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Your Genome Scanned While You Wait
dotc writes "A Wired reporter has his DNA scanned for disease predispositions. While we all knew this was coming soon, it's still a little strange to read the first-person account."
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When will we have to make sure we leave no testable samples of DNA when going in for an interview? :)
More importantly when we go on dates?
...is just a few years away. On the upside, GE should render those "add three inches..." spams pretty much obsolete for my grandchildren.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
You mean I've been collecting Jude Law's blood and urine samples all these years for nothing?!
And of course, the next news article will be that HMO's have begun rejecting medical procedures based on the predisposition for certain diseases of certain genomes.
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
1) People will take predispositions too seriously. People with 'bad' genes will think they're doomed and live like it. People without any 'bad' genes will think they're bulletproof and live like it.
2) This won't just be used for diseases. You may remember in the movie Gattica there was one of these devices being used for personality analisis. How long before (even if made illegal) employers feed this information in about employees? People run their date's information through a computer to try and predict compatibility?
...was that this was coming. The question now are, when and will people accept this as a moral practice, or reject it as something unethical.
... we all earned from Bart in episode 2F20 (The conclusion to "Maggie Shot Mr. Burns") that no court would ever accept DNA evidence!
Sure, you can find a few statistical correlations between a few very dangerous diseases and genetic markers, but as the story points out, they still don't know enough to say for certain that a person will get breast cancer at age 47 1/2, or have a heart attack at 53 while climbing 3 flights of stairs.
We don't know enough about the genetic code yet (whether we should even try to learn it is another debate, you need only look at how Western Society has been damaged by the results of invetigating the poor fertility of yam-eating Mexican Indians) to do more than rough guesses that are about as accurate as asking about your families medical history.
If you want to live longer, eat right, exercise and don't smoke. I'm sure our Pope will soon ban this useless exercise, anyhow.
A. Rightmann
I read that J. Craig Venter (owner of Celera, who beat the HUGO project to sequence the human genome) sells the opportunity to have your own genome sequenced for 500,000$
How far into the future is the Genescope from Michael Cordy's books, a device that, among other things, can show a real life image of someone constructed from his/her DNA?
-- Cheers!
... on school playgrounds everywhere:
"My genome is better than your genome!"
My jeans get scaned everytime I walk down the street and the ladys check out my ass.
I hear that a new drug called Stummies will fix all of these genetic problems.
Did anyone other than me just get *TOTALLY* creeped-out by that article? Not the Gattica references, although the social implications are staggering (i.e. the Philip-Morris quote), but more of the feeling that knowing all the things about my body that *could* go wrong, and trying to treat them in advance is just something that we don't understand the ramifications of entirely?
I started trying to read it. It reads like some boring work of fiction laden with irrelevant details such as the fact the sun was setting! What are the key relevant facts in that article?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
DNA as Destiny
.49: I will live to the age of 88. 44 years of StairMaster to go.
.49 on his scale. It indicates a lifespan at least 20 percent longer than that of the average American male who, statistically speaking, dies in his 74th year. I will likely live, then, to the age of 88. That's 44 years of StairMaster to go.
DNA is the book of life. It's also the book of death. In the future we'll all be read cover to cover. Here's what it's like to take the world's first top-to-bottom gene scan.
By David Ewing Duncan
I FEEL NAKED. EXPOSED. As if my skin, bone, muscle tissue, cells have all been peeled back, down to a tidy swirl of DNA. It's the basic stuff of life, the billions of nucleotides that keep me breathing, walking, craving, and just being. Eight hours ago, I gave a few cells, swabbed from inside my cheek, to a team of geneticists. They've spent the day extracting DNA and checking it for dozens of hidden diseases. Eventually, I will be tested for hundreds more. They include, as I will discover, a nucleic time bomb ticking inside my chromosomes that might one day kill me.
For now I remain blissfully ignorant, awaiting the results in an office at Sequenom, one of scores of biotech startups incubating in the canyons north of San Diego. I'm waiting to find out if I have a genetic proclivity for cancer, cardiac disease, deafness, Alzheimer's, or schizophrenia.
This, I'm told, is the first time a healthy human has ever been screened for the full gamut of genetic-disease markers. Everyone has errors in his or her DNA, glitches that may trigger a heart spasm or cause a brain tumor. I'm here to learn mine.
Waiting, I wonder if I carry some sort of Pandora gene, a hereditary predisposition to peek into places I shouldn't. Morbid curiosity is an occupational hazard for a writer, I suppose, but I've never been bothered by it before. Yet now I find myself growing nervous and slightly flushed. I can feel my pulse rising, a cardiovascular response that I will soon discover has, for me, dire implications.
In the coming days, I'll seek a second opinion, of sorts. Curious about where my genes come from, I'll travel to Oxford and visit an "ancestral geneticist" who has agreed to examine my DNA for links back to progenitors whose mutations have been passed on to me. He will reveal the seeds of my individuality and the roots of the diseases that may kill me -- and my children.
For now, I wait in an office at Sequenom, a sneak preview of a trip to the DNA doctor, circa 2008. The personalized medicine being pioneered here and elsewhere prefigures a day when everyone's genome will be deposited on a chip or stored on a gene card tucked into a wallet. Physicians will forecast illnesses and prescribe preventive drugs custom-fitted to a patient's DNA, rather than the one-size-fits-all pharmaceuticals that people take today. Gene cards might also be used to find that best-suited career, or a DNA-compatible mate, or, more darkly, to deny someone jobs, dates, and meds because their nucleotides don't measure up.
It's a scenario Andrew Niccol imagined in his 1997 film, Gattaca, where embryos in a not-too-distant future are bioengineered for perfection, and where genism -- discrimination based on one's DNA -- condemns the lesser-gened to scrubbing toilets.
The Gattaca-like engineering of defect-free embryos is at least 20 or 30 years away, but Sequenom and others plan to take DNA testing to the masses in just a year or two. The prize: a projected $5 billion market for personalized medicine by 2006, and billions, possibly hundreds of billions, more for those companies that can translate the errors in my genome and yours into custom pharmaceuticals.
Sitting across from me is the man responsible for my gene scan: Andi Braun, chief medical officer at Sequenom. Tall and sinewy, with a long neck, glasses, and short gray hair, Braun, 46, is both jovial and German. Genetic tests are already publicly available for Huntington's disease and cystic fibrosis, but Braun points out that these illnesses are relatively rare. "We are targeting diseases that impact millions," he says in a deep Bavarian accent, envisioning a day when genetic kits that can assay the whole range of human misery will be available at Wal-Mart, as easy to use as a home pregnancy test.
But a kit won't tell me if I'll definitely get a disease, just if I have a bum gene. What Sequenom and others are working toward is pinning down the probability that, for example, a colon cancer gene will actually trigger a tumor. To know this, Braun must analyze the DNA of thousands of people and tally how many have the colon cancer gene, how many actually get the disease, and how many don't. Once this data is gathered and crunched, Braun will be able to tell you, for instance, that if you have the defective DNA, you have a 40 percent chance, or maybe a 75 percent chance, by age 50, or 90. Environmental factors such as eating right -- or wrong -- and smoking also weigh in. "It's a little like predicting the weather," says Charles Cantor, the company's cofounder and chief scientific officer.
Braun tells me that, for now, his tests offer only a rough sketch of my genetic future. "We can't yet test for everything, and some of the information is only partially understood," he says. It's more of a peek through a rudimentary eyeglass than a Hubble Space Telescope. Yet I will be able to glimpse some of the internal programming bequeathed to me by evolution, and that I, in turn, have bequeathed to my children -- Sander, Danielle, and Alex, ages 15, 13, and 7. They are a part of this story, too. Here's where I squirm, because as a father I pass on not only the ingredients of life to my children but the secret codes of their demise -- just as I have passed on my blue eyes and a flip in my left brow that my grandmother called "a little lick from God." DNA is not only the book of life, it is also the book of death, says Braun: "We're all going to die, ja?"
Strictly speaking, Braun is not looking for entire genes, the long strings of nucleotides that instruct the body to grow a tooth or create white blood cells to attack an incoming virus. He's after single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced "snips"), the tiny genetic variations that account for nearly all differences in humans.
DNA as Destiny (continued)
Imagine DNA as a ladder made of rungs -- 3 billion in all -- spiraling upward in a double helix. Each step is a base pair, designated by two letters from the nucleotide alphabet of G, T, A, and C. More than 99 percent of these base pairs are identical in all humans, with only about one in a thousand SNPs diverging to make us distinct. For instance, you might have a CG that makes you susceptible to diabetes, and I might have a CC, which makes it far less likely I will get this disease.
This is all fairly well-known: Genetics 101. What's new is how startups like Sequenom have industrialized the SNP identification process. Andi Braun and Charles Cantor are finding thousands of new SNPs a day, at a cost of about a penny each.
Braun tells me that there are possibly a million SNPs in each person, though only a small fraction are tightly linked with common ailments. These disease-causing SNPs are fueling a biotech bonanza; the hope is that after finding them, the discoverers can design wonder drugs. In the crowded SNP field, Sequenom vies with Iceland-based deCode Genetics, American companies such as Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Orchid BioSciences, and Celera Genomics, as well as multinationals like Eli Lilly and Roche Diagnostics. "It's the Oklahoma Land Grab right now," says Toni Schuh, Sequenom's CEO.
The sun sets outside Braun's office as my results arrive, splayed across his computer screen like tarot cards. I'm trying to maintain a steely, reportorial facade, but my heart continues to race.
Names of SNPs pop up on the screen: connexin 26, implicated in hearing loss; factor V leiden, which causes blood clots; and alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, linked to lung and liver disease. Beside each SNP are codes that mean nothing to me: 13q11-q12, 1q23, 14q32.1. Braun explains that these are addresses on the human genome, the PO box numbers of life. For instance, 1q23 is the address for a mutant gene that causes vessels to shrink and impede the flow of blood -- it's on chromosome 1. Thankfully, my result is negative. "So, David, you will not get the varicose veins. That's good, ja?" says Braun. One gene down, dozens to go.
On the horizon: multi-disease genekits, available at Wal-Mart, as easy to use as home pregnancy tests.
Next up is the hemochromatosis gene. This causes one's blood to retain too much iron, which can damage the liver. As Braun explains it, somewhere in the past, an isolated human community lived in an area where the food was poor in iron. Those who developed a mutation that stores high levels of iron survived, and those who didn't became anemic and died, failing to reproduce. However, in these iron-rich times, hemochromatosis is a liability. Today's treatment? Regular bleeding. "You tested negative for this mutation," says Braun. "You do not have to be bled."
I'm also clean for cystic fibrosis and for a SNP connected to lung cancer.
Then comes the bad news. A line of results on Braun's monitor shows up red and is marked "MT," for mutant type. My body's programming code is faulty. There's a glitch in my system. Named ACE (for angiotensin-I converting enzyme), this SNP means my body makes an enzyme that keeps my blood pressure spiked. In plain English, I'm a heart attack risk.
My face drains of color as the news sinks in. I'm not only defective, but down the road, every time I get anxious about my condition, I'll know that I have a much higher chance of dropping dead. I shouldn't be surprised, since I'm told everyone has some sort of disease-causing mutation. Yet I realize that my decision to take a comprehensive DNA test has been based on the rather ridiculous assumption that I would come out of this with a clean genetic bill of health. I almost never get sick, and, at age 44, I seldom think about my physical limitations, or death. This attitude is buttressed by a family largely untouched by disease. The women routinely thrive into their late eighties and nineties. One great-aunt lived to age 101; she used to bake me cupcakes in her retirement home when I was a boy. And some of the Duncan menfolk are pushing 90-plus. My parents, now entering their seventies, are healthy. In a flash of red MTs, I'm glimpsing my own future; my own mortality. I'm slated to keel over, both hands clutc
hing at my heart.
"Do you have any history in your family of high blood pressure or heart disease?" asks Matthew McGinniss, a Sequenom geneticist standing at Braun's side.
One gene seems to shield smokers from lung cancer. "That's my favorite," says the doctor, a smoker. "I wonder what Philip Morris would pay for that."
"No," I answer, trying to will the color back into my face. Then a second MT pops up on the screen -- another high blood pressure mutation. My other cardiac indicators are OK, which is relatively good news, though I'm hardly listening now. I'm already planning a full-scale assault to learn everything I can about fighting heart disease -- until McGinniss delivers an unexpected pronouncement. "These mutations are probably irrelevant," he says. Braun agrees: "It's likely that you carry a gene that keeps these faulty ones from causing you trouble -- DNA that we have not yet discovered."
The SNPs keep rolling past, revealing more mutations, including a type-2 diabetes susceptibility, which tells me I may want to steer clear of junk food. More bad news: I don't have a SNP called CCR5 that prevents me from acquiring HIV, nor one that seems to shield smokers from lung cancer. "Ja, that's my favorite," says Braun, himself a smoker. "I wonder what Philip Morris would pay for that."
By the time I get home, I realize that all I've really learned is I might get heart disease, and I could get diabetes. And I should avoid smoking and unsafe sex -- as if I didn't already know this. Obviously, I'll now watch my blood pressure, exercise more, and lay off the Cap'n Crunch. But beyond this, I have no idea what to make of the message Andi Braun has divined from a trace of my spit.
Looking for guidance, I visit Ann Walker, director of the Graduate Program for Genetic Counseling at the University of California at Irvine. Walker explains the whats and hows, and the pros and cons, of DNA testing to patients facing hereditary disease, pregnant couples concerned with prenatal disorders, and anyone else contemplating genetic evaluation. It's a tricky job because, as I've learned, genetic data is seldom clear-cut.
DNA as Destiny (continued)
Take breast cancer, Walker says. A woman testing positive for BRCA1, the main breast cancer gene, has an 85 percent chance of actually getting the cancer by age 70, a wrenching situation, since the most effective method of prevention is a double mastectomy. What if a woman has the operation and it turns out she's among those 15 percent who carry the mutation but will never get the cancer? Not surprisingly, one study, conducted in Holland, found that half of healthy women whose mothers developed breast cancer opt not to be tested for the gene, preferring ignorance and closer monitoring. Another example is the test for APoE, the Alzheimer's gene. Since the affliction has no cure, most people don't want to know their status. But some do. A positive result, says Walker, allows them to put their affairs in order and prepare for their own dotage. Still, the news can be devastating. One biotech executive told me that a cousin of his committed suicide when he tested positive for Huntington's, having seen the disease slowly destroy his father.
Walker pulls out a chart and asks about my family's medical details, starting with my grandparents and their brothers and sisters: what they suffered and died from, and when. My Texas grandmother died at 92 after a series of strokes. My 91-year-old Missouri grandmom was headed to a vacation in Mexico with her 88-year-old second husband when she got her death sentence -- ovarian cancer. The men died younger: my grandfathers in their late sixties, though they both have brothers still alive and healthy in their nineties. To the mix, Walker adds my parents and their siblings, all of whom are alive and healthy in their sixties and seventies; then my generation; and finally our children. She looks up and smiles: "This is a pretty healthy group."
Normally, Walker says, she would send me home. Yet I'm sitting across from her not because my parents carry some perilous SNP, but as a healthy man who is after a forecast of future maladies. "We have no real training yet for this," she says, and tells me the two general rules of genetic counseling: No one should be screened unless there is an effective treatment or readily available counseling; and the information should not bewilder people or present them with unnecessary trauma.
Many worry that these prime directives may be ignored by Sequenom and other startups that need to launch products to survive. FDA testing for new drugs can take up to 10 years, and many biotech firms feel pressure to sell something in the interim. "Most of these companies need revenue," says the University of Pennsylvania's Arthur Caplan, a top bioethicist. "And the products they've got now are diagnostic. Whether they are good ones, useful ones, necessary ones, accurate ones, seems less of a concern than that they be sold." Caplan also notes that the FDA does not regulate these tests. "If it was a birth control test, the FDA would be all over it."
I ask Caplan about the Gattaca scenario of genetic discrimination. Will a woman dump me if she finds out about my ACE? Will my insurance company hike my rate? "People are denied insurance and jobs right now," he says, citing sickle-cell anemia, whose sufferers and carriers, mostly black, have faced job loss and discrimination. No federal laws exist to protect us from genism, or from insurers and employers finding out our genetic secrets. "Right now you're likely going to be more disadvantaged than empowered by genetic testing," says Caplan.
After probing my genetic future, I jet to England to investigate my DNA past. Who are these people who have bequeathed me this tainted bloodline? From my grandfather Duncan, an avid genealogist, I already know that my paternal ancestors came from Perth in south-central Scotland. We can trace the name back to an Anglican priest murdered in Glasgow in 1680 by a mob of Puritans. His six sons escaped and settled in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, where their descendants lived until my great-great-grandfather moved west to Kansas City in the 1860s.
In an Oxford restaurant, over a lean steak and a heart-healthy merlot, I talk with geneticist Bryan Sykes, a linebacker-sized 55-year-old with a baby face and an impish smile. He's a molecular biologist at the university's Institute of Molecular Medicine and the author of the best-selling Seven Daughters of Eve. Sykes first made headlines in 1994 when he used DNA to directly link a 5,000-year-old body discovered frozen and intact in an Austrian glacier to a 20th-century Dorset woman named Marie Mosley. This stunning genetic connection between housewife and hunter-gatherer launched Sykes' career as a globe-trotting genetic gumshoe. In 1995, he confirmed that bones dug up near Ekaterinburg, Russia, were the remains of Czar Nicholas II and his family, by comparing the body's DNA with that of the czar's living relatives, including Britain's Prince Philip. Sykes debunked explorer Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki theory by tracing Polynesian genes to Asia and not the Americas, and similarly put the lie to the Clan of the Cave Bear hypothesis, which held that the Neanderthal interbred with our ancestors, the Cro-Magnon, when the two subspecies coexisted in Europe 15,000 years ago.
Sykes explains to me that a bit of DNA called mtDNA is key to his investigations. A circular band of genes residing separately from the 23 chromosomes of the double helix, mtDNA is passed down solely through the maternal line. Sykes used mtDNA to discover something astounding: Nearly every European can be traced back to just seven women living 10,000 to 45,000 years ago. In his book, Sykes gives these seven ancestors hokey names and tells us where they most likely lived: Ursula, in Greece (circa 43,000 BC), and Velda, in northern Spain (circa 15,000 BC), to name two of the "seven daughters of Eve." (Eve was the ur-mother who lived 150,000 years ago in Africa.)
Sykes has taken swab samples from the cheeks of more than 10,000 people, charging $220 to individually determine a person's mtDNA type. "It's not serious genetics," Sykes admits, "but people like to know their roots. It makes genetics less scary and shows us that, through our genes, we are all very closely related." He recently expanded his tests to include non-Europeans. The Asian daughters of Eve are named Emiko, Nene, and Yumio, and their African sisters are Lamia, Latifa, and Ulla, among others.
DNA as Destiny (continued)
Before heading to England, I had mailed Sykes a swab of my cheek cells. Over our desserts in Oxford he finally offers up the results. "You are descended from Helena," he pronounces. "She's the most common daughter of Eve, accounting for some 40 percent of Europeans." He hands me a colorful certificate, signed by him, that heralds my many-times-great-grandma and tells me that she lived 20,000 years ago in the Dordogne Valley of France. More interesting is the string of genetic letters from my mtDNA readout that indicates I'm mostly Celtic, which makes sense. But other bits of code reveal traces of Southeast Asian DNA, and even a smidgen of Native American and African.
This doesn't quite have the impact of discovering that I'm likely to die of a heart attack. Nor am I surprised about the African and Indian DNA, since my mother's family has lived in the American South since the 17th century. But Southeast Asian? Sykes laughs. "We are all mutts," he says. "There is no ethnic purity. Somewhere over the years, one of the thousands of ancestors who contributed to your DNA had a child with someone from Southeast Asia." He tells me a story about a blond, blue-eyed surfer from Southern California who went to Hawaii to apply for monies awarded only to those who could prove native Hawaiian descent. The grant-givers laughed - until his DNA turned up traces of Hawaiian.
The next day, in Sykes' lab, we have one more test: running another ancestry marker in my Y chromosome through a database of 10,000 other Ys to see which profile is closest to mine. If my father was in the database, his Y chromosome would be identical, or possibly one small mutation off. A cousin might deviate by one tick. Someone descended from my native county of Perth might be two or three mutations removed, indicating that we share a common ancestor hundreds of years ago. Sykes tells me these comparisons are used routinely in paternity cases. He has another application. He is building up Y-chromosome profiles of surnames: men with the same last name whose DNA confirms that they are related to common ancestors.
After entering my mtDNA code into his laptop, Sykes looks intrigued, then surprised, and suddenly moves to the edge of his seat. Excited, he reports that the closest match is, incredibly, him -- Bryan Sykes! "This has never happened," he says, telling me that I am a mere one mutation removed from him, and two from the average profile of a Sykes. He has not collected DNA from many other Duncans, he says, though it appears as if sometime in the past 400 years a Sykes must have ventured into Perth, and then had a child with a Duncan. "That makes us not-so-distant cousins," he says. We check a map of Britain on his wall, and sure enough, the Sykes family's homeland of Yorkshire is less than 200 miles south of Perth.
The fact that Sykes and I are members of the same extended family is just a bizarre coincidence, but it points to applications beyond simple genealogy. "I've been approached by the police to use my surnames data to match up with DNA from an unknown suspect found at a crime scene," says Sykes. Distinctive genetic markers can be found at the roots of many family trees. "This is possible, to narrow down a pool of suspects to a few likely surnames. But it's not nearly ready yet."
Back home in California, I'm sweating on a StairMaster at the gym, wondering about my heart. I wrap my hands around the grips and check my pulse: 129. Normal. I pump harder and top out at 158. Also normal. I think about my visit a few days earlier -- prompted by my gene scan -- to Robert Superko, a cardiologist. After performing another battery of tests, he gave me the all clear -- except for one thing. Apparently, I have yet another lame-heart gene, the atherosclerosis susceptibility gene ATHS, a SNP that causes plaque in my cardiac bloodstream to build up if I don't exercise far more than average -- which I do, these days, as a slightly obsessed biker and runner. "As long as you exercise, you'll be fine," Superko advised, a bizarre kind of life sentence that means that I must pedal and jog like a madman or face -- what? A triple bypass?
Pumping on the StairMaster, I nudge the setting up a notch, wishing, in a way, that I either knew for sure I was going to die on, say, February 17, 2021, or that I hadn't been tested at all. As it is, the knowledge that I have an ACE and ATHS deep inside me will be nagging me every time I get short of breath.
I have two lame-heart genes, which will nag me everytime I'm short of breath. My lifespan score is
The last results from my DNA workup have also come in. Andi Braun has tested me for 77 SNPs linked to lifespan in order to assess when and how I might get sick and die. He has given me a score of
Braun warns that this figure does not take into account the many thousands of other SNPs that affect my life, not to mention the possibility that a piano could fall on my head.
That night, I put my 7-year-old, Alex, to bed. His eyes droop under his bright-white head of hair as I finish reading Captain Underpants aloud. Feeling his little heart beating as he lies next to me on his bed, I wonder what shockers await him inside his nucleotides, half of which I gave him. As I close the book and then sing him to sleep, I wonder if he has my culprit genes. I don't know, because he hasn't been scanned. For now, he and the rest of humanity are living in nearly the same blissful ignorance as Helena did in long-ago Dordogne. But I do know one thing: Alex has my eyebrow, the "lick of God." I touch his flip in the dark, and touch mine. He stirs, but it's not enough to wake him.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
is *NOT* the same as actually being diseased/sick. Just because you carry a ressive trait for diabetes or heart disease does not mean that you will suffer from either. I already know I am "predisposed to heartdisease and diabetes", my grandfather had it. I do not need a DNA scan to tell me.
You tell some people they are predispositioned for heart disease and they are going to think it is a death warrant. Even though it is only a chance, people will throw money at it in attempt to do something about it. More importantly this will spawn a whole new branch of medicine where you sell drugs/therapy to healthy people. We are already starting to see that practice today, look at the logic behind pepcid/ac, the heartburn medication you take over the counter *before* you have heartburn.
Just my two cents.
"For instance, you might have a CG that makes you susceptible to diabetes, and I might have a CC, which makes it far less likely I will get this disease."
CC is not an allowed base pairing. It could be GC, AT or TA instead, but CC would be recognized as a defect and repaired.
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
All this talk about DNA had me thinking not only about mapping the human genome, but the very processes through which other organisms replicated and pass-on this DNA "code" to their very existance.
Every hour, each E. coli bacterium multiplies by producing a copy of its DNA and then splitting into two daughter bacteria. Each is identical to its parent.
But, when protein diffusion is combined with the binding and release of proteins from the cell membrane, oscillating patterns in E. Coli occur.
Well, "Who cares?" you think to yourself.
However, it's actually fascinating because this is almost identical to the Turing model reaction-diffusion equations that you read about in your biology class(es); behind every set of zebra stripes or leopard spots lies this Turing model.
Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S., Canada, B3H 3J5
All the article on one nice page.
DNA scanning will fan the flames of the fetus rights debate, as parents desire to alter the DNA of unborn children.
http://www.jokes2go.com/jokes/3867.html?15
If you had bothered to test them you would've seen he was mecha.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
We check a map of Britain on his wall, and sure enough, the Sykes family's homeland of Yorkshire is less than 200 miles south of Perth.
Err...Britain's not really that all that big. 200 miles is considered a fair distance here. I'm from Yorkshire originally, and there's no way I would have considered Perth to be close.
I've sinced moved further south. It's 160 miles between where I came from (Sheffield in Yorkshire) and where I moved to (Marlow in Buckinghamshire). That too is considered a fair hop, although travelling that distance is something I'm completely used to now. But some of my friends in Yorkshire thing it's a long way to go.
All a difference of scale, really.
Cheers,
Ian
I wonder how long before we hear: Only those with something to hide would refuse to be screened. Using encryption (for example) just pisses off government, but there's nobody with deep pockets brib^H^H^H^H lobbying them to ban it. But insuring sickly people costs insurers big money. How much would it cost them to buy laws to make screening mandatory, or at least to allow them (all of them) to insist on it if you want a policy? At the least, I expect to see policy rises for those who refuse a screening, on the basis that only those with something to hide...
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Please don't do crap like this.
DNA is the book of life. It's also the book of death.
Hard science journalism at it's best. Sheesh.
This, I'm told, is the first time a healthy human has ever been screened for the full gamut of genetic-disease markers.
Yeah, RIGHT. Imagine that lab meeting: Guys, I have a plan, we've never done this before, so lets invite in a journalist and see if we can humiliate ourselves.
Braun, 46, is both jovial and German.
Yes, Homer, Germany is the land of chocolate.
These disease-causing SNPs are fueling a biotech bonanza; the hope is that after finding them, the discoverers can design wonder drugs.
The hope of many of these bottom feeders is that they can identify an SNP and exert some intellectual property over it to horn in on whomever actually can find a treatment. Anyone want me to deliver another manifesto on the evil of this approach?
Alright - let's talk genetic diversity.
As Braun explains it, somewhere in the past, an isolated human community lived in an area where the food was poor in iron. Those who developed a mutation that stores high levels of iron survived, and those who didn't became anemic and died, failing to reproduce.
Good point! This is reason number one NOT to reduce the genetic diversity of the human race. All of these alleles floating around the population - which may become increasingly rare as there is selective pressure against them, and may even cause considerable suffering or death to some of those who carry them - should not be removed from our collective gene pool, at least not without considerable discussion. Why? Because WE MAY NEED THEM. A monoculture (were all organisms have the same genes) is not sustainable in a biological sense.
This is also one of the great tragedies of our times - sub-saharan africa contains only a fraction of the human population, but it contains over a third (depending on how you measure it) of human genetic diversity. The region of the world being devastated by AIDS may contain any number of alleles which our decsendents may need in the population in order to face the challenges of the future, whatever they may be.
"Ja, that's my favorite," says Braun, himself a smoker. "I wonder what Philip Morris would pay for that."
Note that this gene doesn't make it safe to smoke - smoking still causes heart disease and so forth in these people. Still, a treatment to clone this gene into your lungs could make billions, no (clone as in move DNA around)?
These genetic modification treatments may not be such a good idea, either. You all remember in 1999 when a research subject at Penn died from a liver treatment (search for "liver")? The upshot is - anything that delivers genes into a person can, and sooner or later will, go out of control and do things you don't expect. Killing the subject is the most likely, but frankly least frightening, of these possibilities. The real threat - and my colleagues in biotech like to play this down but I am not at all convinced by their arguments - is that vectors for DNA delivery into humans could go wild and become contagious.
Of course, I'm opposed to animal organ transplantation for fear of introducing new human pathogens, so maybe I'm just a naysayer.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
What I found most interesting in the article was this quote:
"No federal laws exist to protect us from genism, or from insurers and employers finding out our genetic secrets. 'Right now you're likely going to be more disadvantaged than empowered by genetic testing,' says Caplan."
Like any new scientific advance, it sounds like genetic testing can be used for good (early medical diagnosis, a way to trace your bloodline through history), or for bad (insurers would raise my premium for life insurance, businesses might find another way to target me, demographically, based on my DNA... imagine the spams!)
I'm not saying 'there oughtta be a law...' yet, but there probably needs to be a committee, at least, of ethicists, scientists and lawmakers who can start to create a framework of laws to make sure that potentially valuable information like this won't be used irresponsibly, especially since the field is so new, and there's so much more to learn...
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
Wired reporter first to be refused any form of medical or life insurance due to his stupidity in paying to find out that he's too risky to insure.
I found this particularly interresting and disturbing.
The fact that Sykes and I are members of the same extended family is just a bizarre coincidence, but it points to applications beyond simple genealogy. "I've been approached by the police to use my surnames data to match up with DNA from an unknown suspect found at a crime scene," says Sykes. Distinctive genetic markers can be found at the roots of many family trees. "This is possible, to narrow down a pool of suspects to a few likely surnames. But it's not nearly ready yet."
It had never occured to me that Y chromosome passes along from father to son would be almost identical, following surnames as they are passed on as well. It seems obvious, thinking about it however.
Im not sure I like the idea of possibly being hauled in for questioning because some messed-up branch of my lineage decided to go rob a liquor store to pay off his bookie. Of course, my family blood is too good to worry about such things!
Scott.
So if your particulat genome sequence reveals a tendency to contract a particular disease I guess the main thing your going to be worried about is if it curable in the event that you DO actually get it, right (or of any long-tern after effects)? This could be inteesting for some reasons: 1) If you know you have a high chance of catching an uncurable disease perhaps we will end up with hugh scores of people all devoting their lives to curing that disease. Medical teams of potentially diseased doctors looking for the cure to a disease they don't yet have...weird. 2) By sequencing more and more genes a huge amount of data can be gathered revealing those diseases which are becoming more common and greater research put into those areas. Just a few thoughts :-)
Rake Free + Mac Poker: CardCrusade
.. The last time I was at my physician he wanted a blood sample, a semen sample, a urine sample and a stool sample.
So I gave him my underwear.
[rimshot]
Trolling is a art,
I can see it now, insurance companies will have manditory blood tests and then map out your DNA. IF you have a high chance of anything then there will be a premium hike. The world of Gattica becomes a reality, now people like the KKK can use this to further their cause! I see a great rift in society where couples planning to be married will try to get DNA info on their spouse to make sure they're not inferior. I see a new form of elitism coming about where the new aristocracy will be of a genetic elite and those who are inferior will be weeded out through poverty, disease, and depression. They will develop gene therapy that can "Clean" your DNA and make you an elite but it will cost millions, a legacy to leave your children. Then while working yout 80 hours a week popping soma you will go visit quaint villages of non-elites and marvel at their simple ways....
Behold the Fordian Society of Huxley's "Brave New World" written in the 30s he warned of this day. Now it's finally here...
It's the end of the world as we know it, but I don't feel fine... not at all...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I am always surprised at the distance distortion that occurs in areas of high population density. I live in the middle of the United States (< 60 miles from the population centroid) and don't think twice about driving 500 miles to my vacation cabin. (Too d*mn hot where I live in the summer. Got to go north.)
I have had friends who live in Manhattan that consider 15 miles to be "far" and 200 miles to be an extraordinary distance to travel.
I wonder if people's definition of far is better correlated to "number of people passed" than "distance"?
Any slashdot readers from the Australian outback want to tell us what they think "far" is?
While screening is an ominous first step, prenatal screening and gene therapy are where this gets really frightening. For starters, as with any cutting edge medical technology, this will be expensive. Therefore, those who would "improve" the dna of their offspring will be the elites. As they branch out from diseases to other areas...intelligence, looks, etc., the line between the rich and the poor will only grow wider. And here in the U.S., minorities represent a greater percentage of the poor than their overall numbers, meaning any growing divide between rich and poor will also widen the racial divide. Unless society comes up with some good answers, the spells big time social problems for the future.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
I did a google search on the author's name and found his page. This guy's got quite an impressive list of books and articles. http://literati.net/Duncan/
.. back in my granddad's day when you could just discriminate based on skin colour. Now you have to be a damn scientist to hate people.
Yes, I'm joking!
Trolling is a art,
This seems like right-smack from the (I think, excellent) movie "Gattaca"
If you saw this movie, you would see how this could be dangerously misused. Of course, it all dependence on the type of government we'll have.
Sigged!
Huh? Take a look at the way my nickname's spelled out. Notice the caps?
MI..me.K.ill.E.r = MIKE.
I think you've got me confused with someone else.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
Yet I will be able to glimpse some of the internal programming bequeathed to me by evolution, and that I, in turn, have bequeathed to my children ...
or not. These types of genetic checks have interesting side-effects, such as finding out that your father is not who you think he was! I read somewhere that this was the case in about 25% of cases. The future will bring us lots of fun!
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
I wont worry too much about it... no CEO wud like to admit that all the employees working under him are smarter than him :-) :-)
Anyway, there are many companies even now who don't recruit the brightest people. The reason, the brighter they are, the more likely they are to switch jobs. I kid you not but many companies have this policy, or used to do in dotcom era.
Besides, if you have too many smart people working at the same place, I think that wud create mayhem...just think of the arguments these guys can have...
So I will say guys, rest assured...we are safe
What's under yellowstone?
I am TERRIBLY sorry. I'm a moderator and I intended ot moderate this up (Funny), but it appears that my mouse let me down and I actually selected the next option down, which is "Overrated", so I moderated the guy down.
I did NOT mean to. My apologies for not being more careful.
RP
And if we're lucky, the one after that will be:
"HMOs become defunct as population realises en masse why total heathcare is a good idea".
Actually, screw lucky, if we're smart.
G
With the risk of getting a flamebait mod, perhaps it is worth pointing out that the technology is not all bad.
So it is creepy to get a genetic test, but also it can be quite useful. If you have predisposition for an illness then you are much better off knowing it in advance so that you can test frequently and adapt your behavior (e.g., diet).
And of course, if you still don't like it, you don't have to.
Now somebody will predict that insurance companies will force everyone to do the test, I'll save you the trouble and reply right away. The scenario is unlikely, because there are quite a few legal limitations on what these companies can and cannot ask for - and the majority of registered voters are very sceptical.
But even if it did happen, would it necessarily be so bad? Widespread testing would make the total, and therefore the average, cost of insurance lower. This is because it is easier and cheaper to treat illnesses at an early stage. Certainly those with certain predispositions would get a higher premium, but would not even that be preferable over paying a standard premium and then getting an illness that could have been averted by frequent tests and say the right diet? One could also think of taxes and subsidies supporting those that got higher premiums. Since the total medical costs would go down, it is at least theoretically possible to come up with a system where everyone is better off.
Tor
From the article:
The SNPs keep rolling past, revealing more mutations, including a type-2 diabetes susceptibility, which tells me I may want to steer clear of junk food. More bad news: I don't have a SNP called CCR5 that prevents me from acquiring HIV, nor one that seems to shield smokers from lung cancer. "Ja, that's my favorite," says Braun, himself a smoker. "I wonder what Philip Morris would pay for that."
Hearing about CCR5 was the only thing in this article that blew my socks off. Genetic immunity to HIV? Wow.
Google hits a lot of things when doing a search for CCR5. The most approachable is here.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
Of course then the scientists patent the guy's DNA for any potential moneymaking ventures.
:)
And then they try to sue the guy on patent infringement (please leave all your DNA when you exit the courtroom).
Laugh and enjoy life while you can.
If they can trace most people back to 7 or 8 specific females that lived 20,000 or 45,000 years ago, is it possible to do the same with males? I got the impression from reading the article (4th page) that there is basically NO difference in the Y chromasome between a father and son (except for the given mutation or two that always may occur).
Karma: NaN
Doesn't posting on the same article that you've recently moderated 'throw away' your moderation? You can't moderate and post on the same article (tends to allow bias).
The moderation you made may have been removed simply by posting. The moderator guidelines don't specifically mention that action, but I thought I experienced it in the past.
Unless you go to south africa and start humping all those 'diverse black people', your ancestors aren't going to get all those alleles you're yammering about.
Braun, 46, is both jovial and German
OMG, I didn't think that was possible! What will genetics bring us next?!?
To read makes our speaking English good. - X. Harris
my fave quote from the article.
"One gene seems to shield smokers from lung cancer. 'That's my favorite,' says the doctor, a smoker. 'I wonder what Philip Morris would pay for that.'"
Ah yes.. now I can blisfully tell myself that yes I must have this gene and therfore my smoking is A.O.K
Huzzah!
If I were only smart enough to accomplish the things I dream about.. Or maybe too dumb to care.
And the good thing about that, is that if someone disagrees, you can use your weapons technology to eliminate said person.
only $220 to get your mtDNA tested?!? where can i get this done?
I am talking about suppressing evolution. The human race going extinct would be evolution. I am talking about making sure that the resources (genetic resources) are available to make sure that the human race can undergo another sort of evolution if our survival depends on it. The population of the Andean Condor fell to, what, a dozen individuals IIRC? Even if the alleles among the rest of the species really made them less fit for the present circumstance (which I doubt,) the genetic homogeneity among the survivors makes the long term survival of the species very doubtful. This is a genetic bottleneck. Having it happen to our species is very, very bad.
Someone else raised the possibility that I want to keep suffering people around as a genetic bank for the human race - that was not my intent. What I mean is that we should eliminate an allele from the population only after serious thought, and only if therapeutics fail, since we simply do not know (and cannot predict) which genes may be helpful to our descendents.
When those who are vulnerable to AIDS have died, there will be many alleles - which have nothing to do with AIDS - lost to the human race as a whole. Those alleles might have saved the human race - or some population of humans on some distant planet we colonised - from dying out under some other circumstance, or might have been linked to some other trait, important for some reason of which we have no inkling.
It is true that in order for the alleles in africa to be helpful to my descendents, I would need shared offspring, somewhere along the line, with a present day African. Since I am talking about a rather long timescale - millennia, at least - I view that as entirely likely. This reveals my multicultural social bias, I am sure; I am mixed Ashkinasi (Jew) and Cherokhee (American Indian.) If you asked my ancestors 1,000 years ago in the Baltics and the present-day SE US if they thought they'd share a great^40 grandchild, I think it would have looked pretty unlikely.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
In short, it's both nature and nurture. Try to be good to yourself...
Oh yeah, eat your goddam veggies, too, ya little bastards.
That is all.
just something that we don't understand the ramifications of entirely?
Hell, do you understand the ramifications of posting to Slashdot entirely, particularly with a link to your homepage? The Wayback Machine and Google (and soon other places) are archiving what you're writing...you may well be building up an indelible record that future employers will *always* look at before considering you.
Uncertainty is part of life. If it wasn't...well, we'd have a much less interesting time.
May we never see th
Puleez, moderators. Don't you recognize this troll? Not even as subtle as some of the better ones, IMHO.
;-]
[And I was SO hoping this would be a Hofstadteresque likening of mitochondria to Turing machines
Not only have I heard of retroviruses, I have studied them. A retrovirus to be used as a vector for cloning into humans would have to be engineered to avoid tripping any immune system alarms. That's playing with fire.
HIV is generally agreed to have hopped from a monkey as a result of a bite. An animal organ - particularly when placed in an individual taking immunosuppressent drugs - might pose the same threat.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Now be honest - you were really trying to collect semen samples. Weren't you?
The hero was trying to get into space, but had a faulty heart valve that might cause him to drop dead at any time.
If there was ever a job that warranted DNA testing, astronaut would be it.
Why else the physicals, even in ou current program (physicals he also had to falsify)
What would be an ironic end to the movie is if that liftoff scene closed with him collapsing to the deck due to the acceleration fatally straining his heart.
I think that this might benefit people in that knowing what they are predisposed to might encourage them to live a healthier life, it is a "might be" kind of test. Its like saying that "sometime in the next 55 years, your going to get into a serious car accident" You'll sweat it for a bit, then start driving normaly again. It might happen, it might not, but you'll still drive your huge ass soccer mom SUV to work everyday...
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
It's written by Wired's author; Wired paid for the rights to publish. It's either their intellectual property or the author's, depending on the agreement between them. So this is a proprietary work, not public domain.
Everytime I read about genetic testing and the possible repercussions from it (job discrimination, social discrimination, insurance discrimination, law discrimination), the idea resonates of obtaining resources and greed. Even though we humans tend to think of ourselves as civilized beings, we are just as savage as the animals we watch on National Geographic Television and the Discovery Channel. Our society is built upon genetic and social connectedness, i.e., birds of a feather flock together. The little camps or groups of people arise from genetic similarities which are expressed as behavior or abilities. People with certain genes will have some abilities, whether they are exceptional use of language, abstract thinking, exceptional physical endurance and motor control (athletes), deviant thinking and behavior (criminals tend to congregate in prisons) will tend to socialize with one another. It's up to the individuals with these genes to utilize what evolution and natural selection provided them to obtain resources necessary to ensure survivability of their genes. Just as the law makers, insurance industry, private industry, and educational system (Ivy League, public, and private schools) would like to have access to this information, it's almost like watching the Lions and Hyienas fighting over the injured gazelle. Law makers want to protect the people or industry to get re-elected. The insurance industry wants to limit insurance to diseased people to increase profits (they're cheating at the game of CHANCE and RISK). Private industry wants more efficient people (education/abilities) to increase profits. Schools only want the best, most successful students to increase their stature and graduation rate. Everyone wants to flex their intellectual and economic muscles with this issue to GAIN RESOURCES that help their organization or cause: GREED!
Let's face it folks, this is a central fact of biology and chemistry: Molecules are competing for energy to sustain the transition state for metabolism and reproduction to continue. It doesn't matter that the needs are currently met, "more" is always sought "just in case" (random events) the energy isn't available in the future. "More" is always sought to prevent foreign genes from being over expressed which might lead lead to native gene extinction.
I never thought much about the significance of an electron being promoted to an excited state in an antibonding orbital until I read this article.
Gosh, it's fun being a chemist.
I fear I am a member of the last generation that has something that resembles equality of opportunity. Genetic screening will end that forever. And getting health insurance? If you think it's hard now, just wait until 50 years from now.
"I'm sorry, we can't cover you Mr. Smith. We only insure people who are genetically disposed not to die or ever get sick."
"I thought insurance was in case I do get sick?"
"That was 25 years ago. Now we just take peoples money. We've found it's more profitable not to have any claims to pay."
-- $G
When you don't want it any longer, advertise it here on /. and you'll find plenty of buyers. I am one.
"Fine pewter portraits of Apathy and Major Boredom singin'...'Whatever and ever, Amen."
;)
You just got added to my friends' list for that one. Oh yeah, and I agree with what you were saying too. Right on. (But it's all about the Ben.)
Triv
I can see the prenatal testing now.
"Well Mrs. Smith, according to the genetic screening, your daughter will grow up to have an enormous rack."
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
The concept of Soma is bullshit as well.
http://www.huxley.net/
What ever happened to just not breeding?
This may be interesting... Of course I'm descended from a black slave, damn I thought I was a native american ... so where is my check!?!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Some genes and their associative traits are not exclusive. Sometimes you get one thing that goes along with another... white hair/pink eyes in albino animals. Also consider that a common gene was found in a large sample of sucessful doctors and reseachers that seemed to make them curious and interested in testing their boundaries. The same gene was also commonly found in another population... heroin addicts. It will not be so easy to custom design humans as one might think. After all, I'm a genius but that also came with my family's "raving lunatic" gene.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Cells swabbed from inside your cheek are not always such a good idea.
about 90% of all genes in all organisms are the same. These are the basis of life as we know it.
Comparative psychology and development is an interesting subject.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Live never to be embarassed about anything said about you
Probably a bit mangled, but it's from Richard Bach's
- Illusions
. He has all this little quotes attributed to "The Messia's Handbook" that was given to him in the story. The way I take that is that you however you choose to present yourself in the world, don't worry too much about how others take it. Your always going to be misinterpreted, sometimes maliciously, but if you worry about it too much, you won't be very authentic. OTOH, if your being deliberately stupid, maybe you'd better hide your identity.I kind of wish I could go back and re-read some of my very old participation in netnews groups. Ok, so maybe it proves I wasted more time than I should have posting at work, but I have enough slack to cover a bit of that ;-). Some of this is probably archived on dusty tapes, but I don't think the on-line archives go back that far (I'm most interested in '83+ timeframe).
You can take it a lot of other ways too, like don't let that boyfriend have any naked pictures of you unless you won't be embarassed when they show up all over the internet.
Ok, so this is off-topic, but someone else started it. The idea of mapping your genome defects is only bad if the information is badly used. I don't think our social systems are really ready for this yet, particularly since the interpretation of the information isn't very advanced. The article is pretty clear about the limitations, but there are a lot of stupid people who will be frightened by the knowledge (of themselves, like the author of the article), or worse will use it to discriminate even though it is provably imperfect.
I've always used my real name as my "handle". At first it was because I couldn't think of a clever nickname, and later because I didn't see any reason to change it. We live our lives, and I don't see a reason to be embarrassed about it. Frankly, many large ISPs monitor and record your Internet activities anyway, so people using aliases aren't completely anonymous anyway.
Life, brought to you by the letters A C G T.
What was even more funny to me than the original joke was that someone moderated this "Informative"
I don't know if I should laugh or cry.
The information is not in and of itself dangerous, nor is it immoral. It is neutral and amoral. What matters is the use made of it.
Let say I have one of these analyses done. I 34, healthy, slightly overweight (90kg for 186cm). There is a history of death by coronary disease at around 65 - 75 years of age amongst the male members of my family.
I already know this, and I would not be astounded to learn that my genetic code contains a predisposition for this and other problems.
However, my diet is not the same as that of my grandfather (he would eat a lot of food fried in beef or pork fat, I eat few fried foods and use olive oil). Nor do I work in a factory with mineral-oil splashing around my hands and making a haze in the air for me to breath.
My environment and lifestyle are already so different to that of my ancestors as to potentially negate the risk increased risk that my genes pose.
But, imagine somebody who does not have access to his family medical history (e.g., a child abandoned or given up for adoption at birth). For him, this information could mean the difference between eating fatty foods and death at fifty, or eating less fat and death at 90.
This is not too difficult to understand, but DashSlotters seem to like analogies, so Ie tried to invent one.
It's about knowing your own limitations and possibilities. If you know you can't walk quickly enough, you wait for a bigger gap in the traffic before you start to cross a wide street. If you know you can walk fast, you can take advantage of a smaller gap in the traffic.
Not a bad book at all, "Less Than Zero" :)
As any actuary can tell you, the biggest killers are nurture: smoking, poor eating, drinking, drugs, and recklessness. (CAUTION: arbitrary numbers) A 5% larger liklihood of developing 'bad behavior' genetically, while statistically significant, is nowhere near a, say, 50% larger liklihood of 'bad behavior' from a poor upbringing. But do insurance companies screen how your parents treated you or the community you grew up in?
Also, insurance premiums will never go up 400% - just enough more than the other guy to make you switch to a competitor - who will then take your money at your marginally increased risk.
I think there is a modern conceit that we are wiser than people in the past. We look at their strange beliefs, and they are obviously strange. We still believe in "progress".
Look at the strange beliefs of the past. Experts thought blood-letting would purge your body of bad humours. Experts thought flagellation would purge your soul of sin. Experts though you could measure a person's talents and character traits by fondling the bumps on your head. Experts thought masturbation would drive you insane.
Set the time machine forward a couple of generations, my prediction is that our generation will be seen as possessing just as many goofy foibles as past generations.
I know it is just a movie, but look at films like " Back to the Future ", and look at how they portray the modern visitor as innately wiser and more insightful than they guys from the past.
According to this link the ship was the USS Truxton. Here is a link to a radio show about Lanier Phillips.
The radio story you linked to is the same one as was replayed on This American Life. Chris Brookes writes for both NPR and the CBC.
The most touching part of the story was his experience in Jacksonville, FL years later. He was trying to get to the Naval Air Station and stopped in an army base (in full uniform) to grab something to eat. He walked into the cafeteria and saw tables and tables of German and Italian prisoners of war. All he wanted to know was where a black guy could get some food (they usually had a separate window for 'em back then), but as soon as he opened the door he was slammed to the floor by a Jacksonville cop, who put his foot on Lanier's throat and pulled his gun. He yelled at Lanier for walking into the room of white people. White...Nazi...P.O.W.s got better treatment than a black US Soldier, more than ready to die for his country.
Sometimes...sometimes this country sickens and revolts me.
Triv
inosine. It's a nucleic acid - not found in naturally occurring DNA but used in molecular biology because it has the useful property of binding to all other bases equally.
I'm a computer science student, not a molecular biologist, but I'd guess that there's no inosine in natural DNA because the C-G and A-T pairings allow the copying procedure to include a bit of error detection; impossible pairings won't happen except in rare mutations. Inosine wouldn't allow for such error detection.
Will I retire or break 10K?
White hair and pink eyes in albino mammals comes from the same gene, which simply reduces the animal's pigmentation.