The DNA Network |
| Posted: 21 Jun 2008 05:01 PM CDT Arrgh. Fremont is just crawling with Pastafarians. Photos below the fold. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... |
| The Best Predictive Health Ethics Blogs - May 2008 [PredictER Blog] Posted: 21 Jun 2008 04:17 PM CDT It was a busy month for predictive health news: the president signed GINA, Francis Collins announced his eminent retirement, bloggers reported from important conferences at Case Western and Cold Spring Harbor, and Google announced the debut of Google Health. These events, and others, are reflected in this month's edition of the best blogs on the ethical issues of predictive health. Are you diseased? Pre-diseased? Potentially diseased? Greg Dahlmann, blog.bioethics.net. 6 May 2008. In this insightful post, Dahlmann examines how predictive health is changing our concept of disease. When, exactly, does increased risk = illness? Dahlmann writes: So we're moving from the concept of disease as a state of impaired function to it representing particular sets of probabilities. In the past you were sick when you had a heart attack. Today, you're sick -- or pre-sick, perhaps -- when you have high cholesterol. What about when it's possible to identify constellations of genes that significantly increase your chances of having high cholesterol, or a heart attack. Would that be considered a disease? Also see Dahlmann's follow up post on "previvors": Blood Matters. Greg Dahlmann, blog.bioethics.net. 11 May 2008. NHGRI Director Francis Collins to Step Down on August 1. Hsien-Hsien Lei, Eye on DNA. 28 May 2008. Lei shares the news the Francis Collins will retire from his post this summer and that Alan E. Guttmacher will become acting director. Lei also some thoughts on Collins' book The Language of God. In All Fairness. Fred Trotter, Fred Trotter: My life and thoughts, often about FOSS in medicine. 23 May 2008. Following the news coverage on the release of Google Health, Fred Trotter weighs in on the privacy questions. Trotter argues that Google is not a health care provider and is, therefore, not covered by HIPAA. He writes: Both Google Health and HealthVault are designed to make the process of dissemination of your health information to people you want them to be disseminated to easier. Are they doing that in a secure, privacy respecting way? Excellent question; fodder for further posts. Should they be covered by the same laws that cover your healthcare providers? No. Workman's Compensation, Stereotypes and GATTACA. Steve Murphy, Gene Sherpas: Personalized Medicine and You. 10 May 2008. Murphy addresses a few of the potential social consequences of predictive medicine, by examining the following scenario: Young person goes to 23andME/Navigenics/ETC (They just may add this immediately)....gets predictive testing indicating that he is at a 300 fold increased risk of herniating a disc in his back. Avoids manual labor (plays video games all day) never herniates the disc. Did we do society a service? 23andMe, deCODEme and Navigenics at Cold Spring Harbor. Daniel MacArthur, Genetic Future. 9 May 2008. MacArthur reports, first hand, from the "Biology of Genomes" meeting at Cold Spring Harbor. In addition to the big players in the consumer genomics movement, the speakers at the event included some ethics and policy experts, like Kathy Hudson from Johns Hopkins. Hudson, MacArthur notes, "responded to the problem of patients being given data of very limited predictive value with a very sensible solution: 'In the absence of demonstrable harm, the default should be to provide the information.'" Genetic testing ethics - consent forms becoming incomprehensible. Elaine Warburton, Genetics and Health. 7 May 2008. Warburton covers the Translating ELSI, Ethical Legal Social Implications of Human Genetics Research conference at Case Western University in Cleveland. In this entry she reports on Laura Beskow's comments regarding informed consent and the attitudes and concerns of research participants. Also see Warburton's related coverage of pediatric research ethics discussions at the conference in her post: Genetic Ethics - testing and storing our kids' DNA. Genetics and Health. 7 May 2008. The FDA ditches the Declaration of Helsinki. Stuart Rennie, Global Bioethics Blog. 6 May 2008. Stuart Rennie of Global Bioethics Blog examines the implications of the FDA's decision to abandon the Declaration of Helsinki. While Rennie focuses on the potential impact of this decision on US research overseas, and not specifically on predictive health research, this decision may have far reaching consequences on clinical trials of any sort. Rennie concludes with the following verdict: "the decision would seem to encourage pharmaceutical companies to cut ethical corners when working abroad". GINA Series: Irrational Bureaucratic Risk Abhorrence [Page 1]. Andrew Yates, Think Gene. 24 May 2008. This is the first post of a (thus far) four part series on GINA. Each post begins with the introduction: Recently, President Bush signed GINA, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, into law. GINA makes it illegal for employers or health insurers to discriminate based on genetics. Virtually the entire genetics community has lauds this legislation, yet few have written why it's wrong that employers and services review objective facts to make decisions. … "It's not fair…" but why? The Puzzling Consensus in Favor of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. Eric Posner, The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog. 6 May 2008. In what may be the most influential post covered in this edition of the best predictive health ethics blogs, Chicago Law professor Eric Posner examines the GINA and asks some compelling questions: Should the insurance company be permitted to offer the cheap insurance policy only to people who obtain a doctor's certification that a genetic test shows that they belong to the low-risk group? If you think that insurers should be able to discriminate on the basis of visible markers and on the basis of simple doctors' tests for the presence of dangerous diseases, then you should think they should be able to discriminate on the basis of genetic tests. There is no morally relevant distinction between looking at a person's blood for the evidence of infection and looking at his DNA for evidence of susceptibility to a disease. ... The only explanation for the enthusiasm for GINA is that there is an inchoate feeling among people that there is something wrong with the way the insurance market operates. Medical Genetics Is Not Eugenics. Gabriella Coleman ("biella"), What Sorts of People. 16 May 2008. Coleman responds to Ruth Cowan's article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, "Medical Genetics Is Not Eugenics". Although Cowan sees little value in thinking about the similarities of modern medical genetics and the mid-century eugenics movement, Coleman cautions: Even if, as [Cowan] rightly states that genetic testing is oriented primarily toward easing human suffering, genetic testing is still entangled with fraught ethical questions about what types of life we value, what is acceptable human life, and what is not—the very sorts of questions central to eugenics. |
| Personalized Genetics: Concerns and a bit of fun [ScienceRoll] Posted: 21 Jun 2008 02:43 PM CDT After finishing my exams (and becoming a 6th year medical student), it takes time to remove my backlog. So here are some interesting news and articles about individualized medicine I would like to share with you. First, let’s see concerns regarding the companies offering genetic services. Daniel MacArthur at Genetic Future wrote:
Andrew Yates at ThinkGene reviewed the service of 23andMe:
He also noted that:
And a little bit of fun:
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| I am curious: Genomics gets personal in Second Life [Discovering Biology in a Digital World] Posted: 21 Jun 2008 01:40 PM CDT Are you curious about Second Life? Next week you can satisfy your curiosity and learn about the personal genomics frontier at the same time. Bertalan Meskó announced that Erin Davis (science writer) and Joyce Tung (human geneticist) from 23andMe will be giving a presentation next week in Second Life on personalized genetics. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... |
| Daniel is a Great Guy! [The Gene Sherpa: Personalized Medicine and You] Posted: 21 Jun 2008 01:39 PM CDT I wanted to post quickly today on a this whole turf topic again. I thank Daniel over at Genetic-Future (Pound for pound the best new blog in this arena). It took some discourse to figure it... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] |
| GMOs Don’t Work. Wait, Maybe They Do. [] Posted: 21 Jun 2008 11:20 AM CDT
We’re so confused. First, they say that GMOs don’t really work. Then, they say that GMOs are a vast improvement, but it’s all a plot a plot to corner the food supply and extort large sums of money from a starving planet. Despite our cognitive dissonance, Aminopop is always able to draw two straight lines through whatever the bio-hysterics have on offer: 1) Corporations Bad. 2) The future looks like a B-Movie science fiction screenplay. |
| Posted: 21 Jun 2008 11:06 AM CDT The most interesting finding is that short of actually genotyping individuals to get estimates of genetic admixture, it is difficult to accurately predict degree of admixture from self-report questionnaire data. Comparing genetic ancestry and self-described race in african americans born in the United States and in Africa. Yaeger R, Avila-Bront A, Abdul K, Nolan PC, Grann VR, Birchette MG, Choudhry S, Burchard EG, Beckman KB, Gorroochurn P, Ziv E, Consedine NS, Joe AK. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2008;17(6):1329-38 Abstract: Genetic association studies can be used to identify factors that may contribute to disparities in disease evident across different racial and ethnic populations. However, such studies may not account for potential confounding if study populations are genetically heterogeneous. Racial and ethnic classifications have been used as proxies for genetic relatedness. We investigated genetic admixture and developed a questionnaire to explore variables used in constructing racial identity in two cohorts: 50 African Americans and 40 Nigerians. Genetic ancestry was determined by genotyping 107 ancestry informative markers. Ancestry estimates calculated with maximum likelihood estimation were compared with population stratification detected with principal components analysis. Ancestry was approximately 95% west African, 4% European, and 1% Native American in the Nigerian cohort and 83% west African, 15% European, and 2% Native American in the African American cohort. Therefore, self-identification as African American agreed well with inferred west African ancestry. However, the cohorts differed significantly in mean percentage west African and European ancestries (P less than 0.0001) and in the variance for individual ancestry (P less than 0.01). Among African Americans, no set of questionnaire items effectively estimated degree of west African ancestry, and self-report of a high degree of African ancestry in a three-generation family tree did not accurately predict degree of African ancestry. Our findings suggest that self-reported race and ancestry can predict ancestral clusters but do not reveal the extent of admixture. Genetic classifications of ancestry may provide a more objective and accurate method of defining homogenous populations for the investigation of specific population-disease associations |
| 23andMe in Second Life [ScienceRoll] Posted: 21 Jun 2008 07:18 AM CDT Just a quick reminder. 23andMe, one of the (if not the) most famous companies focusing on personalized genetics, will present a slideshow in Second Life in the next session of the Scifoo Lives On series.
If you would like to participate, here is the teleport link and some details as well. I’m looking forward to meeting you inside Second Life.         |
| Twitter for Health and Medicine [ScienceRoll] Posted: 21 Jun 2008 05:53 AM CDT I’m a fan of Patricia F. Anderson. For the reason why, see this slideshow about the role of Twitter in medicine and healthcare. (Via Emerging Technologies Librarian) If you want to follow me on Twitter, click here. If you want to follow Patricia, click here. If you want to follow Tim O’Reilly, click here. If you want to read every news about Second Life, click here.         |
| Don't do it Josh! [Omics! Omics!] Posted: 20 Jun 2008 10:03 PM CDT The Globe this week had a number of articles on the passing of the $1B biotech bill in Massachusetts and the proxy fight for Biogen Idec. But a third item really raised my eyebrows. Vertex's CEO Joshua Boger announced that Vertex is contemplating moving out of the state. The apparent driver of this is a concern that Vertex might outgrow the Boston area and that now might be the time to move, before the company grows even larger. Previous discussion of moving had produced a striking plan to relocate to the Boston waterfront. Now, I'll confess a certain personal interest. I'm probably going to be in this area for most of my employment life, so I don't want to see employers leave (I can see Vertex headquarters from my office). Furthermore, I believe big companies like Vertex, BiogenIdec and such have a beneficial effect on their overall corporate neighborhood -- they tend to grow more talent than they need and those persons tend to start new ventures near the old ones. Which is the point -- people don't really like to move. Yes, some folks will follow their job to the ends of the earth, but a lot of folks won't. So atop the disruption & distraction of moving, a lot of good people will leave in a short timespan. My general prejudice is that planners recognize such costs but then grossly underestimate them. Why might Vertex be contemplating such a move? The most cynical explanation is to try to extract tax incentives from either Massachusetts or wherever they move to. Such incentives have driven previous moves or new sites, with mixed success. Rhode Island trumpeted extracting Alpha-Beta from Massachusetts, until Alpha-Beta failed in the clinic and disappeared into the dust. More practically Boston does have its drawbacks & tradeoffs. Traffic is awful; but that's true of a lot of America. Housing prices are insane. Neither of these encourages new workers. On the other hand, the academic & hospital environment is huge and Boston has a decent transit system, which somewhat offsets the traffic issue. It is striking that so many large biotech & pharma have been trying to move in to Cambridge/Boston over the last decade or so (Merck, Novartis, Schering, Astra, Amgen, Sanofi-Aventis, etc). But in any case, I return to my main argument. I'm sure Vertex could thrive in many places -- Boston is not Mecca, and if they moved they would recover and thrive again -- but after paying a steep price of disruption & lost talent. Are there other options? One of course is to stick it out in Boston. Another is to have multiple locations, which incurs its own inefficiencies. No solution is perfect. But please leave migrations for the birds! |
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