Word: icelander
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Kari Stefansson can trace his ancestry back 1,100 years. That's almost unheard of in the U.S., but in his native Iceland, where genealogy is a national obsession, it hardly raises an eyebrow. The island nation is a genetic anomaly: settled by a few Norsemen and Celts in the 9th century A.D. and relatively free of later immigration, it is among the most genetically homogeneous countries on earth. And in the late 1990s, when scientists were racing to map the human genome, Stefansson realized that Iceland's genetic isolation and unrivaled genealogical records made it a potential gold mine...
Thus began Iceland's great genetic experiment, an attempt to mine the gene pool of an entire country in search of the root causes of--and potential cures for--some of the world's worst diseases. And after years of controversy, dashed hopes and burst stock bubbles, the effort is finally paying off. Over the past decade, deCODE Genetics, the company Stefansson co-founded in his home city of Reykjavík, has discovered more than a dozen genes linked to diseases ranging from stroke to schizophrenia. Last month, deCODE announced that it had found a gene that boosts the risk...
...differs from the DNA of healthy people. In practice, however, individual genes rarely cause illness on their own; instead, they tend to make people more susceptible. And in places with genetically mixed populations, the complex interaction among genes makes it hard to find the risky ones. But in Iceland, with its uniform population and genealogies that show how everyone is related, risky genes tend to stand out. The country's meticulous medical records provide even more data...
Then in 1998 the U.S. firm Hoffmann--La Roche agreed to pay $200 million for the right to develop drugs based on some of deCODE's data. The idea that a foreign company might profit from their personal information made many Icelanders balk. A woman named Ragnhildur Gudmundsdottir sued to keep her deceased father's medical records from going into the deCODE-run database, citing a right to privacy, and in 2003 Iceland's supreme court ruled in her favor...
...heard but is not overwhelming,” said Morrissey. Each month, there will be 12 video art pieces rotating on the displays, one of which will be commissioned by Lumen Eclipse and centered on life in Cambridge. The first commissioned piece is by an Icelandic artist, Pall Thayer, who used photographs of Cambridge to create his piece. According to Keohane, both artists from foreign places—like Iceland and Brazil—as well as locals artists submitted work. Another of the inaugural pieces for the display was created by Nell B. Breyer, a research affiliate at MIT?...