The fossil's amazing preservation means that the scientific team has managed to glean a huge amount of information from it, although this required new X-ray techniques that had not previously been applied to any other specimens. "So you have more information in it than almost any fossil you could think of." "It's caught at a really very interesting moment when it fortunately has all its baby teeth and is in the process of forming all its permanent teeth," said Dr Holly Smith, an expert in primate development at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who was part of the team. "She says, 'there are two Idas now, there's me I'm living and then there's the dead one.'"
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Hurum said Ida is very excited about her namesake. Hurum chose Ida's nickname because the diminutive creature is at the equivalent stage of development as his six-year-old daughter. "You need an icon or two in a museum to drag people in," said Hurum, "this is our Mona Lisa and it will be our Mona Lisa for the next 100 years." He did not see the fossil before buying it – just three photographs, representing a huge gamble.īut it appears to have paid off.
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I was just thinking about how to get this to an official museum so that it could be described and published for science." Hurum would not reveal what the university museum paid for the fossil, but the original asking price was $1m. "My heart started beating extremely fast," said Hurum, "I knew that the dealer had a world sensation in his hands. It was Perner who approached Hurum two years ago. He kept it under wraps for over 20 years before deciding to sell it via a German fossil dealer called Thomas Perner. Ida was originally discovered by an amateur fossil hunter in the summer of 1983 at Messel pit, a world renowned fossil site near Darmstadt in Germany. She will then be transported back to Oslo, via a brief stop at the Natural History Museum in London on Tuesday, 26 May, when Attenborough will host a press conference. There is even talk of Ida being the first non-living thing to feature on the front cover of People magazine. It has been shipped across the Atlantic for an unveiling ceremony hosted by the mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg today. It's been hidden because the only specimens are so incomplete and so broken there's nothing almost to study." The fossil has been formally named Darwinius masillae in honour of Darwin's 200th birthday year. "It tells a part of our evolution that's been hidden so far.
"This will be the one pictured in the textbooks for the next hundred years," said Dr Jørn Hurum, the palaeontologist from Oslo University's Natural History Museum who assembled the scientific team to study the fossil. "The more you look at Ida, the more you can see, as it were, the primate in embryo." "This little creature is going to show us our connection with the rest of all the mammals with cows and sheep, and elephants and anteaters," said Sir David Attenborough who is narrating a BBC documentary on the find. The skeleton is 95% complete and thanks to the unique location where she died, it is possible to see individual hairs covering her body and even the make-up of her final meal – a last vegetarian snack. Health care personalized medicine personomics precision medicine.The top-level international research team, who have studied her in secret for the past two years, believe she is the most complete and best preserved primate fossil ever uncovered. In this paradigm, precision medicine may be considered a necessary step in the evolution of medical care to personalized medicine, with personomics as the missing link. These unique personal characteristics are defined by tools known as personomics which takes into account an individual's personality, preferences, values, goals, health beliefs, social support network, financial resources, and unique life circumstances that affect how and when a given health condition will manifest in that person and how that condition will respond to treatment. These unique biological characteristics are defined by the tools of precision medicine: genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, epigenomics, pharmacogenomics, and other "-omics." Personalized medicine, as defined herein, uses additional information about the individual derived from knowing the patient as a person. Precision medicine, as defined herein, characterizes unique biological characteristics of the individual or of specimens obtained from an individual to tailor diagnostics and therapeutics to a specific patient.
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When medicine is informed solely by clinical practice guidelines, however, the patient is not treated as an individual, but rather a member of a group. Clinical practice guidelines have been developed for many common conditions based on data from randomized controlled trials.