Case squeezing medical school, dean says (genetics news)

... The expenditures were part of the medical school's campaign to improve its competitive edge and a key component of the university's ambitious Vision Investment Program, a five-year plan to funnel $181 million into undergraduate teaching, academic medicine, graduate research and other areas.

The university was to operate in the red until 2008, but the approach, and Hundert, came under fire when fund-raising efforts and federal research dollars that were supposed to erase the planned deficit fell short.

Horwitz said $57.5 million of the Vision program was dedicated to the medical school.

He said he had understood the money to be a long overdue investment needed to restore the school's national reputation and competitiveness for research grants.

Now, the university is treating it more like a loan, he said.

Before he arrived, Horwitz wrote, the medical school was losing key faculty members, driving away promising students and losing its competitive edge because of outmoded educational facilities, antiquated laboratories, decaying buildings and other problems.

In a telephone interview Wednesday, Horwitz said he would not have taken the job if not for the university's financial commitment.

Instead, Horwitz outlined in the memo, the university has squeezed the medical school's funding by requiring increased payments to the university administration.

The outlays, which Horwitz said rose from $37 million in 2003...

Nature's mummy process (genetics news)

... Answers: Forensic experts say that if features such as eye and hair color are determined by one or a few genes, identifying these traits of a suspect may be relatively simple, though height and weight may be harder, says Nigel Calder in "Magic Universe." A fascinating line of research regarding faces blends fundamental and forensic science.

No two faces are ever exactly the same, not even those of identical twins.

If Mother Nature varies human faces by shuffling a reasonably small number of genes, each definable face should be genetically traceable.

In fact, says Calder, researchers at University College of London have experimented with matching 3-D scans of volunteers' faces with their DNA samples.

As medical physicist Alf Linney put it, "Sometime in the future we hope to be able to produce a photorealistic image of an offender's face, just from the DNA in a spot of blood or other body fluid found at a crime scene," i.e., leaving one's face in a DNA fingerprint.

Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich at strangetrue@compuserve.com, co-authors of "Can a Guy Get Pregnant?

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Skin colour is an inaccurate race identifier (genetics news)

...Academics from all over the world are presenting research on the socio-ethical aspects of human variations in colour and health at the annual conference, the Africa Genome Education Institute's fourth, in Somerset West.

'To think of Africa just as a black continent is incorrect'Skin colour varied across continents in a continuous distribution, but the most human genetic diversity was in Africa, Shriver said.

"Africa has more skin colour variation than any (other) part of the world.

To think of Africa just as a black continent is incorrect." Scientists had shown there were "pretty good correlations" between colour and exposure to ultraviolet light.

There was more ultraviolet light intensity throughout the southern hemisphere.

Since skin colour had evolved under the action of natural selection, higher pigmentation in Africa's inhabitants would protect them from sunburn and cancer, among other things.

Sexual selection could also be factor influencing pigmentation content, Shriver said.

"Skin pigmentation is a beautiful aspect of human biodiversity.

The more we know about skin colour the more we can demystify it as a race identifier or issue." No population was more highly evolved than any other and there were not, nor ever were, "pure" human stocks.

The term "race" was understood to refer to cultural and biological features, and ethnic heritage with a social component, Shriver said.

Nina Jablonski, of the California Academy of Sciences, said that other environm...

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