English Common Law, Slavery, and Human Rights

This paper considers the issues of villeinage and slavery in England and the British colonies; the decision in Somerset v. Stewart\u27 and other cases in English common law courts; the application of English common law in the colonies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with particular reference to the British colonies of Demerara, Essequibo and Berbice (formerly British Guiana, now Guyana); the Magna Carta 1215 to the Slavery Abolition Act 1833; the factors which led to the introduction of human rights provisions in English law in the Human Rights Act 1998; and the decision of the House of Lords in A & Others v Secretary of State for the Home Department2 in 2005, relating to the question of admissibility of evidence procured by torture. The thesis of the paper is that English common law was found wanting in connection with the application of fundamental principles of human rights in the United Kingdom and colonies. Lord Mansfield and the other judges who heard the case of Somerset were provided with an excellent opportunity to apply fundamental common law principles of personal security and liberty of the individual to rule that slavery and the slave trade were in breach of the common law and to set a precedent by declaring the liberty of each and every slave who arrived on English shores. Sadly, the judgment failed to live up to the expectations of many of those who had followed the case with avid interest, and it was not until 228 years after that judgment that fundamental principles of human rights became part and parcel of English domestic law, with the introduction of the Human Rights Act 1998 on 2 October 2000

Bases and spaces: resources on the web for accessing the draft human genome - II - After publication of the draft

The volume of human genome sequence and the variety of web-based tools to access it continue to grow at an impressive rate, but a working knowledge of certain key resources can be sufficient to get the most from your genome. This article provides an update to Genome Biology 2000, 1(4):reviews2001.1-2001.5

Sushi gets serious:the draft genome sequence of the pufferfish Fugu rubripes

The publication of the Fugu rubripes draft genome sequence will take this fish from culinary delicacy to potent tool in deciphering the mysteries of human genome function

The meso-genomic era

A report from HGM2001, the sixth annual International Human Genome Meeting organized by The Human Genome Organisation (HUGO), Edinburgh, UK, 19-22 April 2001

POCUS: mining genomic sequence annotation to predict disease genes

Here we present POCUS (prioritization of candidate genes using statistics), a novel computational approach to prioritize candidate disease genes that is based on over-representation of functional annotation between loci for the same disease. We show that POCUS can provide high (up to 81-fold) enrichment of real disease genes in the candidate-gene shortlists it produces compared with the original large sets of positional candidates. In contrast to existing methods, POCUS can also suggest counterintuitive candidates

The genomic signature of trait-associated variants

BACKGROUND: Genome-wide association studies have identified thousands of SNP variants associated with hundreds of phenotypes. For most associations the causal variants and the molecular mechanisms underlying pathogenesis remain unknown. Exploration of the underlying functional annotations of trait-associated loci has thrown some light on their potential roles in pathogenesis. However, there are some shortcomings of the methods used to date, which may undermine efforts to prioritize variants for further analyses. Here, we introduce and apply novel methods to rigorously identify annotation classes showing enrichment or depletion of trait-associated variants taking into account the underlying associations due to co-location of different functional annotations and linkage disequilibrium. RESULTS: We assessed enrichment and depletion of variants in publicly available annotation classes such as genic regions, regulatory features, measures of conservation, and patterns of histone modifications. We used logistic regression to build a multivariate model that identified the most influential functional annotations for trait-association status of genome-wide significant variants. SNPs associated with all of the enriched annotations were 8 times more likely to be trait-associated variants than SNPs annotated with none of them. Annotations associated with chromatin state together with prior knowledge of the existence of a local expression QTL (eQTL) were the most important factors in the final logistic regression model. Surprisingly, despite the widespread use of evolutionary conservation to prioritize variants for study we find only modest enrichment of trait-associated SNPs in conserved regions. CONCLUSION: We established odds ratios of functional annotations that are more likely to contain significantly trait-associated SNPs, for the purpose of prioritizing GWAS hits for further studies. Additionally, we estimated the relative and combined influence of the different genomic annotations, which may facilitate future prioritization methods by adding substantial information