genomeboy.com

I can only hope that this is still active, because I’m sure every homeless hospital patient in New York would be glad to know that his/her genome is worth five gallons of gas, four Sunday Times, three six packs, and a partridge in a freaking pear tree.

The hospital plans to offer a $20 incentive to any patient who donates an eight-milliliter vial of blood to a new Biobank, a warehouse of DNA and plasma that is a central component of the hospital’s Institute for Personalized Medicine. “Personalized medicine,” an approach that incorporates molecular analysis into managing a patient’s health, has been touted as the future of medicine ever since scientists completed the map of the human genome in 2003.

Woo hoo! Muchos gracias, Mt. Sinai! Can I give 16 mls and get $40? Can I bring my kids in, too? How much for my dog’s lymphocytes?

“Vegas Solves Health Care Crisis!”

(l to r) Brian Greene, some photobomber, Paul Nurse, Nikolas Rose, Jim Evans, Francis Collins

The World Science Festival was as delightful as advertised. The street fair was overflowing with stuff to do, especially for kids. Next year I hope to bring mine. Bravo to Brian Greene!

I don’t know how my fellow panelists or the audience felt, but I thought our session, “Your Biological Biography,” was both fun and engaging, largely due to the masterful moderating job of Sir Paul Nurse, who is the antithesis of the stereotypical egocentric Nobel laureate/major university president. He is quick-witted, modest to a fault, and a brilliant conversationalist, someone you could chat with for hours on just about any subject. Drs. Rose, Evans and Collins responded in kind with thoughtful and nuanced discussion of personal genomics and all of the surrounding medical, legal, ethical and social issues. My only regret is that Dr. Latanya Sweeney was not able to make it and share her insights on genomic privacy.

I talked about getting my SNP data from George and from Navigenics, the limitations of it, SNPedia, my family history, my own curiosity, and how I’m probably not a terribly zealous early adopter after all. At the end I tried to make two points. One is that genome scientists themselves are succeeding in killing genetic determinism where bioethicists and philosophers have failed. That is, by finding that traits like type 2 diabetes and height are influenced by some ridiculous number of genes and the environment, genomicists are putting to rest the notion that single genes typically exert powerful, inexorable effects that determine who we are. Yeah, that happens in some cases, but complex traits are still complex, which makes accurate genetic predictions harder to achieve and genetic discrimination even harder to justify.

The other thing I tried to get across is that simply trashing personal genomics companies is not terribly helpful. Whatever their shortcomings (and they have plenty), these companies are here to stay in some way, shape or form. The more productive things to do, in my opinion, are to find out why people want this information, what their expectations are for it, how it should and shouldn’t be regulated, and how personal genomics, in all of its guises, can be assimilated by both the health care community and the public in useful ways.

You know, people, if you give a guy a few Navitinis, he’s probably not gonna remember much at all…

Just sayin’.

Let me add my loud huzzahs to the congratulatory chorus: Amy Harmon has won a richly deserved Pulitzer. I read everything she writes and if they are doing their homework, then my students do, too. Mazel tov, Amy!

So maybe this systems biology thing might catch on after all…Matthew Herper calls attention to a Nature study (summarized here) wherein Rosetta Inpharmatics and deCODE analyzed the expression of ~24,000 genes in order to find networks of genes associated with changes in body mass index. In other words, it’s GWAS meets microarrays.

The new technique isn’t a final solution to the problem of how to figure out which genetic defects actually cause disease, says Leroy Hood head of the Institute for Systems Biology. Leonid Kruglyak of Princeton University led a 2002 team that used the same basic ideas to understand genes in yeast. “It’s nice to see this beginning to bear fruit in human studies,” he says.

George Church of Harvard University says his project to sequence the DNA of thousands of people–called the Personal Genome Project–is collecting data from tissue samples to do similar kinds of work.