Over 85 percent of proteins in the body can’t be targeted with conventional chemical drugs. By working on the RNA responsible for problematic proteins, gene silencing opens up an enormous portion of the genome to intervention. If realized, a new class of drugs based on gene silencing could overhaul modern medicine.
Neuroscientist Brie Linkenhoker believes that leaders must be better prepared for future strategic challenges by continually broadening their worldviews.
As the director of Worldview Stanford, Brie and her team produce multimedia content and immersive learning experiences to make academic research and insights accessible and useable by curious leaders. These future-focused topics are designed to help curious leaders understand the forces shaping the future.
Worldview Stanford has tackled such interdisciplinary topics as the power of minds, the science of decision-making, environmental risk and resilience, and trust and power in the age of big data.
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For anyone who has accidentally injured themselves, Dr. Zachary Campbell not only sympathizes, he’s developing new ways to blunt pain.
“If you have ever hit yourself with a hammer, afterward, even a light touch can be painful for days or even weeks,” said Campbell, who researches pain on the molecular level at The University of Texas at Dallas. “While many of us may not be coordinated enough to avoid an accident, my goal is to disrupt the inception and persistence of pain memories.”
Campbell directs the Laboratory of RNA Control and recently published a study in the journal Nature Communications in close collaboration with Dr. Ted Price, an associate professor from the Pain Neurobiology Research Group, and Dr. Michael Burton, a new assistant professor from the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences who conducted postdoctoral work at UT Dallas.
An international team of researchers led by a group with deCODE Genetics, a biopharmaceutical company in Iceland, has partly recreated the DNA of a man who died in 1827, despite having no body to take tissue samples from. In their paper published in the journal Nature Genetics, the team describes reconstructing “a sizable portion” of the original DNA of the man by studying DNA samples from his descendants.
In a unique and interesting project, the team worked with genetic information from people living in Iceland to recreate the DNA of a man well known in that country due to his unique story. He was an escaped black slave who made his way to Iceland—a place where there were no other people of African descent. That made his DNA extremely unique. More importantly, the man, Hans Jonatan, was, as the story goes, “welcomed with open arms,” which meant he was able to marry a local woman and have children. Those children produced children of their own, who inherited part of Jonatan’s DNAdding to the story, Iceland just happens to have one of the most extensive genealogical databases in the world today—it includes data on over a third of the entire population of the country.
In this new effort, the researchers took advantage of the unique situation to find Jonatan’s descendants by narrowing an original pool of 788 descendants down to a manageable 182—each one of whom held one small piece of the puzzle in their genes. After much work, the team reports that they were able to use the pieces they found to recreate a large part of Jonatan’s DNA without using any tissue from him at all—the first time such a feat has ever been achieved. They were also able to trace some of Jonatan’s ancestry starting with his mother, an African slave on a plantation in St. Croix, which at the time of Jonatan’s birth was a Danish colony. They believe his father was a white European.
