"Genomic Parasites Nibbling Away at Us: Why I should win the Nobel Prize"
Saturday, May 16 at 10 AM PDT
By Stephen Gasior, PhD
Aging, infertility, neural degeneration, cancer, genetic variability.
What could they all have in common? An underappreciated source of their
cause in little genomic parasites known as retrotransposons.
Retrotransposon exist in our genomes and live a life of copying and
pasting into new locations to reproduce themselves. Unfortunately, this
involves making breaks in DNA to insert themselves. This DNA breaking
is, well, bad for genomes to stay intact. While long thought to be
dormant in most cells, they were found to actually be actively
expressed. To be discussed will be the speaker’s seminal work on
demonstrating the DNA breaking activity of retrotransposons in human
cells and the potential impact they have on human health. The case will
be made for this body of work to be in the running for Nobel Prize
recognition.
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