Class acts
I have a piece in the June 23, 2010 edition of Slate (is it fair to call it an edition?) on the recent kerfuffle surrounding personal genomic testing on Bay Area college campuses:
A new kind of testing is coming to university campuses across the country. In the last month or so, Berkeley and Stanford each announced that their students would be offered the opportunity to have their DNA analyzed from saliva samples. The range of reactions to this news—from horror at the thought of young people misinterpreting their results to unbridled enthusiasm at the chance for large-scale genetics education—confirms that the field of personal genomics continues to mystify. Genetic testing for disease has been around for 50 years now, yet we have no consensus on how and even whether it should be used in healthy people.
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."