EXPRESSION IS ABOUT

When Mexican scientist Luis Miramontes signed his lab notebook on October 15, 1951, he didn’t know he was documenting history. That day, he made a new molecule — norethindrone. Derived from the wild Mexican yam that locals call barbasco, norethindrone became one of the first active ingredients in birth control pills. “The pill” gave women control over when they had children and let men and women enjoy sex without the chance of reproduction, thus ushering in seismic social change. Miramontes’ notebook page has been immortalized in books and articles by his former supervisor, Carl Djerassi, as well as reporters. Yet compared with Djerassi and others who contributed to the pill, Miramontes attained little recognition, says Gabriela Soto Laveaga, a historian of science at Harvard University and author of Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill. “It isn’t until recently that Miramontes has even been spoken about.” black and white image o

All Search across 12,000+ articles Home / News One of the ancient Japanese skulls from which DNA was extracted. Credit: Shigeki Nakagome / Trinity College Dublin UPDATED 19 SEPTEMBER, 2021 - 18:40 SAHIR Ancient DNA Rewrites Story of Japanese Ancestry READ LATER PRINT The archipelago nation of Japan has been occupied since the Upper Paleolithic period (36,000 BC), and dual genomic Japanese ancestry has been the dominant theory, up until now. A new study carried out by Trinity College Dublin, published in the journal Sciences Advances , has completely changed this narrative, pointing to a tripartite Japanese ancestry, i.e., genetic origins from three different, ancient populations. "We are very excited about our findings on the tripartite structure of Japanese populations. This finding is significant in terms of rewriting the origins of modern Japanese by taking advantage of the power of ancient genomics," said Professor Shigeki Nakagome, a geneticist at Trinity College