ABO blood group and secretor status exert a powerful influence on the growth on many microorganisms in the body, including yeast, such as Candida albicans, and many of the bacterial forms that inhabit the intestinal tract. In life it’s not just what you are eating, but what is eating you.

Imagine that you are the owner of a small factory that makes replacement windows. Normally, your ordering department does a pretty good job of things and the supply of the constituent parts necessary to make a decent replacement window (one assumes these to be things like glass, vinyl, aluminum, hardware, etc.) arrive punctually and in […]

  The stream of time sweeps away errors, and leaves the truth for the inheritance of humanity. —Georg Brandes     Approximately 10% of the protein pool encoded by the mammalian genome plays a role in transcription or chromatin regulation.  Given that the mammalian genome consists of 3,000,000,000 base pairs this gives rise to an […]

My mailbox got choked up the other morning with emails from friends and strangers wondering about my thoughts on the recent study published in Nature on the mapping of gut bacterial (microbiome) patterns to basically three general groups. The findings were extensively reported in the media, including Wired Magazine which managed to start the article […]

A recent Lancet article has resuscitated some interest about the influence of ABO blood groups and one’s chances of developing coronary atherosclerosis. Like a lot of earlier studies that documented the influence of blood group phenotypic influences on disease incidence, the researchers went in looking for one correlation and wound up finding another; and possibly produced an oversimplification in the rationale of their results.

Natural Selection is the process by which certain heritable traits that convey some advantage become more common in a population over successive generations. These advantages typically make the organism more likely to survive and successfully reproduce.

Cholera, a disease that is assuming serious proportions in hurricane-ravaged Haiti. Cholera strikes so fast it is sometimes called the lightening disease. Without rehydration therapy, or antibiotics for severe cases, cholera can kill in a matter of hours. The disease causes acute diarrhea that can lead to severe dehydration. Blood group O individuals have a greater risk of infection with cholera and develop the most severe and life threatening forms of this illness.

Harvard University has developed an animation that would take their cellular biology students on a journey through the microscopic world of a cell. Amazing.

How and why would natural selection further a trait that is good for the survival of a group or society, but injurious to the individual? Can genes be selfish? Are we are the “survival machines” of our genes?

Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck (1744 – 1829) was a French naturalist and an early proponent of the idea that evolution occurred and proceeded in accordance with natural laws. Lamarck is however remembered today mainly in connection with a discredited theory of heredity, the inheritance of acquired traits (“Lamarckism”) He was also one of the first to use the term “biology” in its modern sense.