February 12 is a significant day for biologists – it’s the date of Charles Darwin’s birth. This year it’s a biggie – if the old gentleman was alive today he’d be 200. There are various commemorative events lined up all around the world, plus TV & radio programs, books & articles, and blogging galore. Here’s […]
Continue readingMonth: January 2009
rivers as ‘medicine cabinets’
I came across an interesting article in yesterday’s Herald. The headline read: Drug firms turn rivers into flowing medicine cabinets. (Not like any medicine cabinet I’d want to put a hand into!) It seems that some waterways in India contains alarmingly high concentrations of a whole range of antibiotics – the result of drugs companies dumping their […]
Continue readingand an answer to that finch question…
… is in the comments thread for the post. Sorry, sorry, this feels like cheating – but I’ve been really busy at work today & not had much time for blogging 🙁
Continue readingethics & pre-implantation genetic diagnosis
A question in the 2007 Scholarship exam asked you to discuss the impact of various forms of genetic testing on the human gene pool. One of those techniques was pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PIGD: testing very early embryos for the genetic markers linked to a variety of conditions (or, where known, for the genes themselves). Now […]
Continue readingone of these things is not like the other
Here’s a couple of paragraphs from the generally excellent book, The beak of the finch, by Jonathan Weiner. Many paths lay open when the finches first arrived, and the smallest flights and trials of their descendants were rewarded. That is why they have traveled in more directions than any other creatures on the islands, that is […]
Continue readingheadlines can be misleading
And this one’s no exception: "Darwin was wrong" on the cover of New Scientist, no less. (& in smaller type: cutting down the tree of life.) This leads to a story about the significance of horizontal gene transfer to our understanding of evolutionary relationships. But why the headline (which will probably be grist to the anti-evolutionary mill…)? […]
Continue readingchoose carefully…
… as the ancient knight said to Indiana Jones **. Okay, I’m talking about choice of subjects, so the outcomes won’t be as life-threatening as the choice Indy faced, but these decisions can still have a big impact on your future study courses. (& I’m aware that if you’re considering Scholarship this year, you’ve most likely […]
Continue readingwaterflea helmets – lamarckian, or epigenetic?
Water fleas – Daphnia – are rather cute little freshwater arthropods: In some circumstances (water temperature, presence of predators), rather than having that sharp little point on their heads (top of the picture, above the eyespot) some Daphnia will have a longer, spikier ‘helmet’. And this is where it gets interesting: it depends on the mother. If a […]
Continue readingconvergence in tomatoes &… a retrovirus
ERV is on a roll this week. She’s just put up this fascinating post about convergent evolution – at the level of enzymes – in tomatoes and (wait for it) the retrovirus HIV. I read it & thought, whoa! this is amazing! But this is ERV’s field of expertise – go over there & read it; […]
Continue readinghiv & your immune system
HIV = Human Immunodeficiency Virus. And there’s an extremely large volume of evidence supporting the hypothesis that infection with HIV generally leads to the development of AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). I say ‘generally’ because there is a very small subset of people (called ‘elite suppressors’) in whom this progression doesn’t seem to happen. But in […]
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