In the book, The Winner-Take-All Society (1995), Robet H. Frank and Philip J. Cook discuss a hypothetical scenario in which a new genetic technique allows babies to be engineered so that they have a 99% chance of performing 15% better on the standardized tests used in...
A common consequence of the evolutionary process in many species is extensive genetic diversity. As has become apparent in recent studies (Tennessen et al., Science 2012; Nelson et al., Science 2012), the growth of the human population coupled with what is believed...
There have been claims that variations in the composition of the intestinal flora influence individual health going back at least to the early years of the 1900s. Late in his career, Ilya Mechnikov, co-receipient of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1908...
Both Nature and Science are currently celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of an icon of logic, computer science, and mathematical biology: Alan Turing. In reading Andrew Hodges’s spectacular biography of Turing (1983) many years ago I came to appreciate...
The new tools for determining nucleotide sequences for whole genomes can sometimes present a problem of data analysis: How can mutations that influence important phenotypes be distinguished from mutations that may be of minimal or no impact on fitness, so-called...
