LCF – Collaborating Internationally to Leap Forward

Great leap forward

One of Europe’s rarest small mammals — the flying squirrel — has been given a boost to save it from extinction, sparing the Finnish government from legal action by the European Commission. The Finnish government has changed its law to protect the squirrels and paid out one million euros in compensation to about 400 farmers and landowners who have to curb normal activities for the squirrels’ saf...

The great leap forward

Similarly, the theory of genome duplication, which was first seriously developed in 1970 by the Japaneseborn geneticist Susumu Ohno (1970), also cannot properly explain the great phenotypic changes that have occurred during the 75 million years since the human and mouse lineages split. Duplications, either of chromosomal regions or of whole genomes, occur naturally, for example, through errors ...

China's next great leap forward.

Looping Back to Leap Forward: Transcription Enters a New Era

Comparative genome analyses reveal that organismal complexity scales not with gene number but with gene regulation. Recent efforts indicate that the human genome likely contains hundreds of thousands of enhancers, with a typical gene embedded in a milieu of tens of enhancers. Proliferation of cis-regulatory DNAs is accompanied by increased complexity and functional diversification of transcript...

Dynamics of Policymaking: Stepping Back to Leap Forward, Stepping Forward to Keep Back

We study a model of dynamic policy-making with three distinct features. First, policy agreements made today persist until they are replaced with a new agreement. Second, agents take into account the dynamic consequences of today’s policies for future policy-making opportunities. Third, there is uncertainty about who will hold political power to propose and to veto policy changes in the future. ...