genomeboy.com

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)

Will Saletan:

We shouldn’t overstate the case. Genes don’t determine everything, and most genes don’t vary significantly between populations. But research is constantly finding new gene-trait correlations and group differences. If your faith in equality depends on an ethnically or racially even distribution of all ability-influencing genes, you’re in trouble.

That’s why the framing question matters. People of your race may be on average faster, smarter, or more volatile than people of my race. But the opposite pattern may turn up if you and I are classified in some other way. My dad was black, my mom was white, I was born in Hawaii, I was raised in a broken home, I grew up in Indonesia, I went to private school, I played basketball, I used drugs, my grades were unspectacular, and I went to Harvard Law. Guess my IQ.

The distribution question doesn’t settle the framing question, because race is just one way in which ability can be unevenly distributed. To answer the framing question in the affirmative, you have to show something more. You have to show that classifying and comparing by race, rather than using some other classification system or judging each person as an individual, does more good than harm.

Happy almost-DNA Day! I spent the morning at Lowes Grove Middle School discussing genomes, alpacas, agriculture, Monsanto and genetic ancestry testing. Thanks to all of the students and thanks to Ms. Lewis!

(Photo from Double D Alpaca Ranch)

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.

With the help of the Personal Genetics Education Project’s Dana Waring Bateman, I have teamed up with Dr. Chris Korey at the College of Charleston. Both of us are teaching mavericky, genomicky classes this semester and Chris asked if his students could post on genomeboy in response to a series of questions he and Dana developed regarding the use of preimplantation genetic diagnosis to select for or against particular traits. “Anything to crowd out the spam,” I told him. I have modified the questions slightly to make them a bit bloggier.

• When we select for or against a trait, does it change how we as a society view that trait?
• How will the proliferation of sequenced personal genomes change our thoughts on what constitutes a disability? Or will it?
• How and whether genetic and genomic information ultimately leads to the expression of human traits remains unclear. How should that affect our use of this technology?
• Should the government restrict the use of this technology for positive and/or negative selection?  Why or why not?
• Is PGD a good idea? Make your case.

I confess I haven’t thought a whole lot about PGD, but I will say this: I see the emergence of this technology as inevitable and I think any attempts to ban it or drastically curtail it will fail. If parents want to select for or against a highly penetrant mendelian trait and they can’t do it in the US, they will go to China or Russia or the Cayman Islands or the UK. And it will only get cheaper. Thus, I think it would behoove regulatory agencies to get off their patooties and try to figure this out. The time for hand-wringing is long past.

Having said that, I worry about what we don’t know regarding the epigenetic effects of PGD and other assisted reproduction technologies. When we’re tiny balls of cells, we are extremely vulnerable. When we mess with a preimplantation embryo’s environment, we are likely to alter that embryo’s patterns of cell division, gene expression and/or morphology.

UPDATE: Will Saletan discusses the advent of increasingly sophisticated prenatal testing and its implications.

Please have at it in the comments.

I don’t always agree with Christopher Hitchens, but this paragraph made my heart flutter for its celebration of two things I love: genetics and Pittsburgh, PA.

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully “cultured” in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature “issue” of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It’s especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.

Jason has a comprehensive roundup of press coverage of Monday’s festivities. Closer to home, the Duke Today website attempts to cure insomnia by linking to this blog. If you go there and scroll down, you can take a poll on whether making one’s genome public is a good idea.

Slate says to quit slagging your Mama’s uterus:

It’s easier—for parents, doctors, educators—to say an obese toddler has a slow metabolism than to teach the family better eating and exercise habits. Since 1970, childhood obesity rates have quadrupled. If fetal programming mattered a lot, adult obesity increases would lag years behind. But they don’t. According to intelligence researcher James Flynn, the average IQ of the first wave of professional Asian-American immigrants was almost 10 points lower than that of white professionals; within one generation, the gap closed, suggesting that genes don’t shackle the mind. As Malcolm Gladwell points out: “There should be no great mystery about Asian achievement. It has to do with hard work and dedication to higher education.”

Munger, who writes the Progressive Alaska blog, told me Palin is not just a creationist, but a “young Earth” creationist who believes that man and dinosaurs once shared the planet, and that the world will end in her lifetime.

Palin-tology, you might call it.

Munger claims she tried to stock the local school board with creationists several years ago, which caused him to quiz her on her beliefs.

“She doesn’t believe in science, and her father was a science teacher,” Munger said. “She told me she felt she would see Jesus in her lifetime.”

May He deliver us all.