Tag: genetics

A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and dissimilar major histocompatibility complexes

By Edward Willett in Blog
January 9, 2007
4 mins to read
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The candlelight is gleaming, soft jazz is playing, the fireplace is crackling, and you’re snuggled on the couch with the woman you love. You finger the diamond ring in your pocket. There’ll never be a better time to pop the question. You look deep into her eyes and say, “My darling, why don’t we get …

Man-made life

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
November 26, 2003
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For as long as I remember, there have been jokes and pop-culture references to scientists creating life in a test tube–usually with the understanding that such a thing was an impossibility outside of horror movies. But last week scientists in the U.S. announced their intention to create the first completely artificial form of life, a …

Have yourself a genetically modified little Christmas

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
December 14, 1999
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Searching for the perfect Christmas tree can be a hassle, and even a tree that looks great on the lot can turn out to have weird branches, flat spots or gaps once it opens up. But someday soon, every Christmas tree may be perfect, thanks to science. Around 40 million Christmas trees are harvested every …

The spider-goat clones of Montreal

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
May 4, 1999
4 mins to read
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Cloned, genetically altered goats producing spider silk in their milk sounds like something out of The X-Files, but it was in all the papers last week when a company called Nexia revealed it had cloned three goats (Clint, Danny and Arnold), and explained why. The cloning of goats brings to four (sheep, mice, cows …

DNA fingerprinting

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
February 7, 1995
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One place science and society frequently interact is within the courtroom. Seldom has that interaction been more dramatic than in the past few days, with the exoneration of Guy Paul Morin, who had served 18 months in jail for a murder he didn’t commit, and with the start of the murder trial of a certain …

Heredity

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
February 28, 1994
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“She’s got her father’s eyes.” “He’s got his mother’s nose.” From the moment a baby is born, expect children to look like their parents. But how does it happen? An Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel took the first step toward our modern understanding of heredity in 1866, when he published a theory of inheritance based …

The Human Genome Project

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
May 5, 1992
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I’ve written before about the genetic code and how it writes a description of each of us using an alphabet of only four letters: the four bases that are contained in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thymine (T). Every organism has different proportions of these four bases. Two strands of …

DNA

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
November 6, 1991
6 mins to read
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Our 26-letter alphabet often seems like a model of efficiency. Look at how much information can be encoded and passed on with it. Look at what Shakespeare accomplished with it. I’m particularly fond of it because my ability to manipulate it is what pays for my food and lodging and other necessities like new CDs. …

Genetic engineering

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
March 20, 1991
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Though the word “biotechnology” sounds very modern, what it describes has been with us for centuries–if you define it, as one science encyclopedia does, as “using biological organisms, systems or processes to make or modify products.” In other words, the first time somebody discovered the wondrous change wrought in grape juice by fermentation, or an …