Ups and downs at Harvard University

A couple of interesting items concerning Harvard University have emerged in the last week or so. In Saturday's Boston Globe, a headline proclaims "Harvard admits to $1.8b gaffe in cash holdings." Has the world gone completely mad? Or just the people at the Globe and Harvard. How can losing $1.8b be considered a gaffe? Note that this wasn't money they lost from their vast endowment. This was money in the current account, that's to say money they use to run the University day-to-day.

And, on a happier note, Harvard Prof. Jack Szostak shared the Nobel prize for Medicine this year. A Boston Globe article gives a brief description of his work and mentions how his colleagues helped him celebrate.

I went back to Matt Ridley's excellent book Genome and found the section that discusses telomeres – the ends of chromosomes – and likens them to aglets on shoe laces. [As I type this, my computer shows its ignorance by not recognizing the word "aglets", but I'm sure you won't need it explained to you]. Apparently, there is a flaw in the mechanism that copies DNA. It always skips the first (and maybe the last) gene of a chromosome. Too many reproductions will fray the ends (to continue the shoe-lace analogy) and problems will occur. This is where telomerase (the subject of the Nobel Prize) comes to the rescue. It repairs the frayed ends and all is well. Evolution has provided us with multiple copies of the base sequence TTAGGG so that we can also stand copying DNA even when the repair operation doesn't apply (i.e. in some or all of the somatic cell divisions, as opposed to the germ-line cell division where the repair is absolutely necessary). Incidentally, all animals have the same telomere sequence, but plants have an extra "T". We have to go a very long way back to find ancestors with different telomeric sequences.

The reason all this is so important is that sometimes telomerase gets switched on for somatic cells that shouldn't have it. This means that they can keep on dividing without any problems. While this sounds at first like a good thing, it isn't of course – it's called cancer.

Well, that's my garbled take on all this but it is interesting. For more detail, see Telomere.