Volume 7 Issue 1, January 2006

From The Editors

Research Highlights

Reviews

  • Review Article |

    Traditional neuroscience and linguistic studies are being integrated with ever advancing developmental, genetic and genomic analyses, among others, and are converging on the view that human language, like many other traits, has evolved by descent with modification.

    • Simon E Fisher
    •  & Gary F. Marcus

  • Review Article |

    Recent years have seen a growing appreciation of the role that epigenetics has in tumorigenesis. The authors suggest that there might be a fundamentally common basis to cancer that lies in the polyclonal epigenetic disruption of stem/progenitor cells.

    • Andrew P. Feinberg
    • , Rolf Ohlsson
    •  & Steven Henikoff

  • Review Article |

    Even complicated networks such as those involved in eukaryotic development lead to reproducible outcomes, which indicates that there are molecular mechanisms that filter out noise. The authors describe the framework in which noise is studied and propose that Wnt signalling is a noise filter.

    • Alfonso Martinez Arias
    •  & Penelope Hayward

  • Review Article |

    Studies on model organisms have led to crucial advances in understanding the molecular processes that are involved in repairing DNA double-strand breaks. These have been complemented and extended by the molecular dissection of human disorders in which double-strand break repair is compromised.

    • Mark O'Driscoll
    •  & Penny A. Jeggo

  • Review Article |

    The wide range of methods for analysing microarray data can seem bewildering to researchers. This Review provides a guide to statistical analysis for the different stages of a microarray experiment, highlighting points of consensus and areas where more work is needed.

    • David B. Allison
    • , Xiangqin Cui
    • , Grier P. Page
    •  & Mahyar Sabripour

Perspectives

    Science and society

  • Science and Society |

    The genetic profiling of babies could revolutionize health-care strategies. However, this possibility raises serious issues of consent, confidentiality and discrimination that need to be considered with great care.

    • Brenda Almond

  • Science and Society |

    The authors explore how human dignity is used in debates about controversial biotechnologies, including biobanks, human gene patents, stem cell research and human cloning, in light of shifting views of what human dignity is actually taken to mean.

    • Timothy Caulfield
    •  & Roger Brownsword
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