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ScienceDaily (Feb. 12, 2010) — Just because you don’t swallow the worm at the bottom of a bottle of mescal doesn’t mean you have avoided the essential worminess of the potent Mexican liquor, according to scientists from the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario (BIO) at the University of Guelph.

They have discovered that the liquid itself contains the DNA of the agave butterfly caterpillar — the famously tasty mescal “worm.”

***

“Showing that the DNA of a preserved specimen can be extracted from the preservative liquid introduces a range of important possibilities,” said Dr. Mehrdad Hajibaebi, a member of the research team. “We can develop inexpensive, high-throughput and non-invasive genetic analysis protocols for situations where the original tissue cannot be touched or when there is simply no sample left for analysis.”

If they had wi-fi, I’d be on the first spaceship out of town:

If it sounds unrealistic to suggest that astronauts would be willing to leave home never to return alive, then consider the results of several informal surveys I and several colleagues have conducted recently. One of my peers in Arizona recently accompanied a group of scientists and engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a geological field trip. During the day, he asked how many would be willing to go on a one-way mission into space. Every member of the group raised his hand. The lure of space travel remains intoxicating for a generation brought up on “Star Trek” and “Star Wars.”

For those interested in family history, the NIH is holding a conference in August:

The purpose of this state-of-the-science conference, open to anyone, is to develop a consensus statement that advances the issue of family history by assessing the available scientific evidence on:

• The key elements of a family history in a primary care setting for the purposes of risk assessment for common diseases
• The accuracy of family history, and under what conditions the accuracy varies
• The direct evidence that getting a family history will improve health outcomes for the patient and/or family
• Factors that encourage or discourage obtaining and using a family history
• Future research directions for assessing the value of family history for common diseases in the primary care setting

The details:

• Attend in person August 24-26, 2009 in Bethesda, MD  
• Or register to watch the live Webcast if you can’t travel to attend in person

Does family history really need a conference to generate consensus statements and “advance” the issue? I’m not sure. But I applaud the organizers for (presumably) holding family history to the same evidence-based criteria they so often demand of direct-to-consumer genetic testing.

(Thanks to Erica Holt for the tip)

Dr. Kao did not deny placing large numbers of seeds outside the prostate, but he said investigators were wrong to single him out. “It’s a recognized risk of the procedure,” he told the panel.

Dr. Kao’s assertion was disputed by Steven A. Reynolds, who oversees materials safety at the N.R.C., which regulates all nuclear materials. Cases where large numbers of seeds miss the prostate, Mr. Reynolds said, “happen very, very infrequently.”

Mr. Specter called the accusations against Dr. Kao serious. Responding to questions from the senator, Dr. Kao confirmed that he had on occasion implanted seeds in the bladder.

“Did you notify the patient?” Mr. Specter asked.

“No, sir,” Dr. Kao replied.

Ahem. Take it away…

More from the Consumer Genetics Conference:

Francis Collins revealed that he has had genome scans from 23andMe, Navigenics and deCODEme. He likes the websites and says the genotyping is accurate. He notes that substantial differences in interpretation exist, in part because of different sets of SNPs that are tested by different companies. But, he notes, even with the same markers, interpretations sometimes vary. “Companies need to get together on this.” Family history is not factored in by companies, interventions are recommended by them, but the evidence is often weak, as is the likelihood of change in health behaviors. “We need to know more about what people do with the information.”

(CNN) – Earth Day may fall later this week, but as far as former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell and other UFO enthusiasts are concerned, the real story is happening elsewhere…Mitchell grew up in Roswell, New Mexico, which some UFO believers maintain was the site of a UFO crash in 1947. He said residents of his hometown “had been hushed and told not to talk about their experience by military authorities.” They had been warned of “dire consequences” if they did so.

[via The Awl, which I love]

With the new year comes opportunity for change in and, l hope, simplification of one’s life. Accordingly, I am eliminating the comments function from this blog. The simple truth is this: I have not gotten spam filter Akismet to work, but I have blacklisted all kinds of IP addresses as well as dozens of words and phrases (e.g., penile enlargement). Still the spam refuses to die and frankly I’m sick of it. In my view, life is too short to have to walk around with an electronic flyswatter 24/7, especially if you’re paying good money for bandwidth. So, at the risk of alienating one or two of you, henceforth Genomeboy will be comment-free. I hope you understand and I hope the blogging will be better for it. As always I would be happy to hear from you via my Duke address…I’m not hard to find.

Thanks for reading.

Ach, Ringo, we hardly knew ye…

Apparently “Peace and love” is the new “Get the hell off my lawn.”

I’m at the Personal Genomes meeting at Cold Spring Harbor. Maybe I’m jaded by now, but my expectations were low. I was wrong (admittedly it’s hard to know because they don’t give you an abstract book until you arrive). Watson gave his unique and pointed first-person history of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins talked about finding rare and semi-rare variants (unemployment has been good for him), and Mary-Claire King gave an absolute tour de force on breast cancer as a paradigm for personal genomics. This morning Richard Gibbs reflected on Watson’s genome and Elaine Mardis talked about using Illumina sequencing to decode the first cancer genome. And it’s not even 10AM.

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.”