An AU$300,000 grant from The Australian Pancreatic Cancer Foundation (Pankind) will support research at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research into the use of a porcupine-targeting molecule for pancreatic cancer.
It doesn't happen very often, but the same scientists who participated in the discovery of a signaling pathway can also undo their findings and go back to square one. “When we discovered Hippo signaling, some 20 years ago, everybody was excited about it because we thought it was going to explain a big part of how growth is regulated. Now it turns out that it is not what it is doing,” Georg Halder told BioWorld.
Social scientists are well aware of the consequences of what’s called assortative mating, that is, the fact that marriages tend to occur between people who are similar in things such as interests, social status, education and wealth. Biologists, on the other hand, have tended to ignore it. “When studying the genetic underpinnings of correlated traits, “for mathematical convenience, we’ve assumed basically for forever that mating is random,” Richard Border told BioWorld. “Which it isn’t.”