When we think about genetic inheritance, we usually leap to DNA, the four-letter code containing the instructions for building a living organism. Scientists know that DNA encodes everything from hair ...

Forty years ago, a postdoctoral researcher named James McGrath who would go on to spend more than three decades as a clinical geneticist and research scientist at Yale, made a discovery that advanced ...

HALF a century before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck outlined his own theory of evolution. A cornerstone of this was the idea that ...

DNA transcription is the vital first step needed for switching on our genes. For a gene to be switched on, it must be acted upon by an enzyme called RNA polymerase. This is a molecular machine which ...

Scientists have long known that the DNA code in genes is not the only way to pass genetic traits from parents to offspring. "Epigenetic" marks—chemical modifications to DNA that don't change the DNA ...

In Destiny’s Child No Longer: Rewriting Genetic Fate, we envisioned a world where every newborn would be screened for genetic risks. We see a future in which the randomness of genetic inheritance ...

The COVID-19 pandemic gave us tremendous perspective on how wildly symptoms and outcomes can vary between patients experiencing the same infection. How can two people infected by the same pathogen ...

Severe mental disorders like major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia share a genetic overlap with ...

Neanderthals vanished as a distinct population tens of thousands of years ago, but they never fully disappeared. Most people ...