Fragment of one gene significant in determining one's skin color

Scientists say the findings could have implications for cancer treatments.
Knight Ridder Newspapers
PHILADELPHIA -- The merest fragment of one gene plays a major role in the differing skin colors of white and black people, scientists have found, capping an 11-year effort that began with the study of similar color variations in a common pet-store critter, the zebrafish.
The team of 25 geneticists, molecular biologists and anthropologists, most of them from Pennsylvania State University, says the work could have implications for skin cancer treatment, crime-scene analysis and even cosmetics.
For those bent on altering their skin color, the gene could lead to pharmaceutical products that would be safer than tanning salons or the chemical skin-lightening creams popular in India, said project coordinator Keith C. Cheng, a cancer geneticist at the Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, Pa.
Challenges assumption
The research, published today in the journal Science, also challenges a common assumption about when the various races branched off after leaving the scene of their common beginnings in Africa, more than 50,000 years ago. The people who would become Asians and northern Europeans were thought by some to have evolved their light skin together, before migrating their separate ways.
The new research indicates that the two groups developed lighter skin after the separation -- giving just a taste of the secrets of history that can be unlocked with the human genome, said Penn State anthropologist Mark Shriver.
"There's a lot left to be learned," Shriver said. "We're basically explorers right now."