genomeboy.com

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Large amounts of aggregate human DNA data that the National Institutes of Health and other groups made open to researchers around the world is being locked up from public view due to privacy concerns that arose this week when a new forensic DNA method was announced that could conceivably leave people vulnerable to identification.

So that’s it? After all the elaborate mechanisms put in place for investigator applications, data submission, data access, data monitoring, data oversight, and governance…now we just pull the plug on sharing of GWAS data because it can’t be protected?

Okay so maybe it’s not so new since the book’s been out for several months…Anyway, my review of Masha Gessen’s Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene, appears in the current issue of Nature Genetics (subscription only, sorry!):

Throughout this remarkable hybrid of a book—part memoir, part science journalism, part narrative nonfiction—Gessen demonstrates both her independence and her willingness to tweak dogma, whether it comes from guilt-ridden postmodernists or didactic medical professionals. Her sometimes conflicting goals are to discover what is possible for herself as a breast cancer ‘previvor’ and to quench her reporter’s compulsion to document and understand the genetic landscape as it shifts beneath her feet.

See? All I have to do is wave my magic wand and the world conforms to my wishes. Scary!

Ach, if only that were true…

Remember cycle sequencing? No? Remember grunge?

Jeez Louise, you’ve got to wake up pretty early to beat these folks to the punch. Anyway, as they point out, the September/October issue of Technology Review features an opinion piece by yours truly:

As a participant in the Personal Genome Project, I’ve been asked more than once, “So…what will you do with your genome?” I have two boring stock answers, at least for now: not much, and I don’t know. But I do want to learn about my genome. I see personal genomics as akin to the first personal computers. What could we actually do with the Commodore 64 or the Apple II? Word-process? Occasionally. A bit of Lotus 1-2-3? I guess. Mostly, I remember software crashes and hardware freezes. In my house we managed to play a lot of solitaire and Minesweeper.

From the Department of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up:

McKinney was arrested in November 2004 in Tennessee in a van with the 15-year-old, according to a Carter County Sheriff’s Department arrest report.

McKinney, then living across the state line in Avery County, N.C., needed money to help her three-legged horse, Crockett said.

“She loved it dearly,” Crockett said. “She was a rather bizarre character, and seems to have a strange circumstance now.”

He recalled that McKinney had two or three dogs in her car when she conferred with him about her case.

“There was a strong aroma about her, and I told her this needed to be taken care of before I went to court with her,” Crockett said.

McKinney made news around the world this summer when she had five pups cloned in South Korea from her beloved pit bull Booger.

One wonders if the Raelians were involved.

Obviously there’s not much to see here (other than the above photo of Django in repose). I am traveling around New England, trying to write and trying to prepare for the fall semester. Back soon, I hope…God knows I miss the spam…