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 […]
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breaking the species barrier
I’ve just stumbled across a provocative – & thought-provoking – essay by Richard Dawkins. It caught my attention because I’m occasionally asked if there’s ever been a chimp-human hybrid. (The answer, so far, is ‘no’ – well, not since the two species diverged around 6 million years ago.) To Dawkins, the creation of such a […]
Continue readingdiabetes, pigs, & xenotransplantation
I know from spending time with the Bio scholarship students at Hamilton Girls High that xenotransplantation is an issue that some of you might have discussed. It seems that ERV is also interested – not surprising given her focus on endogenous retroviruses. In her latest post, she says: Why the hell was I interested in […]
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