Do you remember being very dubious of all those aliens and humans mating and having children on Star Trek? Now wait a minute, didn’t you say? How could beings from totally different planets with different histories of genetic descent possibly do that? Some researchers are hinting at an answer. Seems that 10 of our 20 […]
I have green eyes, while my parents and all my siblings have blue eyes. I always thought that my eye color was the same as theirs, just tinted slightly differently. But the way I read this story, that is simply not the case: ALL BLUE-eyed people can be traced back to one ancestor who lived […]
Preparing for the Foresight Vision Weekend in Sunnyvale, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my map of the development space for nanotechnology which we revisited in a recent edition of FasftForward Radio. I’ve never been completely satisfied with the axes of that diagram. I wanted to show how some developments have this immediate […]
Following my super-long post on “The Genetic Debate,” Phil got right to the point with a brief comment: Parents want to protect their children from risk. Society generally looks favorably upon this predisposition. The first “augmentations” that are practiced will likely be protections from genetic predisposition to things like diabetes, heart disease, and various forms […]
Methuselah Mouse Prize co-founder Dave Gobel e-mails: Peter Diamandis announces Archon X Prize for Genomics $10,000,000 prize to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days. A global competition to develop breakthrough technology that dramatically reduces the time and cost of sequencing human genomes and accelerates a new era of personalized, predictive and preventive medicine. Three […]
This sort of sounds like news… Entrepreneurial skill may be in the genes Wednesday June 7, 2006 Forget family influence and upbringing. When it comes to being an entrepreneur, genes seem to play an important role. By comparing self-employment in 609 pairs of identical twins, who share all the same genes, and 657 pairs of […]
Paul Boutin has a must-read report on the danger of biowar. He asked geneticist Roger Brent whether a layperson could learn the skills necessary to sequence a disease. He got his answer by learning to do it himself. Making DNA turns out to be easy if you have the right hardware. The critical piece of […]