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Weekly Editors' Picks

"It's Ok, We're Not Cousins by Blood": The Cousin Marriage Controversy in Historical Perspective

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Marriage between first cousins is highly stigmatized in the West and, indeed, is illegal in 31 US states. But is the hostility to such marriage scientifically well-grounded?

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Historical and Philosophical Perspectives on Contemporary Biology

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Evelyn Fox Keller introduces a new series that aims to promote productive dialogue between laboratory researchers and historians and philosophers of science to address the challenges arising from the rapid pace of biological discovery.

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Gal4 Gets Genes to Loosen Up

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A new nucleosome-occupancy technique reveals how the transcriptional activator Gal4 determines chromatin structure as genes are activated and repressed.

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Towards an Integrated Framework for Assessing the Vulnerability of Species to Climate Change

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Climate change is a major threat to global biodiversity. A novel integrated framework to assess vulnerability and prioritize research and management action aims to improve our ability to respond to this emerging crisis.

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Animal Defenses against Infectious Agents: Is Damage Control More Important Than Pathogen Control?

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The ability of hosts to withstand a given number of pathogens is a critical component of health. Now playing catch-up with plant biologists, animal biologists are starting to formally separate this form of defense from classical resistance.

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In the News

In a new Editorial in PLoS Biology, Evelyn Fox Keller launches a new series of Magazine articles, Historical and Philosophical Perspectives. The first article of the series, by Hamish Spencer and Diane Paul, questions US laws, which ban cousins from marriage. The article has received widespread coverage in the news and the blogosphere, a selection of which follows:

December 2008 Issue

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