genomeboy.com

Eugenics lives:

Worried that welfare costs are rising as the number of taxpayers declines, state Rep. John LaBruzzo, R-Metairie, said Tuesday he is studying a plan to pay poor women $1,000 to have their Fallopian tubes tied.

“We’re on a train headed to the future and there’s a bridge out,” LaBruzzo said of what he suspects are dangerous demographic trends. “And nobody wants to talk about it.”

Oh really? A bridge you say?

Munger, who writes the Progressive Alaska blog, told me Palin is not just a creationist, but a “young Earth” creationist who believes that man and dinosaurs once shared the planet, and that the world will end in her lifetime.

Palin-tology, you might call it.

Munger claims she tried to stock the local school board with creationists several years ago, which caused him to quiz her on her beliefs.

“She doesn’t believe in science, and her father was a science teacher,” Munger said. “She told me she felt she would see Jesus in her lifetime.”

May He deliver us all.

I can tell when a science story has created mainstream buzz: I read about it here.  The blogosphere has reacted–with nuance and thoughtfulness, IMHO– to David Goldstein’s contention that the Common Disease Common Variant Emperor is pretty much buck naked.

In my own inbox over the last two days, I’ve seen loud and emphatic grumblings from NIH-funded researchers who claim that Goldstein is prematurely eulogizing CDCV and that if he hasn’t found variants related to cognition, then it must be the result of poor phenotyping on his part.

Fiddlesticks.

I am a subject in Goldstein’s cognition study and I can tell you that I have been tested out the wazoo. I have spent hours in front of a screen trying to remember patterns of dots, letters and numbers. I have sat with an examiner for an hour and tried to recall the details of stories that were read to me. I have lain inside an MRI tube while staring at photographs and answered questions about them. I have filled out lengthy questionnaires. So yeah, it could be inadequate phenotyping, but if it is then I suspect we will never have adequate phenotyping until we start drilling holes in people’s skulls. (Also, if the powers that be are so concerned about this, then why isn’t the 1000 Genomes Project using some of its $50 million to collect trait data? Where is the 1000 Phenomes Project?)

As for the common-disease-common-variant hypothesis, maybe I’m missing something, but please tell me: What do we do with so many weak susceptibility loci for Crohn’s and type 2 diabetes that fail to explain so much of the genetic variance? Schizophrenia has a heritability of 0.8 and we still can’t find a major gene after 25 years of looking.

Uncle Sam and his fundees have a lot invested in CDCV and the genome-wide association studies that are supposed to find the culpable variants for human diseases. I don’t blame them for wanting to pursue it as far as they can. But when will it be time to move on and start to sequence? I get that it’s still expensive and unwieldy. And that it too may not succeed. But why use a magnifying glass when you have an electron microscope?

UPDATE: I just heard an excellent talk by Muin Khoury (some of which irritated me, but we can talk about that later).  One of his many salient points was that CDCV has not born fruit because we have failed to take into account gene-gene and gene-environment interactions. This strikes me as plausible and more importantly, as the source of an immense if not intractable informatics and computational problem. Of course, someone more cynical than I might say that it will also mean many more years of funding…

“There is absolutely no question,” he said, “that for the whole hope of personalized medicine, the news has been just about as bleak as it could be.”

The New York Times has a feature on population genomicist David Goldstein  that is well worth your time. David, I should say, is a friend and colleague. He’s not always the warmest and fuzziest guy in the world, and his worldview tends to be closely aligned with Eeyore’s. But he is funny, charismatic, engaging and one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met. He’s right a lot more often than he’s wrong. I had the pleasure of doing some editing on his book, Jacob’s Legacy, which I heartily and objectively recommend (heh).

Mackenzie Cowell (left) and Jason Bobe are trying to create simple, at-home methods for doing sophisticated biology. (Dina Rudick/Globe Staff) 

The clash between the potential benefits and dangers of doing home science were highlighted by the case of Victor Deeb. The retired 71-year-old chemist in Marlborough saw his basement lab dismantled by authorities this summer after it was noticed by fire officials putting out a second-floor air conditioner fire.

The state DEP said officials intervened in Deeb’s workspace because it did not meet lab standards. Chemical companies shipping Deeb their materials were unaware that they were shipping to a residence, authorities said.

Deeb, who said he was trying to make safer surface coatings for food containers, insists that the chemicals he was using were less hazardous than common cleaners and household chemicals. He questions why his hobby was seen as more dangerous than, for example, a hunter with a gun collection, or a person using a propane grill.

“The more I tried to explain, the more they thought I was a lunatic,” Deeb said, questioning why he should need permits to tinker in his basement.

One wonders if maybe we couldn’t use a few more lunatics.

“…Never before have there been so many gaping chasms between what the world seems to be and what science tells us it is. `Us’ meaning laymen. It’s like a million Copernican Revolutions all happening at the same time…”

- David Foster Wallace  (1962-2008)

Rich people salivating.

As the party throbbed in the ground floor space of Barry Diller’s IAC Building on West 18th Street, Mr. Weinstein, the film producer, who has acquired the Halston clothing brand, joked that DNA testing was as buzzworthy as the fashion shows taking place all week. “Now that I’m in the fashion business,” he said, “I think genetics is a natural extension.”

Cognitive dissonance, for lack of a better term:

According to Alaska’s 2009 catalog of earmark requests the state’s sea life are in great need of federal money. As Politico points out, Palin’s office requested $2 million in federal monies to study crab mating habits; $494,900 for the recreational halibut harvest and $3.2 million for seal genetics research.

Those requests for the study of wildlife genetics and mating habits seems pretty antithetical to the long-standing views of Palin’s running mate, John McCain.

“We’re not going to spend $3 million of your tax dollars to study the DNA of bears in Montana,” McCain said earlier this year, referring to a request from Montana for federal money to study the endangered grizzly bear. “I don’t know if it was a paternity issue or criminal, but it was a waste of money.”

If you give Watson a drug for Caucasians and he metabolizes it like an Asian, you won’t help him, and you might hurt him. You also owe him the courtesy of seeing and treating him as an individual. The most important difference between him and you is technological and economic, not hereditary: His genome has been sequenced. Now for the rest of us.

Will Saletan on race, genes and the future of medicine.

If you don’t want to look at Alzheimer’s because you’re afraid that you would be unable to face the fact that you’re likely to lose the little God gave you, then you just don’t click on it.

- Kari Stefansson, DISCOVER magazine, September 2008