Aggregated News
Las Vegas has long been the philosophic capital of U.S. commerce, a physical (if hallucinator) reminder that luck does indeed exist, and, with just enough of it, people like me can get whatever they want.
The same guiding principle of business, unfortunately, is beginning to take root in science as well—most especially in the world of genetics. Since decoding of the human genome was begun in the Reagan years, all 20,000 to 25,000 human genes have been translated to their basic chemical sequences. With this accomplishment, the race has been on to find the big one, the one key gene that magically will make the short tall, the dull sharp or the fat thin. In Vegas parlance: the jackpot.
This week’s entry comes to us from the venerable scientific publication the Journal of Clinical Investigation. In it, a group of European investigators examined the relationship between FTO, a protein associated with fat mass, and obesity. Previous work had shown that persons with variations in the FTO gene were more likely to be obese, but the current researchers wanted to...
The same guiding principle of business, unfortunately, is beginning to take root in science as well—most especially in the world of genetics. Since decoding of the human genome was begun in the Reagan years, all 20,000 to 25,000 human genes have been translated to their basic chemical sequences. With this accomplishment, the race has been on to find the big one, the one key gene that magically will make the short tall, the dull sharp or the fat thin. In Vegas parlance: the jackpot.
This week’s entry comes to us from the venerable scientific publication the Journal of Clinical Investigation. In it, a group of European investigators examined the relationship between FTO, a protein associated with fat mass, and obesity. Previous work had shown that persons with variations in the FTO gene were more likely to be obese, but the current researchers wanted to...