Word: humanity
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Archbishop Desmond Tutu has dedicated his life to the promotion of equality. Now a new study of his genetic makeup has helped scientists understand how different human beings are - at least genetically...
...authors said the diversity was no surprise, given that humans have lived in southern Africa for longer than anywhere else and have had some 200,000 years to develop genetic differences. "It is the cradle of mankind. If you are looking for the full range of human genetic variation, it's the place to look," says Stephan Schuster of Pennsylvania State University, the lead author of the study...
...study found 1.3 million genetic variations that had not been previously observed in studies of human DNA, which have until now focused mainly on European and Asian genomes. The variations described in the Nature paper should greatly aid scientists' quest to understand which genes increase susceptibility to disease or influence a patient's response to certain medications. The study of the latter phenomenon - known as pharmacogenomics - has thus far excluded southern Africans, who have not only been poorly represented in clinical drug trials but also, in many cases, fail to respond optimally to crucial medications for tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS...
...something that should threaten racial harmony. "It is exciting that science is finding evidence of genetic diversity among groups of people as well as among individuals, and this discovery should be embraced, not feared," he said. "It would be disastrous if scientists were to ignore the diversity of the human race, because this is the greatest asset of humanity...
...Experts say the vanishing of the Bo language comes at a particularly perilous moment in the history of human speech. "There's a consensus [among linguists] that we are seeing an unprecedented pace of language extinction. And it is accelerating," says David Harrison, a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and co-founder of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. Of the world's roughly 7,000 spoken languages, over half are spoken by only 0.2% of all the people on earth. Nearly 80% of the world's population speaks just 83 languages, a proportion that...