European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - August 3, 1993, Darmstadt, Hesse                                By Jomn joint oui Man int Ric Maho Ruhno a i my was minoan Posi scientists say a key to ethnic differences around the world May be encoded in the genes. Tracing humanity s genetic heritage or amp j by Boyce Rensberger the Washington Post hidden within the Dan of each human being is a record of that person s ethnic history. It is a chronicle that begins in humanity s dim evolutionary past and traces the ancient migrations and ancestral intermixing that have shaped every tribe and culture on Earth. Encoded in the genes scientists say Are the answers to such questions As. Did today s europeans arise in Europe or did they Migrate from a Homeland elsewhere How Are they related to the people of India from what tribes in Africa Are Black americans descended can individual african americans be linked to specific tribes a Are iraqis in the City of Basra the direct descendants of the ancient sumerians As other evidence suggests a did All the Indian tribes of North and South America descend from a single group that migrated from Asia or were there separate migrations from different parts of Asia at different times a was much of Africa once populated by the Small Light skinned people known As Quot bushmen who were then pushed into a Small a enclave in Southern Africa by the Bantu people migrating out of West and Central Africa such longstanding mysteries and countless others have tantalized historians anthropologists and armchair explorers for centuries. Now according to a group of scientists who met at the National institutes of health in Bethesda this past Winter it is possible to answer those questions with several new. Techniques of molecular biology similar to Dan  but it can be done Only if Dan samples can be collected from hundreds of ethnic groups including Many Small tribes living in Remote locations and the individual genomes tested for hundreds of different  this is the genetic equivalent of Sherlock Holmes trick of checking the mud on a suspect s boots. Just As a person carries evidence of his travels in the various mods on his shoes a ethnic group carries Odd bits of Dan codes picked up from other groups with which it has intermarried sometimes including ethnic mixing that occurred thousands of years in the past. With Large samples from Many populations geneticists can Check the Dan for various markers and often determine How Long each has been present in the group based on estimated rates of evolutionary change. Quot it s a big undertaking. But if we can do it there is every reason to think that we can address some of the most fundamental questions about who we Are As a species and where we came from Quot said Marcus Feldman a Stanford University geneticist the group s Central committee has been working out a plan for the project and preparing to seek funding. A tentative Cost estimate is $23 million Over five years. The Money would pay for a a anthropologists and technicians to visit 400 ethnic groups a preliminary list has been drawn up draw blood samples from 25 unrelated individuals in each group and Rush the blood to a Laboratory where cells from each of the 10,000 individuals can be processed into a form that will grow indefinitely in Laboratory dishes. The Money would also cover costs of examining each Quot cell line Quot for a Standard set of markers and for a system of making the data available to any researcher who wanted to Analyse the collection. Anthropologists say the project has great urgency. Many of what one project Leader Calls Quot the hippest people Quot a for Quot historically interesting populations Quot a Are vanishing. The Effort is called the human genome diversity project a similar to but emphatically different from the. Human genome project the $3 billion Effort to decipher All the 50, or so human genes and map their positions on the chromosomes. Tax larger project which is in Progress under the sponsorship of Nih and the department of Energy seeks to establish a single Quot reference Quot genome. Along with answering anthropological questions said Mary Zaire King a geneticist at the University of California at Berkeley the project would have great payoffs in the study of human disease much of which results from the interaction of genes with environmental factors one of the Hornier issues discussed at the meeting was whether discoveries of genetic differences among the world s Peoples would or could be misused As support for belief in the superiority of one race or ethnic group Over another. The scientists said the findings could not logically Lead to such conclusions. Short subject Comet fireworks come july 1994, a strange string of Comet fragments orbiting Jupiter will zoom in so close that some chunks May get tossed into new orbits around the Sun. Other fragments May even collide with Jupiter streaming Down into the dense atmosphere of the solar systems biggest planet. Chances Are slim that astronomers will get to see the Jovian fireworks. But they will be watching for ejected debris to see if Jupiter a Gravity slingshots some of the fragments toward Earth. Quot it will be very exciting to see if that happens Quot said astronomer Fred Whipple at the Harvard smithsonian Center for astrophysics in Cambridge mass. Quot its one of the most interesting things we be Ever had Quot from Comet observations he said. The Comet was first seen last year after Jupiter trapped it and broke it into More than 20 pieces. Whipple originator of the Quot dirty snowball Quot theory of Comet composition said Quot we be known for a Long time that comets can get close to Jupiter like that but to have it break into so Many different pieces is  and to see them fall into Jupiter if that a possible would be equally exciting and unprecedented. Astronomers also said the collision of a chunk of the Comet a named for its discoverers geologist Eugene Shoemaker and Amateur astronomer David Levy both of Arizona a with Earth is unlikely but not wholly impossible. Quot in 1770 the Comet Lexell missed Earth by Only 1.5 million Miles Quot Whipple  discovery the Hubble space Telescope has peered deep into the Center of a Distant Luminous mass and discovered a Stellar Nursery filled with Young Bright stars and a Pinwheel of shining Gas scientists say. Brad Whitmore of the space Telescope science Institute says Hubble photographs show that a Galaxy called ngc7252 is actually the result of two galaxies colliding some one billion years ago creating groups of Young stars called globular clusters. Whitmore said astronomers have Long believed that such clusters of stars Are formed of Stellar bodies that Are billions of years old but the Bright Blue stars of ngc7252 Are estimated to be Only 50 million to 500 million years old Mere youngsters in the history of the universe. Globular dusters such As those that orbit the Milky Way Galaxy generally contain about a million stars Many of them very old red giant stars. The ngc7252 dusters Are about the same size but the stars Are hot and Blue Whitmore said. The Pinwheel Structure in the Center of the Galaxy he said is formed by in failing hot Gas that swirls about a nudes. The Structure resembles a spiral Galaxy but it is orgy 10,000 Light years across about one twentieth the size of the whole Galaxy. A from wire reports tuesday August 3, 1993 the stars and stripes 17