Youngstown native to lecture on ancient DNA

YOUNGSTOWN -- Dr. Charles Greenblatt, a Youngstown native and professor emeritus of parasitology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, will present a seminar on "Ancient DNA" at 10:30 a.m. June 23 in Room 121 of DeBartolo Hall at Youngstown State University.
Greenblatt, who attended Harding and Rayen schools, studied at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and has worked for the National Institutes of Health.
From 1959 to 1961, he served in El Salvador, where he began his work in tropical diseases. In 1967, he went to Israel as a medical volunteer in the Six Day War. He emigrated to Israel a year later.
He has served as the founding director of the Kuvin Centre for the Study of Infectious and Tropical Diseases and director of the Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine. Most of his work has been in leishmaniasis, a major tropical disease. In 1992, he began studies of ancient DNA, which involves retrieval of DNA from ancient archaeological samples using molecular biological techniques.
His lecture will show how these techniques have shed light on the evolution and history of tuberculosis, judged by many infectious disease experts to be the world's most important infectious disease. The research will deal with a range of samples spanning some 17,000 years.