One Penn State Professor Unmasks the Role Genetics Play in Human Faces

By Boen Wang,
The Daily Collegian
| 08. 07. 2015
Untitled Document
The lab is like many others. Located at the end of a long hall on the top floor of Carpenter building, it is filled with microscopes and desktop computers, sinks and samples of human hair. At the far end is a revolving door, the kind used for photography darkrooms, which leads to a clean room for DNA extraction. Shelves of PCR machines line one side of the room, and on the other side are freezers, most of which are “full of saliva — human saliva,” said research assistant Brooke Mattern.
On the countertop are 3-D printers used to make plastic models of human faces. The faces are scattered throughout the lab — arranged side by side on a cabinet, hanging by the dozen on a wall — and adorn biological anthropology professor Mark Shriver’s office door.
Faces fascinate Shriver.
Last March, Shriver coauthored a paper titled “Modeling 3D Facial Shape from DNA.” Drawing on data from hundreds of 3-D scans of human faces, including the faces of Penn State students, the paper purported to uncover the genetic factors...
Related Articles
It’s been a busy couple of months in biopolitics, with developments in the US, UK, China, Japan, and implicitly on Mars. Time for a brief roundup.
• • •
Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...
By Editorial Staff, The Lancet | 07.20.2024
Image by DrKontogianniIVF from Wikimedia Commons
Despite major advances in securing sexual and reproductive rights globally, one aspect is continually neglected: infertility. Evolving gender norms and financial precariousness have led to delayed childbearing, which increases infertility in both males and...
By Julia Black and Margaux MacColl, The Information [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 07.19.2024
When venture capitalist Jack Abraham first began dating his wife, Gabriella Massamillo, he insisted on one condition: that when they were ready to have children, she’d be willing to conceive using in vitro fertilization. Abraham had lost both his mother...
By Robert Resta, The DNA Exchange | 07.22.2024
Medical geneticists and genetic counselors have an often complicated and at times tense relationship with people with disabilities, their families, advocates, and scholars. Geneticists are strong advocates and supporters for all of their patients, regardless of their abilities and disabilities...