genomeboy.com

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.

A few months ago Dan Vorhaus asked me to contribute a brief commentary to his and his colleagues’ fantastic blog, The Genomics Law Report. The admittedly modest fruits of my labor are now up.

Dear Dr. Board-Certified Clinical Geneticist:

First of all, thank you! Sure, you could have bailed after pediatrics or internal medicine and made more money, but you chose to stick around for a couple more years, incur still more debt, and make less. Much less! (Fortunately, you are a doctor and not a financial adviser.)  And a fine doctor you are, schooled in the ancient art of dysmorphology, which is probably as inscrutable to your molecular-fetishist colleagues as exon-capture protocols are to you.

It is meant to be light and to both poke a bit of fun at and sympathize with medical geneticists. I thank David Dimmock for helpful feedback, though all of the blame lies squarely with me.

For a more responsible take, please read Hank Greely’s commentary.

No one treats anything they care about based on efficiency.

- Andrew Kimbrell

“Cancer’s A Funny Thing”

I wish I had the voice of Homer
To sing of rectal carcinoma,
Which kills a lot more chaps, in fact,
Than were bumped off when Troy was sacked.
Yet, thanks to modern surgeons’ skills,
It can be killed before it kills
Upon a scientific basis
In nineteen out of twenty cases.
I noticed I was passing blood
(Only a few drops, not a flood).
So pausing on my homeward way
  From Tallahassee to Bombay
I asked a doctor, now my friend,
To peer into my hinder end,
To prove or disprove the rumour
That I had a malignant tumour.
They pumped in BaSO4
Till I could really stand no more,
And, when sufficient had been pressed in,
They photographed my large intestine.
In order to decide the issue
They next scraped out some bits of tissue.
(Before they did so, some good pal
Had knocked me out with pentothal,
Whose action is extremely quick,
And does not leave me feeling sick.)
The microscope returned the answer
That I had certainly got cancer.
So I was wheeled into the theatre
Where holes were made to make me better.
One set is in my perineum
Where I can feel, but can’t yet see ‘em.
Another made me like a kipper
Or female prey of Jack the Ripper.
Through this incision, I don’t doubt,
The neoplasm was taken out,
Along with colon, and lymph nodes
Where cancer cells might find abodes.
A third much smaller hole is meant
To function as a ventral vent:
So now I am like two-faced Janus
The only* god who sees his anus.
(*In India there are several more
  With extra faces, up to four,
  But both in Brahma and in Shiva
  I own myself an unbeliever.)
I’ll swear, without the risk of perjury,
It was a snappy bit of surgery.
My rectum is a serious loss to me,
But I’ve a very neat colostomy,
And hope, as soon as I am able,
To make it keep a fixed time-table.
So do not wait for aches and pains
To have a surgeon mend your drains;
If he says ‘cancer’ you’re a dunce
Unless you have it out at once,
For if you wait it’s sure to swell,
And may have progeny as well.
My final word, before I’m done,
Is ‘Cancer can be rather fun.’
Thanks to the nurses and Nye Bevan
The NHS is quite like heaven
Provided one confronts the tumour
With a sufficient sense of humour.
I know that cancer often kills,
But so do cars and sleeping pills;
And it can hurt one till one sweats,
So can bad teeth and unpaid debts.
A spot of laughter, I am sure,
Often accelerates one’s cure;
So let us patients do our bit
To help the surgeons make us fit.
                        - J.B.S. Haldane

Many people feel that it is a more elevated act to donate anonymously: not to pick a recipient, in other words, but simply to show up at a hospital and offer one’s kidney, leaving it to the transplant center to assign it to the next person on the list. Sometimes the recipients in these transactions choose not to meet their donors; sometimes they don’t even send a note to say thank you. For a donor to pick a recipient through a service like MatchingDonors can seem, from this perspective, like egotism—playing God by choosing who will live, and encouraging gratefulness by arranging for a relationship with the recipient. But, in a certain literal sense, a nondirected donation is not altruistic in a way that picking a recipient is, because there is no other there. There is no human story, just a principle; the only thing visible to the donor is his own shining deed.

Larissa MacFarquahar on kidney donation in the New Yorker (registration required). Wow. Best nonfiction I’ve read this year.

Moms are more than sources of existential angst and mitochondrial DNA. My friend Nicole Chaison has written a book that demonstrates this with unmatched wit and aplomb. It’s called The Passion of the Hausfrau and if you are a parent or ever had parents, then you should obtain a copy post haste.