UMBC will soon be convening an Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC) to ensure our research continues to conform to the NIH Guidelines associated with plant, pathogen, transgenic animal and recombinant DNA research Committee members have been selected and the registration of the IBC is pending approval from the NIH Office of Biotechnology Activities (OBA). The first IBC meeting is tentatively planned for late October.

The overall purpose of the IBC is to:

• advise and approve investigator-initiated protocols,
• evaluate potential risk to the environment and public health,
• set responsibilities for investigator compliance with surveillance, data reporting, and adverse event reporting, and
• provide annual reports to the OBA. 

UMBC will soon be convening an Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC) to ensure our research continues to conform to the NIH Guidelines associated with plant, pathogen, transgenic animal and recombinant DNA research Committee members have been selected and the registration of the IBC is pending approval from the NIH Office of Biotechnology Activities (OBA). The first IBC meeting is tentatively planned for late October.

The overall purpose of the IBC is to:

• advise and approve investigator-initiated protocols,
• evaluate potential risk to the environment and public health,
• set responsibilities for investigator compliance with surveillance, data reporting, and adverse event reporting, and
• provide annual reports to the OBA. 

Since Charles Darwin wrote "The Origin of Species" more than 150 years ago, it's been known that nature's selection creates some species and ends others.

But researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County suggest that another actor is responsible for driving wedges in animal populations to create new species — mothers themselves.

A study published last month in the journal Ecology Letters suggests that female creatures' sexual preferences may launch an evolutionary process that can lead to the creation of new species. Whom they choose for mates trickles down through generations in such a way that, combined with other factors, may make a population distinct from others with which it once intermingled.

It's a theory that is gaining acceptance relative to the idea that adaptation to differing environments — Darwinian "natural selection" — is mainly, if not solely, what drives evolution of new species.