New Scientist's Michael Brooks recently spoke with Princess Sumaya bint El Hassan of Jordan — who is also president of that country's Royal Scientific Society — about how science is perceived and how it should be used to "serve all the world's people." In the Arab world, the princess says, there isn't a clear understanding that science can improve lives. That may be because research priorities are geared towards the needs of a few, and not global issues. "When you think of the money spent on obesity-related research in comparison with the money spent on researching energy, water, environment and food, I'm not sure we have prioritized our research properly," she says. "The link between science and society is very important — you can't just be researching for research's sake. If there isn't an impact on people, what is the point?" The princess also tells Brooks that Jordan is developing a mentoring program for young scientists to start "nurturing a new generation of scientists in emerging nations."

Roy Britten, who discovered that mammalian genomes includes a number of repetitive sequences, has died, reports the Los Angeles Times. He was 92. Britten, along with his colleague David Kohne at the Carnegie Institution, used a renaturation approach to show that mammalian DNA contains repetitive sequences."It soon became clear that actual genes, which serve as the blueprint for proteins, enzymes, and other cellular components, accounted for only a few percent of the genome," the LA Times says. Britten later moved to Caltech. His work "provided the most accurate images of what DNA is like until sequencing came along decades later," adds Caltech's Eric Davidson.

Working with ancient DNA isn't easy, but Russian researchers have reported that they've generated living plants from the fruit of an arctic flower that has been dead for 32,000 years, reports The New York Times' Nicholas Wade. The campion-like fruit was stored by a squirrel in its burrow in Siberia, and lay buried under the frost until scientists dug it up a few years ago. "This would be the oldest plant by far that has ever been grown from ancient tissue. The present record is held by a date palm grown from a seed some 2,000 years old that was recovered from the ancient fortress of Masada in Israel," Wade adds.

The field of ancient DNA has gained credibility as new technologies have allowed researchers to do things like reconstitute the Neandertal genome, Wade says. "The Russian researchers tried to germinate the campion seeds [they found in the burrow], but failed. They then took cells from the placenta, the organ in the fruit that produces the seeds. They thawed out the cells and grew them in culture dishes into whole plants," he adds. "If the ancient campions are the ancestors of the living plants, this family relationship should be evident in their DNA. ... If the claim is true, then scientists should be able to study evolution in real time by comparing the ancient and living campions. Possibly other ancient species can be resurrected from the permafrost, including plants that have long been extinct."

Renato Dulbecco, the genome sequencing proponent who shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in medicine "for his role in drawing a link between genetic mutations and cancer," has died, reports The New York Times. He was 97. A founding fellow of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., Dulbecco's prize-winning work "showed that certain viruses could insert their own genes into infected cells and trigger uncontrolled cell growth, a hallmark of cancer," the Times says, adding that this discovery "provided the first solid evidence that cancer was caused by genetic mutations." In 1986, Dulbecco "proposed cataloging all human genes to gain deeper insights into cancer," the Times reports, thus "providing the intellectual impetus for the Human Genome Project."

From both his genome sequence and a paper record trail, Harvard University’s Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was able to delve into his ancestry, reports BusinessWeek. "It turns out that I'm descended on my mother's side from a white woman who was impregnated by a black slave, and on my father's side from an Irishman who conceived with a black woman named Jane Gates," he says, later adding: "I was searching for African roots, and they led to an African kingdom called the United Kingdom." Gates adds that he found nothing that worried him about his health.

In PLoS Genetics this week, a team led by investigators at the Australian National University reports its use of "chromosome painting and gene mapping to deconstruct the DFTD [Tasmanian devil facial tumor disease] karyotype and determine the chromosome and gene rearrangements involved in carcinogenesis." Through its analysis, the team produced detailed maps of both the devil and tumor karyotypes, which the researchers say will aid future genomic investigations into the transmissible cancer.

Elsewhere in the journal, researchers at the University of Southern California present "evidence from the heritable cancer syndrome multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2B" that positive selection for new disease mutations has occurred in the human germline. The USC team also says its study may be "useful for studying other disease mutations with similar characteristics and could uncover additional germline selection pathways or identify true mutation hot spots."

Over in PLoS Computational Biology, a separate team led by researchers at USC discusses the "use of gene ontology annotations to assess functional similarity among orthologs and paralogs." The researchers show there is a global ascertainment bias in experiment-based gene ontology annotations for human and mouse genes, and say that "GO annotations are often incomplete, potentially in a biased manner, and subject to an “open world assumption” (absence of an annotation does not imply absence of a function), and that conclusions drawn from a novel, large-scale GO analysis should whenever possible be supported by careful, in-depth examination of examples, to help ensure the conclusions have a justifiable biological basis."