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DNA by James Watson: additional notes part 3

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DNA by James Watson: additional notes part 3

Mary-Claire King

Mitochondrial Eve as cover girl

San hunters

!Gubi, a Namibian hunter-gatherer, one of the first African individuals, along with social activist Desmond Tutu (below), to have their genome sequenced. !Gubi hails from the Khoisan community, one of the most ancient and diverse human populations. His was the first genome from a minority population in Africa to be sequenced.

Abraham contemplates his complicated domestic arrangements.

Evolutionary response of body shape to climate: a heat-adapted Masai in Kenya and cold-adapted Inuit in Greenland

Alec Jeffreys, father of DNA fingerprinting

The first application of DNA fingerprinting: the X-ray film used by Alec Jeffreys to determine Andrew Sarbah’s true parentage

Colin Pitchfork, the English baker convicted of murdering two teenage girls in Leicestershire, in England in 1988. Pitchfork’s case was the first use of DNA fingerprinting to identify a murder suspect.

The Romanovs and their genetically certified remains

DNA — Pretender Anna Anderson in 1955, and Ingrid Bergman in the title role of Anastasia (1956), the movie inspired by Anderson’s claims

The remains of a discontent King Richard III were exhumed from a Leicester car park. DNA analysis sealed the identification of the last king of the Plantagenet dynasty.

A father’s lonely and ultimately forlorn crusade: The long-running campaign to clear James Hanratty’s name ran aground on DNA evidence.

Bruce Bryer, whose partial X chromosome deletion led to the identification of the DMD gene. He managed to lead a remarkably normal life and was an accomplished organist by the time he died after a car accident at the age of seventeen.

Lap-Chee Tsui, gene tracker

Arguably the remotest inhabited spot on the planet: Tristan da Cunha viewed from an uninhabited island nearby

In 2015, President Obama officially announced the Precision Medicine Initiative at the White House.

The karyotype—the full set of chromosomes—from a male with Down syndrome. Note the extra copy of chromosome 21.

Simone is a student with Down syndrome in Italy. He was photographed by Positive Exposure, a nonprofit organization that seeks to empower people living with difference.

Eight-cell embryo

Anne Morriss, CEO of GenePeeks, is banking on the potential of virtual progeny.

Cindy Cutshall, pioneering gene-therapy patient. After a visit to Cold Spring Harbor, she sent me her portrait of me in action.

When all the news was good: Alain Fischer and Marina Cavazzana-Calvo announce their breakthrough gene therapy triumph in April 2000.

DNA — CRISPR royalty: The scientific community broadly recognizes the major contributions of Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna (left, winning the 2017 Japan Prize), and Feng Zhang (right), even as their host institutions battle for patent supremacy.

Caroline Bernardi, cancer survivor

John Diamond, author and journalist

Helen Hunt portrayed BRCA1 mapper Mary-Claire King in the 2013 film Decoding Annie Parker.

The long path from normal tissue to cancer’s spread: Classic studies by Bert Vogelstein, Ken Kinzler, and colleagues showed that colon and other cancers result from a sequential series of mutations in multiple genes.

DNA — Bob Weinberg (left) and Douglas Hanahan (right), researchers who have highlighted the essential hallmarks of cancer

The hallmarks of cancer, as laid out by Douglas Hanahan and Bob Weinberg. The latest iteration includes “avoiding immune destruction” and “deregulating cellular energetics” as core hallmarks.

Judah Folkman championed the inhibition of angiogenesis as a route to tackling cancer.

Drug discoverer Jay Bradner (left) reviews some Novartis research data.

A genome analysis report on a lung adenocarcinoma patient details genes harboring potentially actionable mutations.

Hitting the target: In one promising immunotherapy strategy, blocking the PD-1 receptor on the T-cell surface with a drug (green) boosts the tumor-killing properties of those white blood cells.

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