Lisa Schlager waited with hundreds of other women outside the Supreme Court in Washington on April 15, hoping to hear arguments over a private company’s effort to patent a human gene that is linked to breast cancer, especially in Ashkenazi women. Schlager, 46, has a huge stake in the controversial case, as do thousands of…
Supreme Court justices on Monday raised tough questions about patents on human genes held by Myriad Genetics Inc. The nine justices signaled reluctance to issue a broad ruling, indicating that some were looking for a compromise that might distinguish between types of genetic material. The biotechnology industry warns that a broad ruling against Myriad could…
A male’s DNA contains information that can help scientists guess his surname, American and Israeli researchers have discovered. The findings have serious implications for data privacy; intelligence services around the world are bound to be interested. In the study published in the journal Science, researchers have developed a formula for an algorithm that can discover…
Expectant mothers long have faced the choice of finding out the gender of their child while still in the womb. But what if parents could get a list of all the genes and chromosomes of their unborn children, forecasting everything from possible autism and future genetic diseases to intelligence level and eye color? The technology…
Pickling cucumbers, cultivating yeast for Challah, sewing tallit … these hebraic homesteading projects are certainly not for everyone. But most Jews would agree that plenty of our traditions instill a cool-before-it-was-cool “Do It Yourself” aesthetic. This is a culture that often made do with very little and did it all behind closed doors, or within…
Last February, on a warm day in North Carolina, Dr. David Wohl entered the playground and saw his eight-year-old son, Zac, sitting motionless in the sandbox. “He looked like a 90-year-old guy who had fallen and couldn’t get up,” said Wohl, an AIDS expert and associate professor of infectious diseases at the University of North…
Ted Meyer was six years old the first time he got involved in medical research, by donating a sample of bone marrow. He had just been diagnosed with Gaucher disease, and his parents hoped their son’s participation might help him and others with the potentially fatal inherited metabolic disorder. Meyer, 54, is still actively participating…
If you were watching the BBC this spring, you would have seen one of Israel’s foremost geneticists debating the issue of marriage to close family members in Doha, Qatar — at the heart of the Arab world. At the Doha Debates Dr. Ohad Birk, who heads the Center for Human Genetics Research at the National…
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