Word: groups
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...developing drugs that treat illness simply by silencing bad genes and jump-starting good ones. In 2004 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved an epigenetic drug for the first time. Azacitidine is used to treat patients with myelodysplastic syndromes (usually abbreviated, a bit oddly, to MDS), a group of rare and deadly blood malignancies. The drug uses epigenetic marks to dial down genes in blood precursor cells that have become overexpressed. According to Celgene Corp. - the Summit, N.J., company that makes azacitidine - people given a diagnosis of serious MDS live a median of two years on azacitidine; those taking...
...Make a Better Mouse As momentous as epigenetics sounds, the chemistry of at least one of its mechanisms is fairly simple. Darwin taught us that it takes many generations for a genome to evolve, but researchers have found that it takes only the addition of a methyl group to change an epigenome. A methyl group is a basic unit in organic chemistry: one carbon atom attached to three hydrogen atoms. When a methyl group attaches to a specific spot on a gene - a process called DNA methylation - it can change the gene's expression, turning it off or on, dampening...
...oncologist Randy Jirtle and one of his postdoctoral students, Robert Waterland, did. That year, they conducted an elegant experiment on mice with a uniquely regulated agouti gene - a gene that gives mice yellow coats and a propensity for obesity and diabetes when expressed continuously. Jirtle's team fed one group of pregnant agouti mice a diet rich in B vitamins (folic acid and vitamin B12). Another group of genetically identical pregnant agouti mice got no such prenatal nutrition...
...blur of energy and enthusiasm, rattling off anecdotes from her years of activism. Like when she led dozens of South Asian youth to a school that had refused them admittance because of their poor Chinese and got them enrolled. Or when, in order to win the trust of a group of Nepalese boys loitering in a park, she scooped up a waddling toddler in their midst and showered him with kisses...
...this is indeed the case, then the attack on the Danish cartoonist, which may or may not have been part of the group's plans, raises the question of whether the Kenyan police have the capacity to stop potential Somali attackers from entering their country and possibly continuing on to other nations...