The stuff we are made of
I belong to a generation that grew up believing we were shaped by love, care, or lack of it — or perhaps even the number of books on our parents’ bookshelves. But we will go to our graves believing that it is a combination of letters in our genetic code that determines how we get there, and when. Our concept of the stuff we are made of will have undergone fundamental changes. I got a glimpse of that when I was looking around that room at my fellow mutants, and again and again…as I looked at myself, my biological daughter, and my adopted son. I was transported to a new era, a future that will rest on a different understanding not only of what causes things to go wrong in human beings but of what makes a human being in the first place, and what connects any one of us to any other.
- Writer and BRCA1 mutation carrier Masha Gessen, from Blood Matters
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."