Regular readers of these pages may recall a previous posting on the 1st International Symposium on Obesity and Hypertension (ISOH’99), where I brought together a panel of distinguished obesity and hypertension experts to discuss the latest research in these fields.
The 2nd Symposium in this series was held on October 28-30, 2001 at the Max Delbrück [...]

Humans may seem immune to the forces of natural selection, but a new study finds evolution was shaping our species as recently as the 19th century.

It’s little wonder that liberalism endorses science when no other ideology is more endorsed by it. Foundational liberal principles have been recently strengthened by new research, solidifying the ideology not just in abstract philosophy but empir…

The Blue People of Kentucky….

Dutch impressionist Vincent van Gogh obsessed himself with sunflowers until his death in 1890, later earning avid collectors tens of millions of dollars for single paintings. These days researchers have developed their own sunflower obsession: Solving the genetic origin of mutant “teddy bear” sunflowers depicted in van Gogh’s ochre-splashed canvases.

A genetic study of cattle has claimed that all modern domesticated bovines are descended from a single herd of wild ox that lived 10,500 years ago.

Yesterday, the 2nd International School on Obesity Research And Management (ISORAM), kicked off with a series of brief overviews of the basic sciences in obesity.
Yvonne Böttcher (Leipzig) provided an update of obesity genetics. Although there are now 33 common genetic risk variants for BMI, even when combined, these markers explain only a small proportion (<10%) [...]

Back in the early 2000s it was still possible to crank out papers that compared allelic distributions of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) of ‘candidate genes’ in tiny populations.
Today, anyone involved in studying the genetics of complex diseases knows that even 10s of thousands of subjects may not be enough to finding any meaningful genetic ’signals’ and [...]

The Indians knew what they were doing….

Researchers have discovered a population of leopard frogs in the New York City area that are probably a previously unrecognized species.

Otzi is sequenced. “These discoveries put a lot of what we see today medically in a broader context,” said Bustamante. “For example, this man, who died when he was about 45 years old, was likely very fit. He got lots…

… that resonates with the present. Contributor: “Lucilla”There is a quote floating around the internet referred to as the “Banker Manifest”:”Capital must protect itself in every way, through combination and through legislation. Debts must be collecte…

Earlier this week, I reviewed ‘The Cure For Everything‘ by Timothy Caulfied, who presented a rather devastating (some would say sobering) view of ‘personalized’ medicine based on genetic analyses. His take essentially is that little (if any) of the promise of genetics for complex conditions has panned out and little (if anything) is likely to [...]

This weekend I read “The Cure For Everything“, a book by Timothy Caulfield, professor in the Faculty of Law and the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta and research director of the Health Law and Science Policy Group. (He is also a rather cool dude and someone who is quite a bit [...]

Nature is supposed to be red in tooth and claw, and domestication an artificial process for making animals gentle. But it appears that some corners of the animal kingdom are becoming kinder, gentler places. Certain creatures may be domesticating themselves.

Toxic barbs on a cucumber’s skin, nanoscopic flakes of metal and a mouse’s technicolor eyeball are just a few of 2011′s best science visualizations.

Spending long periods at low gravity may alter genes, suggests a new experiment involving a magnet-powered trick used on Earth to simulate weightlessness in space.

Continuing in my series of past publications on obesity, today’s post is special, because it is about an event that ‘officially’ launched my shift from hypertension into obesity research and for the first time made some of the leading obesity researchers of the time aware of my very existence.
Back in 1998, I had already well-established [...]

Continuing in my series of revisiting some of the obesity research I was involved in, here is a paper to which I contributed a fairly significant number of DNA samples from my patients.
The paper, published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology in 1999, examined the relationship between obesity and a common genetic [...]

Genetic traces of a supposedly extinct giant Galapagos tortoise species have been found in living hybrids, and the tragically vanished behemoths may soon be resurrected.