George Church, a molecular geneticist at Harvard Medical School and a pioneer of whole-genome sequencing, is unpersuaded.

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Alan McHughen, a molecular geneticist, is a professor of botany and plant sciences at the University of California, Riverside.

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Paul Soloway, a molecular geneticist at Cornell University in New York, says some human traits could be affected by paramutation.

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But Jeffrey Turner, the molecular geneticist behind the goat gambit and chief executive of publicly held Nexia Biotechnologies, has more pragmatic goals.

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"The experiments are very similar, " said George Church, a molecular geneticist at Harvard and senior researcher for the project reported in Science.

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Mineola Johnson's DNA type is "a fairly common type found in sub-Saharan Africa, " according to Bert Ely, a molecular geneticist and professor at the University of South Carolina.

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"Apo E is one of those genes that we suspect controls life span because it affects people's susceptibility to diseases of aging, " says Jan Vigh, a molecular geneticist at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston.

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