(JTA) — A fundraising campaign started quietly by two first graders two years ago to help find a cure for a rare genetic disease just passed the $1 million mark, with donations streaming in from all 50 states and 60 countries across the globe. The million-dollar achievement has been celebrated as the perfect feel-good story,…
(Haaretz) — Where did the Jews originate? For Bennett Greenspan, the founder and president of Family Tree DNA, there’s little doubt, and it can all be proven with a swab of cheek cells. The overwhelming majority of Jews living today should be able to trace their roots back to the Middle East with a little…
Exploring Ashkenazi Jews And Their Origins
All women of Ashkenazi descent should be screened from age 30 for the BRCA gene mutation that causes breast cancer, an Israeli study recommends. The study, by a research team headed by Ephrat Levy-Lahad of Shaare Zedek Medical Center, was published Friday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United…
Be fruitful and multiply. The Biblical command sounds so straightforward, yet it can be anything but. In order to conceive a child, some aspiring parents — be they lesbian couples, single mothers, or straight men with poor sperm quality — need a little outside help… at least a few milliliters of help, to be precise,…
Climate change and population growth have agricultural experts throughout the world increasingly worried. In addition to the usual battles against pests and diseases, poor countries now face threats of food shortages, price spikes and the political instability those conditions can cause. Since the amount of land set aside for agriculture is limited, researchers are therefore…
“I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer,” said actress Angelina Jolie last May when she announced that she underwent a preventive double mastectomy. Describing her pervasive family history of breast and ovarian cancer in a New York Times op-ed, Jolie said that she had…
As a newlywed in the 1970s, I watched my vibrant, stylish maternal grandmother go from trim to gaunt. She and my grandfather had raced their family out of Vienna the day Hitler marched in. But now she was diagnosed with an ovarian tumor the size of an orange, too late for treatment to save her…
