genomeboy.com

Much of the genetic data available direct to consumers is incomplete and preliminary, but in coming years, it will be tested and validated.

God, let’s hope so. Or I, for one, will look pretty stupid.

In any case, I’m looking forward to David Ewing Duncan’s book.

With the new year comes opportunity for change in and, l hope, simplification of one’s life. Accordingly, I am eliminating the comments function from this blog. The simple truth is this: I have not gotten spam filter Akismet to work, but I have blacklisted all kinds of IP addresses as well as dozens of words and phrases (e.g., penile enlargement). Still the spam refuses to die and frankly I’m sick of it. In my view, life is too short to have to walk around with an electronic flyswatter 24/7, especially if you’re paying good money for bandwidth. So, at the risk of alienating one or two of you, henceforth Genomeboy will be comment-free. I hope you understand and I hope the blogging will be better for it. As always I would be happy to hear from you via my Duke address…I’m not hard to find.

Thanks for reading.

And it makes a swell gift.

Seemed like an appropriate sentiment for the end of 2008…

‘Tis the season for a re-gifting pandemic:

Recently, Nancy’s 11-year-old daughter, Chun, aided and abetted by Nancy’s partner, Chrissie Schlesinger, presented Nancy with a birthday present that seemed oddly familiar. They had spotted a carving that Nancy had just been given by one of her students in their Lower Manhattan loft, and they added it to their own pile of gifts for her. This incident would seem to suggest the primacy of the behavioral model in re-gifting. Close investigation, however, points to the possibility of a strong genetic factor as well, probably on the maternal side.

The Frieds’ father, the late Dr. Paul Fried, was a prosperous Philadelphia physician. He and his wife, Grace, had a four-story town house and a country house, and employed a maid. Yet one day when driving back to the city with her three young daughters, Mrs. Fried spotted some boxes on the side of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

“She pulled over,” Nancy remembers, “and we’re tearing these boxes open. They were filled with stockings. We took them back to the house and spent days sorting thousands of stockings in every shade. What was funny is my mother grew up in a wealthy home, it wasn’t like she was somebody who was deprived, and the fact is we all could have been killed.”

If you want to know where biotech is headed, you could assemble an army of consultants, or convince [George] Church to talk to you for five minutes.

- Matthew Herper, Forbes.com

I’m not sure why, but lately I’ve been thinking about organ transplantation. This 2006 article from living kidney donor and writer Virginia Postrel is a jaw-dropper:

Many hospitals and bioethicists seem to believe a demeaning set of assumptions:

• Normal people won’t give up an organ except under coercion.
• Anything that encourages a decision to donate is coercion.
• To avoid coercion, living donors should be discouraged.

Some transplant centers require intrusive psychological probes that scare people off. Some bioethicists treat benevolence or religious conviction as a mental disorder. Even relatively supportive transplant centers like mine make it easier to quit than to go through with it.

The scrutiny is particularly nasty when people want to give to “strangers”– not truly unknown people but patients they’ve gotten to know through Internet sites or news coverage. Many centers flatly refuse “directed donations” to specific strangers, forcing donors to lie about how they met recipients.

Ms. Darling, who was pregnant when her insurance ran out, worked at Archway for eight years, and her father, Franklin J. Phillips, worked there for 24 years.“When I heard that I was losing my insurance,” she said, “I was scared. I remember that the bill for my son’s delivery in 2005 was about $9,000, and I knew I would never be able to pay that by myself.”

So Ms. Darling asked her midwife to induce labor two days before her health insurance expired.

“I was determined that we were getting this baby out, and it was going to be paid for,” said Ms. Darling, who was interviewed at her home here as she cradled the infant in her arms.

As it turned out, the insurance company denied her claim, leaving Ms. Darling with more than $17,000 in medical bills.

But we wouldn’t want to rush into anything.

Maybe I’m a sucker for methylation, but when it comes to interpretive dance as a means of explaining one’s dissertation, my vote goes to “The role of folate in epigenetic regulation of colon carcinogenesis” by Lara Park of Tufts University.

You can see the rest here.

The New York Times treads familiar ground this morning with a front-page account of testing kids for the ACTN3 gene, variants of which can predispose one to excelling at speed or endurance sports. Never mind that we have known about this for more than five years or that 23andMe has been doing it for a year or that it’s been available via Australia for four years. Whatever: it’s always fun to revisit the tired memes of genetic determinism, designer babies, ambitious parents living vicariously through their children,  and unscrupulous biotechnology companies. Yawn.

UPDATE: Will Saletan sees more significance in this than I do*. I suspect these companies are more interested in making a killing than they are in “national greatness,” but I admit I tend to be cynical about these things.

*Thanks for the name-check, Will. I would write you personally and tell you what a huge fan of Human Nature I am if only Slate were less covetous of its reporters’ email addresses.