NEWSWEEK International Editions: Highlights and Exclusives, OCT. 15, 2007 Issue
NEWSWEEK International Editions: Highlights and Exclusives, OCT. 15, 2007 Issue COVER: Biology Reborn. (All overseas editions). In recent months, a perfect storm of new technology and research has blown apart 20th-century dogma in the fields of biology and genetics, writes Lee Silver, a professor of molecular biology at Princeton. He writes that many scientists now believe that heredity is the result of an incredibly complex interplay among the basic components of the genome, scattered among many different genes and even the vast stretches of "junk DNA" once thought to serve no purpose. The result of this seemingly modest conceptual breakthrough has been a torrent of new discoveries. Scientists around the world have identified alterations in the sequence of DNA that play causative roles in a range of common diseases, including types 1 and 2 diabetes; schizophrenia; bipolar disorder; glaucoma; inflammatory bowel disease; rheumatoid arthritis; hypertension; restless legs syndro...