Word: geneticists
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...they did not count on the harelike speed -- and less mercenary mind-set -- of Daniel Cohen. An ambitious French geneticist, he has jumped ahead of his American rivals and is close to completing the first map of the human genome...
...medical advice. It might say, "This individual has a tendency toward skin cancer and should avoid overexposure to the sun." Or: "He has insufficient LDL cholesterol receptors and a proclivity to obesity, so he should begin a high-fiber, low-fat diet at age 3." Explains Mark Skolnick, a geneticist at the University of Utah: "Once you can make a profile of a person's genetic predisposition to disease, medicine will finally become largely predictive and preventive." With the profusion of such profiles will come a demand for, and laws enforcing, genetic privacy, to ensure that those with potentially crippling...
While forcing scientists to revise their thinking about heredity, the findings are also raising ethical quandaries. "It now appears we can identify people who may be asymptomatic but whose risk for transmitting a devastating illness is very high compared with the rest of the population," observes geneticist David Housman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a member of one of the research teams. "Should they be informed?" A man or woman with such a defect will have to consider the brutal fact that not only is there a fifty-fifty chance that a child will inherit the illness, but also...
...switch in the sequence of nucleotide bases that are the building blocks of DNA. Sometimes an entire gene can jump to another place on a chromosome. "But you don't usually see a big increase in the absolute number of bases within a single gene," says Greg Lennon, a geneticist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., and a member of one of the teams that made last week's announcement. Moreover, mutations tend to occur at a slow pace. "The rate is so low from one generation to the next -- maybe...
...same bar of music repeats on a scratched record. The DNA repeat gets worse with each generation, just as with each playing of a flawed record, the music stutters for a longer period. "Presumably the replication error occurs in the sperm or egg before conception," says molecular geneticist Pieter de Jong, who headed the Livermore team...