Latest Jenny Tung Stories

Changes in a female monkey's social status lead to changes in her immune system, and researchers writing in this week's edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Early Edition suggest that the findings may be applicable to humans as well. The research, which was led by Jenny Tung, currently a visiting assistant professor in Duke University's evolutionary anthropology department and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago at the time of the study,...

Evolutionarily speaking, baboons may be our more distant cousins among primates. But when it comes to our experiences with malaria over the course of time, it seems the stories of our two species have followed very similar plots.In humans, subtle variation in one particular gene that controls whether a protein on the surface of red blood cells gets made or not literally spells the difference between susceptibility or resistance to one form of malaria. That's because the blood protein serves...