Dna

ARDMORE, Pa. - Wednesday was a beautiful day at the Merion Golf Club. Soft clouds, perfect temperature, gently cooling breezes. It was also the day before the U.S. Golf Assn., the diabolical mastermind of the U.S. Open, hands 150 players blindfolds and offers each a final puff on a cigarette. The 113th edition of this annual golf agony is meant, as always, to make the greatest golfers in the world feel as if they are wearing starched underwear. Mike Davis, executive director of the USGA, summed up nicely Wednesday morning.

For the past 60 years, we have been learning a new language. Ever since the double-helix structure of DNA was uncovered in 1953, the vocabulary of genetics has been creeping into our lives, becoming over time a full and rich lexicon. Last week's Supreme Court ruling against patents for two genes implicated in cancer is a step toward ensuring that this language remains one of science and humanity rather than profit. The landmark ruling centered on patents for two genes - BRCA1 and BRCA2 - held by Myriad Genetics, a diagnostic testing company based in Utah.

The history of Europe is written in its people's DNA. The Huns and the Slavs made incursions into Eastern Europe about 1,500 years ago. Migrants moved from Ireland to England in recent centuries. Populations in Italy and Spain have been comparatively stable. None of this is breaking news. But scientists were able to see it anew by examining the patterns of genes in 2,257 people now living in 40 countries on the continent. It's surprising "how much past history was still evident in the patterns we've seen," said Peter Ralph, a computational biologist at USC who reported the findings Tuesday in the journal PLOS Biology.

Re "DNA done right," Letters, June 8 Wow, did I get an education reading Saturday's letters to the editor. Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck and other writers have done us a service: I had no idea that DNA sampling is no more intrusive than fingerprinting. In an age of blanket collection of telephone metadata and surreptitious scanning of Internet servers, why should one worry that DNA, unlike fingerprints, also provides other important information that can impact any number of things?

The most enduring and romantic legend of the Russian Revolution -- that two children of Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, survived the slaughter that killed the rest of their family -- may finally be put to rest with the positive identification of bone fragments from a lonely Russian grave.

Before John Lennon imagined "living life in peace," he conjured "no heaven … / no hell below us …/ and no religion too. " No religion: What was Lennon summoning? For starters, a world without "divine" messengers, like Osama bin Laden, sparking violence. A world where mistakes, like the avoidable loss of life in Hurricane Katrina, would be rectified rather than chalked up to "God's will. " Where politicians no longer compete to prove who believes more strongly in the irrational and untenable.

Using decade-old DNA evidence, Port Hueneme police arrested a local man Tuesday in the rape and slaying of an 87-year-old deaf and mute woman, who was stabbed to death in her apartment at a senior citizens complex. Ricardo Villa, 28, was arrested at a local auto shop in the June 27, 1993, slaying of Beatrice Bellis, said Police Cmdr. Jerry Beck. The identification of Villa was made after investigators matched a DNA sample taken from the suspect with one found at the scene, Beck said.

Opening a new frontier for solving cold cases, California prosecutors are hunting for DNA from killers, rapists and other prison inmates who died before authorities obtained their genetic profiles. Prosecutors from Sacramento, Los Angeles and Orange counties are sifting through old court exhibits and examining long-since forgotten crime-scene evidence in search of blood, saliva and other material that can be tested for DNA. Once obtained, the DNA is compared with the genetic profiles from unsolved cases that have DNA from unidentified perpetrators.

Nearly 1.5 miles beneath Earth's surface in Canada, scientists have found pockets of water that have been isolated from the outside world for more than 1 billion years. The ancient water, trapped in thin fissures in granite-like rock, has been bubbling up from a zinc and copper mine for decades in Timmins, Ontario. Only recently have scientists been able to calculate the age of this water and determine that it is the oldest ever discovered - possibly as old as 2.6 billion years, when Earth was less than half its current age. And it may harbor life.

ABOUT THIS SERIES This is the second in a series of occasional articles that will examine how DNA evidence is transforming criminal justice. -- State crime lab analyst Kathryn Troyer was running tests on Arizona's DNA database when she stumbled across two felons with remarkably similar genetic profiles. The men matched at nine of the 13 locations on chromosomes, or loci, commonly used to distinguish people.

Re "Court goes too far on DNA," Editorial, June 4 The U.S. Supreme Court got it absolutely right in finding that it is constitutional for DNA to be collected at the time of arrest and checked against a national database of unsolved cases. The Times' claim that doing so violates an arrestee's 4th Amendment rights is off base. The 4th Amendment prohibits only unreasonable searches, and case law through the years has found it reasonable for law enforcement to collect a number of identifying traits at the time of arrest.

Kelly Soo Park's DNA was all over the crime scene where an aspiring model lay strangled. It was on the victim's clothing and the inside of the locked front door of her Santa Monica apartment. It was on the victim's cellphone, which had been used to make a 911 call that did not go through, and the knob of a stove that was left on, filling the home with gas. It was even on the victim's neck. The evidence was overwhelming, a prosecutor told a jury last month, arguing that Park killed Juliana Redding as part of a business dispute.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court cleared the way Monday for police to take DNA samples from all people arrested in serious crimes, a major step toward expanding a national database that will match new suspects to evidence from old crime scenes. The decision means that a mouth swab for DNA is likely to become as common as taking fingerprints and a mug shot of those who are taken to a police station under arrest. That's a major victory for investigators, who say DNA testing is the most effective way to catch serial rapists, killers and other violent criminals.

The killing of an aspiring 21-year-old model and actress found strangled in her Santa Monica apartment was connected to a business negotiation that her father ended with a Marina del Rey doctor just days before her death, a prosecutor told jurors Wednesday. Detectives investigating the 2008 slaying of Juliana Redding found DNA and fingerprint evidence at her apartment that matched Kelly Soo Park, an associate of the physician, the prosecutor said during opening statements at Park's murder trial.

He is not in court. He is not even charged with a crime. But looming over the murder trial of a woman accused of strangling an aspiring model and actress in her Santa Monica apartment five years ago is a doctor who once dated the victim. A prosecutor told a downtown jury Wednesday that Juliana Redding was killed five days after her father broke off business negotiations with her ex-boyfriend Dr. Munir Uwaydah. Deputy Dist. Atty. Stacy Okun-Wiese said that Redding, 21, was killed by one of the doctor's associates, Kelly Soo Park, whose DNA was discovered on the victim's neck, tank top and areas of her apartment.

By opting for surgery to remove her breasts while they were still healthy, Angelina Jolie joined a growing number of women who have used genetic testing to take control of their health. Here are answers to some common questions about how DNA influences breast cancer risk and what women can do about it. What genes are involved in breast cancer? The two primary ones are known as BRCA1 and BRCA2. Hundreds of variants of these genes have been found that make a woman - or a man - more likely to develop breast cancer.

Marilyn Vann can trace her Cherokee roots back more than 200 years through generations of Native Americans and the descendants of black slaves who lived among them. She has mountains of paper -- birth certificates, tribal enrollment cards, land deeds, affidavits, yellowing photographs -- documenting her family's life within the tribe.

From the time he was a child in Peru, the Mormon Church instilled in Jose A. Loayza the conviction that he and millions of other Native Americans were descended from a lost tribe of Israel that reached the New World more than 2,000 years ago. "We were taught all the blessings of that Hebrew lineage belonged to us and that we were special people," said Loayza, now a Salt Lake City attorney. "It not only made me feel special, but it gave me a sense of transcendental identity, an identity with God."

How's this for spring cleaning? Scientists have discovered that a carnivorous plant deletes so much of its own junk DNA that it has hardly any left. The finding, published online in Nature, hints that such noncoding DNA may not be as important as some scientists believe. "Junk DNA is probably well named as junk. There doesn't seem to be any glorious reason or function behind it," said Victor Albert, a University at Buffalo molecular evolutionary biologist and one of the lead authors on the study.

The history of Europe is written in its people's DNA. The Huns and the Slavs made incursions into Eastern Europe about 1,500 years ago. Migrants moved from Ireland to England in recent centuries. Populations in Italy and Spain have been comparatively stable. None of this is breaking news. But scientists were able to see it anew by examining the patterns of genes in 2,257 people now living in 40 countries on the continent. It's surprising "how much past history was still evident in the patterns we've seen," said Peter Ralph, a computational biologist at USC who reported the findings Tuesday in the journal PLOS Biology.