For me as a practicing nonscientist who has inveigled his way into the temple of science and consorted with its high priesthood, that day was last month. What moved me was a story that ran the Oct. 26th edition of USA Today . This year, the Food and Drug Administration began to require folic acid fortification of enriched foods such as breads, flours, pastas and rice. And breakfast cereal makers can add folic acid to products. And there's more.
Study suggests large benefit, probably due to folic acid in daily supplements.
Science at the Barbizon Hotel T he opulent oak-paneled meeting rooms of New York's Barbizon Hotel are gone now, casualties of a major renovation. Dressed in a dark suit and holding a pointer, Jorge J. Yunis , professor of laboratory medicine and pathology and a leading geneticist, took the elite of science journalism on a brief journey along the length of a chromosome. In 1969 Torbjorn Caspersson at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden found that certain stains caused chromosomes to show light and dark lateral bands along their length. For a long time chromosome researchers could see only about 250 total bands for the entire complement of human chromosomes. Yunis pioneered high-resolution chromosome banding.