The amount of energy, time, money, and care that many people devote to learning about their ancestry is a wonder to some of us not similarly obsessed (though doubtless we all have equally unremunerative but gratifying passions; I know I do). Today, though, an article in The Washington Post offers a stark reminder of just how important it may be to know your ancestry. It turns out that a particularly deadly form of breast cancer afflicts black women far more often than those in other ethnic groups, and at least part of the reason is very likely ancestral: this particular type of tumor is extremely common in certain areas of West Africa that were involved in the Atlantic slave trade. More at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/22/ AR2007062201902.html With news like this, knowledge of one's distant personal past becomes startlingly, even urgently, relevant. As William Faulkner famously remarked, "The past is not dead. It's not even past." Not least because for better or worse, we carry it in our genes. -- Jurretta Heckscher