Henry Louis Gates
ddobbs | April 29, 2010I had the pleasure of attending the Genomes, Environment, and Traits conference on Tuesday. Was wonderful and strange, with many inspiring, exciting, and/or entertaining moments -- and a few things a bit worrisome.
The twitter feed from the event tracks the talks and agenda pretty thoroughly; it's far better than my own notes. I especially enjoyed the morning's main event, in which a tag team of Robert Krulwich and Carl Zimmer called to stage for interviews different combinations of 13 the 10 "pioneers" who had been among the first to have their entire genomes run. As a journalist, I had…
razib | March 18, 2010Henry Louis Gates Jr. is looking for his male Irish forebear using genetics:
Well, it turns out that the men sharing that Ui Neill haplotype tended to have certain surnames. If we use those surnames, we narrow the number of possibilities in Allegany and Hampshire counties to 178 men born between 1800 and 1830 bearing 22 surnames.
What's so exciting about this? Well, it turns out that the men in the Gates family line have a particular mutation, a slight variation, in our Ui Neill haplotype. And we inherited that slight mutation, a spelling variant in that DNA signature, through one of those…
razib | July 24, 2009With the whole Henry Louis Gates affair there has been some talk about how racist Boston is. This is a joke. I am aware that the North has a checkered history, from busing in Boston in the 1970s to Bensonhurst in the 1980s. But calling Boston the Alabama of the North is an insult to our intelligence. Part of the issue here I think is that it is easy to show how racist the North is, and how far the South as come, by using as a counterpoint a cartoon model of race relations as a function of geography which never existed. It is a fact that in much of the North blacks were excluded from…
emjohnson | July 22, 2009Cambridge authorities are now dropping the disorderly conduct charge against the country's leading African-American scholar, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (see right), after he was arrested in his own home when police confused him with a burglar. This was after Gates showed both his Harvard ID and Driver's License that gave proof of address.
Probably the best reaction to this story came from Al Sharpton who stated:
I've heard of driving while black, and I've heard of shopping while black. But I've never heard of living in a home while black.
Gates is asking for a formal apology…