genomeboy.com

Bob, who’s owned wild animals all his life, admits Higgins has not always been a model pet. When Higgins was 3, he slept with the couple, often awakening Bob in the morning by climbing to the bedroom rafters and dropping onto Bob’s stomach. On one occasion, they got in a wrestling match, and Higgins put one of his “steel-like fingernails” through Bob’s scrotum.

Bob has considered moving him to a sanctuary, but “I’m just too attached to him,” he says.

…

Bob has been bitten several times by Higgins, who now weighs 50 pounds and has large incisors. Once, when Bob was leading him from an outdoor enclosure back to his cage in the house, Higgins exploded and the two got into a battle so ferocious that despite the steel mesh glove Bob was wearing, he screamed for Carlie to get his .22 rifle and put a bullet in Higgins’s head. She got Higgins a slice of raisin bread instead, quickly defusing the fight. But Bob accepts it: a wild animal will never be domesticated, he says.

…

“He shivered and I leaned over and said, ‘Come here, baby, are you cold?’ and he exploded,” Ms. Bowers says. “He started biting and screaming at me, biting any place he could touch. It was a nightmare. We tipped over furniture, I would have killed him if I could. But he was so strong. I tried to choke him to make him stop. We fought for I don’t know how long. I was trying to hold him so he couldn’t bite me. I took one of my big fabric books and held it on his throat.”

…

JUDIE HARRISON, 50 and three times married, is an extreme example of monkey love. She once demanded that her 15-year-old son give up his bedroom for a chimp, and today she is estranged from all three of her children because she put the primates first. Her passion also cost her her home.

Words fail. 

Zen has also helped him to learn to “stop whining,” Mr. Cohen said, and to worry less about the choices he has made. “All these things have their own destiny; one has one’s own destiny. The older I get, the surer I am that I’m not running the show.”

A friend alerted me to this Atlantic Monthly podcast  because of Craig Venter’s discussion of genomic testing, which manages both to recycle old platitudes and be self-aggrandizing…all in less than a minute! An equally brief but more powerful viewing experience from the same podcast is Reed Tuckson on the endless health care policy debates.

Qu’est-ce que c’est? A refugee from Bee Movie? The love child of a large drug-addicted boll weevil and a mutant Pittsburgh Steeler?  No and no. Why, it’s SYRINGE MAN. Mise en garde, Peloton!

(via Deadspin)

Misha Angrist, an assistant professor at the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy at Duke University, completed his graduate studies with Chakravarti working on the genetic basis of Hirschsprung’s disease. Angrist remembers his mentor as an idea man above all else. “In the 1990s, I used to walk into Aravinda’s office and he’d be sitting there chain smoking and he’d have a yellow pad of paper in front of him and a pencil and he would sit there and…using only his own gray matter, solve a problem [in] population genetics, with no computer and no massive datasets,” Angrist says. “So he comes from this very pure intellectual tradition in genetics.”

I was extremely fortunate to have seven years in the Chakravarti lab, even if I didn’t always appreciate the experience at the time. Read the rest of the tribute to Aravinda here.

Peter Dizikes has a wonderfully nuanced article about genomic privacy in Salon (which I remember reading back when it was run by three people in their basement with an Apple II). The piece features quotes from Linda Avey, Amy DuRoss, Blaine Bettinger (a law student! who knew?), and yours truly, among others. My favorite is from the always pithy and thoughtful Hank Greely:

This is the seeming paradox of DNA: The better we understand our genes, the less important we might find them. “People believe in the magic of genes, and buy into the idea that they are the deepest secrets of our being,” Greely says. “Whereas maybe my credit card records come closer to being a deep secret of my being.”

Last November, an inebriated 24-year-old with the woefully apt name of Kyle Drinkwine was found by police in the back of a Wisconsin alley, his hands covered in blood. According to testimony compiled by the Smoking Gun, Drinkwine had spent the evening unwinding at Emma’s Bar, a local watering hole that was hosting a karaoke night. Shortly after performing an Eminem song, he allegedly became so enraged by another patron’s version of “Holy Diver”—the 1983 anthem by heavy-metal patriarch Ronnie James Dio—that he assaulted the singer and his friend and fled when police arrived. “This had started … over one’s ability to sing karaoke,” notes the arrest report, which reads like a Mike Judge novella.

The doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found.

It remains to be seen whether this will mollify the conspiracy theorists.

(via Balk)