genomeboy.com

I belong to a generation that grew up believing we were shaped by love, care, or lack of it — or perhaps even the number of books on our parents’ bookshelves. But we will go to our graves believing that it is a combination of letters in our genetic code that determines how we get there, and when. Our concept of the stuff we are made of will have undergone fundamental changes. I got a glimpse of that when I was looking around that room at my fellow mutants, and again and again…as I looked at myself, my biological daughter, and my adopted son. I was transported to a new era, a future that will rest on a different understanding not only of what causes things to go wrong in human beings but of what makes a human being in the first place, and what connects any one of us to any other.

- Writer and BRCA1 mutation carrier Masha Gessen, from Blood Matters

My response to the recent NEJM editorial on commercial personal genomics companies:

…many [personal genomics customers] will march into their doctors’ offices looking for help reading their genomic tea leaves. Most physicians, at least for the moment, are ill-equipped to deal with this. But does that mean the appropriate response is to simply pat patients on the head and tell them to wait a few years until the New England Journal says it’s OK?

That strikes me as both unproductive and naive.

Read the rest here.

Me: I’m hoping you’ll sign my book.

JCV: You wrote a book?

Me: Not yet, but you did. Will you sign it?

JCV: It’s not out for another month. How did you get it?

Me (sheepish, eyes cast downward): Um…eBay?

JCV: (grumbles about eBay, signs book, hands it to me). Here. Now it’s worth a whole bunch of money. (As elevator doors are closing) Did you read it?

I also should have realized that Peter Pauling would feel a filial duty to send my manuscript to his father. After reading it, Linus fired off an angry letter to [editor] Tom Wilson calling Base Pairs “a disgraceful example of malevolence and egocentricity.” He wrote demanding that I remove the lines “Linus’s screwy chemistry” and “Linus looking like an ass.” These were phrases I knew good taste would lead me to delete before the manuscript went to the printer. But since they were true, I was loath to remove them before absolutely necessary.

- from Watson’s forthcoming memoir, Avoid Boring People

“I’m not doing it just to satisfy myself. I’m doing it because I know that, if the audience only gets this story and the way that it is written, their lives are going to be changed.”

- Sir Ian McKellen on performing Shakespeare