Among the most pressing global public health problems at present is the AIDS epidemic. While it is clear that chemotherapy and behavioral interventions have much to offer in limiting the spread of infections by the causative virus, HIV-1, interest in developing a...
In the May 26 (2011) issue of Nature, Vijaykrishna et al. address patterns of evolution and transmission exhibited by swine influenza A viruses (SwIV) isolated from pigs beings slaughtered in Hong Kong between May 1998 and January 2010. Although the focus of the...
An assumption fundamental to medical genetics is that the DNA sequence of an allele at a particular locus will (in the vast majority of instances) be faithfully transcribed into RNA and translated into protein. This assumption has been largely accepted in spite of...
A minimal requirement for evolution via natural selection is heritable phenotypic variation that affects reproductive success, or more generally, genetic success. The concept of heritability is often used somewhat loosely in casual non-technical conversation, but...
In his essay (2011) on the history of Darwinian (or evolutionary) medicine, Jonathan Fuller describes potentially relevant interests and insights that preceded the famous paper by Nesse and Williams (1991) that is widely regarded as having catalyzed the resurgence of...
