Word: biologist
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...Cambrian started almost exactly 543 million years ago and, even more startling, that all but one of the phyla in the fossil record appeared within the first 5 million to 10 million years. "We now know how fast fast is," grins Bowring. "And what I like to ask my biologist friends is, How fast can evolution get before they start feeling uncomfortable...
...proliferation of wildly varying body plans during the Cambrian, scientists reason, therefore must have something to do with Hox genes. But what? To find out, developmental biologist Sean Carroll's lab on the University of Wisconsin's Madison campus has begun importing tiny velvet worms that inhabit rotting logs in the dry forests of Australia. Blowing bubbles of spittle and waving their fat legs in the air, they look, he marvels, virtually identical to their Cambrian cousin Aysheaia, whose evocative portrait appears in the pages of the Burgess Shale. Soon Carroll hopes to answer a pivotal question: Is the genetic...
...mystery. The virus that the donor contracted and then passed on, the team reported last week in Science, contains flaws in its genetic script that appear to have rendered it innocuous. "Not only have the recipients and the donor not progressed to disease for 15 years," marvels molecular biologist Nicholas Deacon of Australia's Macfarlane Burnet Centre for Medical Research, "but the prediction is that they never will." Deacon speculates that this "wimpy" HIV may even be a natural inoculant that protects its carriers against more virulent strains of the virus, much as infection with cowpox warded off smallpox...
...killer is a devouring dragon, and that dragon is sin. The hero, a wildlife biologist named Steve Benson, has fallen into adultery with a slinky local deputy who seduces him with wine. No God-fearing person--indeed no survivor--drinks liquor in these novels; the temptress has no potion that can protect her when she meets the dragon. But powered by a last-minute conversion to Jesus, Benson wrestles the beast and eventually kills...
...step for the researchers is to locate the precise gene or genes involved and attempt to determine their biochemical effects. Will finding such "gay genes" rule out the idea that social and psychological influences can have a significant effect on a man's sexual preference? "Absolutely not," declares molecular biologist Dean Hamer of the National Cancer Institute, who headed both the 1993 investigation and the new one. "From twin studies, we already know that half or more of the variability in sexual orientation is not inherited. Our studies try to pinpoint the genetic factors, not to negate the psychosocial factors...