Genetic Ancestry Testing is big business (and growing)

The 19 October 2007 issue of Science had a policy forum piece entitled "The Science and Business of Genetic Ancestry Testing" by Deborah A. Bolnick et al. [318 Science 399]. The article noted that more than 460,000 people have purchased these tests in the last 6 years. The basic tests address mitochondrial DNA (which relate to maternally inherited material) and the paternally inherited Y chromosome (via single tandem repeats or SNPs)

The article "Genetically Capitalist" by Samuel Bowles (reviewing a book) got into Joseph Townsend's analysis of predator/prey interactions. See 318 Science 394.

The discussion by Science of the 2007 Nobel Prize in chemistry gets into some of the politics of prize giving. Nobel winner Gerhard Ertl is quoted: "I was a little disappointed that he [Gabor Somorjai of UC/Berkeley] didn't share [the Nobel Prize] with me." The Science article did get into Ertl's contributions to the understanding of the Haber-Bosch process for making ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen. See 318 Science 373.