genomeboy.com

At last week’s Translating ELSI meeting, I was amazed at how large the topic of race and genetics loomed. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been: Race is our deep and abiding national wound — it never seems to heal.

In Slate, Will Saletan rethinks his earlier defense of James Watson’s unfortunate remarks:

…policy prescriptions based on race are social malpractice. Not because you can’t find patterns on tests, but because any biological theory that starts with observed racial patterns has to end with genetic differences that cross racial lines. Race is the stone age of genetics. If you’re a researcher looking for effects of heredity on medical or educational outcomes, race is the closest thing you presently have to genetic information about most people. And as a proxy measure, it sucks.

Might personal genomics and widespread sequencing help to change this?

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – A little less than a week after its passage by the US Senate, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act has been passed by the US House of Representatives by a vote of 414 to 1.The bill is the closest it has ever come to being signed into law after being considered in various iterations by both chambers of Congress over the past decade. GINA, which would protect Americans from discrimination based on information from genetic tests, had previously passed in the House twice before — most recently last year, when the vote was 420 to 3 in favor of its passage.

And by the way, we’ll miss you Ron Paul, you ornery cuss.

In April 1986 Nancy Wexler appeared on 60 Minutes to talk about Huntington’s. “I’ve always believed in knowledge for its own sake,” she said. “And it is ironic that after working for precisely that, I’m finding it much more complex than I ever thought it would be.”

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Speaking once again on CBS in 2004, [Wexler] said, “I think there’s a huge amount of social pressure on people to get tested. I know that with me, if I were to go to bed every night thinking I’m going to die of Huntington’s, you know, why should I bother getting up?”

- From Blood Matters by Masha Gessen