John Mair

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Andrew Melville, sacred chronology and world history: the Carmina Danielis 9 and the Antichristus

The accepted view of the ecclesiastical reformer Andrew Melville (1545–1622) as the dynamic leader of the Presbyterian movement in Jacobean Scotland has been severely eroded in recent years, with particular criticism of the actual importance of his contribution to the Kirk and to Scottish higher education. While this reductionism has been necessary, it has resulted in an inversion of the overwhelmingly positive traditional image of Melville, and does not give us a rounded assessment of his life and works. This article attempts to partially redress this balance by looking at a neglected aspect of Melville's Latin writings, which showcase his talents as a humanist intellectual and biblical commentator. It focuses on two long poems that are both commentaries and paraphrases of Daniel and Revelation: the Carmina Danielis and the Antichristus. Through these poems, we see how Melville engaged with two problems exercising reformed theologians across Europe: the dating of key biblical events and the historicised meaning of prophecies within these texts. We also find evidence that Melville read widely among both contemporary and ancient commentators on both these issues

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio