john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

Bloggingheads: Synthetic biology and Neandertal genomics

Sat, 2010-05-29 01:14 -- John Hawks

I got to return to bloggingheads.tv this week for Science Saturday, with a conversation between me and Christina Agapakis, of the Oscillator blog.

Here's a non-embedded link to the diavlog. Christina's work is in synthetic biology, and we talked a lot about the recent announcement from the J. Craig Venter Institute, with some background on what synthetic biology is, and how the newsmaking work fits into the field as a whole. I learned a lot from our conversation. We got to the Neandertal genome in the second half of our conversation, and we found several common links -- and neither of us mentioned synthetic Neandertals once!

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Neandertal DNA
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synthetic biology
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Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.