A large portion of medical research is dedicated to designing and testing new and better drugs for treating disease. But what if we could improve treatments with the drugs we already have - and potentially cut costs at the same time? That’s the proposal made in an editorial this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association written by the Medical Center’s M. Eileen Dolan and Vanderbilt University’s Russell Wilke. Their article, “Genetics and Variable Drug Response,” is an optimistic snapshot of the current state of pharmacogenetics, the use of genetic information to improve the use of pharmaceuticals.

Though individualized or personalized medicine has been a goal of physicians and researchers for several years, the science (as it tends to do) is moving slowly. But as Dolan and Wilke write, promising pharmacogenetics examples are beginning to accumulate, from genes for enzymes found to influence the metabolism of chemotherapy and anti-clotting drugs to genetic variants that predict severe side effects from various agents. Some of these discoveries have already made it to the clinic, such as the genetic test (developed at the University of Chicago by Mark Ratain) for a variant that affects the response to the cancer drug irinotecan. Physicians can use the test to lower the dose in patients found to carry the variant associated with severe side effects at the normal dose.

Dolan and Wilke dream even bigger about pharmacogenetics. Currently, the standard drug dose is set by the average response of a large population, hoping to capture a level where people get the most benefit at the least risk. But as more information about the genetics of drug response are revealed, those doses can be better shaped to each patient according to their own personal risk-benefit. This could bring some drugs deemed “too dangerous” back to common use, if some patients have a genetic profile that enables them to endure the treatment safely.

“For drugs with a narrow therapeutic index, pharmacogenetic studies may hold the potential to resurrect treatments previously withdrawn from the market, particularly for agents designed to fill underserved clinical niches,” they write.

If smarter dosing can truly bring effectiveness up and toxicity down, it would be a benefit to both patients and the health care system in general. One suggestion by the authors is to start building gene-based drug dosing into electronic medical records, creating alerts for doctors about “drug-gene interactions” similar to current alarms for potentially dangerous drug-drug interactions. The future of medication may be more complicated than “take two of these,” but smart implementation may save dollars and lives.

Cohen Video

The American Society of Clinical Oncology recently filmed a short video with Medical Center associate professor of medicine Ezra Cohen, where he talks about how he decided to treat cancer patients while working as a small-town family physician. It’s a nice piece about how doctors are inspired to do their work and the connection between laboratory research and clinical care. If you want to see more videos with Dr. Cohen, he discussed head-and-neck cancer with ScienceLife almost exactly one year ago.

Elsewhere…

Right after his very cool study on the genetic origins of limb development was published, evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin departed for his annual expedition to the Canadian Arctic in search of fossils from the earliest limbed creatures. If you want to follow along with the hunt, Shubin’s teammate (and Tiktaalik co-discoverer) Ted Daeschler is blogging from the dig for the Philadelphia Inquirer! Read about how their remote site on Devon Island is “almost like Mars,” and how the expedition is already finding interesting fossils two days into the trip.

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It’s one of the most significant events in Earth’s history: the moment when a sea creature first stepped - or more likely wriggled - onto land. The momentous occasion 400 million years ago opened up a whole new habitat where life on Earth could evolve and spread out, and made that first bold pioneer and its peers the ancestor to everything from dinosaurs to birds to humans. Obviously, scientists would love to know more about what that brave explorer looked like, and have long hunted for their fossils. But genetics offers another way to journey back in time and look at the biology of the first fish to leave the water, and a study published today by University of Chicago scientists suggests that the genetic tools to make those first historic steps were present long before they actually occurred.

In this case, the genetic hunt was inspired by a famous fossil find, the 2004 discovery of Tiktaalik by a team led by University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin. Tiktaalik was described by its discoverers as a “fishapod” - a transitional species between fish and the four-limbed land-dwelling tetrapods. Though Tiktaalik and its cousins had fin-like appendages, the skeletal structure within those fins was more complex than typically seen for an aquatic species, featuring wrist and hand-like compartments that may have allowed it to do “push-ups” and drag itself slowly across land. Such a sophisticated structure probably didn’t develop overnight, leading Shubin to wonder just how far back the genetic program for developing a limb might have existed in fish.

“This is really a case where knowing something about the fossils and the morphology led us to think about genetic experiments,” said Shubin, the Robert R. Bensley Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and senior author of the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Tiktaalik and its cousins showed us that this limb compartment is not an utter novelty in tetrapods, as was thought for a long time. So an antecedent of that program must exist.”

To answer that question, Igor Schneider, a postdoctoral research in Shubin’s laboratory, assembled a genetic “time machine” to look at the origin of a genetic switch for limb development. A genetic switch controls the expression of genes - where and when they are turned on during embryonic development. Schneider took the human sequence of a genetic switch called CsB that controls limb development and looked for similar sequences in a diverse group of animals: mouse, chicken, frogs, zebrafish, and the skate. Though very different today, the animals all share a common ancestor some 400 million years in the past, millions of years before Tiktaalik. Looking at what the CsB switches share in common between those distant relatives today offers a glimpse at the biology of their great-great-great-(repeat 100 million times)-grandfather.

Just looking at the sequences revealed many similarities between the CsB switches of fish species and tetrapods. But the real test was to determine whether the switches performed similar functions despite 400 million years of divergent evolution. To test this required a little bit of mad science: swapping gene sequences across species. First, the CsB switch from a mouse was put into a zebrafish embryo, where it was shown to activate gene expression in the distal fin. The reverse experiment - zebrafish CsB into mouse embryo - was even more exciting, as the primitive fish switch successfully activated gene expression in the developing mouse paw (seen at right).

“The genetic switches that drive the expression of genes in the digits of mice are not only present in fish, but the fish sequence can actually activate the expression in mice,” Schneider said. “This tells us how the antecedents of the limb go back in time at every level, from fossils to genes.”

In both experiments, the gene that the switches activated was merely a reporter gene that told researchers where and when the switch was flipped on. The actual genes that cause an appendage to form the skeletal structure for a limb or fin were not present. But could a transplant of the mouse switch and the relevant genes into a fish embryo produce a lab-grown fishapod?

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Teaching with Treadmills

Inside the Biological Sciences Learning Center on the Medical Center campus is a laboratory that looks more like a gymnasium. Six state-of-the-art treadmills and six futuristic exercise bikes sit around the room, each connected to a computer alongside modified oxygen masks and suction cup sensors. Instead of dissecting frogs or mixing chemicals, students show up to lab sections in shorts and running shoes, prepared to sweat for science. In Mark Osadjan’s “Metabolism and Exercise” course, part of a two-quarter Exercise and Nutrition sequence, there’s no sitting on the sidelines.

Since joining the University of Chicago as a senior lecturer in 2003, Osadjan has designed courses that teach undergraduates about biology by connecting with what most college students care about: keeping fit, and sex. As part of the UChicago core curriculum, every undergraduate must fulfill a biology requirement, even if their interests lie in political science, music theory, or philosophy. With his “Metabolism and Exercise” and “The Biology of Gender” courses, Osadjan has met these science-shy students halfway, filtering instruction on evolution, physiology, and genetics through their own personal hobbies and interests. The efforts have been such a success that Osadjan’s courses fill up soon after registration is opened.

Today, Osadjan was announced as one of this year’s recipients of the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, an esteemed UChicago honor that goes back to 1938. Last week I met with Mark to talk about his award and his career path, from a graduate student studying Antarctic fish to an instructor of graduate-level science to his current position, teaching predominantly undergraduate non-biology majors.

“It’s always a trick to figure out how to teach with enough enthusiasm, such that it spills over to the students,” Osadjan said. “It’s our challenge not only to teach these students a certain number of facts, but to show them why those facts are important, relevant, and worth thinking about throughout life.”

You can read more about Osadjan and the other Quantrell winners in the award package at The University of Chicago news site.

Elsewhere…

Most college students spend their summers traveling the country or working an internship, but 20-year-old Rachel Garneau had other plans: donating a kidney. On Tuesday morning, Garneau came to the Medical Center and made the rare gift of an altruistic kidney donation, triggering a kidney swap chain that helped patients in need of the organ in New York and Madison. Neil Steinberg at the Chicago Sun-Times followed the story before and during the surgery, and got some great play-by-play commentary from Yolanda Becker, professor of surgery and director of the kidney and pancreas program.  For instance: “‘The pancreas is the bitch of the abdomen,” she confided.’”

Are clinical trials handicapped by their own success? A new analysis from Anup Malani and Tomas Philipson of the University of Chicago Law School finds that trial enrollment for a given disease plummets when a treatment is found to be effective, using AIDS clinical trials after the approval of anti-retroviral therapy to illustrate the point. Richard Schilsky, professor and section chief of hematology/oncology at the Medical Center, agreed with the findings at Nature News: “There are so many options that patients are not flocking to get into clinical trials like they used to.”

Read how turtles move to warm areas to bask - even in their own eggs as embryos. Adorable photos and interesting commentary (are they determining their own sex?) at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

That news about the World Health Organization adding cell phones to their list of possible carcinogens? Here’s an article from Cancer Research UK to reassure your fears. Another reassuring fact: it was placed by the WHO into the same risk category [pdf] as coffee, dry cleaning, and pickled vegetables.

Can jazz musicians tell the difference between another musician improvising or following composed music? A new study finds the answer, and a ScienceNOW article gives you the chance to test yourself.

Did you know UChicago evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin does a regular science news roundup on local newsmagazine show Chicago Tonight called Scientific Chicago? Well he does, and the latest edition discussed a story familiar to readers of the blog: the mass extinction 360 million years ago that ended “The Age of Fishes.” Watch the video here.

More Honors for Shubin

In 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed an order creating the National Academy of Sciences, an organization bringing together the country’s most esteemed scientists to “investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art.” From the original 50 members, the group has blossomed to 2,100 today, with roughly 200 of those Nobel Laureates. Any club with a 10 percent Nobel ratio is pretty exclusive, so being elected to the Academy’s lifetime membership is a thrilling honor for a scientist.

This week, evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin was the latest UChicago scientist given the honor of NAS membership, part of this year’s class of 72 new members and 18 “foreign associates.” Shubin becomes the 40th current member of the NAS located at the University of Chicago, and joins Medical Center faculty such as Janet Rowley, Martin Weigert, Donald Steiner, Bernard Roizman, Robert Haselkorn, and David Jablonski, who was elected last year (Fermilab director and professor of physics Pier Oddone was also elected in this year’s class). Election is no simple matter - each new member must pass a 10-step process [pdf] and be voted in to the academy by their potential peers.

Shubin is most famous for the discovery of the pivotal fossil named Tiktaalik roseae, a transitional species between ancient fish and the first limbed creatures to walk the land. But Shubin’s research is more than just fossil-hunting, as he studies the genetic programs that control development of limbs in the embryos of species such as sharks and salamanders. On the blog, we recently featured a paper by Shubin and former graduate student Andrew Gillis, where the embryos of strange creatures called holocephalons revealed some of the earliest steps in limb evolution.

In all likelihood, Shubin’s election was helped by his scientific communication skills as well. From his book about the discovery of Tiktaalik and the story of human evolution, Your Inner Fish: A Journey Through the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, to his appearances as a correspondent on WTTW, to his anatomy teaching duties at Pritzker Medical School, Shubin has proven himself eager to educate the public at large about science. Appropriately enough, a second honor announced for Shubin this week was the Distinguished Service Award for Enhancing Education through Biological Research from the National Association of Biology Teachers. Once again, he finds himself in good company, as previous recipients include James Watson, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Dawkins.

“I am deeply honored to receive the NABT Distinguished Service Award. In an age where the ideas and tools of biology are increasingly playing a role in our lives, it is a deep honor to be recognized by those who are at the front lines of educating the next generation,” Shubin said.

The Science of Killing Bin Laden

A news story as big as the killing of Osama Bin Laden spares no beats, and there were plenty of science stories written this week in the aftermath of Sunday night’s surprise news. The most direct scientific angle was in the identification of the terrorist leader’s body, a step U.S. officials wanted to prove beyond a doubt before going public with the news. Like many of the events surrounding the raid, many of the details remain classified. But that hasn’t stopped science writers from writing explainers on how biometrics and DNA matching likely would have been used to make sure the Navy SEALS really had killed Bin Laden. President Obama himself confirmed that DNA testing was used to confirm they had the right body, but one fascinating mystery is where the DNA used to make the comparison was gathered. Nature blog The Great Beyond describes the candidates - from Bin Laden’s half-brothers and half-sister to one of his purported 26 children - and talks a bit about the recent history of using DNA identification techniques in criminal matters, including one crook busted by DNA he left on a slice of pizza.

Elsewhere…

The creation of new drugs, and the death of old drugs - Medical Center researchers commented on both sides of the pharmaceutical life cycle in newspaper stories this week. In the New York Times blog Fixes, reporter David Bornstein looks at the “valley of death” in developing new drugs for less-than-common diseases, and focused on the Myelin Repair Foundation and researchers such as Brian Popko (who we have featured twice). Then yesterday, the Chicago Tribune’s Bruce Japsen wrote about the upcoming patent expirations on the popular drugs Plavix, Lipitor, and Actos, and talks to our Caleb Alexander about the implications for health care.

How do you make a new species in the lab? It’s easier if you find a lizard species that is entirely female and can reproduce by cloning. Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science describes genome mash-ups, asexual reproduction, and the trickiness of species-naming in this great post.

A retired nurse and research coordinator at the Medical Center talks with Dawn Turner Trice about her experiences working with a small rural clinic in Ghana.

The unsung heroes of scientific research are the graduate students*. Graduate students provide the enthusiasm to run experiments 7 days a week and all hours of the day and night to generate data for publications and their own thesis projects. The fresh perspective a graduate student brings to an area of research can also provide new ideas to their mentors and collaborators, spotting connections or opportunities that might have been missed by those with more experience. In even the biggest discoveries, graduate students play a critical role.

That was the take-home message from Neil Shubin’s keynote lecture at last week’s Scientific Diversity: People, Research, Careers Symposium organized by the Biological Sciences Division. Following talks by graduate students, post-docs, and young professors, Shubin delivered a characteristically fascinating and funny tale about his laboratory’s discovery in 2004 of Tiktaalik, an important transitional fossil between sea and land animals. The story of Tiktaalik may have been familiar if you’ve read Shubin’s excellent Your Inner Fish or seen him speak before. But this time around, Shubin put added emphasis on the critical role of his graduate students and collaborators, both in setting the stage for the fossil’s excavation and in the continued quest to learn from Tiktaalik’s remains.

In fact, Shubin said the very spark for Tiktaalik’s discovery came from a friendly argument between him and his former graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, Ted Daeschler. Shubin and Daeschler had found many Devonian era fossils of fish with primitive limb-like structures in their home state, but wanted to find even earlier examples of the transition from fins to limbs. So they had to pick the right place for an expedition, with exposed rocks of the right age for finding such an elusive fossil.

“Everything changed for us in a conversation in my office in 1998. We were having an argument, as graduate students and their advisors typically do, and we settled the debate with a college geology textbook,” Shubin said. “I was thumbing through the book, and I hit a diagram that changed the course of my career.”

The diagram showed the three areas where the ancient deltas Shubin was seeking were known to be exposed. Two of them had already been the site of expeditions, but the third - a cluster of islands in the Canadian arctic - was largely unexplored. Shubin and Daeschler “ran to the library,” he said, and found a paper that confirmed the region held the exact type of rock they were looking for.

“It was truly exciting; here was a whole part of the world that was unexplored,” Shubin said. “After we saw this, we went to Chinese food for lunch, and my fortune cookie said, ‘Soon you will be at the top of the world.’”

It took six more years for an expedition to find Tiktaalik, embedded in the rocks of Ellesmere Island. It took a further two years for the fossil to be prepared sufficiently (by preparator Robert Masek) for analysis and publication. The rest is history - massive media coverage, a book, and even The Colbert Report. But the story of Tiktaalik isn’t over, and it is graduate students that are writing the newest chapters.

“It’s really a nice system, because so many bones are so well preserved, for us to ask new kinds of questions, and this is where graduate students come in,” Shubin said.

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Lauren Sallan and Michael Coates in the lab (photo by Jason Smith)

In the Devonian Period of roughly 400 million years ago, fish were the masters of Earth, filling the seas and rivers with enormous diversity from the 30-foot-long Dunkleosteus to lobe-finned fishes like the modern lungfish. Then, 359 million years ago, something happened. The fossil record tells a clear before-and-after story: Dunkleosteus and its family members, the placoderms, disappear, and the ray-finned fishes that we currently think of when we think about fish went from underdog to dominant. Shortly thereafter, a few survivors figured out how to crawl onto land, and the rest was vertebrate history.

For paleontologists, extinction events are the chapter markers in the story of life, marking profound shifts in the course of evolution. Scientists have long focused on one such marker occurring near the end of the Devonian Period: the Kellwasser Event, considered one of the “Big Five” extinctions in Earth’s history. But evidence for the Kellwasser Event 374 million years ago was based on invertebrate fossils such as clams and mussels, which are abundant and easy to find. The vertebrate fossil record of the time, consisting largely of fishes, is less complete, making it difficult to do the detective work necessary to pinpoint a critical extinction event.

That is, until now, when Lauren Cole Sallan and Michael Coates applied analytic techniques from the field of ecology to a richer dataset of vertebrates fed by recent fossil discoveries. The research, published today by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at the pattern of vertebrates in the late stages of the Devonian Period, and found a different chapter break - not at the Kellwasser Event, but at the “Hangenberg Event,” 15 million years later.

What’s more, the global species shakeup that resulted from the Hangenberg Event would set the stage for the evolution of all modern vertebrates, including humans. By significantly reducing the species pool, the extinction created a bottleneck effect that allowed a small set of survivors to re-diversify and re-populate.

“There’s some sort of pinch at the end of the Devonian,” said Coates, professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago. “It’s as if the roles persist, but the players change: the cast is transformed dramatically. Something happened that almost wiped the slate clean, and, of the few stragglers that made it through, a handful then re-radiate spectacularly.”

“Everything was hit, the extinction was global,” said Sallan, a graduate student and lead author of the paper. “It reset vertebrate diversity in every single environment, both freshwater and marine, and created a completely different world.”

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Six months ago, some of the world’s brightest evolutionary biologists and scholars gathered on the University of Chicago campus for a three-day birthday party celebrating Charlie Darwin’s 200th. At the time, the blog featured live-ish coverage of the event wherein I tried my best to capture the fascinating lectures and discussion on display at Rockefeller Chapel and Ida Noyes Hall. But if my words were insufficient, you can now watch a handful of videos from the conference, courtesy of the official website. The videos are not embeddable, but here’s a quick viewer’s guide.

Jerry Coyne (University of Chicago): “Speciation:  Problems and Prospects”

The author of Why Evolution is True discussed where he and Darwin disagree: the answer to the very title of Darwin’s seminal On the Origin of Species. Coyne explains the debate between sympatric and allopatric speciation, and how barriers - physical or otherwise - are usually the cause of new species formation.

Paul Sereno (University of Chicago): “Dinosaurs: Phylogenetic Reconstruction from Darwin to the Present”

Famed fossil hunter Sereno brought along the second-oldest bird skeleton ever found, but turned his focus from bones and digs to how morphologists - scientists who study the physical characteristics of specimens - can keep pace with the geneticists in constructing the Tree of Life.

David Jablonski (University of Chicago): “Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology: The Revitalized Partnership”

Speaking of paleontology, Jablonski pointed out how Darwin pointedly avoided using the fossil record in his classic writings because of its many holes and gaps in the mid-19th century. Today, fossil remains of species such as the bivalves that Jablonski studies provide scientists with a “trail of mayhem, destruction and heartbreak” that can be useful in reconstructing evolutionary history.

Neil Shubin (University of Chicago): “Great Transformations in Life: Insights from Genes & Fossils”

Shubin traveled to the unforgiving environment of the Canadian Arctic to make the landmark discovery of Tiktaalik, the earliest-known limbed tetrapod fossil. But the majority of his talk focused on the more comfortable setting of the laboratory, where genetic experiments on how limbs develop in sharks and skates offer clues to human evolution.

Robert J. Richards (University of Chicago): “Darwin’s Biology of Intelligent Design”

Co-organizer Richards represents the more historically and culturally-inclined upper half of the conference, presenting the provocative claim that Darwin believed natural selection to be a purposeful force rather than a blind machine of nature. ScienceLife founding father Jeremy Manier wrote about Richards’ lecture here.

Do Polish Tracks Trump Tiktaalik?

A bit of a firestorm with local significance was stirred up this week when a paper published in Nature purported to reset the clock on when marine animals took their first step out of water. Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki and colleagues from Warsaw and Sweden presented a fossil “trackway” made up of what the team identified as several hand and footprints from a tetrapod four-limbed vertebrates thought to be a key step in evolution from marine animals to land dwellers. The tracks, found in south-eastern Poland in a layer dated as 395 million years old (video), reveal some fascinating details in the authors’ analysis, including distinct hand and foot prints, toes and ankles - all critical aspects of the transition from fin to limb. It’s also the earliest known evidence for a tetrapod, predating fossil findings of “fish-with-limbs” such as Tiktaalik by nearly 20 million years.

While some are convinced of these conclusions, others are skeptical. Tiktaalik, discovered in 2004 in far northern Canada by a team led by University of Chicago paleontologist Neil Shubin, remains the earliest known tetrapod fossil, a remarkably complete specimen that clearly shows limb-like bone structure. Footprints, on the other hand, are acceptable as paleontological evidence, but much more open to question. Indeed, no tetrapod fossils - or any fossils, for that matter - were found near the trackway, which the authors attribute to the soil being a poor environment for preserving skeletons. Nevertheless, in a news article accompanying the Nature paper, other paleontologists express caution in accepting the veracity of the trackway fossil, and Phillippe Janvier of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris suggested “a risk” that natural processes could have produced track-like markings.

Shubin, currently on sabbatical writing the follow-up to this award-winning Your Inner Fish, wasn’t immediately available for comment. But when he’s back, ask him what he thinks of the new discovery and how it changes our view of early tetrapod evolution.

The Cell Phone Treatment

In an almost too-weird-to-be-true piece of science news this week, a story started kicking around that the type of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) generated by cell phones was found to be effective at protecting against or even reversing the effects related to Alzheimer’s disease in mice. Studies of cell phone radiation - usually focused on proving that the phones’ electromagnetic waves cause harm - are notoriously unreliable. Time and again, studies have shown these waves do not cause brain tumors or other diseases…but in looking for damage from cell phone use, were scientists overlooking benefits?

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4:15 p.m. - Of Mice and Mammoths

The last talk of the day (for me, as I had to leave before the final, final talk) made for a great reminder of how far the field of evolutionary biology, wrapped in a relatively simple story told engagingly by Hopi Hoekstra of Harvard. Hoekstra described her research quest as “the hunt for genes that make a difference,” and she uses a really nice model system - the oldfield mice of the southern United States. These mice typically are brown in color, but they have migrated in the recent (meaning thousands) of years to the gulf and atlantic coasts and taken up residence, like a retired couple, on the beach. But a brown mouse on a beach is a target, and their predators, which include birds and coyotes, find it all to easy to locate their brown fur on white sand and make a beachside snack out of them.

Cue natural selection - soon you have brown oldfield mice inland, and predominantly white oldfield mice that live on the beach. Hoekstra tested whether the fur color really does construe an evolutionary advantage with a simple experiment - make a bunch of clay mice colored brown or white, and leave them out on the beach. Sure enough, the brown clay mice quickly showed divots and bitemarks left by attacks from (presumably very frustrated) predators.

That would have been a fine experiment for the 1959 conference, but Hoekstra’s next step was pure 2009 - she took examples of brown and white mice back to the lab, bred them, and searched for the genes that determined fur color. Her laboratory narrowed the gene candidates down to three genes, and in one of them - a receptor called Mc1r - the substitution of a single amino acid flipped the switch from brown fur to white fur. Amazingly, when another group of scientists sequenced the genome of extinct mammoths in 2006, they found the same amino-acid substitution in the same gene, implying that mammoths, like the oldfield mice, came in different color varieties.

After so much high theory and methodological complexity, Hoekstra’s experiment sent all of us (or at least me) home with a warm feeling - not only was her experiments a beautiful example of evolutionary biology that would have been impossible in 1959, it was a great example of teachable science, the kind of story that a 3rd-grader could wrap their head around and begin to see the truth of evolution. The cloud hanging over Darwin/Chicago 2009 was the uneasy feeling that all this scientific progress was still losing out in the arena of public opinion, but Hoekstra’s work and charismatic speaking style (on the heels of similar ambassador figures Neil Shubin and Michael Shue) chased away some of the pessimism, and left me confident that the more examples we find of Darwin’s elegant theory at work in nature, the easier it will be to convince the world that it is true.

And with that, we’re finished. Happy Halloween to those of you who have followed me this far, and thanks very much for reading and perhaps linking to the posts. I’ll be back Monday with a digest post to help navigate the coverage of the last few days, and Jeremy Manier will be here Tuesday with his own thoughts on the conference.

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Whenever I see a drawing of Tiktaalik like the one above, I always think “Man, that walking fish sure looks snooty.” But Tiktaalik roseae, discovered in 2004 by University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin and his team in the Canadian Arctic, is worthy of its haughty air. For one thing, the “fishapod” had a neck, a feature you don’t typically find on a fish, and the explanation for its stuck-up posture. Tiktaalik’s limbs were even more unusual and exciting, as Shubin found bones that were more like fingers than the tiny bones typically seen in fish fins. These structures meant Tiktaalik held a very important place in the tree of life, one of the elusive transitional species (in this case between fish and amphibians) that evolutionary biologists dream of discovering.

Shubin’s book about Tiktaalik and how it demonstrates the process of evolution, Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, was released almost two years ago. Perhaps it takes scientists a while to squeeze in some non-journal reading time, because the book (now in paperback, cough plug cough) was today named as the 2009 book of the year by the National Academy of Sciences. Here’s what they said:

Neil Shubin for his delightful, intellectually challenging view of evolution from primitive fish to humans by a scientist who finds fossils in the most uncomfortable places and chronicles it all in Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (Pantheon Books).

Your Inner Fish was also on the shortlist for this year’s Royal Society Prize for Science Books, in the esteemed company of science writers such as Carl Zimmer, Leonard Mlodinow and Ben Goldacre.

UPDATE: You can read an online excerpt from Your Inner Fish, thanks to University of Chicago Magazine!

Shubin is as good a public speaker as he is a writer. As probably the only fish paleontologist who teaches anatomy to medical students (here at the Pritzker School of Medicine), Shubin uses evolutionary theory to explain the stranger features of the human body. I caught an excellent lecture from him at the AAAS Meeting this past February (my favorite quote: “When I look at a human being, what I see is a giant, morphed-up fish.”), and he came off like a seasoned television pro on the Colbert Report. If you’d like to see Shubin live and in person, he is one of several speakers at the star-studded Darwin Conference taking place October 29-31 at the University of Chicago to celebrate the 150th anniversary of The Origin of the Species.

For a little teaser, here’s some video taken by Jeremy Manier earlier this year of Shubin talking about how cartoons and toys mischaracterize the process of evolution.

This blog will cover a lot of research that happens beyond the walls of this university, but with some of the world’s leading authorities on Darwin and evolutionary biology just a short walk away, I wanted to collect some of their thoughts about Darwin Day.

Here’s Neil Shubin, bestselling author of “Your Inner Fish” and leader of a team that made one of the great paleontological finds in recent history - Tiktaalik roseae, also called the ”fishapod.” Neil keeps a funny little Darwin toy in his office that he uses to explain a central misconception about evolution - the idea that evolution always progresses toward ever greater complexity.