Indigenous People

The term indigenous people gained legitimacy within international law with the creation in 1982 of the United Nations Working group on Indigenous Populations.This group has representation from all six continents.

Social movements worldwide have adopted the term indigenous people as a self-identifying and political  label based on past oppression but now legitimizing a search for social,cultural and political rights.

Working to promote cultural survival is a growing international pan tribal movement.In June 1992 the World Conference of Indigenous Peoples met in Rio De Janeiro with 300 representatives of the tribal diversity that survives in the modern world.

Gender Bias

Gender bias is behavior that shows favoritism towards one gender over another. The gender bias is often in favor of men and boys over girls and women. Women and girls are expected to demonstrate feminine behavior and boys and men are expected to act masculine.

Discovery of DNA

Once  chromosomes were recognized as the carriers of genes scientists sought to understand the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA the chemical that makes up chromosomes.

In 1953 the American geneticist James Watson and British biophysicit Francis Crick published their discovery that DNA molecules have a ladder like double helix structure.Also important was the work of the British X Ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin who used a special technique X- Ray diffraction to produce  hiqh quality images of DNA.

The combined efforts of Franklin,Watson and Crick opened up a whole new vista by helping explain how chromosomes are replicated.

Analysis of the DNA from a wide variety of organisms provided new perspectives on biological relationships and also shed light on the growing list of illnesses such as viral and bacterial infections ,cancer,heart disease and stroke