Pacific castaway flies out of Marshall Islands

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AFP Castaway flies out of Marshall Islands on way home

Majuro (Marshall Islands) (AFP) - Castaway Jose Salvador Alvarenga flew out of the Marshall Islands Monday on his way home to El Salvador after an odyssey he says saw him drifting in the Pacific for 13 months.

Alvarenga shook hands with Marshalls President Christopher Loeak in a brief ceremony at the airport before departing the island nation where he washed up 12 days ago with an amazing story of survival.

"Thank you for everything the people of the Marshall Islands have done for me during my stay," the 37-year-old fisherman said through an interpreter as Loeak placed a woven lei garland around his neck.

Alvarenga will arrive in Hawaii in the early hours of Tuesday and then travel to San Salvador, most likely via the US West Coast, to be reunited with the family who had long thought he was dead.

It will be a quicker and more comfortable journey across the Pacific than the 12,500-kilometre (8,000-mile) odyssey which began when a fishing trip off the Mexican coast went awry in late 2012.

Alvarenga says he stayed alive in his seven-metre (24-foot) fibreglass boat on a diet of raw fish and bird flesh, with only turtle blood and his own urine to drink.

He told AFP last week that his crewmate -- named as 24-year-old Ezequiel Cordoba -- could not stomach such foodstuffs and starved to death four months into the voyage.

Officials have said his story checks out and survival experts concede living in such conditions is theoretically possible, supporting the veracity of what would be one of history's greatest maritime endurance feats.

Alvarenga needed a green light from doctors to fly out of the Marshalls after suffering from ill-health in the wake of his ordeal, which ended when he was found disorientated and clad only in ragged underpants on a remote coral atoll.

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Pacific castaway flies out of Marshall Islands

Genome editing goes hi-fi: Editing the human genome …

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Sometimes biology is cruel. Sometimes simply a one-letter change in the human genetic code is the difference between health and a deadly disease. But even though doctors and scientists have long studied disorders caused by these tiny changes, replicating them to study in human stem cells has proven challenging. But now, scientists at the Gladstone Institutes have found a way to efficiently edit the human genome one letter at a time -- not only boosting researchers' ability to model human disease, but also paving the way for therapies that cure disease by fixing these so-called 'bugs' in a patient's genetic code.

Led by Gladstone Investigator Bruce Conklin, MD, the research team describes in the latest issue of Nature Methods how they have solved one of science and medicine's most pressing problems: how to efficiently and accurately capture rare genetic mutations that cause disease -- as well as how to fix them. This pioneering technique highlights the type of out-of-the-box thinking that is often critical for scientific success.

"Advances in human genetics have led to the discovery of hundreds of genetic changes linked to disease, but until now we've lacked an efficient means of studying them," explained Dr. Conklin. "To meet this challenge, we must have the capability to engineer the human genome, one letter at a time, with tools that are efficient, robust and accurate. And the method that we outline in our study does just that."

One of the major challenges preventing researchers from efficiently generating and studying these genetic diseases is that they can exist at frequencies as low as 1%, making the task of finding and studying them labor-intensive.

"For our method to work, we needed to find a way to efficiently identify a single mutation among hundreds of normal, healthy cells," explained Gladstone Research Scientist Yuichiro Miyaoka, PhD, the paper's lead author. "So we designed a special fluorescent probe that would distinguish the mutated sequence from the original sequences. We were then able to sort through both sets of sequences and detect mutant cells -- even when they made up as little one in every thousand cells. This is a level of sensitivity more than one hundred times greater than traditional methods."

The team then applied these new methods to induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells. These cells, derived from the skin cells of human patients, have the same genetic makeup -- including any potential disease-causing mutations -- as the patient. In this case, the research team first used a highly advanced gene-editing technique called TALENs to introduce a specific mutation into the genome. Some gene-editing techniques, while effective at modifying the genetic code, involve the use of genetic markers that then leave a 'scar' on the newly edited genome. These scars can then affect subsequent generations of cells, complicating future analysis. Athough TALENs, and other similarly advanced tools, are able to make a clean, scarless single letter edits, these edits are very rare, so that new technique from the Conklin lab is needed.

"Our method provides a novel way to capture and amplify specific mutations that are normally exceedingly rare," said Dr. Conklin. "Our high-efficiency, high-fidelity method could very well be the basis for the next phase of human genetics research."

"Now that powerful gene-editing tools, such as TALENs, are readily available, the next step is to streamline their implementation into stem cell research," said Dirk Hockemeyer, PhD, assistant professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in this study. "This process will be greatly facilitated by the method described by Dr. Conklin and colleagues."

"Some of the most devastating diseases we face are caused by the tiniest of genetic changes," added Dr. Conklin. "But we are hopeful that our technique, by treating the human genome like lines of computer code, could one day be used to reverse these harmful mutations, and essentially repair the damaged code."

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The Genetic Origins of High-Altitude Adaptations in Tibetans

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Newswise Genetic adaptations for life at high elevations found in residents of the Tibetan plateau likely originated around 30,000 years ago in peoples related to contemporary Sherpa. These genes were passed on to more recent migrants from lower elevations via population mixing, and then amplified by natural selection in the modern Tibetan gene pool, according to a new study by scientists from the University of Chicago and Case Western Reserve University, published in Nature Communications on Feb. 10.

The transfer of beneficial mutations between human populations and selective enrichment of these genes in descendent generations represents a novel mechanism for adaptation to new environments.

The Tibetan genome appears to arise from a mixture of two ancestral gene pools, said Anna Di Rienzo, PhD, professor of human genetics at the University of Chicago and corresponding author of the study. One migrated early to high altitude and adapted to this environment. The other, which migrated more recently from low altitudes, acquired the advantageous alleles from the resident high-altitude population by interbreeding and forming what we refer to today as Tibetans.

High elevations are challenging for humans because of low oxygen levels but Tibetans are well adapted to life above 13,000 feet. Due to physiological traits such as relatively low hemoglobin concentrations at altitude, Tibetans have lower risk of complications, such as thrombosis, compared to short-term visitors from low altitude. Unique to Tibetans are variants of the EGLN1 and EPAS1 genes, key genes in the oxygen homeostasis system at all altitudes. These variants were hypothesized to have evolved around 3,000 years ago, a date which conflicts with much older archaeological evidence of human settlement in Tibet.

To shed light on the evolutionary origins of these gene variants, Di Rienzo and her team, led by first author Choongwon Jeong, graduate student at the University of Chicago, obtained genome-wide data from 69 Nepalese Sherpa, an ethnic group related to Tibetans. These were analyzed together with the genomes of 96 unrelated individuals from high-altitude regions of the Tibetan plateau, worldwide genomes from HapMap3 and the Human Genome Diversity Panel, as well as data from Indian, Central Asian and two Siberian populations, through multiple statistical methods and sophisticated software.

The researchers found that, on a genomic level, modern Tibetans appear to descend from populations related to modern Sherpa and Han Chinese. Tibetans carry a roughly even mixture of two ancestral genomes: one a high-altitude component shared with Sherpa and the other a low-altitude component shared with lowlander East Asians. The low-altitude component is found at low to nonexistent frequencies in modern Sherpa, and the high-altitude component is uncommon in lowlanders. This strongly suggested that the ancestor populations of Tibetans interbred and exchanged genes, a process known as genetic admixture.

Tracing the history of these ancestor groups through genome analysis, the team identified a population size split between Sherpa and lowland East Asians around 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, a range consistent with proposed archaeological, mitochondria DNA and Y chromosome evidence for an initial colonization of the Tibetan plateau around 30,000 years ago.

This is a good example of evolution as a tinkerer, said Cynthia Beall, PhD, professor of anthropology at Case Western Reserve University and co-author on the study. We see other examples of admixtures. Outside of Africa, most of us have Neanderthal genesabout 2 to 5 percent of our genomeand people today have some immune system genes from another ancient group called the Denisovans.

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Lindsey Williams & Dr. Rodrigo Rodriguez – Patriot Radio News Hour – Joe Jaquin – February 5th 2014 – Video

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Lindsey Williams Dr. Rodrigo Rodriguez - Patriot Radio News Hour - Joe Jaquin - February 5th 2014
http://www.lindseywilliams.net - Pastor Lindsey Williams Dr. Rodrigo Rodriguez on The Patriot Radio News Hour speaking with Joe Jaquin on February 5th, 201...

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Lindsey Williams & Dr. Rodrigo Rodriguez - Patriot Radio News Hour - Joe Jaquin - February 5th 2014 - Video

Health Care Recruiting Firm Cejka Executive Search Ranked #1

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St. Louis, MO (PRWEB) February 10, 2014

Based on an independent survey of clients, Cejka Executive Search was named the top performing health care search consulting firm by board members and human resources leaders.

Black Book ranked Cejka as the #1 health care search consulting firm from a field of more than 1,000 firms, most of which have embraced modern sales and marketing techniques. The independent survey of 1,400 health care leaders examined 18 specific performance areas of operational excellence, with rankings based on aggregate client experience and customer satisfaction scores.

Were deeply appreciative to our clients for this independent and unsolicited endorsement, says Lori Schutte, president of Cejka Search. This achievement was based on the strong partnerships with organizations who have entrusted us to deliver top leadership talent.

To ensure the highest standards of service and quality provided to clients and candidates, each of member of the Cejka Executive Search Associate Consultant team is recognized by the Association of Executive Search Consultants (AESC) as a Certified Researcher/Associate (CRA). In addition, each maintains the status of Certified Internet Recruiter (CIR) through AIRS, an ADP Company.

Black Book Rankings, a division of Black Book Market Research LLC, provides health care providers, media, investors, analysts, payors, quality minded vendors, and prospective solutions and system buyers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and other interested sectors of the clinical, outsourced services, technology and equipment sectors with comprehensive comparison data of the industry's top respected and competitively performing vendors.

About Cejka Executive Search Cejka Executive Search, http://www.cejkaexecutivesearch.com, is a nationally recognized executive and physician search organization providing services exclusively to the health care industry for more than thirty years. Partnering with our client organizations to identify and present the best talent, Cejka Executive Search completes assignments across all levels of the health care continuum and is a market leader in providing flexible, innovative recruitment and leadership development services. Cejka Executive Search is a part of Cross Country Healthcare, Inc., a leading provider of health care staffing services in the United States.

About Cejka Search Cejka Search, http://www.cejkasearch.com, is a nationally recognized physician and allied health and health care executive search firm providing services exclusively to the health care industry for more than 30 years. Cejka Search recruits top health care talent for organizations nationwide through our team of experienced professionals, award-winning recruitment technology and commitment to service excellence. Cejka Search is a Cross Country Healthcare, Inc. company, a leading provider of health care staffing services in the United States. For more information visit http://www.cejkasearch.com, or contact Mary Barber, 314-236-4410.

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Conference brings national health expertise to region's leaders

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Health and health care system leaders from the Great Lakes Bay Region and beyond convened at Saginaw Valley State University recently to learn about how to leverage national expertise for local communities.

This years conference continued the track record of featuring thought leaders from across the country, nationally recognized organizations and community health system improvements, said Cathy Baase, Michigan Health Information Alliance Board Chair and global director of health services for The Dow Chemical Co. It is wonderful to see the breadth of community leaders coming together for these shared learning experiences as we unite on a path to become a thriving community of health excellence.

Co-hosted by the Hospital Council of East Central Michigan, MiHIA, and Saginaw Valley State University, the Annual Health Conference is in its fifth year. This years conference focused on population health under the conference series title, The Regions Health and Health Care Systems: Communities Achieving Excellence and Accountability.

Attendees heard from Dr. George Flores, Dr. Janine Janosky and Genoveva Islas-Hooker in the areas of accountable care communities, looking at health in a time of reform, and the role of grassroots leaders in improving community health. Full information and presentations can be found on MiHIAs website at http://www.mihia.org and clicking on News and Events, and selecting the 5th Annual Health Care link.

We are in a time of significant change in healthcare, said Spence Maidlow, CEO of Covenant Health Care System and member of the MiHIA Board of Directors. The insights shared at the conference are valuable to our community as we examine the challenges and opportunities before us. This session on population health was especially helpful, real community examples.

Others on the MiHIA board, including Brenda Coughlin, president and CEO of Health Delivery Inc., agreed.

This conference helps us recognize that to maximize our regions health, we need to focus more on staying well and creating a healthy community than on treating disease, Coughlin said. I believe we are focused on our regional environment in this manner because of our growing partnerships through MiHIA.

Diane Postler-Slattery, president and CEO of MidMichigan Health and MiHIA board member, attended with 30 of her team members.

Gary Bilotti, project leader for MiHIAs regional Choosing Wisely campaign, was also on-hand at the conference, continuing to educate on the importance of providing consumers the right care at the right time and lists of commonly used tests that are often unnecessary and sometimes harmful.

MiHIAs vision of driving a thriving health community is what inspires us to support events like the 5th Annual Health Conference, said Kim Morley, CEO of MiHIA. Our ability to convene and connect the expertise and resources both in our region and beyond is what gives us hope about truly achieving this transformation.

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Conference brings national health expertise to region's leaders

Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs Adds Health Care Attorneys

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VOL. 129 | NO. 27 | Monday, February 10, 2014

Omni Visions Inc., a Nashville-based agency that provides support and placement services to children and teens as well as adults with special needs, has bought the Varangon Academy property at 3030 E. Brunswick Road in Bartlett for $2.5 million.

The property includes a 10,147-square-foot Class A facility built in 2008 on 5.4 acres on the east side of Brunswick Road north of Interstate 40. The Shelby County Assessor of Property, which classifies the property as a correctional facility, appraised it at $1.4 million in 2013.

The sale also includes 5.3 acres of vacant land north of the facility and appraised at $519,400 this year.

No financing was associated with the transaction. In conjunction with the sale, Varangon assigned Omni Visions its rights as lessor/landlord, effective Feb. 1.

Omni Visions was formed in 1991 to provide individualized, community-based wrap-around support service through therapeutic foster care services to children in state custody, according to the organizations website. It has since expanded to provide services in North Carolina, Kentucky and Georgia, and to include services for adults with intellectual or developmental disabilities in Tennessee.

Source: The Daily News Online & Chandler Reports

Daily News staff

Nova Medical Centers, which describes itself as the nations largest 100 percent pure occupational health services company, will be opening its first locations in Memphis this month.

Nova currently has 45 occupational medicine facilities across Texas, Georgia and Tennessee. The Memphis facilities will be located at 3965 S. Mendenhall Road and 2781 Airways Blvd.

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Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs Adds Health Care Attorneys

Genetics in Medicine – Nature

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Welcome to Genetics in Medicine

Genetics in Medicine, the official journal of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics, offers an unprecedented forum for the presentation of innovative, clinically relevant papers in contemporary genetic medicine. Stay tuned for cutting-edge clinical research in areas such as genomics, chromosome abnormalities, metabolic diseases, single gene disorders and genetic aspects of common complex diseases.

Instructions to Authors Here you will find all the information you need to submit your manuscript including details on word limits. Submit your manuscript here.

Open Access Genetics in Medicine now offers authors the option to publish their articles with immediate open access upon publication.

Volume 16, No 2 February 2014 ISSN: 1098-3600 EISSN: 1530-0366

2012 Impact Factor 5.560* Rank: 20/161 Genetics & Heredity

Editor-in-Chief: James P. Evans, MD, PhD

*2012 Journal Citation Report (Thomson Reuters, 2013)

December's Genetics in Medicine podcast examines the public health implications of Angelina Jolie's op-ed in the New York Times in May, 2013. In the piece, Jolie reported on her decision to get tested for a mutation of the BRCA gene based on a family history of breast and ovarian cancer; when she tested positive, she then underwent a double mastectomy. Two studies in Genetics in Medicine evaluate the response: one analyzes the media coverage of Jolie's announcement, while the second investigates the public's knowledge of Jolie's situation and understanding of genetics and risk. Listen here for more.

View the most recent special issue on incidental findings, and many other special issues!

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Genetics in Medicine - Nature

Seven new genetic regions linked to type 2 diabetes

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9-Feb-2014

Contact: News & Information Office press.office@admin.ox.ac.uk 44-018-652-80530 University of Oxford

Seven new genetic regions associated with type 2 diabetes have been identified in the largest study to date of the genetic basis of the disease.

DNA data was brought together from more than 48,000 patients and 139,000 healthy controls from four different ethnic groups. The research was conducted by an international consortium of investigators from 20 countries on four continents, co-led by investigators from Oxford University's Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics.

The majority of such 'genome-wide association studies' have been done in populations with European backgrounds. This research is notable for including DNA data from populations of Asian and Hispanic origin as well.

The researchers believe that, as more genetic data increasingly become available from populations of South Asian ancestry and, particularly, African descent, it will be possible to map genes implicated in type 2 diabetes ever more closely.

'One of the striking features of these data is how much of the genetic variation that influences diabetes is shared between major ethnic groups,' says Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Professor Mark McCarthy from the University of Oxford. 'This has allowed us to combine data from more than 50 studies from across the globe to discover new genetic regions affecting risk of diabetes.'

He adds: 'The overlap in signals between populations of European, Asian and Hispanic origin argues that the risk regions we have found to date do not explain the clear differences in the patterns of diabetes between those groups.'

Among the regions identified by the international research team are two, near the genes ARL15 and RREB1, that also show strong links to elevated levels of insulin and glucose in the body two key characteristics of type 2 diabetes. This finding provides insights into the ways basic biochemical processes are involved in the risk of type 2 diabetes, the scientists say.

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Rose scent in poplar trees? WSU turns to genetic engineering

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Sniff the air around Norman Lewis experimental poplars, and you wont pick up the scent of roses.

But inside the saplings leaves and stems, cells are hard at work producing the chemical called 2-phenylethanol which by any other name would smell as sweet.

Sweeter still is the fact that perfume and cosmetics companies will pay as much as $30 an ounce for the compound that gives roses their characteristic aroma. Because what Lewis and his colleagues at Washington State University are really chasing is the smell of money.

Born out of the frustrating quest to wring biofuels from woody plants, the WSU project takes a different tack. Instead of grinding up trees to produce commercial quantities of so-called cellulosic ethanol, their goal is to turn poplars into living factories that churn out modest levels of chemicals with premium price tags.

The potential market for specialty chemicals many of which are now synthesized from petroleum is big, said Lewis, director of WSUs Institute of Biological Chemistry. Hes already patented some of the technology, which relies on genetic engineering, and created a spinoff company called Elasid.

In the longer term, the profits from high-end products could boost the struggling biofuel industry by helping companies survive whats called the valley of death the point where firms need to scale up production, but money is hard to come by.

The ideal operation would combine the two product lines, extracting valuable chemicals and using the waste for biofuel. But thats a long way off, Lewis said.

Biofuels dont provide a compelling economic case at this point in time, he said. Weve been trying for many decades to understand how plants make these special chemicals that can be used in flavorings, fuels and medicinals, and that seemed like the obvious first place to target.

But failures outnumber successes in the world of green technology, and it remains to be seen whether Lewis and his group will buck the trend.

Costs and controversy

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Gene therapy – Psychology Wiki

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Assessment | Biopsychology | Comparative | Cognitive | Developmental | Language | Individual differences | Personality | Philosophy | Social | Methods | Statistics | Clinical | Educational | Industrial | Professional items | World psychology |

Biological: Behavioural genetics Evolutionary psychology Neuroanatomy Neurochemistry Neuroendocrinology Neuroscience Psychoneuroimmunology Physiological Psychology Psychopharmacology (Index, Outline)

Gene therapy is the insertion of genes into an individual's cells and tissues to treat a disease, and hereditary diseases in particular. Gene therapy typically aims to supplement a defective mutant allele with a functional one. Although the technology is still in its infancy, it has been used with some success. Antisense therapy is not strictly a form of gene therapy, but is often lumped together with them.

In the 1980s, advances in molecular biology had already enabled human genes to be sequenced and cloned. Scientists looking for a method of easily producing proteins such as insulin, the protein deficient in diabetes mellitus type 1 investigated introducing human genes to bacterial DNA. The modified bacteria then produce the corresponding protein, which can be harvested and injected in people who cannot produce it naturally.

On September 14, 1990 researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health performed the first approved gene therapy procedure on four-year old Ashanti DeSilva. Born with a rare genetic disease called severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), she lacked a healthy immune system, and was vulnerable to every passing germ. Children with this illness usually develop overwhelming infections and rarely survive to adulthood; a common childhood illness like chickenpox is life-threatening. Ashanti led a cloistered existence--avoiding contact with people outside her family, remaining in the sterile environment of her home, and battling frequent illnesses with massive amounts of antibiotics.

In Ashanti's gene therapy procedure, doctors removed white blood cells from the child's body, let the cells grow in the lab, inserted the missing gene into the cells, and then infused the genetically modified blood cells back into the patient's bloodstream. Laboratory tests have shown that the therapy strengthened Ashanti's immune system; she no longer has recurrent colds, she has been allowed to attend school, and she was immunized against whooping cough. This procedure was not a cure; the white blood cells treated genetically only work for a few months, and the process must be repeated every few months. (VII, Thompson [First] 1993).

Although this simplified explanation of a gene therapy procedure sounds like a happy ending, it is little more than an optimistic first chapter in a long story; the road to the first approved gene therapy procedure was rocky and fraught with controversy. The biology of human gene therapy is very complex, and there are many techniques that still need to be developed and diseases that need to be understood more fully before gene therapy can be used appropriately. The public policy debate surrounding the possible use of genetically engineered material in human subjects has been equally complex. Major participants in the debate have come from the fields of biology, government, law, medicine, philosophy, politics, and religion, each bringing different views to the discussion.

Scientists took the logical step of trying to introduce genes straight into human cells, focusing on diseases caused by single-gene defects, such as cystic fibrosis, hemophilia, muscular dystrophy and sickle cell anemia. However, this has been much harder than modifying simple bacteria, primarily because of the problems involved in carrying large sections of DNA and delivering it to the right site on the genome.

In most gene therapy studies, a "normal" gene is inserted into the genome to replace an "abnormal," disease-causing gene. A carrier molecule called a vector must be used to deliver the therapeutic gene to the patient's target cells. Currently, the most common vector is a virus that has been genetically altered to carry normal human DNA. Viruses have evolved a way of encapsulating and delivering their genes to human cells in a pathogenic manner. Scientists have tried to take advantage of this capability and manipulate the virus genome to remove disease-causing genes and insert therapeutic genes.

Target cells such as the patient's liver or lung cells are infected with the vector. The vector then unloads its genetic material containing the therapeutic human gene into the target cell. The generation of a functional protein product from the therapeutic gene restores the target cell to a normal state.

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Gene therapy - Psychology Wiki

Live at The Rooster’s Wife – Jeremy Gilchrist – The Futurist (original w/improv) – Video

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Live at The Rooster #39;s Wife - Jeremy Gilchrist - The Futurist (original w/improv)
This is Jeremy Gilchrist performing his original song "The Futurist" with Nick DeWinkeleer on bass at the coveted stage of the Poplar Knight Spot in Aberdeen...

By: Jeremy Gilchrist

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Live at The Rooster's Wife - Jeremy Gilchrist - The Futurist (original w/improv) - Video