genomeboy.com

If you’re a boomer and a Bowie fan, you can’t help but love this. (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

If nothing else, George Church’s Personal Genome Project has spawned some blogging careers.

I loves me some Daily Scan.

This link actually points to my fellow PGPer, John Halamka, aka Participant #2, and his blog, wherein he reveals his experience in the PGP thus far. Apparently, he already has his SNP chip data…bastard. (Hello, George!) No, seriously, I love John and I love his RFID.

I am at the Sigma Xi Center in Research Triangle Park, NC at the NC Science Blogging Conference. I came last year with a fair amount of trepidation, but even a desultory and reluctant blogger like me found it hard not to drink the Kool-Aid. I suspect–and hope–it will only continue to metastasize.

At the moment Janet Stemwedel is leading a fascinating discussion on blog ethics and whether there is a need for a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval or some other uber-standard. As long as it doesn’t compromise my ability to traffic in rumor, innuendo and salacious gossip, I’m all for it…

Dollars to donuts says that yours truly carries at least a maternal copy of this allele (subscription only, sorry) but is more likely homozygous for it:

Researchers at Yale have identified a gene mutation for “rumination” — the kind of chronic worry in which people obsess over negative thoughts. It’s a variation of a gene known as BDNF that’s active in the hippocampus, an area of the brain involved in thinking and memory.

Again, I’m not a genetic determinist, but sometimes the shoe seems to fit:

…Other people use worry as a kind of magical shield — if they worry that the plane will crash, it won’t. It doesn’t, ergo, they have to worry on every flight.

Fortunately there’s an over-the-counter treatment for us BDNFers:

Practice saying or writing whatever you fear most, such as, “the plane is going to crash” or “I’m going to lose my job.” “Repeat it over and over again slowly, like a zombie, and the fear will begin to subside,” [Dr. Leahy] says. Eventually, “you’ll just get bored with it.”

Unless, of course, you have a long list of fears…

Jason chimes in in the comments section of the previous post on the potential value of knowing one’s genotype:

…there are many reasons why someone might want to learn about predisposition to disease, even when therapies are not available, including disease advocacy (i.e. joining a “race for a cure”), or in the specific case of Alzheimer’s, behavioral modifications like the avoidance of contact sports.

To me the judgmental browbeating from the medical community would be comical if it were about anything other than disease. Medical geneticists have been in the business of–in the immortal words of Steve Murphy–”diagnose and adios” for the better part of a century. I wonder how many medical professionals ever, in good conscience, said to the dysmorphologists of yesteryear, “Why even bother trying to understand this syndrome? There’s nothing you can do for this family.” Okay sure, one could argue that dysmorphology and medical genetics are ex post facto pursuits–the unfortunate event has already happened and hey, we need a box to put it in so we can say we did something and at least tell families what we know.

But if we accept the “can’t do anything to change it” argument and the idea that genomes are fixed, then why is it okay to examine something retrospectively but verboten to see what might lie ahead? Because someone might get depressed? Because we have to save people from themselves? Blogga please. When people ask me whether I’m nervous about getting my DNA sequenced, my response is always the same: “Maybe I will feel differently in a month or a year, but for right now  my genome is the least of my problems.”