Currently, I am on vacation near the beach in South Carolina. Consequently, I have opted for a topic that is bit different than the majority of my monthly commentaries in that it focuses not on a recent original report but instead on a conceptual point made in a book...
The consortium of investigators known as ENCODE (ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements) published, with much publicity, a series of about thirty papers last fall purporting to “identify all functional elements in the human genome sequence” (https://www.genome.gov/ENCODE/). ...
In 1996, Dean et al. (Science), demonstrated that a loss-of-function allele (CCR5Δ32) encoding a version of the chemokine receptor, CCR5, confers very substantial resistance to infection with HIV-1 in the homozygous state and slows progression in the heterozygous...
Influenza A viruses continue to be of enormous interest to biomedical researchers and clinicians alike. In addition to the annual influenza epidemics, which have been inferred to cause substantial excess mortality, there is the ever-present threat of a global...
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...