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Genetic Linkage

Turkey Genetics 101

I love watching the turkeys on Martha’s Vineyard. They travel in small family groups of two parents with chicks and adolescents, coalescing into larger tribes.

When it rains, wild turkeys go about their business, pecking at food – I’ve yet to see one raise it’s mouth and drown. And they have feelings. My daughter and I once watched as 4 turkeys stood around a comrade who’d just been run over, clearly distraught. None left, even as cars went by. Read More 
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Will Layla Save Gene Editing?

(Great Ormond Street Hospital)
I had planned to blast last Thursday’s news of the use of gene-editing to save a British baby from aggressive leukemia. “Two months later, Layla was cancer-free,” proclaimed one of many enthusiastic reports.

I’m always skeptical when I hear the words “cancer” and “cure” in the same sentence, let alone uttered so soon after treatment and without an accompanying technical paper so I can see the data. But when I considered the timing of unfolding events, I realized that the seemingly premature reporting of Layla’s rapidly restored health just might add an important point to the heated discussion over gene and genome editing. That is, can we keep the promising clinical applications on somatic cells, while forbidding the Frankenstein scenarios of germline manipulation? Read More 
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