Tag: humans
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Stem cells could bypass embryo laws to shine a light on human development
14 Days. This is the maximum number of days researchers are allowed to sustain an embryo. In 1979, when this policy was first proposed by the Ethics Advisory Board of the US Department of Health, Education and Wealthfare, culturing an embryo ex vivo (removed from the body) was an extremely difficult and expensive task, and…
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You are what you eat: is cannibalism a good idea?
During lockdown I, like many, have been watching more TV shows. My most recent watch was Hannibal. For those who don’t know, Hannibal is a horror-thriller TV series which follows Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a forensic scientist and secret cannibal. Recently, writers and directors have been reframing cannibalism for entertainment purposes, treating their subjects not as…
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Is this it for Human Evolution?
Humankind, in all our arrogance, have always told ourselves that we were different from our animal relatives– that we were stronger, more intelligent, superior. Even the father of Evolution himself, Charles Darwin, talked extensively of how we may and should use the principle of natural selection to further our acts of domestication and agriculture. So…
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Ancestral interbreeding: our Neanderthal relatives may be closer than we thought
Neanderthals, our enigmatic and extinct relatives, may have been even more closely related to us then we thought, new research suggests. It is well established that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals in Europe around 50,000 years ago, leaving Eurasians with around 1-3% of our genome containing Neanderthal DNA. However, it now appears that this was…