Category Archives: Human Genetics

Beth Pratt| Special to the Avalanche-Journal

Going through accumulated paper stuff, including copies of some feature articles as well as copies of columns, is a slow process.

Reawakened memories send me in remembrance of people and their stories, the part of the job I most enjoyed was listening and learning how amazing people really are at overcoming life's sometimes difficult surprises.

And I wonder, how could I forget this, that or the other? I am thinking not just of the newspaper career, but of other activities, ideas and challenges that loomed so important at the time.

Although the time frame would be somewhat different in the big cities, rural America's awakening tended to arrive after its sons (and sometimes daughters) left home to go to war during the 20th century.

Travel and cultural experiences also were influenced by the growing communications possibilities. Firstradio and then television brought the world closer together in one sense and sometimes further apart as cultures collided.

What is unique about today's culture is the speed with which it moves. In every environment, families are exposed to a vast flood of information and entertainment. The possibilities for knowledge seem endless.

Yet, a heavy sense of despair seems to grip much of the country as neighbor turns against neighbor.Imported, failed ideologies became popular among many of the so-called scholars of the day and the early 1960s university students were prime targets.

Now, our greatest inner-cities have become killing fields as a brazen lawlessness paralyzes the forces of legal restraint with bitter cries of hatred and blame.

The public good seems to have mostly turned into public bad in many areas of the country, still known in other parts of the world as a beacon of freedom even in its imperfections.

Some people blame all our troubles on politicians whichever side they choosebut they are wrong in that the voters make the choices for office.

What we really have is a spiritual crisis brought about by the same problems that have assailed the world's people groups from its beginning.

The issue? We are still trying to create God in our own image instead of letting God transform us into His image.

To his people, God says through the Prophet Isaiah, I will lay waste the mountains and hills and dry up all their vegetation; I will turn rivers into islands and dry up the pools...

"You have seen many things, but you pay no attention; your ears are open, but you do not listen. … So he poured on them his burning anger, the violence of war. ...but they did not take it to heart. (from Isaiah 42 NIV)

What we experience today is as ancient as time itself, but we seem to have lost interest in knowing and understanding what history can teach us.

Yet, we have astounding advancement today in science (I'm currently reading The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson about what science calls the code of life. It is a compelling story of scientific advance amid other wonders of our Digital Age.)

The story of genetic manipulation is enhanced by the 2012 publication of research that brought the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier.

It opens a window on major researchers and their painstaking lab work. On the outside, warnings reverberate around the moral issue of making genetic code changes in human life. Rewriting the code of life to fight disease by changes to human genetics could be be opening a last frontier of human effort to make God in our own image.

From way before Isaiah's time until now, human history has shown itself to be repetitive.

Do not be deceived. God, who designed and set life on Earth in motion, will not be mocked according to the accumulated wisdom and prophesy of the ages.

Beth Pratt retired after 25 years as the religion editor of the Avalanche-Journal.

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Pratt: We seem to have lost interest in understanding what history can teach us - LubbockOnline.com

Building on its commitment to genomic research and health care innovations, Avera Health will utilize Sema4s health intelligence platform to further advance cancer care

Avera Health, an integrated regional health care system that serves 300 locations across the Upper Midwest, and Sema4, a patient-centered health intelligence company, today announced a new collaboration launching a precision medicine initiative. This initiative will initially focus on advancing oncology care, enabling Avera Healths providers and patients to benefit from data-driven insights that inform targeted cancer treatments.

Avera Cancer Institute has had a robust precision oncology program for several years in which the patients tumor has been genetically sequenced to guide individualized cancer treatment. This collaboration will take that a step further by leveraging Centrellis, Sema4s health intelligence platform, to curate, structure and integrate clinical and genomic data to support both cancer research and clinical care at Avera Health. Sema4 will deliver predictive disease network models and clinically actionable insights, empowering Avera Healths providers to further improve the prevention, detection, and treatment of cancer for their patients. Sema4 will also offer digital tools, which give Avera Healths providers the ability to easily search for cohorts of patients based on clinical criteria, view a patients treatment history that is contained in the curated data as an interactive timeline, and more systematically match patients to clinical trials.

Avera Health has a longstanding commitment to genomics and personalized medicine, and a forward- thinking approach to understand the critical role it plays in generating better health outcomes, said John Lee, MD, FACS, Chief Medical Officer for Cancer Research at the Avera Cancer Institute. Our collaboration with Sema4, and the resulting access to curated and structured real-time oncology data, will allow our providers to leverage cutting-edge tools that will improve the delivery and quality of cancer care. This access to increasingly rich clinical data throughout the patient journey will also accelerate critical, lifesaving treatment options.

The collaboration between Avera Health and Sema4 significantly builds upon Avera Healths existing clinical genomic offerings, led by the Molecular and Experimental Medicine team, Avera Institute for Human Genetics, the Avera Cancer Research team, and its dedicated physicians and genetic counseling clinical team. Averas providers and researchers have worked tirelessly to develop and collaborate with like-minded partners on innovative clinical trials and strategies to provide the right drugs to each and every patient that entrusts us with their care, said Casey Williams, PharmD, Chief Scientific Officer for Cancer Research at Avera Health. In time, thousands of patients across our six cancer centers, 40 outreach sites, and 37 hospitals will have access to the insights and offerings generated from this collaboration.

Avera Health is an outstanding health system with a proven history of excellence and innovation in personalized care and research, said Michelle Zimmerman, JD, MBA, General Manager of Oncology Solutions and Emerging Markets at Sema4. We are pleased to use our deep expertise in artificial intelligence, data science, and genomic sequencing to further enable precision oncology care for Avera Healths patients. We look forward to a successful, wide-ranging collaboration advancing numerous clinical and research initiatives across the Avera Health system.

As part of their work together, Avera Health will also utilize Sema4s industry-leading, information-driven genomic solutions. More Avera patients will be able to receive genomic testing earlier in their disease timeline to help oncologists choose the best chemotherapy treatment regimens, based on the individuals genomic data and genetic mutations that have taken place within the tumor, and the individuals hereditary risks. They will have access to Sema4 Signal Whole Exome Sequencing (WES), Whole Transcriptome Sequencing (WTS), and Hereditary Cancer testing to provide clinically actionable information about a broad range of genomic variants across the tumor and germline.

Our collaboration with Avera Health will accelerate discoveries which help oncologists provide optimized care to individual cancer patients in real time, said William K. Oh, MD, Chief Medical Science Officer at Sema4. Avera Health shares our vision to use clinicogenomic data to improve patients lives.

About the Avera Health

The Avera Health system has over 19,000 employees and physicians, serving more than 300 locations and 100 communities in a five-state region. Our ministry, our people and our superior value distinguish Avera. We carry on the health care legacy of the Benedictine and Presentation Sisters, delivering care in an environment guided by our values of compassion, hospitality and stewardship. For more information about Avera, visit our website at Avera.org. Learn more in our newsroom.

About Sema4

Sema4 is a patient-centered health intelligence company dedicated to advancing healthcare through data-driven insights. Sema4 is transforming healthcare by applying AI and machine learning to multidimensional, longitudinal clinical and genomic data to build dynamic models of human health and defining optimal, individualized health trajectories. Centrellis, our innovative health intelligence platform, is enabling us to generate a more complete understanding of disease and wellness and to provide science-driven solutions to the most pressing medical needs. Sema4 believes that patients should be treated as partners, and that data should be shared for the benefit of all. For more information, please visit sema4.com and connect with Sema4 on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube.

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Avera Health and Sema4 Announce Collaboration to Advance Precision Oncology Care - Avera Health

KU Leuven's Yves Moreau is pushing to have a 2017 Human Genetics paper that he suspects did not have the proper informed consent retracted, Science reports.

According to Science, the paper used data from the Y chromosome haplotype reference database (YHRD), which includes submissions from around the world. In June, Nature News reported that YHRD could include submissions obtained from Uyghurs in China and Roma in Europe who may have been unable to freely give informed consent and that while the database asks if informed consent was obtained, it does not check.

Moreau tells Science the Human Genetics paper from Chinese and German researchers is especially troubling due to the volume of data it includes as well as since the co-authors include members of Chinese law enforcement. Additionally, while the paper says established ethical principles were followed, co-author Michael Nothnagel from the Cologne Center for Genomics has since said, according to Science, that some data may have been obtained by approaches that did not meet relevant ethical standards.

Science adds that Springer Nature, the publisher of Human Genetics, is investigating the issue, but Moreau tells it the publisher is moving too slowly and that he has now written to the journal's editorial board. This approach, it notes, has led to resignations at other editorial boards Moreau has contacted about other papers he has identified for review.

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Pursuit of a Retraction | Genomeweb - GenomeWeb

One-third of the members of the editorial board of a leading American medical journal has resigned in protest against the publication of several research papers that could help the Chinese regime in its persecution of minorities. According to a report by The Intercept, after a slew of research papers that can help racial profiling of minorities in China were published by the journal named Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine, eight of the 25 editorial board members resigned in protest. The members protested after the management of the journal failed to take any action on the papers despite repeated complaints.

According to The Intercept, emails accessed by it shows that the editor-in-chief of the journal was slow in responding to several controversial papers related to Tibetans, Uyghurs and other ethnic groups in China. Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine is published by Wiley, a New Jersey based company, and the company also took a long time to respond to concerns about the papers published by the journal.

The papers under question were first flagged by Yves Moreau, a Professor of Engineering and a bioinformatician at the University of Leuven in Belgium, and according to The Intercept, he has been fighting a tireless campaign to get journals to retract troubling or unethical papers. He has been successful in getting an order of Kuwait govt overturned, which had called for compulsory DNA collection from all citizens.

He was studying the DNA profiling of the minorities done by the Chinese authorities. During such searches, he found 18 papers published by Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine, which dealt with various genetic topics related to the people in China. Some analysed the genetic differences between ethnic groups, including the genetic gaps between the majority Han community and minorities like Tibetans and Hui Muslims, and some had relied on samples that Moreau suspects were collected without proper consent.

Many of the papers were related to forensic genetics, a problematic subject in the entire scientific community. It refers to the collection of DNA for forensic databases, which is used by the police in criminal investigations. But although in theory it should be used only to find suspect criminals, it has the potential to conduct racial profiling, a highly problematic area. Moreover, scientists also worry about collection of DNA sample from ethnic minorities without their consent, which is happening in China.

The Chinese government is already DNA from its male citizens to build a massive a national forensic DNA database. Reportedly, the Communist government aims to collect and store genetic profiles of around 70 million people, around 10% of the countrys male population. Apart from that, Chinese police also forcibly collecting DNA samples from ordinary citizens, including migrant workers, dissidents, and minority Uyghur Muslims.

Although the Chinese govt says it is being done to fight crimes, researchers dont believe that, they say it is a part of the government efforts to deepen social control. Although most western countries collect DNA sample of convicts, the collection of such samples from ordinary citizens have been described as unprecedented. Human Rights Activists say the only purpose of this genetic profiling is the oppression of ethnic minorities by the Chinese govt.

This concern is being raised because of the kind of data collected by the Chinese govt. They are cataloguing markers known as short tandem repeats (STRs), which are repeating regions of DNA that are specific to the Y chromosome found in men. These STRs are extremely similar between men in the same male lineage, which means, when the authorities nab a dissident man, they can track all his male relatives using the database, even if they are not identified as relatives in official documents.

Since 2019, Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine has published several papers authored by Chinese authors on the topic of forensic genetics, which means they used samples collected by the police, many of which could be done without consent. Many of the papers listed institutions as co-authors which work closely with the police or receive funding from the police. One paper even lists the Public Security Bureau in Tibet as the co-author, which is the police agency in the region.

All these show that the research papers published by the American journal were effectively authored or sponsored by the Chinese govt.

After discovering the papers, Yves Moreau had written in March this year to Suzanne Hart, the journals editor-in-chief and deputy director at the medical genetics and genomic medicine training program with the U.S. National Institutes of Healths National Human Genome Research Institute. He noted that before 2019, the journal had published only two papers on forensic genetic studies from outside China, which shows that the Chinese govt has specifically identified the journal where the papers on forensic genetic studies of vulnerable Tibetan and Muslim minorities can be published.

However, although Suzanne Hart acknowledged the mail and promised to look into the matter, he received no update for months after that. As a result, he wrote to the entire Editorial Board in June, describing the concerns with the papers published by them. Many of the board members agreed with him for a probe in the matter, and many said that they were not even aware of the papers.

When the board members wrote to Hart, she said she will get back with further information on how the management intends to address this issue. But when no communication came from her for several weeks, the board members started to resign in protest. Ophir Klein, a board member and a pediatric medical geneticist at the University of California San Francisco said that he left the board as he was really concerned about the lack of communication.

However, not all editorial board members who question the paper have resigned, some have decided to stay on to push for scrutiny of the papers, including Joris Veltman, the dean of the Biosciences Institute at Newcastle University Medical School in UK. After he wrote to the management escalating the issue, they responded that Wiley would begin an investigation immediately.

After that, the company released a statement saying that the Integrity in Publishing Group of the company was overseeing the matter. However, they informed that they are only contacting with the authors and the institutional review boards associated with the published papers to clarify the consent procedures undertaken for collecting the DNA samples.

Although the consent was a major issue, it was not the only one. The company kept silence on the much larger issue of use of scientific instruments in racial profiling and discrimination by authoritarian governments. Moreau said the focus on consent is too narrow, and the larger question is whether the journal should be publishing research on vulnerable minorities, some of which directly involves the authorities persecuting them.

The board members are saying that if the papers are determined to be unethical, at least they should be retracted.

This is not the first time that Wileyhas been accused of allying with China. In September 2000, the editor of another journal published by the company had resigned over the issue of freedom of speech. Prof David Curtis, from University College Londons Genetics Institute, had resigned as the editor-in-chief of the Annals of Human Genetics, after he was prevented from publishing an article which said that academic journals should boycott papers from China protesting against Chinas human rights violations in Xinjiang.

Wiley, and Lancet which also refused to published the article, had said that publication of the article could pose difficulties for their offices in China. Yves Moreau was one of the co-authors of the article.

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One-third of editorial board members of American medical journal resign over papers that could help China persecute its minorities: Details - OpIndia

TheHuman Genome Project,a large-scale international effort to determine the complete DNA sequence that defines the human body, took more than 12 years to complete and involved thousands of researchers.

Now,a similar effort is underway to map each of the trillions of cells in the human body.

The Human Cell Atlas(HCA) would be acomprehensive map of cells that has the potential to rapidly advance the understanding of human health and the diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of disease, according to Gary Bader,a computational biologist and professor at the University of Torontos Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research and the department of molecular genetics in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine.

This project will likely be larger than the Human Genome Project, and it requires a massive international effort. No single individual or institute could do this on their own, he says. Its multi-disciplinary in nature, and pulls in people from genomics and technology development, basic biology, clinical research, computational biology and ethics.

We encourage participation from all countries and relevant scientific communities.

Bader, who is on the organizing committee for HCA, is helping to co-ordinatea scientific meeting of the HCA from Aug. 25 to 27. The meeting will focus on human development and pediatrics, mapping the body from conception to adolescence. Medicine by Design is a lead sponsor of the meeting, along with theChan Zuckerberg Initiativeand others.

Bader says the August meeting will bring together groups of people who are working on critical questions about cell types and states during human development.

Were aiming to deliver a highly interactive meeting that will provide plenty of opportunities for virtual face-to-face interaction in breakout discussion sessions, Bader says. A silver lining of having the meeting online instead of in-person, as was originally planned, is that there are no space restrictions. It can be open to anyone who wants to attend. Also, there are no travel costs for attendees, and we are able to offer registration free of charge.

Session topics will include: understanding cellular decision-making during development;lineage tracing; clonal evolution; tagging and its applications;and developmental origins of health outcomes over a lifespan. There will also be a session on regenerative medicine, led byGuoji GuoandJason Rock, focusing on how developmental and pediatric single cell atlas data can shed light on tissue aging and repair processes.

Regenerative medicine uses stem cells to replace diseased tissues and organs, creating therapies in which cells are the biological product. Regenerative medicine can also mean triggering stem cells that are already present in the human body to repair damaged tissues or to modulate immune responses. Increasingly, regenerative medicine researchers are using a stem-cell lens to identify critical interactions or defects that prepare the ground for disease, paving the way for new approaches to preventing disease before it starts.

There is strong evidence that well have to really understand development to live up to regenerative medicines key aims, Bader says. There are questions we dont know the answer tofor example, why do children heal better than adults? These answers are essential for researchers who are developing stem cell therapies or ways to encourage self-repair in the body.

The HCA group is mapping 14 organ systems, each organized into its own bio network. For instance, the gut, heart and kidney each have their own bio network, comprisingresearchers that focus on that specific system. Bader is part of the liver bio network.

Bader, along with the Temerty Faculty of Medicine Associate ProfessorSonya MacParlandand ProfessorIan McGilvray a scientist,and surgeon and senior scientist, respectively,at University Health Network (UHN) are part of a Medicine by Design collaborative research team that, in 2018,created the firstmap of human liver cells at the molecular level. They are currently part of the large, Medicine by Design-funded team projectstudying how to harness the livers power to regenerate.

The liver map represents the first time a human organ has been charted at the single-cell level. It illuminated the basic biology of the liver in ways that could eventually increase the success of transplant surgery and enable powerful regenerative medicine treatments for liver disease such as regenerating the liver with stem cells.

This is a tool that can be used by researchers who are developing cells in the lab. For instance, a U of T and UHN teamrecently published work that showed they can develop functional blood vessel cells found in the liver. This drew on our liver map work, which provided a benchmark for those researchers to compare their cells with adult human liver cells, says Bader. HCA continues to expand this work for example in pediatricsand it will become a fundamental resource for regenerative medicine researchers.

Medicine by Design is sponsoring the HCA meeting in August because its an opportunity to engage with the international effort on human cell mapping, which creates new scientific collaborations for the Medicine by Design community.

Moreover, the HCA informs new directions in regenerative medicine research, says Michael Sefton, executive director of Medicine by Design and aUniversity Professorin the department of chemical engineering and applied chemistry in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and theInstitute of Biomedical Engineering.

This international event will connect fields and people that traditionally dont work together, says Sefton, whose lab is located at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research. A massive collaborative undertaking is whats necessary to bring HCA to fruition, and Medicine by Design is proud to support this effort. We cant overstate how much the HCA project could advance and transform regenerative medicine.

Bader says in addition to the opportunities for scientific learning, the event could have other benefits for attendees.

One of the advantages to attending the HCA meeting is the opportunity to network and potentially find out about funding opportunities one might not be aware of otherwise. Its a great opportunity for researchers to connect beyond their local collaborations.

Funded by a $114-million grant from theCanada First Research Excellence Fund, Medicine by Design brings together more than 150 principal investigators at U of T and its partner hospitals to advance regenerative medicine discoveries.

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U of T's Medicine by Design helps unite international researchers working to map every human cell - News@UofT

Nearly 300 gene variations that influence the reproductive lifespan of women have been identified by scientists in a global research collaboration.

Academics from more than 180 institutions, jointly led by the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge, also successfully manipulated several key genes associated with the variants to extend their reproductive lifespan.

The research greatly increases our knowledge of the reproductive ageing process, could improve the prediction of which women might reach menopause earlier than others and lead to improvements in fertility treatment.

Women are born with all the eggs they will ever have. Menopause occurs at about 50 years old, when most of a womans eggs have gone, although natural fertility wanes years earlier.

Co-author Professor Eva Hoffmann, of the University of Copenhagen, said: It is clear that repairing damaged DNA in eggs is very important for establishing the pool of eggs women are born with and also for how quickly they are lost throughout life.

Improved understanding of the biological processes involved in reproductive ageing could lead to improvements in fertility treatment options.

The study increased our knowledge of known genetic variations linked to reproductive lifespan, from 56 to 290.

Testing the effect of naturally-occurring genetic differences also enabled the researchers to examine the health impacts of having an earlier or later menopause. A genetically earlier menopause was found to increase the risk of type 2 diabetes and was linked to poorer bone health and increased risk of fractures.

However, it reduced the risk of some types of cancer, such as ovarian and breast cancer, which are sensitive to sex hormones that are at higher levels while a woman is still menstruating.

The findings followed analyses of datasets from hundreds of thousands of women from sources including UK Biobank and 23andMe. Customers of 23andMe provided their data by opting in to the research.

Most of the data came from European women, but 80,000 of East Asian ancestry were included in the study, with broadly similar results.

They found many of the genes involved are linked to DNA repair processes. Many of these genes are active from before birth when human egg stores are created but also throughout life as well.

Two important cell cycle checkpoint pathways CHEK1 and CHEK2 - regulate a wide variety of DNA repair processes.

The research showed knocking out the CHEK2 gene so that it no longer functions, and over-expressing CHEK1 to enhance its activity each led to an approximately 25 per cent longer reproductive lifespan in mice.

While mouse reproductive physiology differs from humans - notably mice do not have menopause - the study also looked at women who naturally lack an active CHEK2 gene, and found they typically reach menopause 3.5 years later than women with a normally active gene.

Co-author Professor Ignasi Roig, from the Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona, said: We saw that two of the genes which produce proteins involved in repairing damaged DNA work in opposite ways with respect to reproduction in mice.

Female mice with more of the CHEK1 protein are born with more eggs and they take longer to deplete naturally, so reproductive lifespan is extended. However, while the second gene, CHEK2, has a similar effect, allowing eggs to survive longer, but in this case the gene has been knocked out so that no protein is produced suggesting that CHEK2 activation may cause egg death in adult mice.

The genes could be used to help predict which women are at highest risk of having menopause at a young age.

Co-author Dr Katherine Ruth, of the University of Exeter, said: We hope our work will help provide new possibilities to help women plan for the future. By finding many more of the genetic causes of variability in the timing of menopause, we have shown that we can start to predict which women might have earlier menopause and therefore struggle to get pregnant naturally. And because we are born with our genetic variations, we could offer this advice to young women.

Co-author Dr John Perry, of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge, a senior author on the paper, said: This research is incredibly exciting. Although theres still a long way to go, by combining genetic analysis in humans with studies in mice, plus examining when these genes are switched on in human eggs, we now know a lot more about human reproductive ageing. It also gives us insights into how to help avoid some health problems that are linked to the timing of menopause.

The research collaboration involved was jointly led by the University of Exeter and the Cambridges MRC Epidemiology Unit, with the Institute of Biotechnology and Biomedicine at the Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona and the DNRF Center for Chromosome Stability at the University of Copenhagen.

The findings were published in Nature.

Read more

Beating heart cells grown in Cambridge lab demonstrate potential of Covid-19 experimental drug

Artificial pancreas developed in Cambridge could help diabetes patients with kidney failure

Urine and blood tests for brain tumours developed by Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute

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The role of genetics in womens reproductive lifespan uncovered - and health impact of earlier menopause revealed - Cambridge Independent

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AMGN - Market Data & News

AMGEN Inc. (NASDAQ: AMGN) shares gained 0.67%, or $1.53 per share, to close Friday at $229.68. After opening the day at $229.11, shares of AMGEN fluctuated between $231.89 and $228.76. 1,797,295 shares traded hands a decrease from their 30 day average of 2,416,949. Friday's activity brought AMGENs market cap to $130,424,328,437.

AMGEN is headquartered in Thousand Oaks, California, and employs more than 22000 people.

Amgen is committed to unlocking the potential of biology for patients suffering from serious illnesses by discovering, developing, manufacturing and delivering innovative human therapeutics. This approach begins by using tools like advanced human genetics to unravel the complexities of disease and understand the fundamentals of human biology. Amgen focuses on areas of high unmet medical need and leverages its expertise to strive for solutions that improve health outcomes and dramatically improve people's lives. A biotechnology pioneer since 1980, Amgen has grown to be one of the world's leading independent biotechnology companies, has reached millions of patients around the world and is developing a pipeline of medicines with breakaway potential.

Visit AMGEN Inc.s profile for more information.

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AMGEN (AMGN) gains 0.67% in Light Trading on August 13 - Equities.com

THE FOLLOWING CONVERSATION, adapted from an event at the University of Marylands Center for Literary and Comparative Studies, is part of the Los Angeles Review of Books special series, Antiracism in the Contemporary University, edited by Tita Chico. Click here for the full series.

JOSIE GILL: Thank you for that question, Michell. The question is how, as humanities scholars, can we approach race and science today, at a moment when certain biological ideas about race seem to be reappearing. There are white supremacist groups discussing (and misinterpreting) genetic studies on internet forums. The New York Times reported that white supremacists were chugging milk because they thought a genetic study was saying that white people were better able to digest milk than others. Trump has often talked about his belief in good genes both his own and those of his followers as a way of signaling the purported superiority of whiteness. So there are seemingly casual but also very prominent ideas about genetics entering public discourse. In relation to COVID-19, recently the home secretary in the UK, Priti Patel, was trying to explain the different impact [of the disease] on Black and Asian communities in the UK. She implied that they are just somehow more susceptible to COVID-19, that theres some kind of biological difference. Whether these ideas represent a return, or whether they have been there all along, there is no doubt that we are in a political moment where these discourses are gaining traction and theres a return to a biological understanding of race.

Approaching this situation as a literary scholar can be quite tricky. There has been an attack on scientific expertise [from the right], and so literary scholars can be under some pressure not to do anything that might undermine science. This is particularly the case for the understanding of race that was confirmed by the Human Genome Project; that race is not biological and has no genetic meaning. That is the established and predominant scientific view. In the main, literary approaches tend to adhere to this view, to support it, and many literary scholars are influenced by critical race scholarship in this regard. Scholars like Kwame Anthony Appiah, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Paul Gilroy have in different ways brought genetic science into their work to support their own, preexisting understanding of race; that it is not a genetic reality. You might ask, whats wrong with that? Im not disputing the finding of the HGP or saying that it is wrong, but what I find interesting in their usage of science, is that it marks a departure from how these scholars talk about science in the past.

When these scholars discuss the historical construction of race in the 18th and 19th centuries, they acknowledge that it was an interdisciplinary idea a construct created from many discourses including science, philosophy, and literature. In these analyses, science is understood as a product of its time, and the colonial context in particular. Theres an understanding that science was influenced by everything that was going on politically and socially at the time. However, when you turn to literary analyses of 21st-century science, you can see theres a tendency to revert to a different stance toward science, treating it as an objective, neutral authority on race, and not as complicated or imbricated in culture as it was historically.

I was interested to see how I could approach contemporary science by maintaining a focus on the political, social, and cultural contexts which have made certain ideas about race possible in 21st century. Im drawing on the work of STS scholar Jenny Reardon, in doing this, and trying to expand her analysis and include the literary and cultural, to think about how that context enables certain ideas about race to emerge narratively. Im not trying to undo the scientific finding that race isnt genetic; Im not saying thats not true; I just want to understand the conditions that enabled this idea to gain traction. I dont think its a coincidence that that idea came about at the same time as the rise of post-racial discourse at the beginning of this century. It seems strange to think of it now, post-BLM, but with Obama, there really was a widespread belief in the US and UK that we were entering a post-racial period and that racism was no longer an issue, that people of color had gained a certain level of equality and that we were moving beyond race. The science of race was feeding into that political climate.

You touched on it toward the end of your response, but Im interested in what scientific studies of race have to learn from literary studies. Your book talks about how the literary contributes to science. Can you speak more on that?

Im not saying theres one particular relationship that literature has to science; that simply wouldnt be possible given that there is so much diversity in scientific perspectives on race in the 21st century. That said, I think there are two main ways in which literature speaks to some of the absences of genetic discourse. First, the novels that I look at in Biofictions all make connections to the history of race and science and try to position the developments happening now within the context of what has happened before. I think that works against what scientific discourse often does, which is to create a very deliberate separation between eugenics, the racial science of the past, and genetic science today.

I think literature can help us to see how older racial ideas seep into the present. Related to this, the other thing literature does is draw attention to ways in which we cant easily separate science from the imaginary or the fictional. Genetic discourses on race continually try to separate the social and cultural from the scientific; they position race and racism as largely a social problem that no longer has anything to do with science. The novels that I look at in Biofictions demonstrate that it isnt really possible to do that. They are very alive to the ways in which the fictional, the made-up, comes to be incorporated into science; how the imaginary shapes the development, expression, and transmission of scientific ideas and the public understanding of science. They show how genetic science functions narratively, rather than objectively, within the racialized contexts in which it is embedded. To say these things might be to align oneself with people who want to undermine science, but thats not what Im trying to do.

Its necessary that we do this work because often racial configurations emerge when we appear to move beyond race and when science appears to move us beyond race. I think literature is good at revealing how older racial thinking is always latent in the new. To deny this would be as regressive as the attack on science itself. I can give an example on how that happens in one of the novels I discuss in my book. Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead was published in 2006. Its the story of an unnamed African American protagonist who works in marketing, and his job is to name products. He becomes famous for naming a range of plasters (band-aids) that are designed to match the skin tone of their wearers so its a kind of multicultural plaster that he calls Apex. The protagonist wears one of these plasters after he stubs his toe; it obscures a serious wound, and, in the end, his toe has to be amputated. The novel is about his recovery from this incident and I think its really a satire on the ways in which race is often invoked in medicine for commercial ends.

It seems to be referencing a real-life example of this BiDil, a drug that was approved by the FDA in 2005, exclusively for the treatment of African Americans with congestive heart failure. BiDil was supported on the basis that it would help a population which really needed the help, but there was no genetic basis for it whatsoever. The makers of the drug admitted that they used race as a proxy for an unknown genetic marker and that the drug might have been effective in nonAfrican American populations. Race was a way of marketing the drug and even though it was a commercial failure, it had a big impact on how Americans (including African Americans) understand race; the drug appeared to signal that, contrary to the findings of the Human Genome Project, there is some genetic basis for race and people were being medicated on that basis.

To go back to the novel, I think Whitehead is interested in exposing the superficiality of the ways in which race is sometimes being invoked in medicine, and the novel is something of a warning about the uncritical adoption of racial categories in that context. He creates a subtle historical comparison to make this point. The amputation of the toe is an echo of a cure sometimes given to enslaved people who were diagnosed with Drapetomania. This was the disease that made enslaved people want to run away, a supposed condition named by Samuel Cartwright, a doctor and major figure in the South in the 19th century. Its obviously an absurd attempt to pathologize enslaved people, and I think what Whitehead shows is how the fictionalization of race and medicine is still happening today with drugs like BiDil, which seems to make race the problem to be treated to make race into the disease.

Id like to ask you some questions now, Michell! Youre working on a period about 100 years before that which Im looking at, but I wonder: Could say something about how your work connects to contemporary social justice movements like Black Lives Matter, and how it speaks to some of the issues which COVID-19 has brought about?

As you said, Im working in an earlier part of history, focusing on the Jim Crow era, specifically on communities of Tri-racial identity for example, those having white, Indigenous, and Black ancestry. Ive been interested in how these communities use scientific technologies in order to make their own identity claims. For example, disease has been one avenue through which these communities make certain racial claims. We know that Black and Indigenous populations experienced a high incidence of diabetes and so this becomes, for some, a way to make certain racial claims.

However, in terms of thinking about BLM and differential health outcomes, with my family being originally from Alabama, I was struck by how the idea that Black people were possibly immune to COVID-19 received a lot of attention throughout the South during the first weeks of COVID-19. It made clear to me that the ideas linking race and disease are not only part of our history but persist into the present day.

Even as we saw Black communities being decimated by COVID-19, it took so long to highlight the narratives surrounding the systemic issues that lead to these health outcomes, rather than some biological innateness specific to black people. It reminded me of the early 20th century and medical discourses which claimed that African Americans were more susceptible to diseases like tuberculosis and syphilis. When we highlight that Black populations are being disproportionately impacted by a disease, we must be vigilant to ensure this calling out isnt misinterpreted as affirming a belief in innate Black difference. BLM is doing important work in terms of combating that narrative.

In that sense, they are doing what genetic science isnt, which is focusing on racism, rather than on the idea of race itself as being the problem. It is structural inequality and racism which is causing inequalities in the COVID-19 pandemic. This relates to my next question: how do you work through the relationship between race and racism, something that is often elided in genetic science?

That question is so important, and its one that I engage students on quite a lot. One of the things I tell them, and this is borrowed from Ta-Nehisi Coates, is to understand, Race is the child, not the father. Meaning that race is the child of racism, not the father. And this for me is a productive way to think about the relationship between the two.

We can have good debates about the etymology or genealogy of these terms, but it is important to remember that race and racism are not always engaged in the same ideological and political projects. They can converge and diverge in all sorts of ways. When we focus on race as the cause or equivalent to racism we can miss the ways in which critical engagement with race and its construction allows us to engage biases and prejudices that can help us combat racism.

Also, because Im an intellectual historian and I study ideas, Im attached in weird ways to the idea of race, because it matters so much for the communities I study. One community I study has been marginalized because of how they racially classify, and there are dozens of communities like that in the United States. We can say were beyond race, but race continues to matter, as do the categories that are part of it.

Is there a tension between the more popular uses of genetics the way certain communities are buying into a biological idea of race and the way academics think about race and science. How does this play out in your work?

There are tensions, particularly when we think about some of the racial politics of the present. The communities that I study want to be recognized as Native peoples. To that end, they are often very invested in the need for outside recognition of inward feeling of identity. This is how the acknowledgment process has worked for much of the 20th century. It has depended on how outsiders view you rather than on how you see yourselves.

There is also tension because when scholars come to communities and they ask questions about lived experiences and identities, were not always cognizant of how these questions will impact the political projects these communities have underway. In my work, Im trying to be sensitive to not repeating the violence of treating my research interests like they dont have real-world consequences. I want to be sensitive to the political projects of the communities and individuals involved. The same should hold for scientists and humanists.

Turning back to the academy, do you see potential synergies in the way scientists and humanists approach race and antiracism?

Im interested in interdisciplinary conversations between the sciences and humanities, whether there can be more dialogue between our disciplines and how that can happen not just at an intellectual level but at a practical level within universities. The most immediate way to tackle the issues of race in science and racism would be to have more face-to-face conversations across our disciplines.

The work Im doing is as much concerned with how humanities scholars approach race, as it is with how scientists approach the concept. I would like to see a renewed focus on talking about race across both the humanities and sciences. I don't know the situation in the US but in the UK, many people are afraid to talk about race and it is avoided because people are afraid of saying the wrong thing, or they are afraid of the decolonization debates, seeing them as too radical. When we talk about race and genetics, that cant be separated from broader discussions of racial issues as they play out in a university, and all the different facets of racism and peoples experiences of it.

These conversations are good. In my own work, I find that scientists are often very earnest about the limitations of their own work, however, the people impacted arent always acknowledging those limitations. For those reasons, having conversations with multiple stakeholders is key. As is thinking about the ways that our work translates outside of the scholarly bubble.

I work in communities that have been victimized by both the academy and the members of the scientific discipline who have been interested in their lived experience. I want to investigate this process and highlight the injustices that have occurred as a result. However, Im also very much interested in how communities have combated these efforts. Both sides of this story highlight the fact that race-making doesnt just happen from the top-down. It happens from bottom-up as well, as individuals and communities push back against notions of scientific expertise. My scholarly position is to highlight that co-production as a way of challenging the hegemony of scientific knowledge and by extension that of the academy.

In the broadest sense, my work is interested in how academic disciplines have marshaled their power and expertise when they have produced studies of racial identity. In terms of my own position, I know that I am within the academy, but it remains an important part of my practice to ensure that this work doesnt stay here, but that I engage with the communities impacted by it.

How has your position within the university informed your work on race and specifically the evolution of academic constructions of and attitudes toward race?

Im a founding member and former director of the Centre for Black Humanities at the University of Bristol. Its an interdisciplinary research center in the Faculty of Arts that we established four years ago. It came together because there was a group of us working on a wide range of topics relating to Black life in Britain, Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean. So the remit is quite wide, but thats good because there arent many research centers in the UK that explicitly foreground Blackness as a topic of study. There are many reasons for that. Black as a term has a different history in the UK, to the US. In the 1970s and 80s, it was a term used by and to describe people of color but thats now changed. It now refers to people of African descent. It was a bold move to establish the Centre because when we were trying to set it up, some people were saying race isnt real, so why are you talking about Blackness and why would you single out Blackness from other ethnicities?

But for us, as a group of researchers, it made a lot of sense because we are situated in Bristol where there is a large, historic Black community, an activist community that has for years been trying to address the legacies of slavery in the city. These legacies were addressed very publicly in June 2020 when the statue of slave trader Edward Colston was pulled down during a BLM demonstration. Creating the Centre for Black Humanities was one way in which we could expand the involvement of that community with the university, creating a space where Black people and Black staff and students could feel that they have a place to have these discussions. Weve developed an MA program, and theres now a bursary for Black teachers wishing to take it. With regard to science, what I have found interesting is that Ive started to have PhD students from the sciences coming to me wanting to talk about racism and Black Lives Matter. Science faculty are beginning these conversations now, but I think that creating the Centre did a lot of work within the university. It immediately had an institutional visibility that meant we could support students and staff from across the disciplines, even though we are only focused on the arts and the humanities in an intellectual sense. In a broader activist sense, were engaging with a much wider constituency of academics and people within Bristol.

We began our conversation today by discussing the return of explicit, biological racism to the public sphere. How might we relate this to the relationship between fact and fiction and the loaded question of truth and post-truth in contemporary society? In your book, Josie, youre thinking about the negotiation of fact and fiction in the development of scientific knowledge.

Scientific facts change all the time. One of the things I havent mentioned yet is epigenetics, which is a recent development within genetics. It overturns what was previously understood about genetics which is broadly that you have genes that are inherited and passed on through generations and apart from a few mutations here and there, they remain largely fixed and stable. Epigenetics has come along and now scientists are looking at how genes have these epigenetic marks that are switched on and off depending on the environment in which someone (or a body) is located. Its still an emerging area, but some studies suggest that those marks, those changes, can also be passed down through generations. This is an interesting example of how we have to be open to the nature of scientific discovery.

To bring fiction into the conversation, for me, the finding of epigenetics that genes can carry a memory of past environments and experiences (that is the metaphor which is often used) is really interesting. It speaks to the way that race has already been imagined in fiction. Im thinking of Octavia Butlers novel, Kindred, which is about a woman, Dana, living in the 1970s who gets pulled back in time to the 19th century to the plantation of her ancestors, who are both white enslavers and enslaved Black people. Dana is in a very dynamic relationship with the past: her body is mutilated through whipping and torture when shes on the plantation, and she ends up having to live in the (1970s) present without an arm and is disabled by this experience and encounter with history. This is an interesting representation of how bodies come to be raced, of how raced bodies are created through racist environments. Im interested in the ways in which we can think about fiction and the kinds of fictional models that are already there for thinking about race not as genetically real, but as the result of certain fictional (i.e., racist) beliefs. The idea that some people are inferior to others because of their race is fiction; but this fiction through racism has real consequences for the body. There are all kinds of interesting and productive ways to think about fact and fiction. We shouldnt limit how we think about this relationship just because some people want to question the validity of science and scientific fact. Theyre going to do that anyway.

Josie Gill is senior lecturer in Black British Writing at the University of Bristol. Her book Biofictions: Race, Genetics and the Contemporary Novel was published by Bloomsbury in 2020 and won the British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize for 2020. She is principal investigator of the Wellcome Trust funded project Black Health and the Humanities (20202022) located at the Centre for Black Humanities.

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Race and Antiracism in Science and the Humanities Michell Chresfield and Josie Gill discuss the ways - lareviewofbooks

As well as the objects we find in graves, were able to extract ever more information from the bones themselves. For me, as a biological anthropologist, its been astonishing how the science around this has developed over the past 20 to 30 years.

If Im presented with a skeleton, I can tell quite a lot just by looking at the bones with the naked eye. I have a background as a medical doctor and before I started learning the business of osteoarchaeology, I would have thought: Its just a skeleton. How much can you really tell? You cant ask it about symptoms, you cant do blood tests. But I was astonished at how much you could work out. First, bone responds to disease. Some infections, such as syphilis and tuberculosis, affect bone in very distinctive ways. Osteoarthritis is also easy to identify from tiny holes on the surface of a joint.

Next you can look at teeth. People suffered from dental disease in the past, just as we do today, but most prehistoric people actually had much better teeth than ours because they didnt have such a starchy, sugary diet. They didnt brush their teeth as fastidiously as we do, but their teeth are nevertheless usually in surprisingly good condition.

Employing radiography techniques, such as using X-rays, allows us to uncover more clues hidden features of the bones. And with a micro CT [computed tomography] scanner were able to slice up the bones virtually, allowing us to analyse them without incurring any damage.

Then there are chemical techniques that allow us to analyse the ratios of different elements in bones and teeth. Our bodies are built from what we consume, so we are essentially made out of our surroundings. That means that the signatures of the landscapes in which we grew up are written into our bodies particularly into teeth, because tooth enamel is laid down in childhood.

For instance, your body is constantly incorporating different stable isotopes of oxygen and strontium in various ratios. We can analyse isotopes in ancient human remains, and see how these elemental ratios match those found in the geology of places in Britain or farther afield. This can be really useful for telling where somebody grew up, for instance, or where they spent the last decade of their life.

Finally, we can extract DNA from ancient bones and sequence it. That technology has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years.

Alice Roberts is the author of Ancestors: A Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials (Simon & Schuster, 2021)

The human genome was fully sequenced in 2003. Since then weve developed the ability to extract DNA from very ancient bones, and to work out how to combine separate fragments of DNA into a complete genome. By doing that, were able to look for rare variants that might give us clues indicating when particular groups of people moved in or out of Britain. Sometimes were able to reconstruct more detailed information about individuals, too. One of the prehistoric skeletons I discuss in the book is known as Cheddar Man, who was discovered in Somerset in 1903, and lived around 10,000 years ago. By analysing his genome, geneticists have revealed that he probably had an unusual combination of dark skin and bright blue eyes. Being able to work that out from just a skeleton is utterly extraordinary.

DNA can also reveal information about kinship and relationships between individuals. Thats been quite profound when it comes to looking at the communal burials found inside Neolithic chamber tombs, for instance. One theory about these chamber tombs is that they were intended to anonymise the dead, and therefore contain people from across the whole community. Another theory is that they effectively acted as family vaults and some recent genetic analyses provide hints that this may indeed have been the case. For example, its been revealed that two bodies buried together in a Neolithic monument at Primrose Grange in County Sligo, Ireland are those of a father and his daughter.

Elsewhere in Ireland, DNA analysis of a man buried at Newgrange Stone Age tomb in the Boyne valley has revealed that he was the son of an incestuous union between either a parent and a child or two siblings. So were finding out some quite extraordinary details, some of which may not even have been public knowledge at the time of those peoples deaths.

Genetic science is not a panacea. Its not as though DNA technology somehow supersedes archaeology in fact, it could actually leave us with more questions than answers. But it does provide important strands of new evidence with the potential to answer some big questions, especially about mobility and migration. We should view it more as a tool for archaeologists to use one that will hopefully help us see the picture more clearly.

Genetics can certainly be disruptive. In fact, its probably as disruptive as radiocarbon dating was when that emerged, from the late 1940s suddenly, archaeologists were able to pin absolute dates on organic material. I think you can see a similar effect playing out with DNA analysis at the moment.

There have been some instances of geneticists treading on archaeologists toes. Theres been a perception by some archaeologists that geneticists have waded into long-standing archaeological debates and simply said: Youve been arguing about this for ages. Well, now weve got the answer. Not surprisingly, archaeologists have responded: Hang on a minute first you need to learn a bit about archaeology and the kinds of questions were asking.

But weve got to capitalise on the power of genetics to help us solve archaeological conundrums. In the book, I talk about a cutting-edge new project called 1,000 Ancient British Genomes, led by Swedish geneticist Pontus Skoglund of the Francis Crick Institute. This is a brilliant example of the power of collaboration between geneticists and archaeologists. Skoglund is engaging with archaeologists up and down the UK, asking them to identify questions that genetics might be able to help solve.

One of the people I became quite obsessed with is Augustus Pitt-Rivers (18271900). Hes best known as a collector, but he also came up with some really interesting ideas about how cultures change and evolve over time, and how these transitions happened. Pitt-Rivers was very influenced by 19th-century evolutionary theory and biology, and wondered how these ideas could apply to culture. He also started to think about whether the origins of new cultures might be linked to the movement of people.

For instance, Bronze Age people in Britain obviously had a different culture from the Neolithic people who preceded them. But where did they pick up this culture from? Pitt-Rivers suggested that there had effectively been a population replacement that Bronze Age culture was actually brought in by a whole load of new people. He tried to back up this theory by measuring skulls, arguing that there were detectable differences between the shapes of Neolithic and Bronze Age skulls. He was trying to use the study of skulls in a similar way to how we would now use DNA studies.

Whats astonishing is that DNA evidence now emerging suggests that Pitt-Rivers may have been right that a lot of people may have arrived in Britain during the Bronze Age, largely replacing Neolithic populations. Those earlier people didnt completely disappear, but there was a really profound turnover of population. Its really interesting to think about the contact between these two groups, and about the ways in which their different cultures may have merged.

Archaeology is a very introspective, self-aware discipline, which I think is extremely useful. Weve long been aware that every archaeologist always has ideas from their own time in the back of their mind whenever they approach a set of observations.

That can impact ideas about gender, for example. Take Iron Age chariot burials: not all of them contain men we know that some, such as the site at Wetwang in East Yorkshire, definitely contain women. I think that in the past antiquarians would have very quickly jumped to a conclusion that the body was male, based on the style of the burial or perhaps artefacts that were buried with the body. This is similar to what Reverend William Buckland (17841856) did when he discovered the oldest skeleton yet found in Britain, on the Gower peninsula in south Wales, which he called the Red Lady of Paviland. The remains are clearly male, but Buckland didnt think it could possibly be a man because the individual was buried with what looked to him like ivory jewellery. As a 19th-century antiquarian, he couldnt stomach the idea that a man might be buried with jewellery.

And these ideas still persist. When we find an Iron Age burial with a sword, theres often an assumption that its a man. Or if a mirror is excavated from a burial, theres an assumption that the remains are that of a woman. In the book, I talk about the need to avoid seeing discoveries through our own current cultural lens to accept that there may have been many more diverse identities in the past than perhaps we understand today, for example. We think that our society and culture is normal in the way that it defines two genders, but perhaps in the past there was a much more diverse approach to identity. Certainly, if you find an Iron Age burial with both a sword and a mirror (and one such site has been excavated), that might be telling us something quite interesting about ancient identities.

I think that new scientific technologies encourage us to move away from our current preconceptions to look at the evidence in isolation to begin with and then to build up a bigger picture.

Its a stunning discovery the most richly furnished Copper Age burial yet found in Britain. This man was buried with almost 100 objects in his timber-lined grave, so he was certainly high status or special in some way. All sorts of things were buried with him: lots of flints and arrowheads, and stone items that we presume are wrist guards for archery hence his name as well as copper knives and five bell-shaped beakers. There were also gold ornaments, thought to be hair wraps or possibly earrings the oldest gold found in Britain.

Because the Amesbury Archer was found only about three miles from Stonehenge, some have suggested that he may have had a link with that site. That may be true, but well never be able to prove it. You can also speculate about who he was his position in that society: are we looking at some kind of Bronze Age shaman or magician? And, connected with that idea, what did people think of those who first developed the ability to extract metal out of stone? It must have been amazing to see a completely new material being produced.

What I find particularly interesting about the Amesbury Archer is that analysis of the stable isotopes in his remains shows that he wasnt a local in fact, he grew up in or near the Alps. Graves such as his show just how far these connections stretched, and the distances that people were travelling. Theres this popular idea that in the ancient past people never travelled farther than the next village, but now we have evidence of some, such as the Amesbury Archer, travelling hundreds of miles in a lifetime.

That burial, found in 2017, is absolutely spectacular. I was lucky enough to visit it with the team that discovered it. We dont see many Iron Age burials across most of Britain, but in Yorkshire several very characteristic chariot burials have been found. These belonged to the Arras culture, which had connections to the near continent and possibly brought this very distinctive funerary style with them.

That Pocklington grave contains the body of a man buried within a chariot. In other similar burials, the chariots tend to have been dismantled before being put in the grave flatpacked, essentially. This one, though, was standing up and intact, with the man placed inside in a crouching position.

Along with the grave, theres evidence of a funeral feast. You get the impression that this funeral was a great spectacle, intended to show off the status of the deceased individual but also that of the surviving family. There are animal bones in the grave, including a rack of ribs, so it looks as if dishes from the feast were being shared with the deceased individual.

The other utterly extraordinary thing is that two pony skeletons were found standing up in the grave. That was just unbelievable. We spent quite a long time scratching our heads, wondering how on earth they got those ponies in there upright. Did they winch dead animals into the grave and then somehow support them, maybe piling up the soil underneath to hold them in a standing position? Or were the ponies led into the grave and then killed? I dont know if well ever quite get to the bottom of how it was achieved, but obviously it was extremely important to the design of the grave to have the chariot looking as though it was ready to depart, taking the dead man off, possibly to the afterlife. That is, of course, if they believed in the afterlife we dont know!

I think that exploring prehistory shows us just how multicultural Britain has always been. What weve seen is that many different groups of people have crossed the North Sea and the Channel in both directions over time, and that those cultures all enriched the others.

Although I write a lot about the power of genetics, I dont think we should be trying to trace direct genetic links between us and people in the ancient past because, once you get back into prehistory, these connections arent terribly meaningful. You dont need to have a direct genetic link with the Red Lady of Paviland or the Amesbury Archer to think about what the lives of these individuals might have been like. Im aiming for an egalitarian approach to ancestry in the landscape. The ancestors I look at in the book belong to everybody.

Alice Roberts is the author of Ancestors: A Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials (Simon & Schuster, 2021). Buy it now on Amazon, Waterstones or Bookshop.org

This article was first published in the July 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine

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Prehistoric Graves: Why They Are Time Capsules Of Early Britain - BBC History Magazine

According to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) researchers, when new mothers complain that all those sleepless nights caring for their newborns are taking years off their life, they just might be right.

UCLA research published this study in the journal Sleep Health.

Scientists studied 33 mothers during their pregnancies and the first year of their babies' lives, analyzing the women's DNA from blood samples to determine their "biological age," which can differ from chronological age. They found that a year after giving birth, the biological age of mothers who slept less than seven hours a night at the six-month mark was three to seven years older than those who logged seven hours or more.

Mothers who slept less than seven hours also had shorter telomeres in their white blood cells. These small pieces of DNA at the ends of chromosomes act as protective caps, like the plastic tips on the ends of shoelaces. Shortened telomeres have been linked to a higher risk of cancers, cardiovascular and other diseases, and earlier death.

"The early months of postpartum sleep deprivation could have a lasting effect on physical health," said the study's first author, Judith Carroll, UCLA's George F. Solomon Professor of Psychobiology. "We know from a large body of research that sleeping less than seven hours a night is detrimental to health and increases the risk of age-related diseases."

While participants' nightly sleep ranged from five to nine hours, more than half were getting less than seven hours, both six months and one year after giving birth, the researchers report.

"We found that with every hour of additional sleep, the mother's biological age was younger," said Carroll, a member of the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at UCLA's Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. "I, and many other sleep scientists, consider sleep health to be just as vital to overall health as diet and exercise."

Carroll urged new mothers to take advantage of opportunities to get a little extra sleep, like taking naps during the day when their baby is asleep, accepting offers of assistance from family and friends, and, when possible, asking their partner to help with the baby during the night or early morning. "Taking care of your sleep needs will help you and your baby in the long run," she said.

Co-author Christine Dunkel Schetter, a distinguished professor of psychology and psychiatry at UCLA, said the study results "and other findings on maternal postpartum mental health provide the impetus for better-supporting mothers of young infants so that they can get sufficient sleep -- possibly through parental leave so that both parents can bear some of the burdens of care, and through programs for families and fathers."

Dunkel Schetter added that while accelerated biological ageing linked to sleep loss may increase women's health risks, it doesn't automatically cause harm to their bodies. "We don't want the message to be that mothers are permanently damaged by infant care and loss of sleep," she emphasized. "We don't know if these effects are long-lasting."

The study used the latest scientific methods of analyzing changes in DNA to assess biological ageing -- also known as epigenetic ageing, Dunkel Schetter said. DNA provides the code for making proteins, which carry out many functions in the cells of our body, and epigenetics focuses on whether regions of this code are "open" or "closed."

"You can think of DNA as a grocery store," Carroll said, "with lots of basic ingredients to build a meal. If there is a spill in one aisle, it may be closed, and you can't get an item from that aisle, which might prevent you from making a recipe. When access to DNA code is 'closed,' then those genes that code for specific proteins cannot be expressed and are therefore turned off."

Because specific sites within DNA are turned on or off with ageing, the process acts as a sort of clock, Carroll said, allowing scientists to estimate individuals' biological age. Greater an individual's biological, or epigenetic, age, the greater their risk of disease and earlier death.

The study's cohort -- which included women who ranged in age from 23 to 45 six months after giving birth -- is not a large representative sample of women, the authors said, and more studies are needed to better understand the long-term impact of sleep loss on new mothers, what other factors might contribute to sleep loss and whether the biological ageing effects are permanent or reversible.

Carroll and Dunkel Schetter reported last year that a mother's stress prior to giving birth may accelerate her child's biological ageing, which is a form of "intergenerational transfer of health risk," Dunkel Schetter said.

Co-authors of the new study included researchers from the department of psychology, the department of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences, and the department of human genetics and biostatistics at UCLA and from the psychology department at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

Funding sources for the study included the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute of Aging, both part of the National Institutes of Health. (ANI)

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Accelerated ageing linked to sleep loss in new mothers: Study - Hindustan Times