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...
An interesting hypothesis in the evolutionary genetics of treating infections and cancers is that if the therapeutic agent does not directly target the pathogen or tumor, then the pathogen or tumor will be less likely to evolve resistance to that agent. While...
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...
Natural selection depends on heritable phenotypic variation. The most obvious source of phenotypic variation is genotypic variation. A new study, by Casanueva et al. in Science (2012) suggests that in addition to genotypic variation, variation in life history and...
As noted in my last post, the selective advantage of heterozygosity for the sickle allele at the beta-globin locus has been known since Allison’s report in 1954 (Lancet). Nevertheless, a plausible and detailed mechanism to account for the protective effect of an...
