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."

Comments

How can they be sure of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the have a high degree of certainty .. but how do they a few people have got unique rare SNP mutations?

Genetic Discrimination

[246o1]

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.

Re:If there ever was...

[espressojim]

Yeah. My paper was just accepted to nature genetics, and uses the hapmap as one of the data sets. Interesting that they claim it's finished now, when I had the 5K data back in may...

Ok, so this is to reflect the nature paper that is just comming out now, where a variation was looked for every 5,000 bases. The new map is 5x as dense (every 1k bases), and was released on the 10-24-05. The new map should provide a lot more resolution for interesting questions.

Funny, David Altschuler is my former boss, and is one of the heads of the project. Nice guy - and brilliant. I attend his meetings all the time, and he's a fun guy to work with. I'm currently working as the primary computational programmer on another one of his projects...

Re:Then what?

[metallichica]

Wow... bring up a simple point/comment, and get downed for trolling... thought this was a place to learn new things, but apparently if you're not already well-informed, you get trashed.

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.

;)

Don't think it'll work

[DG]

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