Free at very long last…
Today was a bittersweet day. One of my graduate professors in human genetics and a true gentleman, Bob Ferrell, is finally free of the yoke of his so-called “crime,” i.e., mailing some innocuous bacterial samples to an artist for a bio-art project. That’s actually great. What’s not so great is the fact that for Bob to get to this day meant enduring four years of FBI scrutiny, three strokes, two bouts with cancer and a partridge in a freaking pear tree. And oh yeah, a guilty plea and a pledge to roll over so the feds can try to build a case against the artist, who’s been charged with mail fraud for the $200 worth of bacterial cultures he received.
How’s that war on terror going, anyway? Are these our tax dollars at work?
I work as an Assistant Professor in the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (although this site and its content are my own).
In 2007 I became the fourth subject in Harvard geneticist George Church's Personal Genome Project. As the PGP moves forward, I am chronicling the dawn of personal genomics, that is, people obtaining their genomic information for whatever reason(s) and figuring out what to do with it. I am interested in the relevant technologies and especially the attendant privacy and other ethical/legal/social issues.
This blog may also discuss some of my non-genome interests or, to paraphrase Dwight Yoakam, "Guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music, etc etc."
The header image comes from the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange's multimedia performance piece, "Ferocious Beauty: Genome."