November 24, 2010
Even as a curious scientist and a 23andMe employee, I hesitated before opening my genetic test results and wondered...Do I really want to know? Misha Angrist asks himself a similar question in his new book, Here is a Human Being. Then again, he had a really good reason to give pause. As subject number four [...]
October 7, 2010
Taken individually, the letters A, G, T, and C seem relatively harmless. However, when arranged three billion strong into a human genetic code, these letters have instilled fear of discrimination, disease risk, and a genetically engineered super race of humans (à la the 1997 film “GATTACA”). Once only [...]
October 5, 2009
Dan Vorhaus at Genomics Law Report has launched "What ELSI is new?", a series of guest posts on the most pressing ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) relating to genomics. (You gotta love the name.) The contributor list is a who's who of voices in the ELSI, policy, and blog worlds. I'm honored to [...]
April 29, 2009
I spent the better part of my undergraduate career lugging around massive biology textbooks. General biology, genetics, embryology: It didn't matter, they all weighed a ton. I pored over endless chapters of text, highlighting the important sentences, always wishing for more photos, more diagrams, more [...]
February 20, 2009
Almost since the 1871 publication of "The Descent of Man," in which Charles Darwin applied his theory of natural selection to the human species, biologists have argued over whether the dramatic series of evolutionary events that led to the emergence of Homo sapiens continues to this day. Some have argued [...]
June 20, 2008
What can we learn from studying how variations of human genes are spread out around the world? A lot, said population geneticist and Harvard junior fellow Sohini Ramachandran, who spoke at 23andMe this week. Ramachandran focused on how genes spread from one continent to another, and how they vary within [...]
March 4, 2008
Last Sunday's New York Times had an interesting story by Amy Harmon about people who choose not to undergo genetic diagnostic testing, or try to keep their results a secret, out of fear that they will lose their health coverage. But the letters in response to that story, published in this Sunday's paper, [...]
