genomeboy.com

Remember cycle sequencing? No? Remember grunge?

Jeez Louise, you’ve got to wake up pretty early to beat these folks to the punch. Anyway, as they point out, the September/October issue of Technology Review features an opinion piece by yours truly:

As a participant in the Personal Genome Project, I’ve been asked more than once, “So…what will you do with your genome?” I have two boring stock answers, at least for now: not much, and I don’t know. But I do want to learn about my genome. I see personal genomics as akin to the first personal computers. What could we actually do with the Commodore 64 or the Apple II? Word-process? Occasionally. A bit of Lotus 1-2-3? I guess. Mostly, I remember software crashes and hardware freezes. In my house we managed to play a lot of solitaire and Minesweeper.

From the Department of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up:

McKinney was arrested in November 2004 in Tennessee in a van with the 15-year-old, according to a Carter County Sheriff’s Department arrest report.

McKinney, then living across the state line in Avery County, N.C., needed money to help her three-legged horse, Crockett said.

“She loved it dearly,” Crockett said. “She was a rather bizarre character, and seems to have a strange circumstance now.”

He recalled that McKinney had two or three dogs in her car when she conferred with him about her case.

“There was a strong aroma about her, and I told her this needed to be taken care of before I went to court with her,” Crockett said.

McKinney made news around the world this summer when she had five pups cloned in South Korea from her beloved pit bull Booger.

One wonders if the Raelians were involved.

Obviously there’s not much to see here (other than the above photo of Django in repose). I am traveling around New England, trying to write and trying to prepare for the fall semester. Back soon, I hope…God knows I miss the spam…

The revolution continues…

Dr. Tenenbaum says patients can get started on a project with as little as $50,000 to $100,000. Sums like that, for example, could fund the creation of a molecular profile of a tumor to try to predict what combination of already approved drugs might be effective. If results proved promising, more money could be raised to set up a full-blown virtual biotech — with a budget in the millions of dollars — that might test cocktails of therapies in animal models and try grouping patients into subtypes to better tailor treatments for them, among other projects.

Pentailed tree shrews have such an appetite for alcohol that each night they imbibe, weight for weight, the equivalent of a human downing up to nine glasses of wine.

***

“Alcohol intake by the pentailed tree shrew reaches levels that are dangerous to other mammals. This finding suggests adaptive benefits inherent to a diet high in alcohol.”

The German-led research team said it was likely the shrews avoided drunkenness and hangovers because their bodies had enhanced biological mechanisms to break down and dispose of alcohol, though what they are has yet to be pinpointed.

On the Media, arguably my favorite show on NPR, tackles direct-to-consumer personal genomics:

DAVID MAGNUS: Well, they have a right to that information, but that’s not the same as saying they have a right to get it in an unencumbered fashion.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: It is the same as saying that. Why should the medical establishment stop me from [getting] information about me?

DAVID MAGNUS: It’s about making sure that you understand and that there’s adequate informed consent for what you’re getting, so that we can avoid harm. In the story that the reporter wrote about cardiovascular disease, if because of his misunderstanding he starts thinking he doesn’t have to worry about his diet and his exercise and has a heart attack at a much younger age because he misunderstood that information - that is very clearly a direct harm that’s a function of the genetic testing.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I understand the risk. I do. But the harm comes from the action he takes based on that information. The government, and companies, and all sorts of interests around the world frequently say that certain kinds of information could harm us because of the actions we could take, regardless of whether the information is true or false.

I’m afraid that, in the case of my own medical information, in which the only real victim is likely to be me, if I take ill-advised action, that if a physician says that he or she deems it unnecessary for me to take such a test, then I don’t get access to it.

DAVID MAGNUS: What we’re saying is not that you can’t get access to it but that you need to have a physician involved. If you get to the point where there’s generally understood standards and people start to understand the information pretty well, you start to have a clear understanding of what the harms are, you have a clear understanding of the efficacy of the tests for different traits, when you get to that point, that’s when you tend to allow things to go over the counter or direct to consumer. But you don’t start that way.

But who will decide exactly when “people start to understand the information pretty well?” Will it be doctors, most of whom probably think “SNP” is slang for a vasectomy? Or should it be bioethicists?

Victor Almon McKusick (1921-2008), the Father of Medical Genetics. I think many of us believed he’d live forever.

…on George Church stories. I forced myself not to read this until I got my hard copy of Wired. I am sorry to report that it’s really, really good. Please don’t write a book in the next year, Thomas.

What could be more adaptive than this?

Dubbed ‘Gastrosexuals’ this new generation of men consider cooking more a hobby than a household chore and use their kitchen prowess to impress friends and prospective partners.

Men having the ability to cook is also now a key factor in attracting women along with salary, status, personality and appearance, according to new research.

I used to hate to cook. Now I find it gives me immense pleasure, though my daughters are not always enamored of my efforts.

For example, I think my fusion chicken is to die for. But you have to like cilantro and some folks are not genomically wired that way. You know who you are.

“The author and his daughter, Lena, who has half his DNA.”

People often assume that because of what I’m doing and because I write a blog called GenomeBoy, that I must be a starry-eyed genome worshipper. But if anything, getting genotyped has reminded me how much more we are than our DNA. All of those common-sense behavior changes actually matter. We are the products, finally, of our genes and our environments. And there is nothing mystical about either.