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Scientists Complete Map of Human Genetic Variation
UltimaGuy writes "A major scientific step in the field of genetics is set to speed up the search for the causes of common illnesses ranging from heart disease and cancer to Alzheimer's and asthma. Scientists have mapped patterns of tiny DNA differences that distinguish one person from another, a step that will speed up the search for genes that promote common illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes."
"... a step that will speed up the search for genes that promote common illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes."
That's all well and good, but can they cure my ugly face?!
If there ever was a case for computational biology, this is it. :-)
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
Here is a link to the mp3 of the Nature podcast on this.
I always think it is ridiculous how these genomic announcements happen. They choose to announce that they have ONE MILLION SNPs with big press release, but this data is available online as soon as its sequenced.
First you animate. Then you SUSPEND!!!
I'm not sure how they define "complete", but I bet in 30 years or so, after major discoveries have been made based off this, and all the patents have expired, and I'm dying of old age, this could really lead to some good treatments for a number of rare genetic illnesses, except for those so rare as to make developing a treatment unprofitable.
This is precisely the process the bioweapons arms merchants needed to perfect in order to make their "ethnic bomb" work in my book Slatewiper.
Maybe the have a high degree of certainty .. but how do they a few people have got unique rare SNP mutations?
This brings us closer to confronting the issue of genetic discrimination on a large scale. IBM made a nice announcementhttp://www.out-law.com/page-6217> that they will avoid this, but there's not much legal protection from genetic profiling in the laws of most countries. Fortunately for those of us not currently in America, health care access in most developed countries won't be affected by this. Unfortunately, for those of us who intend to live in America at some point in the future, health insurance could certainly be affected by this. For example, it's well known that Amish, Ashkenazi Jews, and other groups suffer from certain genetic maladies far above the average. This kind of research will make it possible to pinpoint other groups with risks not yet known, and raise their health insurance costs, avoid hiring them (a la Wal-Mart's recent memo regarding hiring healthy people to cut down on benefits costs), etc. While I don't want to spread too much paranoia on the issue, I think it's very important that we make sure to protect people from genetic discrimination before it becomes widespread and harder to stop.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
All those tiny little variations they've mapped are either owned, or going to be owned by a company. This is good news, because curing almost any disease will be as simple as opening your checkbook. If you can write a digit followed by 6 zeroes in that checkbook, you're A-OK!
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Hurry up!
As a survivor of stage I kidney cancer, stage III colon cancer, arthritis, and diabetes I am a little anxious for progress in this field.
(Enter: the usual suspects.)
(From a speaker)
AAAAGGUATCUCGCUAGCUAUTCGGGCA...GTAC, please step forward!
(Suspects look around in confusion.)
(The third suspect tenatively steps forward.)
(From a speaker)
I said AAAAGGUATCUCGCUAGCUAUTCGGGCA...GTAC, AAAAGGUATCUCGCUAGCUAUTCGGGCA...GTAT! Get back in the line-up.
(AAAAGGUATCUCGCUAGCUAUTCGGGCA...GTAT shuffles back into the line-up.)
(The suspects look around in apprehensively and glance furtively at each other.)
Haha! I have you now!
That segment of genes are infringing on my patent! Remove that part now or pay royalties for every cell in your body!
Welcome to the future, invalid.
so if there are SNP mutations that only have a 1 in 270 or lesser chance of being present ..it's not going to be in their Map. You could be walking around with an SNP they missed cause the mutation happened recently (unique to you or maybe your grandparents etc) or is rare or whatever.
99.9% of your genes are belong to everyone!
my apologies for the ugly link. I should "Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs!" Feel free to learn from my mistakes.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
Read the friendly Haplotype Map, that is:
http://www.hapmap.org/.
You can even browse the project data: Gbrowse
"The achievement probably won't result in new disease treatments for five or 10 years or more, he said." - From TFA
Ah medicine, how impervious to progress you are.
No, it doesn't. Organisms that survive create slightly different offspring. Those that survive create slightly different offspring. That some of these organisms create toxic secretions, block airways, kill mucous membranes, etc. is just a side effect of diversity.
Too late... companies already sell gene sequences. As much as we like to think that genetic manuplation is future.. we are wrong. It has been here for a long time... and it here now in a whole new way. You only hear very small snipits what is going on in private and educational institutions.
;)
Be afraid
Yippee!!!!!
The potential misuses of this are obvious, immediate and must be legislated against now:
That's a short list and others can think of more, I'm sure.
The first two are obviously evil, but the third is perhaps the most terrifying. It would be very tempting to have a magic wand to change your child's DNA in such a way that they would not have high blood pressure. But what else would that do? Scientist are just beginning to understand how RNA and proteins magnify DNA differences and no one understands the relationship to thought patterns or behavior. Informed consent, under such circumstances, is impossible and experiments are not ethical.
Formulating laws to deal with problems without halting reasonable research is difficult but must be persued.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Knowing the sequence of your genes will help you avoid or delay disease and make cures easier. The benefits may outweight the costs.
And what about people with good genes, should they subsidize the people with bad genes?
Take antibiotics, for example. They were supposed to be able to cure so many things... but the viruses and bacteria learn to get around them. The more ways we come up with to avoid getting sick, the more mutations occur at that level.
In other words, by getting rid of "such-and-such" disease, we could be setting ourselves up for something worse. We don't have the knowledge or the willpower to make the correct decisions - the dollar will make them for us. And I am afraid.
This sentence is false.
The University of Queensland's physics blog, Illuminating Science has a summary with some interesting thoughts about the implications of this project.
So, did they find the bit where God signed his name and copyrighted it?
(c) God, 5800BC
The author asserts His moral rights over this work.
Resemblence to all persons in history is expressly intentional.
For Ethel.
Disease and death are what I'm talking about. 100 years ago, people didn't live to the ages they do now, because we didn't know how to fight these things. We're now trying to trick nature so that we can live longer. But now instead of having 10 kids because only 3 will actually survive past their 25th birthday, we can have one or two "perfect" kids. Also, see my previous post about antibiotics.
This sentence is false.
"Corporations complete patent applications for human genetic variations".
Yes, people with good genes should "subsidize" the people with bad genes. Everyone has their own ideas of a just society, but it seems pretty brutal to make everyone suffer for their genetic problems more than they inherently do. I know I certainly wouldn't want to live in a society where we just left the mentally handicapped to die on their own, instead of taking care of them, for instance. Some people disagree, but I think it's important that the genetically blessed help those not blessed. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Or something like that, in an ideal world.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
The good news: drug companies might be able to resurrect some failed medications if they can determine which genetic variants are helped by the drug versus being harmed by the drug. Some promising but previously unapproved medications will make it on to the market.
The bad news: Current drug development focuses on blockbusters. Finding something that millions of people will need to take. This pushes development to help the greatest number of people. If the treatment works for most people (based on genetic screening), there's little reason to develop a cure for genetic minority populations. Genetic orphan populations will be marginalized.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
except it will be patented and kept quiet for 5 to 7 yrs only for NEOSCO to sue all living persons for patent violations demanding $699 per set of cromozones.
aww the constitution
I have also: totaled three cars in crashes, been hit by a car while riding a bicycle, cracked my sternum in a freak lawn mowing accident, and overdosed on aspirin when I was 4. I cracked both shoulder blades by falling out of a tree when I was 6, got attacked by monkeys (twice), and I've been hit by lightning.
I'm 38, and I haven't died yet. I'm pretty sure I'm immortal.
There are so many things incorrectly implied about this finding that it's almost hard to begin:
1) The headline and idea: "New DNA Map Will Help Find Bad Genes". There are no bad genes. Evolution didn't just come around and place some miscreant gene in your body just to give you a hard time after living off a diet of pizza and Mt. Dew for ten years. Every gene has its own function. Genetic research is based more upon finding which variation of a gene is more beneficial to an individual and how to change/block the non-beneficial variations. Genes are either more or less successful, but definitely (minus the case or rare genetic diseases) not evil or bad.
2) "The project analyzed DNA samples from 269 people from Nigeria, Beijing, Tokyo and Utah." Well, this would be fine if everyone was of a direct Nigeria, Beijing, Tokyo or Utah decent similar to the test subjects. As for real world population, they probably contain mutations not near those found in any of these people. A native american, a man from agentina, and a guy from India I guarantee you would have completely different results. And that's assuming pure-bread people. Where would someone like Tiger Woods fit in? As an interesting side note, why do you think they picked Utah? Could it be that one of the principal investigators of the study is Mormon and thought it might be nice to bring government funds to his own people? I think that most of us can agree that politics and science rarely mix to give good results...
3) 269 People? You're telling me that out of 3 billion DNA basepairs, we can find all the parts that have changed over the last few hundred thousand (and more) years in only 269 people?
4) "This clustering greatly simplifies the task of analyzing what variations a person carries, because not all of them have to be identified." and "A person with one particular version of a SNP is highly likely to carry particular versions of other SNPs as well." When you begin to think about the error rates contained in "highly likely" and then start to cluster those rates togeter, your model falls apart.
Basically, from my own experience of working with data of thousands of whites, blacks, both male and female, the rates at which certain areas of DNA are linked vary directly upon the strata one looks at and the number of individuals in that strata. This project is a neat theorhetical idea, but until we can sequence the entire genomes of thousands of people overnight for a small fee, there is not enough realy data to really do anything with.
i keep reading the title as "Genetic Vacation".
it sounds like a nice break away from stresses of being made up of genetic material... this could catch on!
serenity now!
Nature doesn't have goals to be tricked out of. Nature doesn't have beliefs to be fooled out of believing.
Coordinators
Abh
Maybe now we'll find out why niggers run so fast.
Reuters will report that monkeys have have long had the ability to type Shakespeare but have never felt it to be a worthwhile endeavor...we are all actually such borderline genomic constructs that we shouldn't really exist...and that we are only using 10 percent of our genomic potential.
Is there some kind of overarching cause of all your health problems? I mean, arthritis and colon cancer at 38? What are the frickin' odds?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
A summary plus a discussion of some thoughts on the ethical issues involved in both intellectual property and discrimination are on the University of Queensland's physics blog.
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
Technology has caught up with millions of years of evolution and shows no sign of slowing pace. I'm sorry but I can't believe nature will be able to beat out us in the long run.
You had me at "freak lawn mowing accident."
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
I'm a little uninformed in this area of science. What exactly does this discovery mean? Does it mean that they now know exactly where the strain of DNA is that makes me white, or have dark hair, or have a weakness toward a certain type of cancer?
How is this going to help? Are they going to be able to reach inside me and change my DNA to fix my problems (gene therapy, this is called? Clueless there too i guess)?
Are we going to start engineering perfect babies, ala Gattaca? (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/)
...assuming I ever MAKE any kids, will they be able to figure out why I was born with 12 toes & zap that, so it doesn't get passed on?
Schatten Teufel
There is nothing "Common" about Sense
"but how about making life better first? Let's work on problems like hunger and opression."
;)
I'm pretty sure curing AIDS in africa would help make a ton of lives better. Just because your idea of making lives better doesn't involve curing illnesses doesn't mean other people should suffer from your oppressive viewpoint and die when their lives could be saved.
I'm headed home so I'm not going to RTFA but as someone working for a company that sells tools for identifying genetic sequences in solution, I can tell you that every time a "gene map" or such has been claimed it's been completely overblown. There are vast regions in the clusters that have iffy data or the clusters are in many pieces and no one knows how they fit together. It'll be a long while before 1 person's DNA has been fully sequenced, much less a comprehensive list of variations among all peoples.
r u going to tell me that a mutation that results in a stop codon, resulting in a painful death 5 years post birth, is not a "bad" gene ?
.....
/.geek and a human geneticist r at a party, and they c a super hot babe across the room. the geek says, lets go over and chat her up, the HG says its not worth it, because after we go half way, half remains, and so forth, and we will never get to the babe. /.geek say, yeah but we could get close enough to do...
u can quibble about semantics here, but sounds pretty bad to me
the rest of your arguments are more or less true but irrelevant, Yeah, they only did 239 people, yeah 1 million snps is not all of them,
the question is, are they close enough to do some practical damage ?
(old joke: a
and the
Many are owned by individual graduate students (and full PhDs) who "wasted" their weekends, social and family lives while certain people (not you...) were at parties, playing video games, or surfing the internet.
No, as long as you can't afford it, someone who works more than you do will pay for it through Medicaid (taxes) and higher premiums for health insurance.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Instead of playing with genes, why not INFORM the people instead? What about making condoms available to them? How about the medicine and food they need?
We're talking about trying to make people live longer lives, but are we prepared to take care of those who can't afford bling for their genes?
This sentence is false.
I'd perhaps pay more attention to your concerns if you appeared to know more about the subject. An antibiotic is a drug that kills or slows the growth of bacteria. It has no effect on viral agents.
As such, a virus doesn't "learn" to get around them.
And THAT being the case, your comments strike me as little more than the semi-modern version of that hoary cry, "There are things man was never meant to know."
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
...but you've got bad breath, too. :-(
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
As of 2001 the location of the genes that causes Red/Green color blindness had not been located. We know that at least one of them is located on the X chromosome, but no idea where. In 1997 the gene that causes Achromatopsia, the complete inability to distinguish color, was located on chromosome 2 but this is the rarest form of color blindness. But say I had Achromatopsia, or that we located the gene for Red/Green color blindness, is there any hope of a cure? If you were to extract some of my stem cells, do some gene therapy on them, inject them into my eye and then flash my retina with a bright light would it grow back with a greater capability to distinguish color?
I know it's more sexy to cure debilitating genetic diseases but there's a lot more people out there with color blindness than there are people with hemophilia. Surely economies of scale dictate that we should get the first shot at a cure.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Mutations are not sent to punish us for our hubris, they are random chemical changes.
What on earth are you talking about? Which diseaes do you think are worse then typhus, plague, polio, and smallpox? Yes, there are bacteria that are developing resistance to antibiotics, but these bugs are not becoming "worse", we're just being pushed back to where we stood with them 80 years ago.
Perhaps I look like I'm playing devil's advocate or something, but that really wasn't my intention. As it is, I really do wonder, though - won't all this just go to the people who can afford it? And aren't they the ones who can already afford the costs of getting cured already?
Thanks for playing, Metallichica.
This sentence is false.
Man, I'm really getting jumped on for this one - had no idea it was so taboo lol.
This sentence is false.
They can require selective breeding to eliminate bad genes, or offer gene therapy. Don't need to do any commie crap.
Actually, the HapMap is basically useless for "rare" genetic variants, because it intentionally is screening for common ones. Hence, it may actually be useful for common susceptibility alleles for heart disease or stroke but it isn't going to find the rare variants that affect only a few people.
From my weblog:
--Johnto evade tigers and law enforcement.
Medical research costs lots of money. There are only a few ways of raising that money: voluntary taxes, (think March of Dimes and the Polio vaccine), involuntary taxes (think National Institutes of Health), and investment by capitalists who hope eventually to get more money back from a project then they put into it (think paying customers). Now I supose you could argue that the human suffering involved cries out for people to volunteer their time and fortunes, but then I have to ask, what are you doing along these lines? If you aren't giving away your time and treasure to cure disease why would you feel others are obliged to?
There are plenty of excellent scientific justifications for the HapMap project and if you're as unaware of them as it sounds, then I wonder what sort of human genetics you actually do. The HapMap is already transforming the way human genetics is being done and if you're unaware of its importance then you must be living under a rock. At the American Society of Human Genetics meeting where this was announced, there are literally hundreds of presentations that touch on the HapMap project in one way or another.
There are excellent reasons for focusing on common genetic variation as the HapMap project has done. One is pragmatic; there are billions of rare variants, but to catalog their relationships would take stupendous effort and would be nearly useless from a practical standpoint. Between any two individuals, nearly all of the genetic differences are common ones in the population. There is a ton of well established statistics that shows that most of the common variation can be captured using a limited number (250K, 500K, etc) of markers, and that these variants generally cross conventional "racial" boundaries because they predate the radiation of humans out of Africa.
One of the PIs is Mormon because there is an extremely well characterized collection of Utah Morman DNA samples (the CEPH pedigrees), that have been used for decades, that were chosen for the "European descent" portion of the HapMap. That guy has been working with those families since they were first recruited to participate in genetic studies. The amount of money that went to Utah had to be trivial because none of the laboratory work was done there.
Sure, if people don't die from one disease, they may well end up dying from a different disease. Or get hit by a truck. So to minimize the risk of disease, try standing in a busy street.
And, it's sad that people DON'T volunteer more time and energy to help those in need. We seem to be moving into a time where people are becoming more selfish even though they have more than they need. Someone raised a question in another post that I find appropriate - will the people with "good" genes have to help fund healthcare for those with "bad" genes? (-1 Redundant ;)
This sentence is false.
If it isn't one thing, it's another - so my cynical, pessimistic side says - WHAT'S THE POINT?
This sentence is false.
Oxen's comment is the first time I've ever made this request, but to any mods who read it, please mod it up! It's brilliant.
It's worth at least a +6 (Miraculous)
I have to say though that the HapMap project is only a transient step to where this is all going. The NIH, NSF, and DOE are throwing significant amounts ofmoney incubating technologies to get us to the infamous '1000 dollar genome'. That's where things become really interesting.
The problem with HapMap, and frankly, the whole human genome project is that it's done on average people from diverse populations. Adults from diverse populations. Living Adults. What we all really want to know is what causes disease, and sequencing healthy people isn't going to completely get us there. There is a theory that common diseases are caused by large numbers of common varients or SNPs working in concert. In that respect, you can learn agood amount about things shuch as heart disease, certain psychiatric disorders, and cancers, but again, the SNPs most likely to be uncovered are those which have no deleterious effect.
Additionally, research using SNPs to find regions of interest on chromosomes (association or LD studies) require hundreds of thousands of data points in tens of thousands of people with disease and carefully paired controls. While the technology is there to do such projects now, it certainly isn't cheap. At some point, when technology allows, it will be way easier to just sequence the whole thing and look at the truely causitive SNPs and not the nearby SNPs with no biological relevance (which is what generally happens in association or LD studies- thus the name association, since they're associated, but not neccessarily the cause).
I certainly don't want to diminish the importance of the HapMap, as it is something that we could only dream of 10 years ago, and it will have a massive effect on medicine over the next 10 years, but the future is going to be absolutely incredible. At some point people will have themselves sequenced and have a comprehensive understanding of their suceptibilities for less than the cost of the prenatal screenings currently done on most newborns in the western world currently.
By that time, your doctor will be able to synthesize anything he needs on the fly, right there in the office.
Technoli
As Oscar Wilde said "A cynic is someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing."
My mother was born in 1925. By the time she was 18 she'd had tuberculosis and lost four or five schoolmates to infectious diseases like scarlet fever. I on the other hand, have had nothing worse then the mumps, and didn't loose any friends to infectious disease until I was well into my thirties. Modern civil sanitation and medicine haven't made anyone immortal, but they have greatly reduced the odds of dying tragically young. Do you really not see the value in this?
One way of looking at this study is the ramifications.
.01% of human DNA plays a huge role in difference between individual humans. The other factors being environmental and randomness.
.01% of human DNA plays a huge role in defects (ie sickness, bad growth,...) in any individual.
-
- Less than
Kind of blows your mind.
What's the point? What the hell kind of question is that?
Only someone that has not lost anyone important in their life would be able to ask something like that. Don't you want to see your grandchildren? Don't you want them to know you?
Life for humans is precious and short at best. If we have the ability to extend it and make it easier to live to extended ages, we should make it happen. Will some "bad" come of it? Most likely. We are barely beginning to enter into this arena. Will some "good" come of it? Most definitely.
I, of course, do not intend to die. Call me "Mr. Cryogenics" and I will see you in two hundred years!
Anyway, face it Buddy, after 7800 years it's all public domain.
Quite a few roads to hell have been paved by eugenicists, so it shouldn't be surprising that many people now hesitate walking on paths that intersect them, knowing full well that there will always be people willing to turn at that intersection and follow in those footsteps, perhaps without even noticing.
The "real question[s]" you point to look more like pamphlet questions to me--the easy, obvious questions that guide the reader to predetermined conclusions. Then the segue into "the magic topic of race". A couple of statements of "fact" to get the nod of agreement, and then,
"How will people react to the mounds of evidence that will continue to build that the races are not indeed equal as they would want to believe?"
Hello! How easy is that jump from issues of medicine to issues of sociopolitical philosophy?
I think the point is that people living with these diseases would like to have cures. Maybe they just want a shot at living a normal life and an average lifespan. There are no guarantees for anyone, but having a fighting chance is nice.
Bioinformatics.
Let me give you a couple of examples of what it is already doing. I have a dear friend with an inoperable brain tumor. It turns out this particular form of tumor has genetic markers that are strongly correlated with its response to chemotherapy. After a biopsy of the tumor they can run genetic tests and give you a much clearer picture of whether chemotherapy is likely to be effective or not. As you doubtless know, chemotherapy is no picnic, so it is a hard, hard decision figuring out whether you should undertake a treatment that may extend your life 5 years, or simply screw up the the last three months you have. Tools like this genetic analysis help a bit.
On the absolute cutting edge of genetic therapy, doctors in France treated several children who had no immune system (bubble boy disease in popular parlance) due to a genetic defect. They were able use viruses to transfer a correctly functioning copy of the broken gene into the children's bone marrow. All of the children developed fully functioning immune systems. Unfortunately three of the children developed leukemia and one died. Certainly here is an example of the unforeseen consequences you are worried about, but what do you do in the face of a lethal disease like this?
Do these sound like cosmetic surgery?
How is this different from any form of medical care now in existence? Across the world, even in countries with socialized medicine, the wealthy can get better health care then the poor. If you are going to wait to develop medical treatments until this inequity can be solved, you are going to wait a very long time.
But again I ask, what is your moral standing to make this criticism? How much of your time and treasure have you given? You could cancel your cell phone this very week, send the money to Doctor's Without Borders, and they might save several lives with the supplies that it buys. Are you going to do it? I don't mean to pick specifically on you here. I have a cell phone, and unfortunately I am not going to cancel it and give the proceeds to a worthy cause. I'm just trying to make the point the people are sometimes too quick to demand charity and sacrifice in others while not offering it themselves.
And with it, all hell has been unleashed?
For example, it's well known that Amish, Ashkenazi Jews, and other groups suffer from certain genetic maladies far above the average.
h tm
Yes, but it's important to note that they don't suffer from more genetic difficulties than other populations. You won't cut your health care costs by excluding the Mennonite bretheren (i.e. Amish.)These populations are homogenous, not defective. Since intensive study always turns up particular defects, there has been some concern about the political consequences of studying a particular population.
Jewish individuals are in a unique position to assist scientists in the understanding of genetic disorders. Due to a long history of marriage within the faith, which extends back thousands of years, the Jewish community has emerged from a limited number of ancestors and has a similar genetic makeup. This allows researchers to more easily perform genetic studies and locate disease-causing genes.
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/epigen/ashkenazim.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Nonsense, nature doesn't have to do anything. And population control in nature happens mainly through multiplication of predators and starvation anyway.
Besides, humans that already live will not benefit that much from these advances. If my genes contain a susceptibility to some disorder, the cure would have to first rewrite the genes in my cells and then the affected tissues would have to be regrown using the updated DNA to get rid of the existing weakness (some disorders can be fixed by just updating the DNA). It would be like binary patching a buggy database server without first stopping it.
Ever hear of Natural Selection?
Yeah, it has stopped working for the human race some time ago. Smartest, healthiest people are not reproducing at a greater rate than the rest of the population. What about it?
I predict that we will see in the future a great conflict between the people who want to have engineered "upgrades" in their kids' DNA - first fixes for diseases and disorders, but later other modifications - and the people who will only accept the "natural" reproduction.
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, where does the road paved with evil intentions lead to?
Here's another study regarding mapping genes. There's a lot of research being done and it is being more and more interdisciplinary, which is a good thing if you want a big picture to find clues and solutions.
GeoPlace reports a story on project METAFUNCTIONS from Informationsdienst Wissenschaft about mapping environmental clues to decipher the function of genes. "Another innovative aspect of this project [METAFUNCTIONS] is the use of geographic information systems (GIS). GIS tools provide for the simulation and analysis of events from a geographical or spatial perspective. Novel patterns - for example, the physical clustering of genes within a genome - will be correlated to the contextual habitat data."
Animoog.org
This map can also show the human family tree, which originates from 1000-odd individuals around 200,000 years ago. It can also explain if we have Neanderthal genes, and if there were other ancestors of ours we dont know about.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Roddenberry still as prophetic as ever http://www.memory-alpha.org/en/index.php/Eugenics_ Wars
This is great. This means in 10 years we'll be able to do soemthing like this:
/dev/bioformer0
diff me.dna wife.dna | sed -e 's/sex=female//' -e 's/skin_burns_easily=y/skin_burns_easily=n' -e 's/good_at_soccer=n/good_at_soccer=y' > child.dna
cat child.dna >
who needs sex?
I've actually got most of a short story written around a similar concept, but in my case (and I think in the real world too) such a thing would never work.
The reason being is that the concept of "ethnicity" is more tribial/social/religious than it is genetic.
I'm willing to bet that there is no set of genes that uniquely identifies a given ethnicity *right now*, and that as time goes forward, the probability of discovering a set of genes that identifies "most" of the population of a given ethnicity is steadily dropping, due to population intermingling and interbreeding.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
made my day, "special attack"! "User ID in heaven"! HA!
"patterns of tiny DNA"
Is there any other kind?
An even more interesting set of data is the data from Iceland, where the entire population's genealogy is known and recorded and the country has a nationwide health care system. This has allowed extensive studies using the current population's data along with their history (privacy concerns heavily addressed, really!).
Roseanne: I fully support this. Who doesn't take pleasure in a well maintained lawn? Fresh green grass, a pleasure to the eyes, nose and toes. Some even take pleasure in hearing the distant sound of the mower across the street on a summer afternoon...
Chase: That's LAWS.
Roseanne: Well then, that's different...Nevermind.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Five years after Craig Ventor's DNA was decoded, they still dont have a precise number of human genes. Thats partly because the the first draft was very rough, being gradually completed by per-chromosome working groups. The other is because there still some ambiguity in how DNA maps into proteins. Mammal DNA with all its introns and exons can have multiple, ambiguous mappings. Some simpler, sub-mammal organisms its easier to do this.
A mouse DNA decoding project has been more precise. They specific match the gene and its resulting protein(s). Then they reverse manaufacture cDNA from the protein and archive these. I recall they are around 30K genes and 60K proteins. Human genes are being analysed in this fashion too, but not as complete yet.
Heck yes! My kids are going to have laser beam vision and mind rays that can pick people up and shake them around!!!
Ever hear of Natural Selection?
Yeah, it has stopped working for the human race some time ago. Smartest, healthiest people are not reproducing at a greater rate than the rest of the population. What about it?
This is a misunderstanding of what Natural Selection means. Having an IQ over 50 is a major factor in survival but having an IQ over 180 is less important. Raw intelligence is such a tiny factor that once you hit an IQ in the 80's it's less important than not having any major genetic diseases. Most of these "Rare" conditions are "Rare" because of natural selection. It's still working but it does not care about the things that you find important. Looking "HOT" as a young teen is probably more valuable genetically than intelligence. You might not like that fact, but it's all about having kids that have kids that have kids.. It's not about not wealth, fame, or power.
When smart people start breading like rabbits it might make a difference but for now Natural Selection is mostly just keeping crap DNA out of the population at large. While looking at the Darwin awards shows you that Natural Selection is weeding some dumb people, it seems more important to weed out people who would commit suicide or overdose on drugs vs. being slightly less productive.
Don't you mean 2 people 4000 years ago?
Same here!!