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You’d think that one might have the right not to know the result of a genetic test for a disease, right? But suppose one wanted to know the risk of one’s children developing, say, Huntington’s Disease? And would one retain that right if it meant that, instead, a potentially harmful test would instead have to be carried out on a fetus or pre-implantation embryo? This sensitive genetic issue is likely to become more common as such tests become commonplace, and now is the time to be thinking about them.

One of my favourite biological entities is the focal adhesion (or focal contact), where the actin cytoskeleton of eukaryotic cells in 2D culture comes to a point and makes a ‘foot’ that binds to the extracellular milieu. I interviewed Martin Humphries a little while ago about a paper from Mark Ginsberg’s lab, looking at the ‘activation’ of single integrin molecules. And the story of these fascinating little complexes gets ever more interesting. Translation and post-transcriptional regulation machinery