Charles Darwin
Following my recent article about Darwin’s 150th Anniversary, the first draft of his book, “The Origin of Species” which changed the world’s attitude to evolution is available for the first time online.  Papers which led to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution were previously only available to scholars at Cambridge University’s library.
This release makes his private papers, mountains of notes, experiments and research behind his world-changing publications available to the world for free.
The online archive about Charles Darwin is so vast it would take someone two months to view it all if they downloaded one image per minute!
Here’s the link….
http://darwin-online.org.uk/
Elaine Warburton  www.geneticsandhealth.com

 
The Washington Post featured a series of thought-provoking articles in ‘The Science Century’ section of the newspaper. 
Here are some of my favourites:
The Post’s Joel Achenbach writes about how “the most important things
happening in the world today…[will] be happening in laboratories — out
of sight, inscrutable and unhyped until the very moment when they change
life as we know it.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/11/AR2008041103328.html
Ronald M. Green, the author of “Babies by Design: The Ethics of Genetic
Choice,” asks, “Why should we think that the human genome is a
once-and-for-all-finished, untamperable product? All of the biblically
derived faiths permit human beings to improve on nature using technology,
from agriculture to aviation. Why …read more

 
Scientists from Helicos BioSciences, Ohio University, and Stanford University have published a paper in Science describing the first single-molecule sequencing of a whole genome.
The researchers used a single-molecule sequencing, sequencing-by-synthesis method, developed by Helicos, to sequence the roughly 7,000-nucleotide genome of the M13 virus.  In the company’s version of single-molecule sequencing, an approach first proposed in the late 1980s, nucleic acid templates that are created by digesting genomic DNA are hybridized to primers that are covalently anchored in random positions on a proprietary glass cover slip in a flow cell. Then, a polymerase and labeled DNA bases are added, one nucleotide at a …read more

 
Geneticist Craig Venter has announced that he is creating a life form that feeds on climate-ruining carbon dioxide to produce fuel.  He disclosed his potentially world-changing “fourth-generation fuel” project at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in California. Among the audience were Al Gore and Google co-founder Larry Page.
Biofuel alternatives to oil are third-generation. The next step, Venter says, is to re-engineer existing life forms that feed on CO2 and give off fuel such as methane gas as waste.  Simple organisms can be genetically re-engineered to produce vaccines or octane-based fuels as waste.
Venter’s team is using synthetic chromosomes to modify organisms that …read more

(Photo credit: Flu viruses among cilia – National Geographic magazine http://www.nationalgeographic.com/)
US scientists have discovered a possible reason why the flu virus is seasonal and tends to infect people mostly in the winter. It has a jacket that melts in the summer causing the virus to die off, and stays hard in the winter, until it enters a host where it melts and gets to work. The discovery could lead to new ways to prevent and treat the flu.
Neuroscientist Joshua Zimmerberg and colleagues, based at the Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Biophysics (LCMB) in the National Institute of Child Health and …read more

 
Papers published in Nature and Science this week support the previously held theory that humans originated in East Africa, migrating outward until they reached all parts of the globe. But the genetic work from these studies brings a new level of precision to human migration studies, with each group finding subtle and intriguing details that shed light on different aspects of human genetic variation and ancestry.
Study 1 – University of Michigan:This study was based on the analysis of more than 500,000 SNPs and nearly 400 copy number variants — sections of DNA that are repeated or duplicated in the genome — for 485 individuals. These samples, …read more