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Dean Hamer received his B.A. from Trinity College, Connecticut
and his Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School . He has worked at the National
Institutes of Health for 24 years, where he is currently the Chief of
the Section on Gene Structure and Regulation in the Laboratory of Biochemistry
of the National Cancer Institute. His research has led to contributions
in a variety of areas including recombinant DNA, drug and vaccine production,
and gene regulation. He was a co-inventor of animal cell gene transfer,
and recently has begun a program on molecular therapeutics for HIV/AIDS.
For the past nine years, Dr. Hamer has studied the role of inheritance
in human behavior, personality traits, and cancer risk-related behaviors
such as cigarette smoking. His discovery of genetic links to sexual orientation
and the temperamental traits of sensation seeking and anxiety have changed
the way we think about human behavior and raise a host of important scientific,
social and ethical issues. In his most recent popular book, The God Gene:
How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes, he proposes that human spirituality
is an adaptive trait, but also that he has located one of the genes responsible.
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