The DNA Network |
| Is human quadrupedalism due directly to genetic factors? [Yann Klimentidis' Weblog] Posted: 27 May 2008 07:13 PM CDT This paper that I blogged about a couple months ago about the possible genetic basis for quadrupedalism (walking on all fours) among a family in Turkey finally came out in PNAS and elicited a couple of letters in the same issue of PNAS (here, here) criticizing the interpretation of what they find. They bring up families in Iraq and among the Hutterites who are quadrupedal yet don't have the same mutation, or have the same mutation but aren't quadrupedal. Both of these letters suggest that quadrupedalism is not due directly to genetic factors but is "epiphenomenal" in that it's a way of compensating for balance problems caused by cerebellar hypoplasia, and due to a lack of "supportive therapy". |
| Pitt faculty receive awards to explore next-generation technologies [Think Gene] Posted: 27 May 2008 05:38 PM CDT Communities powered by clean, local-source energy. Faster, more reliable technologies and computers with a better grasp of human language. Medical care tailored to your DNA, or neural stem cells readily available for treating neurological diseases and injuries. Five University of Pittsburgh faculty members will advance the futures of energy, health, and technology as part of Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards they received this year from the National Science Foundation. The awards fund junior faculty members' emerging careers and include an education component that encourages outreach to women and underrepresented minorities. Four recipients teach in Pitt's Swanson School of Engineering: Tracy Cui, an assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering; Di Gao, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering; Lisa Weiland, an assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science; and Jun Yang, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Rebecca Hwa, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science in Pitt's School of Arts and Sciences, also received an award. Pitt is among 22 schools to receive five or more of the nearly 400 CAREER awards granted so far this year—the award cycle ends Sept. 30. Matching Pitt with five awards are Cornell University, Harvard, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of Missouri at Columbia, and the University of Utah. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign tops the list with 16. A description of each Pitt recipient's research is below. Tracy Cui will develop a platform for better understanding how to harvest neural stem cells for therapeutic use for neurological diseases and injuries. Her research involves creating a surface of electroactive polymers on which neural stem cells can be directed to become functional neurons. This technology would allow scientists to answer the predominant questions regarding neural stem cell growth and neural tissue regeneration, namely, if stem cells can become functional cells on an engineered surface and, if so, under what circumstances. Di Gao could help usher in the much-heralded future of personalized medical care based on an individual's DNA in his effort to revamp the technique for screening and separating DNA molecules. Gao's approach would stretch DNA strands tethered to a solid surface via an electric field, allowing them to be pulled from the surface and analyzed based on their viscoelasticity. This method would overcome the limitations of the predominant method of electrophoreses—submerging the strands in a matrix and applying an electric field. By stretching the DNA, chromosome-sized DNA molecules can be separated and studied, large fragments can be screened for mutations, and longer sequence fragments can be extracted. The technique might also be applied to RNA. The education component of Gao's project includes outreach to minority high school students through a related course and workshop at Baldwin and Westinghouse high schools in Pittsburgh, both of which have large African American student populations, and collaboration with Tsinghua University in China on an international field study module for Pitt undergraduates that focuses on international views of the ethical and social issues of genetic research. Rebecca Hwa aims to improve the ability of computers to process and translate human language. She will address the difficulty many systems have in processing texts from such specialized domains as business emails or scientific literature as well as texts that are automatically translated from foreign languages. Specifically, Hwa will create machine-learning algorithms that find correspondences between "standard English" and texts from specialized domains. The project focuses on three types of correspondences: direct translations, such as bilingual documents; loose translations, e.g., paraphrased articles; and indirectly related texts without an explicit translation. Building from these correspondences, a standard system will be adapted to translate texts in specialized domains. Better language processing for a wide range of texts could allow for such computer applications as intelligent tutoring programs and data mining for medical documents. Lisa Weiland will undertake a twofold effort to help sustainable energy gain a foothold in Western Pennsylvania by implementing self-powered materials into an ongoing project to power the town of Vandergrift in Westmoreland County with hydrokinetic power. The Vandergrift project, based in the Swanson School’s Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation, will harness the Kiskiminetas River and help power the town's main business district with free, clean-source electricity using micro-hydro generators. Because the river—and thus the generator—is small, Weiland will investigate a potential power harvesting method based on electromechanical materials that would generate power as the river's current moves over them. One material Weiland will focus on are known as ionomers. Ionomers have been tested for such uses as self-powered sensors in bridges and for monitoring blood flow in patients at risk for arterial blockage; as the sensors move from vibrations or fluid flow they would simultaneously send out an electric data signal and recharge themselves. But ionomers have not yet been applied to such high-power devices as generators because of a concern that electrical output and fragility increase in tandem. As part of her CAREER project, Weiland will work on constructing more robust ionomers that can produce more power without becoming too delicate. The education component of her project includes working with civic and business leaders in Vandergrift—and eventually other cities—to develop tailored plans for becoming more efficient producers and consumers of energy and goods. As technologies become more compact and powerful, the microprocessors within them become more prone to overheating, leading to poor performance, reduced reliability, and shorter lifetimes. Jun Yang will investigate ways of controlling temperature by proactively scheduling workloads among different processing cores—which perform specific tasks within a processor—of today's multicore processors. Current processors adopt a reactive temperature control by decreasing power flow within the entire processor—even if only one core overheats. Yang's technique instead prevents overheating by swapping a high-stress task in an overheating core with a low-stress task from a cooler core. This approach would diminish the occurrence of hotspots and maintain a temperature at which the processor can function with maximum performance and reliability. Yang focuses her research on computer architecture particularly power and thermal aware design, energy efficiency, and chip multiprocessor designs. Source: University of Pittsburgh |
| Estrogen helps drive distinct, aggressive form of prostate cancer [Think Gene] Posted: 27 May 2008 05:37 PM CDT Using a breakthrough technology, researchers led by a Weill Cornell Medical College scientist have pinpointed the hormone estrogen as a key player in about half of all prostate cancers. Estrogen-linked signaling helps drive a discrete and aggressive form of the disease caused by a chromosomal translocation, which in turn results in the fusion of two genes. “Fifty percent of prostate cancers harbor a common recurrent gene fusion, and we believe that this confers a more aggressive nature to these tumors,” explains study senior author Dr. Mark A. Rubin, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, and vice chair for experimental pathology at Weill Cornell Medical College. Dr. Rubin is also attending pathologist at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. “Interfering with this gene fusion — or its downstream molecular pathways — will be crucial in the search for drugs that fight the disease. Based on our new data, we now believe that inhibiting estrogen may be one way of doing so,” he says. The findings are published in the May 27 online edition of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Rubin conducted the study while at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and in collaboration with Dr. Todd Golub and other members of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, in Cambridge, Mass. His team is now continuing this line of research at Weill Cornell. Dr. Rubin, along with researchers at the University of Michigan, first discovered and described the common fusions between the TMPRSS2 and ETS family member genes subset of prostate cancer in the journal Science in 2005. “The discovery showed that these malignancies occur after an androgen (male hormone)-dependent gene fuses with an oncogene — a type of gene that causes cancer,” he explains. Experts have long understood that male hormones help spur prostate cancer — in fact, androgen-deprivation therapy is a first-line treatment against the disease. And yet the disease can progress despite androgen reduction, suggesting that other pathways might be at work. “So, we wanted to learn more — what is the genetic and molecular ‘fingerprint’ of this aggressive subset of prostate tumor”" Dr. Rubin says. Answering that question required the analysis of 455 prostate cancer samples from trials in Sweden and the United States that were conducted as far back as the mid-1970s. “These samples were placed in fixative and not frozen, so we needed new methods of retrieving the genetic information,” Dr. Rubin says. To do so, his team led by co-lead authors Dr. Sunita Setlur and Dr. Kirsten Mertz developed an innovative technology for effectively “reading” the gene transcription profiles hidden in the samples. “That led us to perform the largest gene-expression microarray analysis yet conducted in prostate cancer research, amassing information on more than 6,000 genes,” Dr. Rubin says. “This allowed us to obtain a robust, 87-gene expression ’signature’ that distinguishes fusion-positive TMPRSS2-ERG cancers from other prostate malignancies.” A close analysis of the signature yielded a surprise: that estrogen-dependent molecular pathways appear to play a crucial role in regulating (and encouraging) this aggressive subset of prostate cancer. While estrogen is typically thought of as a “female” hormone, men produce it as well. “Now, we show for the first time that this natural estrogen can stimulate the production of the cancer-linked TMPRSS2-ERG transcript, via the estrogen receptor (ER)-alpha and ER-beta. These receptors are found on the surface of some prostate cancer cells,” Dr. Rubin explains. The finding could have implications for prostate cancer research, including drug development. According to Dr. Rubin, “We now believe that agents that dampen estrogen activity (ER-beta antagonists) could inhibit fusion-positive prostate cancers. Alternatively, any intervention that boosts estrogen activity (ER-alpha) might also give a boost to these aggressive malignancies.” Research into just why fusion-positive prostate cancers are so aggressive — and potential molecular drug targets to help curb that aggression — will continue under Dr. Rubin’s direction at Weill Cornell, in collaboration with members of his group and with computational biologist Dr. Francesca Demichelis. “The technological achievement of using fixed samples that were up to 30 years old is significant,” Dr. Rubin says. “In the future, we hope to explore banked tissues from clinical trials to help understand why they failed. This should lead to insight for designing the next trial.” Source: New York- Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center/Weill Cornell Medical College Josh says: This has a lot of potential to help prostate cancer patients. Knowing that we should also try to inhibit estrogen and estrogen production in these patients is a novel strategy and hopefully will help save a lot of lives. |
| Posted: 27 May 2008 04:44 PM CDT In part I, I wrote about the shortage of technicians in the biotechnology industry and the general awareness that this problem is getting worse. This part will address the challenge of getting more students into programs that will prepare them for jobs in the biotech field. I've also been asked to write a bit more about finding jobs in companies, that post will be a bit later. Before proceeding, there are two points that need a bit of discussion. The first point is the whether there's a shortage at all and the second applies to the kind of shortage. |
| Biotech Expo - the excitement builds [Discovering Biology in a Digital World] Posted: 27 May 2008 03:59 PM CDT Students, teachers and scientists converge tommorrow morning from all around the Puget Sound region and elsewhere in Washington to share their experiences and talk about science. The students will present posters, science-themed music, art, drama, and many different types of projects that involved first-hand research and investigation. Scientists from the local biotech companies and research institutions talk with the students and judge the projects. The public viewing time is tomorrow, May 28th, between 9 am-12 noon at the Meydenbauer Center. More information can be found here. This video is a great snapshot of a Biotech Expo from the past. Read the comments on this post... |
| Web 2.0 and Medicine Course: Join Us! [ScienceRoll] Posted: 27 May 2008 03:26 PM CDT I’m very excited and proud to announce that next semester I will give 20 slideshows about web 2.0 and medicine at the University of Debrecen, Medical School and Health Science Center. I guess this will be the first Medicine 2.0 university course worldwide. I’ve written more than 300 posts about the impact of web 2.0 on medical education and healthcare so I feel it’s time to share these thoughts and views with my fellow medical students. Anyway, the lectures will be free for everyone so it would be my pleasure if you could join us from this September in Debrecen (exact dates and times later).
The list of topics I plan to cover (some details): 1st week:
2nd week:
3rd week:
4th week:
5th week:
6th week:
7th week:
8th week:
9th week:
10th week:
I also plan to publish my slideshows and to run the whole course online as well (Twitter account, Youtube channel, etc.). Your feedback is much appreciated. You can find many relevant posts here or just follow our Medicine 2.0 carnival.         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| What’s on the web (2008 May 27) [ScienceRoll] Posted: 27 May 2008 02:50 PM CDT
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| Scientists Without Borders [T Ryan Gregory's column] Posted: 27 May 2008 02:39 PM CDT I am sure that most readers are familiar with programs like the Nobel Prize winning Doctors Without Borders (i.e., Médecins Sans Frontières) and its spin-offs. |
| A Neutral Theory of Memetics [evolgen] Posted: 27 May 2008 01:00 PM CDT
In his classic book from 1976, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of the meme. Basically, a meme can be thought of as a cultural gene -- an idea that is transmitted in a population. This being Dawkins, memetics has a certain adaptationist flavor to it. The Selfish Gene introduces evolution from the gene's eye view. But Dawkins is a staunch advocate of natural selection as the primary driving force behind evolution. The debate over the role of natural selection in evolution has been carried out using empirical data, theoretical modeling, and philosophical arguments. I won't get into any details of it here. What I am interested in is the adaptationist nature of memetics. From what I have seen, memeticists argue that memes survive or fail based on their ability to propagate through a culture. Memes that are good at infecting new individuals persists, while those that are not go extinct. The probability of extinction depends on some properties inherent to the memes and the culture they inhabit. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... |
| Search for life on Mars [The Tree of Life] Posted: 27 May 2008 11:04 AM CDT   Well the Phoenix lander has, well, landed on Mars. And it is, well, on a mission. To search for evidence of life (OK, that is not the only part of the mission, but it is the coolest part). And it is time to place bets. Who out there thinks they will find some sort of evidence for life and how strong will that evidence be? I for one think there will be life on Mars somewhere. And the Polar regions are not such a bad place to look for evidence of past or present life on the planet. Not sure what others out there think overall but here is some stuff from the web to consider: Oliver Morton, my favorite Martian Blogger (interpret that however you want) says at MainlyMartian: Having witnessed two Mars lander failures, Mars Polar Lander before this blog was even born and Beagle-2 back when it was young and active (Landing and prelanding in the December 2003 archive, and the whole sad story in the Beagle-2 archive), and having been absent for all the other attempts that have proved successful, it seemed to me only prudent not to cover the landing of Phoenix this weekend Oliver also points to a "In the field" blog from Eric Hand. Neil Saunders says: If there ever was (or is?) microbial life there, Phoenix has a pretty good shot at finding the signs.Others out there I am sure have more to say. What do you think? (1) Is there life on Mars now? (2) Was there ever life on Mars? (3) Will Phoenix find and positive evidence? |
| Senator Kennedy's Cancer Family History [The Gene Sherpa: Personalized Medicine and You] Posted: 27 May 2008 10:55 AM CDT Dr Lubin, my partner at Helix Health asked me this question. "Am I the only one to think about this? Ted Kennedy Junior had Osteosarcoma. His other son Patrick had a Spinal Tumor (I'd love to see the... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] |
| GSL and C++ [Mailund on the Internet] Posted: 27 May 2008 10:06 AM CDT Yesterday, in my machine learning class, I showed some example code for artificial neural networks. I am giving my students a project tomorrow where they have to do regression using neural networks, and I wanted to show them how to program these networks. The pictures we draw of networks, and the mathematics we do with them, looks less like the implementation than the other machine learning methods we cover in the course, so I thought a code demo would be in order. The projectIt’s a simple feed-forward neural network I want them to implement in their project, so essentially they just need to be able to calculate target values from predictor variables and the network weights and then minimise the error function (as a function of the network weights). training: argminw Σn(tn - y(xn,w))2 Example implementationsFor class I showed how simple neural networks could be implemented and trained in Python, using scipy to do the training. This works very fine for the demonstration, since I can interactively train the networks to various target functions and plot how well the network fits the target. To show that the language is more or less arbitrary for the solution, I also implemented a neural network in C++, this time using GSL to minimize the error function. In theory, there shouldn’t be much difference between the Python and the C++ solutions — and for the actual neural network implementation there isn’t — but using GSL is much more tedious than the Python approach. It really shouldn’t be. The main problem is that GSL is a C library and not a C++ library, so the features in C++ that would make the C++ solution just as simple and intuitive as the Python solution are simply not supported. One thing is operator overloading. It is missing from C, so working with vectors is a bit annoying. Especially since, in C++, you are used to the STL vectors, and switching back and forth between std::vector<> and gsl_vector * is a bit annoying. It is not the worst problem, though. Not in the neural network application, at least (it might be for more linear algebra intensive applications). The one thing that annoyed me the most was how I should call the minimization function. In Python it was reasonably easy using high-level functions, so I could curry my error function and create a function of just the weights. In GSL, I had to go through a void pointer. In C++, I would have used a functor to deal with this, but since GSL is C it doesn’t have templates, so I couldn’t do that. I wasn’t happy with resource management either. GSL is clearly not designed with exceptions in mind — after all, they do not exist in C — and this means that you either have to wrap all GSL types in small specialized classes so they will be destroyed properly, or you need to be careful with calling the correct <type>_free() functions. The later is very hard to do exception safe. C++ wrappers for GSL?I googled around a bit for C++ wrappers for GSL, and it seems like there are a few around, but not really any I found particularly attractive. GSL for C++ doesn’t appear particularly active (but I could be wrong). GSLwrap seems like it only wraps the linear algebra. Are there any good GSL wrappers around, that use the high level features of C++? Or any obvious replacement? Just overloading operators to provide linear algebra syntax for matrix manipulation is not the way to go, unless there is some pretty heavy template magic involved, I think. The methods in BLAS are pretty efficient because they can do a lot of operations with a single call. Doing the same using operators would be very inefficient. That is why the efficient C++ solutions use template expressions. I am not sure that there is an easy way to do this through GSL, although the template expressions could end up just calling the BLAS routines, of course. What about high level functions (functors) for optimization? |
| Posted: 27 May 2008 09:33 AM CDT In my ever-lasting challenge to Mendel, I submit my thesis. "There is no such thing as a carrier, nor is there such a thing as a single gene disorder." Why? I have a treatise on the subject. But... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] |
| Posted: 27 May 2008 09:29 AM CDT If you are interested in the funding of microbiology research from the National Science Foundation, there is a good opportunity coming up to find out what NSF's plans are and to give your input. James Collins, the Assistant Directory of the Biological Sciences Division at NSF will give a presentation at the ASM Meeting in Boston. His presentation will be June 4, 2008 At the ASM Meeting at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center Room 052A 12-1:30 PM If you are in town and interested in microbiology research funding, it would be worth going to give your input. And if you are going to be in the area for the meeting or otherwise, you might consider going to the Division R Symposium that is from 8-10:30 in Room 156A. The talks in that session are:
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| How I Chose a “Grad School” (UK edition!) [Bitesize Bio] Posted: 27 May 2008 06:33 AM CDT To accompany Dan’s article on choosing a grad school, I thought I’d relay my experiences and thoughts on this subject. As Dan said, these articles were prompted by a suggestion emailed to us by one of our readers (thanks Vida). We are always glad to hear you article suggestions so if you’d like us to cover something, feel free to drop us a line. Being in the UK, my experiences of grad school and the grad school entry process will be a bit different from Dan’s US experience because the systems are quite different. The first thing people from the UK might ask is “what exactly is grad school?” (I certainly did). Well after looking it up on Wikipedia I found that Grad school is the American term for any institute that offers post-graduate training - masters, PhD’s etc. Glad that’s cleared up then. Like Dan, I was extremely naive in how I chose where to do my PhD (in fact in the end I didn’t really make much of a choice at all). So this is probably more of a “how not to”. Having typed out my story, I can see that it is fairly long, so I’ll give you the quick reference version of my advice first, and then my own experiences below. 1. Choose several subject areas you are interested in - unless you have a specific reason, don’t narrow your options by sticking with one topic. Once you have a PhD you might want to look at my general tips for PhD students and thesis writing tips. After completing my bachelors I new I wanted to do a PhD at some point since, to me, it was the next natural step in my career. You work (hard), you get paid and you get a nice shiny degree at the end. Sounded like a good deal to me. In the last year of my Bachelor’s I did all of the right things. I applied for interviews for a range of places that I was interested in. I was already in one of the top UK centres for Bioscience (The University of Dundee) so I applied to various labs there, Oxford and Cambridge. I did the interviews and was offered a few places. Everything was lined up. Then I had a bit of a brain fart, which changed everything. Besides science, my other love is music and at that time I was in a band that was surely destined for stardom. I decided that rather than go straight into a PhD, I would get a job as a technician for a year or two and keep playing in the band. This made perfect sense on paper. Undergrad teaching in the UK leaves students woefully equipped for practical work compared to other countries. I thought that with one or two years of practical experience under my belt I would do a much better job of my PhD - and I was probably right. But the job search didn’t go well and after 6 months of looking I still didn’t have anything. The UK job market was and still is saturated with people with bachelor’s degrees so finding your first job is extremely difficult. [note: I restricted my search to the northern half of the UK - jobs are more plentiful down south but I suspect the market is just as saturated]. After 6 months of playing music and stacking supermarket shelves I’d had enough and was missing science so I called the PhD advisor at Dundee University and asked if anything was still available. By now it was December and all of the conventional places were gone but there was one possibility - a Wellcome Institute-funded position with a relatively new research group in the department. I made the grade required for the funding - Wellcome funding normally requires a 1st class honours degree, but I scraped in with a “very good” upper second class - and I went along for the interview. To be honest, I didn’t do any of the things you are meant to do when choosing a PhD position. I didn’t ask the lab members how they liked it there, I didn’t ask what previous PhD students in the lab had gone on to do and I didn’t look at any other possible positions (well, there weren’t any). The project looked quite interesting to me (compared to stacking supermarket shelves) and the people in the lab seemed ok. So I signed on the dotted line and started a month later. Having put myself in a difficult position by opting out of the traditional route to a PhD I landed on my feet to some extent. I had very good funding from Wellcome (more than most of my peers) in a well equipped lab, in an institute with lots of friendly people in it and in a town I knew well and liked. But two very important things were very wrong. Without going into details, the lab ethos was wrong for me and my project was not terribly well planned or defined, resulting in a fairly miserable 3-4 years. I got my PhD in the end but it took me several years to recover my enthusiasm for science afterwards. The moral of the story is that the decision-making process when choosing a PhD is extremely important - whether you are in the UK or anywhere else in the world. And the bottom line is that my PhD experience could have been much better I had paid more attention to that process. What are your thoughts on choosing a PhD position? Photo: ffi |
| Science Tuesday: Breath-taking insanity [chrisdellavedova.com » Science] Posted: 27 May 2008 06:08 AM CDT
International readers may wonder where I’m going here.”Yeah, yeah”, they’ll say, “What’s the issue? Let’s see some more pictures of that kid.” The issue is, as one federal judge put it, “the utter waste of monetary and personal resources” that is the debate over teaching evolution in school. One of the lovely side-effects of six years of whack-job rule was that the far right got cocky and started pushing either the outright banning of the teaching of evolution in public schools or at the very least giving equal time to a bollocks “theory” known as Intelligent Design (ID). ID is nothing more than creationism in a lab coat. It espouses the theory that the world was created by an “intelligent designer”some time in the last 10,000 years and that life as we know it appeared at roughly the same time. It differs very little from the creation fable in Genesis.
Berkman’s group found that 98% of high school Biology teachers spent at least an hour on general evolutionary processes - OK so far, though I’m curious about that two percent. When it came to teaching human evolution - the shocking idea that we diverged from a common ancestor with apes a couple of million years ago - 17% of teachers chose to eschew the topic entirely. What’s even more disturbing us that 25% of public school teachers dedicated at least an hour to teaching creationism or ID - in direct violation of the law and common sense. For me, the most shocking finding reported in this paper is that 48% of the American public believes that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” Who are you, 48% of Americans? Could you please out yourself so we can have a serious discussion about science and the origin of life? I can understand the importance of religion and I respect that, I really do. But you don’t believe everything in the Bible is literally true, do you? Can’t we just read the creation story as allegory and move on?
This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| In Memoriam - Leo William Little [The Genetic Genealogist] Posted: 27 May 2008 02:00 AM CDT
The null439 Project currently has at least 83 members, including myself. In June 2006 my Y-DNA analysis revealed that I have the L1 SNP and thus had no result at DYS439. When I joined the null439 project at FTDNA, Leo promptly emailed me and welcomed me to the group. Other Contributions But the S26 SNP and the null429 group are just a few of Leo’s contributions to the field. Other work includes his incredibly useful “Eclectic Genetic Genealogy Information” page, or a number of articles at the Little DNA Project (including this one entitled “Tracing the Borders Littles through DNA Testing“). Indeed, a search of the GENEALOGY-DNA archives reveals at least 150 messages posted by Leo’s email address (lwlittle@yahoo.com), and a search of his name reveals many more messages in which he was mentioned. Leo was a consultant for the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, a member of the following organizations: the Association of Professional Genealogists, the International Society of Genetic Genealogy, and the Austin Genealogical Society. In July 2005, Leo’s work was highlighted in an article from Time magazine entitled “Can DNA Reveal Your Roots? “:
Since Leo’s passing was so unexpected, the family is still dealing with the shock. On Monday, Terry Barton posted to the ISOGG Yahoo Group that the family had been contacted, and that Mrs. Little had requested that there be “no phone calls, no emails, no cards, no contact of any kind.” She did mention the possibility of a memorial fund in the future. Additionally, Mrs. Little indicated that she would try to respond to Leo’s emails at some point. If you would like to leave a comment below, I will compile them and send them in letter to Mrs. Little when she is ready to receive mail. In addition, this post will be available indefinitely as a memorial to Leo Little. Thank you to Katherine Hope Borges for her assistance in completing this post. |
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