I don’t have any deep ethical insight, but this sort of stuff is interesting because there are a lot of samples out there I assume being used from a time before consent was as formalized. Sounds like the scientists probably oversold the practical applications of their research…like they would to a grant committee. Tribe Wins Fight to Limit Research of Its DNA:

“Did you have permission,” she asked during the question period, “to use Havasupai blood for your research?”

The presentation was halted. Dr. Markow and the other members of the doctoral committee asked the student to redact that chapter from his dissertation.

But months later, tribe members learned more about the research when a university investigation discovered two dozen published articles based on the blood samples that Dr. Markow had collected. One reported a high degree of inbreeding, a measure that can correspond with a higher susceptibility to disease.

Ms. Tilousi found that offensive. “We say if you do that, a close relative of yours will die,” she said.

Another article, suggesting that the tribe’s ancestors had crossed the frozen Bering Sea to arrive in North America, flew in the face of the tribe’s traditional stories that it had originated in the canyon and was assigned to be its guardian.

Listening to the investigators, Ms. Tilousi felt a surge of anger, she recalled. But in Supai, the initial reaction was more of hurt. Though some Havasupai knew already that their ancestors most likely came from Asia, “when people tell us, ‘No, this is not where you are from,’ and your own blood says so — it is confusing to us,” Rex Tilousi said. “It hurts the elders who have been telling these stories to our grandchildren.”

I guess I have more sympathy with the idea that you might have some implied property right to how your genetic information is used than I do with being offended because your primitive beliefs might be overturned (there is no way that American Indian land claims are based on paleoanthropology in any practical terms). Creationism is primitive too, and many evangelical Christians are “offended” at the idea that they might share common descent from apes. So?

Genomics Law Report has more commentary.

When I was a kid, I used to haul my 25 cm ’scope out to the end of the driveway every clear night to observe. In the summer, one of my favorite targets was the Lagoon Nebula: it’s bright, easy to find, and even with the frakkin’ streetlight I had to peer past, details in the vast gas cloud were easy to spot.

But I kinda wish I had access to a 1.5 meter telescope. Their view is a wee bit better:

Wow! Click to embiggen, or grab yourself a ginormous 2000×2000 pixel image if your current desktop is boring. Compared to this, I bet it is.

This image of the Lagoon was taken using the European Southern Observatory 1.5 meter Danish telescope in La Silla, Chile. It’s actually kinda sorta true color, using filters that mimic the sensitivity of the human eye.

If you could find a nice dark spot away from city lights, the Lagoon is actually bright enough to spot with your unaided eye, which is quite a feat considering it’s 40 quadrillion kilometers away — that’s 40,000,000,000,000,000 if you like your zeroes. Even from moderately light-polluted skies it’s easy in binoculars.

The Lagoon is one of those giant star-forming regions I’ve written so much about. And it’s big: a hundred light years across, and busily forming lots and lots of stars.

A wider view of it shows why it’s such a great target for small telescopes. It’s bright, colorful, and has lots of cool swirls and shock waves that accentuate its shape. It’s also located between us and the center of the galaxy — think of it like being towards downtown of a big city when you live in the suburbs — so that whole area of the sky is lousy with gorgeous, interesting things to see.

That also makes these objects great targets for large telescopes, because then we can see all kinds of incredible details. The more of these we study, the better we understand the environment where stars are born, including the Sun. There’s lots of science here… but when I look at images like this, I can’t help but think of that poor dorky teenager (me!) struggling mightily to get that giant, heavy telescope positioned just right so he could see a few wisps of gas gazillions of kilometers away.

All I can do is mentally smile and give him a virtual decades-later pat on the back. Keep at it, kid. It’ll pay off. I promise.

Image credit: ESO/IDA/Danish 1.5 m/ R. Gendler, U.G. Jørgensen, K. Harpsøe

I didn’t know Oliver Wendell Holmes thought the odors of boxwoods “carry us out of time into the abysses of the unbeginning past.” I didn’t know that the necks of daffodils bulge when their ova are fertilized. At least, I didn’t know such things before my wife Grace started to garden, and then to chronicle her experiences in a new blog. I think it’s delightful, but don’t take my spousal word for it–check it out!

There’s a lot of circumstantial evident that mtDNA haplogroup U5 was brought to Europe by the first anatomically modern populations. Though this haplogroup is extant around frequencies of ~10% in modern European populations, with the highest proportions in northern Fenno-Scandinavia and the east Baltic region, extractions of DNA from hunter-gatherer remains in northern Europe yield very high proportions of this lineage. This is not totally surprising, in the early aughts Bryan Sykes wrote a book, The Seven Daughters of Eve, and correctly pointed out that the coalescence for the U5 lineages is very deep in Europe, suggesting that it has had a lot of time to diversify. Sykes’ main thesis though was that most of the genetic heritage of Europe predates the expansion of Neolithic farmers within the last 10,000 years. The rough implication was that ~80% of the ancestry of modern Europeans could be derived from people who were resident within the modern boundaries of the continent of Europe during the last Ice Age.

But Ancient DNA extractions and more thorough analyses of modern population variation are muddling the picture somewhat. Some of the lineages which were presumed to be Paleolithic, such as R1b, may not be so. But the fact remains that we do know that modern humans began to settle Europe within the last 40,000 years, and extirpated the Neandertals within 10,000 years of their initial arrival. Unless those initial populations were totally replaced, there has be a very ancient lineage which dates to the Paleolithic, and in particular the Ice Age. U5 is the mtDNA lineage which is the best candidate, and its frequencies within modern European populations may be a clue to who the real “aboriginals” are. For example, the Sami have very high frequencies of U5, which may be ironic in light of theses that the Finnic populations of the Baltic are hybrids between populations from eastern Eurasia and native Scandinavian groups (the other group which high frequencies of U5 are Basques).

In any case, that is why U5 is of some interest, though the “golden age” of mtDNA & Y studies is probably in the past. A new paper in PLoS one surveys central and eastern European groups, , The Peopling of Europe from the Mitochondrial Haplogroup U5 Perspective:

It is generally accepted that the most ancient European mitochondrial haplogroup, U5, has evolved essentially in Europe. To resolve the phylogeny of this haplogroup, we completely sequenced 113 mitochondrial genomes (79 U5a and 34 U5b) of central and eastern Europeans (Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Russians and Belorussians), and reconstructed a detailed phylogenetic tree, that incorporates previously published data. Molecular dating suggests that the coalescence time estimate for the U5 is ~25–30 thousand years (ky), and ~16–20 and ~20–24 ky for its subhaplogroups U5a and U5b, respectively. Phylogeographic analysis reveals that expansions of U5 subclusters started earlier in central and southern Europe, than in eastern Europe. In addition, during the Last Glacial Maximum central Europe (probably, the Carpathian Basin) apparently represented the area of intermingling between human flows from refugial zones in the Balkans, the Mediterranean coastline and the Pyrenees. Age estimations amounting for many U5 subclusters in eastern Europeans to ~15 ky ago and less are consistent with the view that during the Ice Age eastern Europe was an inhospitable place for modern humans.

The simple reality is that much of northern Europe was not habitable during the Last Glacial Maximum, so naturally hunter-gatherers would rapidly expand to settle the new territory as it became accessible. This may be why the Basques have a more diverse array of U5 lineages than the Sami, northern populations are sampled from the diversity of the southern. But after the expansion it may be that the original genetic substrate of Paleolithic Europe was heavily overlain by agriculturalists, and it is only in the far north and east than the Paleolithic populations persisted because of ecological parameters. This is why I suspect that a deeper analysis of northeast European genetics will give us some clues as to the demographic process of the shift from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to agriculture.