Henry Harpending is about to titillate the world's conspiracy theorists with one of the most politically incorrect academic papers of the new millennium.

Why, he and his colleagues at the University of Utah asked, have Jews of European descent won 27 per cent of the Nobel Prizes given to Americans in the past century, while making up only 3 per cent of the population? Why do they produce more than half the world's chess champions? And why do they have an average IQ higher than any other ethnic group for which there's reliable data, and nearly six times as many people scoring above 140 compared with Europeans?

Prof. Harpending suggests that the reason is in their bloodline — it's genetic.

The 61-year-old anthropologist's explanation is not easily dismissed, but it crosses into the territory scientists fear most.

For a glimpse of what post-human athletes may look like beginning in the 2012 or 2016 Olympics, take a look at an obscure breed of cattle called the Belgian Blue.

Belgian Blues are unlike any cows you've ever seen. They have a genetic mutation that means they do not have effective myostatin, a substance that curbs muscle growth. A result is that Belgian Blues are all bulging muscles without a spot of fat, like bovine caricatures of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The more we find out about genomes, the more humiliating the news they bring us. The human genome turns out to be profoundly ordinary. We have known for decades that human beings have one fewer chromosome than chimpanzees, which should have been ample warning. We have known for years that grasshoppers have three times as much DNA per cell as we do, deep sea shrimps ten times, salamanders 20 times and African lungfish a staggering 40 times. But we still kidded ourselves until just the last few years that human beings would prove to have more genes, arranged in a more sophisticated way, than most other creatures. How else to explain our exquisite brains?

We have 25,000 genes (or recipes for protein molecules) which is the same as a mouse, just 6,000 more than a microscopic nematode worm and 15,000 fewer than a rice plant. However sophisticated our brains are, it is not reflected in our genes. This has led some to suggest that we have been exaggerating the role of genes in shaping our brains. In fact, it reminds us that recipes are more than lists of ingredients. How those ingredients are cooked is also crucial. And the instructions for cooking up a body are hidden in the genome too - between the genes themselves.

he moment the little boy was born, the hospital staff knew there was something unusual about him. His muscles looked nothing like the soft baby muscles of the other infants in the nursery. They were bulging and well defined, especially in his thighs and upper arms.

"Everybody noticed," said Dr. Markus Schuelke, a pediatric neurologist at Charité University Medical Center in Berlin.

The baby, it turned out in the first such documented case in a human, had a double dose of a genetic mutation that causes immense strength in mice and cattle. Drugs are under development that, investigators hope, will use the same principle to help people whose muscles are wasting from muscular dystrophy or other illnesses. Experts say the little boy, now 4½ and still very strong, offers human evidence for the theory behind such drugs.

Scientists are often accused of trying to play God. Cloning experts, genetic engineers and atomic physicists have all fiddled with aspects of the world that many believe should remain the preserve of some higher power. But for one group of scientists in particular, playing is a serious business. They are seeking to create life itself, and in doing so could push God aside.

They are making astonishing progress. According to the Bible it took six days to create heaven, Earth and everything in them; the scientists already need only a fortnight to produce a totally synthetic organism. They are also figuring out how to expand life's genetic code, which has acted as a barrier to new forms of creation since time immemorial. "I don't think there's anything wrong with playing God," says Clyde Hutchison, one of the new breed of scientists learning to master creation. "As long as it's just playing."

Before tackling the creation of new life, the scientists have been forced to ask a more fundamental question: what, precisely, is it? What are the bare essentials life requires, the building blocks needed to make the most basic living organism? The answer has an almost profound significance, for it is these components that form the common denominator that links every living thing on Earth, from aardvarks to amoebae, zooplankton to zebras.

The common denominator for life is a package of genes that together do the bare minimum necessary to produce a living organism; enough to produce life, but no more. All other genes are add-ons, tweaks that nudge an organism into one species or other, that help grow fins or feet, trunks or tails.

At his lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Hutchison is trying to find the essentials for life by playing what seems a macabre game. He begins by taking a clutch of the most basic forms of life known to man, a bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium. The bacterium has only 500 or so genes, compared with an estimated 42,000 genes found in humans.

Because M. genitalium has fewer genes than any other living organism, Hutchison says it is the closest nature has to the simplest possible life form. Most of the genes inside the bacterium are vital for its survival, helping the bacterium to grow its body, divide and convert nutrients around it into energy. But to find out the bare minimum required for life, Hutchison is systematically whittling down the bacterium by knocking out genes to find the point at which life becomes impossible. So far, he believes he's found up to 215 genes that are strictly superfluous for the microbe's survival, meaning that a cassette of fewer than 300 genes is required for life.

USC study finds meat-tolerant genes offset high cholesterol and disease.

When our human ancestors started eating meat, evolution served up a healthy bonus – the development of genes that offset high cholesterol and chronic diseases associated with a meat-rich diet, according to a new USC study.

Those ancestors also started living longer than ever before – an unexpected evolutionary twist.

The research by USC professors Caleb Finch and Craig Stanford appears in Wednesday's Quarterly Review of Biology.

The report for the Hastings Center-American Association for the Advancement of Science project, "Tools for Public Conversation about Behavioral Genetics," is now available. The report is called "Genetic Differences and Human Identities: Why Talking about Behavioral Genetics is Important and Difficult." It attempts to give an honest account of what behavioral genetics research has--and hasnot--discovered. It also begins to say what such research might mean for how we think about who we are.

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Now that the human genome has been sequenced, sequencing know-how is turning to other organisms. A team of researchers, including some from the University of Iowa, has sequenced the genome of a highly versatile and potentially useful bacterium. The multidisciplinary effort determined the complete genetic sequence of Rhodopseudomonas palustris, a bacterium that could potentially be used for cleaning up toxic industrial waste and as a biocatalyst for producing hydrogen as a bio-fuel.

Closest relative's code will highlight human qualities.

Researchers today released a draft version of the genetic sequence of our closest relative, the chimpanzee Pan troglodytes.

The differences between the chimp's genetic code and ours should reveal what makes us human, scientists hope. The disparities might, for example, lie in genes that control the development of the brain and language, or of human-specific diseases such as Alzheimer's, AIDS and malaria.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has donated $100 million to launch a private research organization in Seattle devoted to deciphering the links between our genes and our brain.

"I think there will be all sorts of surprises," said Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. "We're very excited about this project and hope to contribute to it as well."

Today, Allen is expected to formally announce the creation of the non-profit Allen Institute for Brain Science and its inaugural project, the "Allen Brain Atlas."

The 6th Day
Director Roger Spottiswoode
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Rapaport
Released 2000

Studies of a gene that affects how efficiently the brain's frontal lobes process information are revealing some untidy consequences of a tiny variation in its molecular structure and how it may increase susceptibility to schizophrenia. People with a common version of the gene associated with more efficient working memory and frontal lobe information processing may pay a penalty in adverse responses to amphetamine, in heightened anxiety and sensitivity to pain. Yet, another common version may slightly bias the brain toward a pattern of neurochemical activity associated with psychosis, report researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

There's hardly any difference in the DNA of human races. That doesn't mean, argues sociologist Troy Duster, that genomics research can ignore the concept.

Race doesn't exist, the mantra went. The DNA inside people with different complexions and hair textures is 99.9 percent alike, so the notion of race had no meaning in science. At a National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) meeting five years ago, geneticists were all nodding in agreement. Then sociologist Troy Duster pulled a forensics paper out of his briefcase. It claimed that criminologists could find out whether a suspect was Caucasian, Afro-Caribbean or Asian Indian merely by analyzing three sections of DNA.

Scientists have found a way to measure the tiny mechanism within the body's cells which many believe may hold the key to the ageing process.
The researchers believe the technique will help efforts to pin down the causes of disease such as cancer that become more common as we get older.
It is widely thought that the number of times a cell can divide - and thus reinvigorate tissue - is controlled by the length of a microscopic structure called a telomere.

These structures are found on the end of our chromosomes and in effect stop them from unravelling, acting in the same way as the shiny bit at the end of the bootlace.

Humans can be sorted into five groups based on ancestry, major genetic study finds.

People the world over are almost identical, yet still so different genetically that they can be easily sorted into five major groups based on ancestry, new research shows.

In the largest study so far of human genetic variation, an international research team separated people by the major migrations of ancient humankind, from Africa into Eurasia, East Asia, Oceania and the Americas, in a way that overturns conventional notions of race.