genomeboy.com

Will Saletan:

We shouldn’t overstate the case. Genes don’t determine everything, and most genes don’t vary significantly between populations. But research is constantly finding new gene-trait correlations and group differences. If your faith in equality depends on an ethnically or racially even distribution of all ability-influencing genes, you’re in trouble.

That’s why the framing question matters. People of your race may be on average faster, smarter, or more volatile than people of my race. But the opposite pattern may turn up if you and I are classified in some other way. My dad was black, my mom was white, I was born in Hawaii, I was raised in a broken home, I grew up in Indonesia, I went to private school, I played basketball, I used drugs, my grades were unspectacular, and I went to Harvard Law. Guess my IQ.

The distribution question doesn’t settle the framing question, because race is just one way in which ability can be unevenly distributed. To answer the framing question in the affirmative, you have to show something more. You have to show that classifying and comparing by race, rather than using some other classification system or judging each person as an individual, does more good than harm.

In the current New England Journal of Medicine, David Goldstein wrote:

If common variants are responsible for most genetic components of type 2 diabetes, height, and similar traits, then genetics will provide relatively little guidance about the biology of these conditions, because most genes are “height genes” or “type 2 diabetes genes.”

In response, a friend of mine emailed and asked:

“What I find difficult to accept is that [Goldstein] has ongoing [genome-wide association] studies, so does he not believe in his own work?”

My response: I can’t speak for David, but having just read his commentary, I think he would say that if you’re going to do GWAS, the disease itself should probably not be the phenotype under study, because we’ve done those studies and so far they’ve produced a failry shitty ROI, at least by conventional definitions of clinical relevance. You’ll have more luck studying endophenotypes, e.g., drug response, brain structure as measured by MRI, a decline in working in memory, etc.

In an accompanying commentary, Joel Hirschhorn wrote:

I believe that the skeptics’ arguments either misconstrue the primary goal of genomewide association studies or are contradicted by their findings. The main goal of these studies is not prediction of individual risk but rather discovery of biologic pathways underlying polygenic diseases and traits. It is already clear that the genes being identified expose relevant biology.

Hmm. Yes of course we’ve learned a lot of biology, but isn’t this moving the goal posts a little bit? In the grants we write, do we not extol the clinical relevance of our work and the enormous promise it holds for diagnostics, therapeutics and–gasp!–actual cures for the diseases that ravage our species? Or do we modestly say, “Each discovery of a biologically relevant locus is a potential first step in a translational journey?” If we acknowledge that 100 years elapsed between the elucidation of the chemical makeup of cholesterol and the development of statins, does that make it okay? Given that 45 years have passed since the recognition that human response to anticoagulant drugs is genetically mediated and we STILL can’t agree about whether pharmacogenetic testing is a good idea, do we just shrug and say, “It is what it is?”

As I’ve said here before by way of disclosure, David Goldstein is a friend and colleague. Even if I don’t always agree with him (and I think he’s wrong when he offers the usual broad indictment of the personal genomics companies), I admire his willingness to — as Richard Preston said of Craig Venter — fart in church.

In the end I’ve had about enough of this debate. It is as if we are arguing over the merits of the compact disc when we all know its days are numbered. Within two years, I imagine that most everyone doing molecular human genetics and genomics of any kind will be sequencing whole genomes.

Whether anyone will understand the data is another matter…

The doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found.

It remains to be seen whether this will mollify the conspiracy theorists.

(via Balk)

On Saturday, my family and I boarded the Carolinian and traveled from Durham, NC to Washington DC. And we would have been on time too, if it hadn’t been for Barack Obama’s own rail journey. So we sat for an hour and a half. But we were in a forgiving mood.

It was to be a weekend of waiting and standing in lines. On Sunday we went to the We Are One concert and waited for 90 minutes to go through the security checkpoint. Once inside, the family found a place near the jumbotron. I waited 90 minutes to buy food. While there I marveled at the sea of humanity and how cheerful everyone was, even those of us with hungry and cranky children and those of us who couldn’t feel our toes.

The concert was fun and had a lot less schmaltz than I expected. Bruce Springsteen singing “The Rising” backed by a massive choir was as moving a performance as I’ve seen. Stevie Wonder, Sheryl Crow, Mary J. Blige, James Taylor, Bettye Lavette, U2…all were stirring and inspired. Even Garth Brooks’ THREE songs couldn’t ruin the moment.

More lines: People were queued up around the block in front of both the House and Senate office buildings to retrieve their inauguration tickets.

Everyone seemed to be cognizant of the significance of the moment, Corporate America included:

Tuesday–Inauguration Day–was pandemonium. The streets around the Capitol were clogged for a mile in every direction. It took us over an hour to go a few blocks. We wound up on the lawn “near” the Washington Monument. The family and I sat down on the grass for a while. But soon the crowd became progressively more dense and we had to stand up. It reminded me of the Who concert I attended in 1979. You could lift up your legs and the press of the crowd would keep you airborne. People literally could not move. It got to be rather scary; eventually I decided to get my kids out of there because I wanted them to be able to live through the next eight years.

We made our getaway and took in the scenery on the way home.

Despite lunatics like the one above, and despite my kvetching and congenital cynicism, it was a spectacular experience. Because of course,

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them - that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works - whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.

There is much to admire about President Obama, but what appeals to me about him as much as anything is this: he is an empiricist. Which brings us back to the same forces that have driven the development of genomics:

We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

Amen. Now back to work.

Sway: I know people have piercings, tattoos. Eric, in particular, is talking about a ban on sagging pants. Do [you] feel like people should be penalized?

Obama: Here is my attitude: I think people passing a law against people wearing sagging pants is a waste of time. We should be focused on creating jobs, improving our schools, health care, dealing with the war in Iraq, and anybody, any public official, that is worrying about sagging pants probably needs to spend some time focusing on real problems out there. Having said that, brothers should pull up their pants. You are walking by your mother, your grandmother, your underwear is showing. What’s wrong with that? Come on. There are some issues that we face, that you don’t have to pass a law, but that doesn’t mean folks can’t have some sense and some respect for other people and, you know, some people might not want to see your underwear — I’m one of them.

Via the immortal Balk

I don’t always agree with Christopher Hitchens, but this paragraph made my heart flutter for its celebration of two things I love: genetics and Pittsburgh, PA.

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully “cultured” in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature “issue” of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It’s especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.

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?

Munger, who writes the Progressive Alaska blog, told me Palin is not just a creationist, but a “young Earth” creationist who believes that man and dinosaurs once shared the planet, and that the world will end in her lifetime.

Palin-tology, you might call it.

Munger claims she tried to stock the local school board with creationists several years ago, which caused him to quiz her on her beliefs.

“She doesn’t believe in science, and her father was a science teacher,” Munger said. “She told me she felt she would see Jesus in her lifetime.”

May He deliver us all.

Cognitive dissonance, for lack of a better term:

According to Alaska’s 2009 catalog of earmark requests the state’s sea life are in great need of federal money. As Politico points out, Palin’s office requested $2 million in federal monies to study crab mating habits; $494,900 for the recreational halibut harvest and $3.2 million for seal genetics research.

Those requests for the study of wildlife genetics and mating habits seems pretty antithetical to the long-standing views of Palin’s running mate, John McCain.

“We’re not going to spend $3 million of your tax dollars to study the DNA of bears in Montana,” McCain said earlier this year, referring to a request from Montana for federal money to study the endangered grizzly bear. “I don’t know if it was a paternity issue or criminal, but it was a waste of money.”