genomeboy.com

Thank you, James T. Kirkus. Note that the official pub date has since been moved up to 2 November 2010.

The book-trailer equivalent of The Player:

The only way I was ever going to get a first-author publication in Nature was if I just made it all up. So that’s what I did. Hat tip to David Dobbs for providing the scientific inspiration.

Sorry if it’s behind a pay wall. Email me and I’d be happy to send a pdf.

Here is a Human Being: At the Dawn of Personal Genomics will be published this fall by HarperCollins. The book is part memoir, part science geek fest, and part journalism. It traces the emergence of a once-radical notion that has, in a just a few short years, become entrenched: the idea that nearly anyone can get access to his or her own DNA sequence for any reason at all. It gives an inside account of the Personal Genome Project, Harvard geneticist and visionary George Church’s ambitious plan to sequence many genomes and make them public. It tells the human stories behind the technology that has enabled personal genomics, the companies seeking to sell you your genetic information, the do-it-yourselfers trying to track down genetic answers about themselves and their families, and the conflicted doctors and scientists who find themselves less than completely prepared for the genomic age. I also tell my own story: a trained human geneticist and genetic counselor eager (perhaps too eager) to experience the life of a research subject and begin to understand what this information means for me, for my family…for all of us.

I’m working on a page for the book, which so far looks…exactly like this. If there is a deeply remedial technical school for WordPress, then I am a promising candidate.

 UPDATE: full episode is here.

Don’t miss Rebecca Skloot tonight on the Colbert Report. Extra special guest: The BioBus!

The awesome Susan Orlean on mules (subscription):

The mule’s commitment to survival is interesting in a Darwinian context, because mules–the hybrid result of mating a male donkey with a female horse–have an uneven number of chromosomes and are therefore sterile. Every mule, then, is sui generis; it leaves no legacy beyond itself, no radiating gene pool to mark its visit to this world…Even the sheer persistence of the breed seems a stroke of genius. Since a horse and a donkey rarely mate on their own, mules are essentially man-made. It has been a successful invention–in fact, mules are probably the most successful and enduring animal hybrid, with beefalo coming in a distant second.

I put down Rebecca Skloot’s first book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” more than once. Ten times, probably. Once to poke the fire. Once to silence a pinging BlackBerry. And eight times to chase my wife and assorted visitors around the house, to tell them I was holding one of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I’ve read in a very long time.

Hear hear! Listen to her on Fresh Air. Go see Rebecca. Buy the book. Give to the foundation. Get the action figure. Read the book!

Not only can the past never really be erased; it co-exists, in cyberspace, with the present, and an important type of context is destroyed. This is one reason that intellectual inflexibility has become such a hallmark of modern political discourse, and why, so often, no distinction is recognized between hypocrisy and changing your mind.

- Jonathan Dee in the New York Times Magazine, 24 January 2010

The New York Times talks to literary theorist Terry Castle:

What are the latest trends in academia? Is poststructuralist theory dead yet?
Well, it carries on in its zombielike, jargon-ridden way here and there. But it’s on the wane. The smartest literary scholars right now are interested in evolutionary psychology and brain science — how we may be hard-wired for fiction-making, aesthetic appreciation and the like.

Is that a good development? How do you feel about seeing the adventure of life reduced to a function of DNA?
I guess I’m down with it because I’ve always felt, for instance, that my own lesbianism was genetic. My cousin, whom I was just visiting in London, we have the same DNA, and we’re both big, old dykes.

Um…you go girl?

The Genomics Law Report continues to dazzle. Two recent commentaries merit special attention.

• Daniel MacArthur on  the right of research participants to the entirety of their data:

Returning incidental findings poses major challenges for researchers: it requires disrupting well-established protocols for informed consent and subject anonymisation, and establishing new frameworks for responsible data return and counselling. Yet the alternative approach – withholding medically useful (or even simply intellectually interesting) information from research subjects even if they request it – is ethically problematic. In the absence of convincing evidence that disclosure of results causes harm, I would argue that the default position should be that research participants have complete access to their own genetic data if they request it.

• And Barbara Prainsack on the ways in which access to that data may create not only rights, but, for better or worse, obligations:

It is indeed a welcome development that growing numbers of people can access genetic and other health information (personalised and otherwise) relatively easily, and that specialised medical knowledge is no longer the prerogative of those with a professional education…But the participatory turn in medicine is also indicative of an ongoing individualisation of responsibility in health care: The more knowledge we can obtain, the more we will be expected to obtain, and to pay for.