The last century has seen science and technology used to justify any and all supremacist theories, culminating in the development of a pseudoscience called “Eugenics”, which advocated the improvement of society through what might me called selective breeding. Now, not all of the eugenic goals were crackpot and indeed many prominent scientists (including one of […]

Again and again I come up against the greatness of one single man. William Clouser Boyd (1903-1983) appears to be one of those fascinating people who go on to dominate an entire area of research for a generation. It seems as if his creativity knew no bounds. In the 1940’s Boyd noticed that the protein agglutinin in lima bean would agglutinate red cells of human blood group A but not those of O or B; he had in fact discovered that many of these blood agglutinins were actually specific to one blood group or another. With Elizabeth Shapely he coined their modern-day name, lectins, which is Latin for “to pick or choose.”

The Basques are culturally and geno-graphically unique, thought to be a mesolithic remnant settling in the northern area of Spain before the LCM (Last Glacial Maximum).

It would be tidy if all people who were blood group O lived in one part of the world, and all blood group A in another. But this does not happen. The various blood groups are found pretty much all over the world. However they are not found in the same frequency everywhere. It was this difference in the frequency of the different blood groups that gave the early blood group detectives their first insights into human individuality.

A fugue is a musical composition in which one or two themes are repeated or imitated by successively entering voices and developed in a continuous interweaving of the voice parts. It is a much used device in classical music, where often one section of the orchestra will start a melodic line, to which other sections […]