Group items tagged

Three years ago, Dr. Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, helped make one of the most monumental discoveries in biology: a relatively easy way to alter any organism's DNA, just as a computer user can edit a word in a document.

Webpages describing types, causes, and effects of mutations.

Unborn babies can sow the seeds for rheumatoid arthritis in their mothers - and the dads might be to blame. Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease, meaning the body's immune system turns on itself. In this case, it causes painful, swollen joints. Women are three times as likely to develop the condition as men, and seem to be especially vulnerable soon after pregnancy. A mother exchanges cells with the fetus while it is in the womb. "For most women, shortly after you give birth, the fetal cells clear up," says Giovanna Cruz, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Berkeley. "But in a subset of women they actually persist for decades." In these women, the fetal cells are effectively incorporated into their bodies, a process known as microchimerism.

More than 400 scientists, bioethicists, and historians from 20 countries on 6 continents have gathered this week in Washington, DC, for the Human Gene Editing Summit. The attendees are a veritable who's who of genome editing: Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, Emmanuelle Charpentier of Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, and Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard-the three discoverers of the CRISPR-Cas9 system's utility in gene editing-plus dozens of other big names in genome science. Cal Tech's David Baltimore along with the heads of the four national societies hosting the meeting (US National Academy of Sciences, US National Academy of Medicine, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the U.K.'s Royal Society) provided opening remarks on Tuesday (December 1). And as I sat stage right in the NAS auditorium, I noticed the unmistakable rear profile of Harvard Medical School's George Church three rows in front of me. Church was scheduled to speak at a session later that afternoon about the application of CRISPR and other new precision gene editing techniques to the human germline-a hot-button topic since April, when a Chinese group published it had successfully modified the genomes of human embryos, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said it would not fund such research. Then in September, the U.S./U.K.-based Hinxton Group, an international consortium of scientists, policy experts, and bioethicists, said it supported the use of genetic editing in human embryos for limited applications in research and medicine.  

Tutorials, interactives, lessons for teaching the nature of science

Deep-sea mystery solved: astonishing larval transformation and extreme sexual dimorphism unite three fish families by Johnson, et al. (2009)* published in Biology Letters, Royal Society. The deep sea fishes at the heart of the investigation and this activity were historically classified into three families or clades based on the obvious morphological differences between the members of each group. 

Evolution is often challenged by those who oppose its teaching or do not understand it. One of these challenges is that evolution is just a theory. This activity addresses this misconception.

cartoon strip of crickets

Evolution is essential to our curriculum and to scientific literacy. To understand the big picture of biology, students need to understand life in terms of both its history and its future - the changing life forms and ecosystems that have arisen and changed over billions of years, as well as the mechanisms that brought about those changes and are shaping the future of life on Earth.