8% of Your DNA Comes From a Virus

An anonymous reader writes "About 8 percent of human genetic material comes from a virus and not from our ancestors, according to an article by University of Texas at Arlington biology professor Cédric Feschotte, published in the Jan. 7, 2010 issue of Nature magazine."

Comments

Re:Useful?

[furby076]

This is where a lot of research scientists fail - they don't tell you what a potential (even a far-fetched) real-life application of this knowledge will give us. They don't break it down to "by knowing this we may be able to...". I am a pretty smart guy but reading that article was painful, and all I wanted to know - by the end - was what this information can do for us. It didn't do that - so I am left to say "who cares?" - well i know that this research may lead to other research which may give us benefit, but not everyone will realize that.

What I am saying leads to this - if you want people to care about your work. if you want people to invest more money in your work. then you need to give people a reason they can understand, a reason that is "tangible". Leave the heavy research dialect for experts-only conferences, papers, etc...when someone is interviewing you for an artcle, smarten up a bit and give information that a large audience would appreciate...an audience that may be interested in parting with their money for your research.

Re:What a crappy press release

[canajin56]

Ya, lets be disingenuous and pretend that in the phrase ""About 8 percent of human genetic material comes from a virus and not from our ancestors", the word "our" means "the current generation", rather than "humanity", and further, that ancestor means "parent", rather than meaning, well, ancestor! The thing about pretending to be incredibly stupid in order to be pedantic, is it's indistinguishable from actually being incredibly stupid.