Fall Reception with Nick Patterson
Our annual Fall Cocktail Reception was held on Thursday, 5th October 2006, in the Oak Room at the Union Club in Boston.
Our guest alumni speaker, Nick Patterson, is Senior Research Scientist at M.I.T. and Harvard's Broad Institute and was a lead author of a paper in May this year which discussed the evolution of chimpanzees and humans. This paper proposed that ancestral humans initially separated from chimps, but that the two populations continued to interbreed before finally splitting from each other less than 5.4 million years ago. Or in the words of other publications discussing the paper, Humans and Chimps are really just kissing cousins
Nick gave an interesting talk on how he had come into genetics (via cryptography and hedge funds) and introduced his recent work, giving an overview about his field. He answered a large number of questions, particularly about his recent paper.
You can read some background on Nick's paper at http://www.broad.mit.edu/ and this weeks issue of Time magazine has an interesting story.
Sincerely
Nick Copley
Balliol College, Oxford
President of the Society
Reception: 6:30 - 9.30 PM
Presentation: 7:15 PM