That October, she was the lead author on a paper published in Nature that laid out her discovery’s “profound implications for the study of human history and for medicine.” For the first time, researchers could look for evidence of positive selection by testing common haplotypes even if they didn’t have “prior knowledge of a specific variant or selective advantage.” By applying this approach to pathogens, there was the possibility of identifying how diseases had evolved to outwit the human immune response or develop drug resistance—knowledge that would open up new avenues to combating disease.

Pardis Sabeti, the Rollerblading Rock Star Scientist of Harvard | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine Tuesday, October 8, 2013 @ 7:12pm