Slashdot Mirror
'IMAX Movie of Body' Allows Stanford Geneticist To Stop Diabetes In Its Tracks
sciencehabit writes "Michael Snyder has taken 'know thyself' to the next level. Over a 14-month period, the molecular geneticist analyzed his blood 20 different times to pluck out a wide variety of biochemical data depicting the status of his body's immune system, metabolism, and gene activity. In yesterday's issue of Cell (abstract), Snyder and a team of 40 other researchers present the results of this extraordinarily detailed look at his body, which they call an integrative personal omics profile (iPOP) because it combines cutting-edge scientific fields such as genomics (study of one's DNA), metabolomics (study of metabolism), and proteomics (study of proteins). Instead of seeing a snapshot of the body taken during the typical visit to a doctor's office, iPOP effectively offers an IMAX movie, which in Snyder's case had the added drama of charting his response to two viral infections and the emergence of type 2 diabetes."
Slashdot headlines are getting pathetically lame. This kind of twisted deceptive word play is what I expect when I stand in line at the grocery store. Would it have been stooping so low to integrity to post
'IMAX Movie of Body' Allows Stanford Geneticist To See Type 2 Diabetes Progress Like Never Before
?
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
Except starting in 2014, if all goes well, it will be illegal for them to deny you coverage based on a pre-existing condition. There will also be no annual cap on your doctor visits, etc because they can no longer cap that, either.
AKA HMOs can't say, "Oh, you're only allowed 3 office visits per quarter, and if you go above such and such amount, we cut off you off for the rest of the year."
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
Cheeseburgers and Twinkies don't cause Type 2 Diabetes, they only reveal it. The tendency to lose regulation of insulin on diet is the illness, and it's congenital.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Causality is tricky, but not without answers. If avoiding cheeseburgers and twinkies causes you *not* to get T2D even if you are predisposed, I would say that both are causal factors and are right to blame. However, the *type* of environmental factor also plays in. If you feed a cat paracetamol, it will die. Does this simply "reveal" a underlying condition? Is the cat sick to start with? Feeding the cat the substance is what killed it, but the reason it died from it is biological and exposure to a substance it would not encounter in nature. If you happened uppon a cat that survived, THAT would be the oddity.
If you are born with relevant genes, you are, and need to look out. You carry one of many polymophisms in the gene pool, but you are not sick or nessearily abnormal. It just means that under a heavy diet with little exercise - an unnatural lifestyle - you might get sick faster than others. It's *multifactoral*, like most conditions we can get. If you are not very good at skydiving, you should not skydive even if everyone you know does. Cheeseburgers and sedentary lifestyle need to take the blame more than genetics.