...Losing weight may be tough, but keeping it off, research tells us, is tougher – just not for the reasons you might think
As the director of the Energy Metabolism Laboratory at Tufts University, Massachusetts, Susan Roberts has spent much of the past two decades studying ways to fight the obesity epidemic that continues to plague much of the western world.
But time and again, Roberts and other obesity experts around the globe have found themselves faced with a recurring problem. While getting overweight individuals to commit to shedding pounds is often relatively straightforward in the short term, preventing them from regaining the lost weight is much more challenging.
Continue reading...Discovery of DNA modifications raises hope of treatment for disorders that particularly afflict twins
The medical mystery of what causes some twins to be born identical may have been solved by scientists in the Netherlands, raising hopes for treatment of congenital disorders that disproportionately afflict them.
Identical twins form after a fertilised egg, called a zygote, splits into two embryos sharing exactly the same genes. The reason for the split is unknown.
Continue reading...Study using DNA analysis reveals not only are statues on these distant islands connected, but inhabitants too
Easter Island’s famous megaliths have relatives on islands thousands of miles to the north and west, and so did the people who created them, a study has found.
Over a 250-year period separate groups of people set out from tiny islands east of Tahiti to settle Easter Island, the Marquesas and Raivavae – archipelagos that are thousands of miles apart but all home to similar ancient statues.
Continue reading...Scientists set initial sights on creating elephant-mammoth hybrid, with first calves expected in six years
Ten thousand years after woolly mammoths vanished from the face of the Earth, scientists are embarking on an ambitious project to bring the beasts back to the Arctic tundra.
The prospect of recreating mammoths and returning them to the wild has been discussed – seriously at times – for more than a decade, but on Monday researchers announced fresh funding they believe could make their dream a reality.
Continue reading...The behaviour geneticist explains how biology could have an influence on academic attainment – and why she takes an anti-eugenics approach
Kathryn Paige Harden argues how far we go in formal education – and the huge knock-on effects that has on our income, employment and health – is in part down to our genes. Harden is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she leads a lab using genetic methods to study the roots of social inequality. Her provocative new book is The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality.
To even talk about whether there might be a genetic element to educational attainment and social inequality breaks a huge social taboo – particularly on the political left, which is where you say your own sympathies lie. The spectre of eugenics looms large, and no one wants to create a honeypot for racists and classists. To be clear, it is scientifically baseless to make any claims about differences between racial groups, including intelligence, and you are not doing that. But why go here?
I wrote this book first for my fellow scientists, who haven’t necessarily seen the relevance of genetics for their own work or have been afraid to incorporate it because of these associations. There is a large body of scientific knowledge being ignored lest the eugenics genie be let out of the bottle.
Skeleton of hunter-gatherer found in Leang Panninge cave sheds light on ancient human migration
Archaeologists have discovered ancient DNA in the remains of a woman who died 7,200 years ago in Indonesia, a find that challenges what was previously known about migration of early humans.
The remains, belonging to a teenager nicknamed Bessé, were discovered in the Leang Panninge cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Initial excavations were undertaken in 2015.
Continue reading...UK scientist says gene-drive study rendering female insects infertile may lead to ‘self destruct mosquito’ field tests within 10 years
Scientists have successfully wiped out a population of malaria-transmitting mosquitoes by using a radical form of genetic engineering to render the females infertile – in the most advanced and largest ever test of use of the technology to fight the disease.
As well as bringing fresh hope in the fight against one of the world’s biggest killers, the study lays the foundations for further trials of gene-drive technology, which could mean self-destroying mosquitoes being released into the wild within 10 years.
Continue reading...We should be suspicious of the role of the Chinese Communist party in the harvesting of genetic data from unborn babies, argues William Matthews
In her column (What does the Chinese military want with your unborn baby’s genetic data?, 10 July), Arwa Mahdawi suggested that the alleged involvement of the People’s Liberation Army (which is directly answerable to the Chinese Communist party) with BGI’s data-gathering (likewise answerable as a China-based company) is essentially equivalent to data-gathering by western companies. To suggest that the former case is worse, she argued, “smacks of Sinophobia”.
As a scholar of China, I cannot agree. While the harvesting of genetic data by any company is frightening and fraught with ethical issues, it should be obvious that this is a false equivalence. It is undoubtedly worse if genetic data is gathered by a company which must also comply with the rule of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) and its military-industrial complex, a regime which harvests and aggregates data on its citizens on a massive scale and uses it directly to implement the most repressive system of social control on earth in Xinjiang.
Continue reading...The scientist and broadcaster discusses the drawbacks of calorie-counting and BMI in measuring obesity, and how our growing understanding of genetics is leading to new treatments
Since the dawn of the 20th century, almost all weight loss guidelines have used calories as a simple measure of how much energy we’re consuming from our food. But according to Giles Yeo, a Cambridge University research scientist who studies the genetics of obesity, there’s one problem: not all calories are created equal. In his new book, Why Calories Don’t Count, Yeo explains that what really matters is not how many calories a particular food contains, but how that food is digested and absorbed by your body.
Can you explain why you feel calorie-counting is a flawed approach to weight loss?
There was an American chemist in the 19th century called Wilbur Olin Atwater who calculated the calorie numbers for different foods, by working out the total energy intake you get from them. But his calculations never took into account the energy it takes our cells to metabolise food in order to use it. This is important. It’s why for example a calorie of protein makes you feel fuller than a calorie of fat, because protein is more complex to metabolise. For every 100 calories of protein you eat, you only ever absorb 70.
eBioAtlas programme aims to identify fish, birds, amphibians and land animals in freshwater systems from the Ganges to the Mekong
Concealed by the turbid, swirling waters of the Amazon, the Mekong and the Congo, the biodiversity of the world’s great rivers has largely remained a mystery to scientists. But now a multimillion-pound project aims to describe and identify the web of life in major freshwater ecosystems around the world with “gamechanging” DNA technology.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and UK-based environmental DNA (eDNA) specialists NatureMetrics have launched a partnership to take thousands of water samples from freshwater river systems like the Ganges and the Niger delta to identify the fish, birds, amphibians and land animals that live in and around them.
Continue reading...Gene-screening, as is used to detect some breast cancer risks, could save thousands of lives
Scientists have begun work to create a prostate cancer screening service for the UK. In a few years, middle-aged men could be tested to reveal their genetic susceptibility to the condition, with those deemed to be under significant threat of developing it being offered treatment or surgery.
The service would tackle a disease that has become the nation’s most commonly diagnosed cancer and would parallel Britain’s breast cancer screening programme. Every year, more than 47,500 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer: 129 a day on average. More than 11,500 deaths from the disease occur each year, with one in eight men being diagnosed with prostate cancer at some time in their lives.
Continue reading...From Doug to Nelly and Eeek, we look at how mutations are affecting the battle against the virus
From the moment public health officials started to track new variants of coronavirus, it became clear that the same mutations were cropping up time and again and making the virus more troublesome. What are these mutations, what do they do, and what do they mean for the pandemic?
Continue reading...