Geneticists oppose consent ruling

Supreme Court reaffirms landmark informed-consent ruling in chickenpox case.

In June the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that a British Columbia family physician had adequately discharged her duty to disclose even though she failed to tell her patient of a serious but very small increased risk to her fetus posed by a case of chickenpox. The patient, Carole Arndt, gave birth in 1986 to a daughter who was diagnosed with congenital varicella syndrome. She requires feeding th...

L1-associated diseases: clinical geneticists divide, molecular geneticists unite.

The neuronal cell adhesion molecule L1 (L1CAM) is a transmembrane glycoprotein belonging to the immunoglobulin superfamily and is essential in the development of the nervous system. It is mainly expressed on neurons and Schwann cells, and plays a key role in axon outgrowth and pathfinding through interactions with various extracellular ligands and intracellular second messenger systems. Mutatio...

Quarreling geneticists and a diplomat.

I N the 1950s the hydrogen bomb was new; it was also fearsome. Some of the test explosions produced debris that was dispersed by high-altitude winds, dropping radioactive fallout over an entire hemisphere. Some geneticists feared that mutations induced by the radiation would constitute a significant genetic hazard to future generations. Other people argued that the tests were a necessary part o...

Ruling out and ruling in neural codes.

The subject of neural coding has generated much debate. A key issue is whether the nervous system uses coarse or fine coding. Each has different strengths and weaknesses and, therefore, different implications for how the brain computes. For example, the strength of coarse coding is that it is robust to fluctuations in spike arrival times; downstream neurons do not have to keep track of the deta...

Training of medical geneticists.