The lab is like many others. Located at the end of a long hall on the top floor of Carpenter building, it is filled with microscopes and desktop computers, sinks and samples of human hair. At the far end is a revolving door, the kind used for photography darkrooms, which leads to a clean room for DNA extraction. Shelves of PCR machines line one side of the room, and on the other side are freezers, most of which are “full of saliva — human saliva,” said research assistant Brooke Mattern.
On the countertop are 3-D printers used to make plastic models of human faces. The faces are scattered throughout the lab — arranged side by side on a cabinet, hanging by the dozen on a wall — and adorn biological anthropology professor Mark Shriver’s office door.
Faces fascinate Shriver.
Last March, Shriver coauthored a paper titled “Modeling 3D Facial Shape from DNA.” Drawing on data from hundreds of 3-D scans of human faces, including the faces of Penn State students, the paper purported to uncover the genetic factors...
A U.K. watchdog balked at the cost-effectiveness of Vertex Pharmaceuticals’ CRISPR-based sickle cell disease therapy Thursday, recommending against funding the treatment unless uncertainties can be cleared up satisfactorily.
The U.K. became the first country to authorize Vertex’s Casgevy (exagamglogene...
An 80-year-old man in Montana pleaded guilty Tuesday to two felony wildlife crimes involving his plan to let paying customers hunt sheep on private ranches. But these weren’t just any old sheep. They were “massive hybrid sheep” created by illegally...
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