I meant to write about this a couple of months ago, after
reading a story similar to this The original article I read, and
forgot to bookmark, focused mainly on the process of how to
train a gorilla to sit still for this kind of procedure (this
article touches on that a little). I’m getting ahead of myself
though. Heart disease is the number one killer of great apes in
captivity. Getting a handle on that issue impacts their quality
of life in captivity, attempts at conservation through
reintroduction of animals into the wild, and, may say something
about human evolution. The gorilla genome has been sequenced and
yields some interesting insights on human evolution. The
research is reported in Nature. The article is open access. Here
is the abstract: Gorillas are humans’ closest living relatives
after chimpanzees, and are of comparable importance for the
study of human origins and evolution. Here we present the
assembly and analysis of a genome sequence for the western
lowland gorilla, and compare the whole gen