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.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
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."