genomeboy.com

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

President Obama will appoint a new bioethics commission, one with a new mandate and that “offers practical policy options,” Mr. Cherlin said

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Under Dr. Kass in particular, the council was sometimes accused of being more ideological than its predecessors, but several bioethicists said that was not entirely fair.

“The other view is that all presidential commissions are structured in the context of a particular administration,” said Dr. Ruth Faden, a bioethicist at John Hopkins University.

Bioethics commissions, mostly at the presidential level, have been in existence since 1974. Composed mostly of biologists and ethicists, they have served to familiarize the public with new advances and have developed guidance on contentious issues like genetic engineering, human cloning and research on humans.

Under Dr. Kass the council produced reports with a somewhat philosophical bent on issues like the screening of newborns and how to determine death.

A sad day. I, for one, will miss being told not to eat ice cream in public.

(via GenomeWeb)

Eugenics lives:

Worried that welfare costs are rising as the number of taxpayers declines, state Rep. John LaBruzzo, R-Metairie, said Tuesday he is studying a plan to pay poor women $1,000 to have their Fallopian tubes tied.

“We’re on a train headed to the future and there’s a bridge out,” LaBruzzo said of what he suspects are dangerous demographic trends. “And nobody wants to talk about it.”

Oh really? A bridge you say?

I have tried to keep my big fat pie-hole shut about the ongoing battle over regulation of personal genomics companies and instead ply you all (my seven readers!) with genomic fluff because 1) I selfishly want to save a lot of the corporate personal genomics stuff for my book; 2) plenty of other folks have weighed in; and 3) I keep waiting for the curtain to fall on this theater of the absurd. Apparently the latter is not going to happen anytime soon:

Ann Willey, director of the Office of Laboratory Policy for New York State, who is both a board-certified geneticist and a lawyer, spoke last week at CHI’s Beyond Genome conference in San Francisco. “I think of this genomic profiling paradigm…as really a star,” Willey said. “By the time we get done regulating it…we’re going to have to force it into a globe and shear off some of its sparkling and promising aspects.”

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Willey said regulation of these companies could potentially fall into several different categories, including the practice of medicine, or a laboratory, or information management. “The jury is out, we haven’t decided what it is,” said Willey. “Once we make it a duck, it better quack like a duck. No matter what box we put it in, we put constraints on it… But we don’t want to leave them in no box, because we have no oversight.” Willey said her office regularly sends warning letters to laboratory testing facilities, from tests on human genes to microbial flora. “We’re not picking on this [genome analysis] industry. We really want to make this work.

“But I’m from the government and I can’t always help.”

Hoo wee! Really fills one with confidence, don’t it? I only wish I’d stuck around Beyond Genome long enough to see the show.

Today was a bittersweet day. One of my graduate professors in human genetics and a true gentleman, Bob Ferrell, is finally free of the yoke of his so-called “crime,” i.e., mailing some innocuous bacterial samples to an artist for a bio-art project. That’s actually great. What’s not so great is the fact that for Bob to get to this day meant enduring four years of FBI scrutiny, three strokes, two bouts with cancer and a partridge in a freaking pear tree. And oh yeah, a guilty plea and a pledge to roll over so the feds can try to build a case against the artist, who’s been charged with mail fraud for the $200 worth of bacterial cultures he received.

How’s that war on terror going, anyway? Are these our tax dollars at work?