Epidemiologist Ann Pulver found her research calling early. As an undergraduate at Boston University, she worked with schizophrenia patients and saw firsthand the devastation the disease can cause. She decided then to devote her career to fighting it. Now, as head of the epidemiology-genetics program in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, Pulver is doing just…
Richard Fishel describes DNA-mismatch repair as the human body’s spell-check program. In most people, this surveillance system is always on, correcting thousands of errors as cells transfer information to new cells. Fishel and his research partner, Joanna Groden, are heading a major new project devoted to finding a cure for Bloom’s syndrome, a rare genetic…
Earlier this year, the Lysosomal Storage Disease Research Consortium awarded its first seven grants, which together total more than $200,000, to scientists conducting research into ameliorating the effects of lysosomal-storage diseases on the central nervous system. There are more than 40 of these diseases, called LSDs, including Tay-Sachs, Gaucher disease, mucopolysaccharidosis (MPS) and Niemann-Pick disease….
To the untrained eye, the basement-level laboratory at the National Institutes of Mental Health, in Bethesda, Md., looks like a scene out of NASA. Scientists sport full-body plastic suits, hair nets and blue booties — all in an effort to keep the outside world’s contaminations at bay. The lab’s sterility is interrupted only by Dr….
At one point in the 1970s, genetic counselors adopted a radical stance on the issue of intermarriage: They routinely advised Jews who carried the genetic mutation that leads to a rare neurological genetic disease found in the Ashkenazic population to marry non-Jews. Their logic was that if a carrier bore offspring with a non-Jew, the…
Two new genes related to Fanconi anemia were discovered in August 2005, bringing to 11 the number of genes identified as having links to the disease. The newly discovered genes, called FANCJ and FANCM, are involved in the process of DNA repair and inch scientists closer to an understanding of F.A. Researchers suspect that a…
When Senator George Allen of Virginia used a racial slur for dark-skinned North Africans, “macaca,” during a recent encounter with a young Indian American cameraman from his opponent’s campaign, many wondered where he had learned the word. Macaca means “monkey,” but Allen’s campaign insisted that the word was made up, an inside joke on the…
Last week, in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in advance of his new autobiography, “Beim Häuten der Zwiebel” (“Peeling the Onion”), Günter Grass — Nobel laureate, public intellectual and arguably the greatest modern novelist in German — revealed his membership in the Waffen-SS, saying that he had been inducted into the ranks of…
In the fastest-growing city in America — Elk Grove, Calif. — there are no synagogues or Jewish community centers, but there is an upstart messianic congregation that offers a place for people of Jewish descent to worship Jesus. A far-flung suburb of Sacramento, Elk Grove offers a window onto the religious trends on the booming…
When Colorado Governor Bill Owens urged the state’s lawmakers to approve a get-tough immigration measure for the November ballot, the move seemed certain to back his Democratic rivals into the tightest of political corners. For months, Owens, a Republican, had accused the Democratically controlled legislature of refusing to deal with illegal immigration — one of…
If you live in Connecticut and are inclined to vote for a Jewish lawyer who has been spurned by his own political party — and is not named Joseph Lieberman — then meet Alan Schlesinger. Schlesinger, 48, the Republican challenger for Lieberman’s Senate seat, until now was the alternately maligned and forgotten interloper in an…
