Many times, scientists embark on a study looking for evidence for a particular hypothesis, and in the process, they come across something totally unexpected and different from their original purpose.

When we think about genetic inheritance, we usually leap to DNA, the four-letter code containing the instructions for building a living organism. Scientists know that DNA encodes everything from hair ...

Forty years ago, a postdoctoral researcher named James McGrath who would go on to spend more than three decades as a clinical geneticist and research scientist at Yale, made a discovery that advanced ...

In Destiny’s Child No Longer: Rewriting Genetic Fate, we envisioned a world where every newborn would be screened for genetic risks. We see a future in which the randomness of genetic inheritance ...

The COVID-19 pandemic gave us tremendous perspective on how wildly symptoms and outcomes can vary between patients experiencing the same infection. How can two people infected by the same pathogen ...

DNA transcription is the vital first step needed for switching on our genes. For a gene to be switched on, it must be acted upon by an enzyme called RNA polymerase. This is a molecular machine which ...