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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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Since they've already done this for every other type of testing result in the past, that's hardly a suprise right?
'Oh you might have a heart problem sometime in the future, even though you're treating the issues and being proactive, I'm sorry, we're going to have to increase your premium 400%'
IIRC, UC-Berkeley employees ended up suing some of the HMOs because they were unfairly rejecting African Americans because they carried a higher risk for high blood pressure, sickle cell, etc.
Nevermind the issues for the whole 'expression of the predisposition' and how accurate these readings are at this time.
Diagnostics, the double/triple edged sword. Wheee!
"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.
DNA scanning will fan the flames of the fetus rights debate, as parents desire to alter the DNA of unborn children.
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
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.
While I agree with you to some extent, what if your grandfather brought about his own diseased heart? You would not have a predisposition to it from him (although you might from other members of your family tree that never actually suffered heart disease). You might be fooling yourself into thinking that not smoking and drinking lots of anticarcinogens is helping you, not knowing that your great-great-great-grandma had a hell of an alcoholism/adictivism kick in her gene pool that drinking all that red wine is plugging into.
Just a thought.
put the what in the where?
Gee, I don't know - wonder why some people thing black people are inferior just because they're black (or green, or gay or whatever). That's what prejudice is - basing a judgement of someone on something arbitrary rather than experience, education level, etc.
There was a great episode of "This American Life" called Them that talks about this, particularly the last story.
From the show's description of this last story:
Grab it. Give a listen.
Triv
On the flip side, why should I pay higher Insurance rates for your heart attack? The whole idea of insurance is to guard against the unknown. It ceases to be a useful model of healthcare reimbursement when the ability to predict health problems becomes a reality.
Let's not hang onto an old business model of a lottery system for healthcare and come up with a new paradigm that's more fair to all.