genomeboy.com

The New York Times treads familiar ground this morning with a front-page account of testing kids for the ACTN3 gene, variants of which can predispose one to excelling at speed or endurance sports. Never mind that we have known about this for more than five years or that 23andMe has been doing it for a year or that it’s been available via Australia for four years. Whatever: it’s always fun to revisit the tired memes of genetic determinism, designer babies, ambitious parents living vicariously through their children,  and unscrupulous biotechnology companies. Yawn.

UPDATE: Will Saletan sees more significance in this than I do*. I suspect these companies are more interested in making a killing than they are in “national greatness,” but I admit I tend to be cynical about these things.

*Thanks for the name-check, Will. I would write you personally and tell you what a huge fan of Human Nature I am if only Slate were less covetous of its reporters’ email addresses.

Mark Ptashne, whose book we looked upon as The Bible of Gene Regulation when I was in graduate school, is featured in a New Yorker article on violin collecting:

He owns a Gyro Swing golf club, which whirs as it responds to his swing and vibrates when he doesn’t keep his left arm in the right position. And—his great passion in life—he owns and plays and lends out violins, two of which are artifacts of the most exacting craftsmanship. He began playing during his adolescence. “They say you can’t really learn at that age,” he said. “Like so much else ‘they’ say, that’s bullshit.” He has made a creditable CD to prove it. And he started a company, Genetics Institute, mainly in order to make enough money to buy one of his treasures—a Guarneri del Gesù. He now owns quite a few other fiddles yet is at pains to make it clear that he is not a collector but a musician and a devotee.

Jerry Dodgson, professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Michigan State University, remarked: “The time is right to sequence the turkey genome. The sequence of the chicken genome is known and continues to be refined. The scientific community has established many of the experimental resources that make this project feasible.” He added: “Pyrosequencing on the Roche GS-FLX platform and assembly of the sequence using the publicly available chicken sequence as a reference represents a very cost-effective approach to deliver the turkey genome sequence rapidly to the wider scientific community.”

Something else to be thankful for while you’re high on tryptophan and watching bad football.

Dustin Pedroia:  .326, 17 HR, 83 RBI, 20 SB, 118 R…Five-foot-nine*, 180 lbs…and oh, yeah: MVP.

On behalf of the world’s vertically challenged cohort, I salute you.

*As if

James P. Evans, a genetics professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, cautions against making too much of genetic information.

Even if Angrist or one of his fellow participants learns he has the gene for a horrible disease. that is far from a guarantee that the disease will ever occur, Evans said. Even in a larger group of donors, Evans said, it would be difficult to make solid medical decisions based on what DNA shows. A woman whose DNA suggests future breast cancer, for example, shouldn’t necessarily run out and get a mastectomy.

“The information one gets is virtually all probabilistic; it’s not actionable information, medically,” he said. “To me, the biggest danger is that its utility will be exaggerated because people put this mystical value on DNA.”

As usual, Dr. Evans is absolutely right.

I appreciate the reporter’s hard work and I like the story, but I would offer a few corrections/clarifications:

• “Americans are notoriously hung up on privacy, and I get that,” he said. “[But] I don’t think that information is toxic.” That is an accurate quote, but that doesn’t mean I think we should all walk around naked or read each other’s mail.
• “When you make everyone anonymous, you impoverish the data,” he said. “You may have that person’s DNA, but you don’t have a name or a lot of the details that you may want someday.” Again, accurate, but I shouldn’t have emphasized names. I should have said that re-contacting research participants is important and you can’t do that when you sever the link.
• Since then, two pioneers in the field, James Watson and J. Craig Venter, allowed their DNA to be totally decoded and made public.  At the risk of nitpicking, Watson wanted his genotype at the Alzheimer’s risk gene APOE redacted. Alas, it couldn’t be done.
• In Angrist’s case, DNA was taken from a graft of his skin and mechanically sheared into smaller pieces; it will be put through a complicated, multistep process until the sequence is determined. Angrist’s DNA sample was taken in late October, and he hopes to have his genome sequence information within weeks. Actually, my genome sequence will be determined from white blood cells I donated in 2007. My skin cells will be used to create a cell line that is stem-cell-like.
• A native of Pittsburgh, he came to Duke in 2003 and works primarily in the areas of intellectual property and gene patenting. While it certainly feels that way at the moment, I’d like to think my work encompasses a lot of other stuff too: personal genomics, teaching, science writing, etc.
• [”Alzheimer’s is] in your 70s,” Angrist said. “Something that’s going to happen to me 30 years from now is not going to keep me up at night.” Of course I realize that many people develop AD much earlier. I did not mean for this to sound as blase and callous as it might. My point was, I have plenty of other stuff to worry about for the next couple of decades.

The prominent atheist is stepping down from his post at Oxford University to write a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in “anti-scientific” fairytales. Prof Hawkins said: “The book I write next year will be a children’s book on how to think about the world, science thinking contrasted with mythical thinking. “I haven’t read Harry Potter, I have read Pullman who is the other leading children’s author that one might mention and I love his books. I don’t know what to think about magic and fairy tales.”Prof Dawkins said he wanted to look at the effects of “bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards”.

“I think it is anti-scientific – whether that has a pernicious effect, I don’t know,” he told More4 News.

Hmmm…didn’t somebody once say that imagination is more important than knowledge?

With this insistence on the importance of environmental factors as shapers of our lives, Gladwell is bucking a deplorable recent trend in science. Over the past few decades, fields such as evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics have tipped the scales toward the nature side of the nature-nurture debate, implying that innate factors largely determine our personalities and talents, and hence our destiny. I call this line of reasoning “gene-whiz science.”

One notorious example of gene-whiz science is the 1994 best-seller The Bell Curve, in which Harvard scholars Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein asserted that blacks are innately less intelligent than whites. James Watson, the Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of the double helix, reiterated this persistent claim a year ago, as did Slate’s own William Saletan.

Well, you know what they say…

Sway: I know people have piercings, tattoos. Eric, in particular, is talking about a ban on sagging pants. Do [you] feel like people should be penalized?

Obama: Here is my attitude: I think people passing a law against people wearing sagging pants is a waste of time. We should be focused on creating jobs, improving our schools, health care, dealing with the war in Iraq, and anybody, any public official, that is worrying about sagging pants probably needs to spend some time focusing on real problems out there. Having said that, brothers should pull up their pants. You are walking by your mother, your grandmother, your underwear is showing. What’s wrong with that? Come on. There are some issues that we face, that you don’t have to pass a law, but that doesn’t mean folks can’t have some sense and some respect for other people and, you know, some people might not want to see your underwear — I’m one of them.

Via the immortal Balk