Copyright could never exist for the model, but would exist for the way in which the model is presented in the book. It is possible that a patent may exist for the model or its application, but I don't know enough about patent law to know how that would work.
Alzheimers disease is one of the biggest causes of death of old people and is caused basically by brain ageing in various forms. So presumably whatever miracle cure is found for 'ageing' in general will also prevent Alzheimer's disease.
Will medical advances alone be enough to extend our longevity to the extent you believe it can be, or will health promoting lifestyle changes also need to be made? If health promotion is more important that medicine, how can we achieve this?
Additionally, if you read some books you now think are too old for your kids, maybe you should consider that those books were too old for YOU, and you turned out fine! I cringe when my son reads MAD, but it was probably just as nihlistic and subversive in the 1970s as it is today.
I agree with that - and your kid doesn't have to get all the subtle political and philosophical layers to enjoy good stories about spaceships and robots.
Sorry I should have read your post more closely. You have a candidate gene so the genotyping might be more valuable. Although if that's the case it really might be worth trying to get it done as part of some research programme. The marginal cost of running these analyses costs nothing like what these sites are charging.
I won't ask what your particular conditions are, but if they are sufficiently badly understood you can probably find a researcher in the field who wants to look at genetic underlying causes and would genotype you for free. But they'll need a lot of similar people to be able to narrow down a genetic cause in this way.
Doing an exploratory genome wide association study on a sample of one (ie yourself) will lead you nowhere, because these sites will only test for relatively common polymorphisms, and the average person has thousands of them that might be considered unusual.
I think that epidemiologically the results can make sense without a direct biological understanding. You can be pretty sure just by doing enough tests that a certain mutation is linked to a certain disease. The part about protein structure and function necessarily comes after that. For example we still don't really know why APOEe4 leads to an increased dementia risk, despite a lot of competeing hypotheses, although we certainly know that it does.
Also, when doing these sorts of genome wide assessments, the actual SNPs that are tested are often not the disease mutations themselves, but are sufficiently close to the gene of interest that they are usually inherited together. So although the tested SNP may be in a non-coding region, it'll probably be strongly linked to a disease mutation.
I agree with you though that the summary and article show an enormous ignorance when it comes to genetics and genomics, and an expert interpretation is needed for these results.
Yeah you're right I was being melodramatic. Extremely heavy regulation, similar to that used to assess the safety and efficacy of drugs is probably the best way forward.
At the moment labs are supposed to have a license and they are insepcted for accuracy with respect to the actual genotyping they provide. But there is no regulation of the dubious medical interpretation or cross-selling that goes on top of your results.
In the UK under the National Health Service (NHS) doctors are usually criticised for trying to do less work than they should, rather than for trying to more than they should which seems to be a major criticism of doctors in a commercial health system.
Despite this and the increased cost to the NHS that keeping genetic testing in the medical profession will entail, our government and medical associations are reaching the same conclusions as in the US, even though the political climate here is favouring more and more private healthcare. So you can't put it down to greed, at least here.
I think doctors here may be concerned about a huge influx of 'worried well' people who have got these test results and don't understand them.
The weird thing is that I don't feel afraid (and I travel frequently) and I don't know anyone who is really afraid. Where are all of these scared people ? Who are they ? More importantly, do we know that the above statement is really true, or is it just what we are told ?
Yes its the fear of the fear of terror that I'm afraid of.
One of the main problems is the education they give you is usually along the lines of 'Well it seems your genes say you and your children will die unless you buy our patented combination of nutritional supplements'.
On a personal note, I'm interested to know if knowing your genotype has changed your life or lifestyle in any way?
Thanks for the link. Since we're at it, I'll repost a link I posted in response to the thread a couple of weeks ago on the same subject.
The US Government Accountability Office compiled a report of genetic testing that is available here. I'm not posting any quotes from it but its quite strongly worded conclusions are that these online genetic tests are at best worthless and at worst harmful. Any government that doesn't try to shut them down is being negligent.
Wired kindly point out that to get any ethically sound advice you should go to a genetic counsellor.
Why the rest of the article is there is then a bit bewlidering. It's like they're saying if you want meaningless information and bad or dangerous advice, and you want to pay a lot of money for it, these are the places to go.
Yes they do go to meet real people but real people don't join unless they think there are already people have joined(you humans are such sheep in that regard)
So what species are you? Some other highly evolved ape that's mastered web-development?
Anyway to clarify: Humans are the ones you should be inventing on your site. Sheep are the small white wooly ones. You probably don't want them on your dating site. Or maybe you do, I don't want to judge.
There's no paradox at all. If you ask a girl out on a date she might say yes. Promising that you are not going to cut her up into little pieces and eat her raw over the next 2 weeks does not improve your chances. People are rightly suspicious when they hear someone state explicitly that they are not planning on doing something evil. Economists are always coming out with nonsense like this.
It's still important research, and I think it's counter-intuitive that the more you talk about safegurading people's data the more nervous they get about revealing it. When we try to recruit people for observational medical studies we send the potential particpants ever increasing details of the safeguards we are going to use to protect their data. At the same time particpation rates are dropping, and a natural response has been to try and make people feel even more secure about our use of their data. Maybe this research suggests we're making it worse.
Thanks for posting, that was interesting. I have a lot of respect for humanities and classics, and I regret not studying them at school. It's also a shame that our commercially motivated government doesn't seem to value any education that doesn't contribute directly to your value in the jobs market.
..and this sort of thing is way cooler and more interesting than the next [RI|MP]AA story with a bunch of tedious hypocrites re-explain why it's OK to pirate entertainment because it sucks so much they don't even want to pirate its sucky ass, for the fifty trillionth time;-)
Ummm...I think that WAS layman's terms. For you math geeks, try being a history major and looking at all that. It just looks like a cat walked on the keyboard to me...
Are you reading slashdot as some kind of anthropological study?
There are actually Creative Commons projects focused on providing free textbook materials on lots of subjects. If you contributed to such a project, the project coordinators would take on the role of the publisher, without gouging their clients.
Thanks I'll look into it, and then try to persuade my boss that it's a worthwhile use of my time.
That's an interesting point, and the answer is I don't know. I suppose the job of the publisher or maybe the editors in that regard is to identify the need for the book, decide on the contents, to identify suitable authors and to make sure the whole book makes narrative sense. They then ask the authors to contribute their chapters. The authors and their parent institutions then get their names and perhaps more importantly their points of view published and read.
Of course there was nothing to stop me writing my chapters on my own and self publishing them, but there would be no guarantee they would ever be read, and quite simply without being asked it would never have occurred to me to do it.
Academics often contribute to textbooks without being paid. I wrote a chapter for a textbook recently and am currently working on another, and I won't get any financial return for either - I consider it a part of my job. Having said that the books do turn out to be quite expensive, I put that down to the low numbers the publisher expects to sell.
Writers of very popular course books will get some return, but for most of us writing specialist texts this isn't the case.
The summary seems to imply that they are creating embryos which combine genetic material from humans and pigs. The article, on the other hand, says that they are taking 100% human DNA and implanting them into pig egg cells which have had their DNA removed. I think it's safe to to say that there is a huge difference between the two ideas.
They would still have pig mitochondrial DNA, even if the nuclear DNA was all replaced.
...but I think that cancer is likely to be triggered by some psychological conditions.
Well, it might not be the *only* cause, but certainly the psychological aspect should never be underestimated when dealing with *any* illness.
Depression is certainly associated with increased mortality. There have been studies linking psychological states to subsequent cancer incidence, but their findings have been mixed.
The negative physical effects of perceived loneliness has had almost no attention in the scientific literature (as opposed to clinical depression, which gets a lot). I know this because I've recently been looking as part of my own research programme. I'm planning a study of the adverse effects of loneliness in the elderly, and I'm hoping to be able to separate the effects of loneliness and depression caused by neuronal changes, which is surprisingly hard in the clinical setting.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright could never exist for the model, but would exist for the way in which the model is presented in the book. It is possible that a patent may exist for the model or its application, but I don't know enough about patent law to know how that would work.
Alzheimers disease is one of the biggest causes of death of old people and is caused basically by brain ageing in various forms. So presumably whatever miracle cure is found for 'ageing' in general will also prevent Alzheimer's disease.
Will medical advances alone be enough to extend our longevity to the extent you believe it can be, or will health promoting lifestyle changes also need to be made? If health promotion is more important that medicine, how can we achieve this?
Exploits of a Mom. XKCD has a comic for everything ;-)
Yeah and it's always that one.
Additionally, if you read some books you now think are too old for your kids, maybe you should consider that those books were too old for YOU, and you turned out fine! I cringe when my son reads MAD, but it was probably just as nihlistic and subversive in the 1970s as it is today.
I agree with that - and your kid doesn't have to get all the subtle political and philosophical layers to enjoy good stories about spaceships and robots.
In other news, the public will phase out Mercedes purchases by 2015.
In other news, economically feasible oil and gas supplies to be exhausted by 2015.
Sorry I should have read your post more closely. You have a candidate gene so the genotyping might be more valuable. Although if that's the case it really might be worth trying to get it done as part of some research programme. The marginal cost of running these analyses costs nothing like what these sites are charging.
I won't ask what your particular conditions are, but if they are sufficiently badly understood you can probably find a researcher in the field who wants to look at genetic underlying causes and would genotype you for free. But they'll need a lot of similar people to be able to narrow down a genetic cause in this way.
Doing an exploratory genome wide association study on a sample of one (ie yourself) will lead you nowhere, because these sites will only test for relatively common polymorphisms, and the average person has thousands of them that might be considered unusual.
I wish you well though.
I think that epidemiologically the results can make sense without a direct biological understanding. You can be pretty sure just by doing enough tests that a certain mutation is linked to a certain disease. The part about protein structure and function necessarily comes after that. For example we still don't really know why APOEe4 leads to an increased dementia risk, despite a lot of competeing hypotheses, although we certainly know that it does.
Also, when doing these sorts of genome wide assessments, the actual SNPs that are tested are often not the disease mutations themselves, but are sufficiently close to the gene of interest that they are usually inherited together. So although the tested SNP may be in a non-coding region, it'll probably be strongly linked to a disease mutation.
I agree with you though that the summary and article show an enormous ignorance when it comes to genetics and genomics, and an expert interpretation is needed for these results.
Yeah you're right I was being melodramatic. Extremely heavy regulation, similar to that used to assess the safety and efficacy of drugs is probably the best way forward.
At the moment labs are supposed to have a license and they are insepcted for accuracy with respect to the actual genotyping they provide. But there is no regulation of the dubious medical interpretation or cross-selling that goes on top of your results.
In the UK under the National Health Service (NHS) doctors are usually criticised for trying to do less work than they should, rather than for trying to more than they should which seems to be a major criticism of doctors in a commercial health system.
Despite this and the increased cost to the NHS that keeping genetic testing in the medical profession will entail, our government and medical associations are reaching the same conclusions as in the US, even though the political climate here is favouring more and more private healthcare. So you can't put it down to greed, at least here.
I think doctors here may be concerned about a huge influx of 'worried well' people who have got these test results and don't understand them.
The weird thing is that I don't feel afraid (and I travel frequently) and I don't know anyone who is really afraid. Where are all of these scared people ? Who are they ? More importantly, do we know that the above statement is really true, or is it just what we are told ?
Yes its the fear of the fear of terror that I'm afraid of.
One of the main problems is the education they give you is usually along the lines of 'Well it seems your genes say you and your children will die unless you buy our patented combination of nutritional supplements'.
On a personal note, I'm interested to know if knowing your genotype has changed your life or lifestyle in any way?
Thanks for the link. Since we're at it, I'll repost a link I posted in response to the thread a couple of weeks ago on the same subject.
The US Government Accountability Office compiled a report of genetic testing that is available here. I'm not posting any quotes from it but its quite strongly worded conclusions are that these online genetic tests are at best worthless and at worst harmful. Any government that doesn't try to shut them down is being negligent.
Wired kindly point out that to get any ethically sound advice you should go to a genetic counsellor.
Why the rest of the article is there is then a bit bewlidering. It's like they're saying if you want meaningless information and bad or dangerous advice, and you want to pay a lot of money for it, these are the places to go.
Yes they do go to meet real people but real people don't join unless they think there are already people have joined(you humans are such sheep in that regard)
So what species are you? Some other highly evolved ape that's mastered web-development?
Anyway to clarify: Humans are the ones you should be inventing on your site. Sheep are the small white wooly ones. You probably don't want them on your dating site. Or maybe you do, I don't want to judge.
There's no paradox at all. If you ask a girl out on a date she might say yes. Promising that you are not going to cut her up into little pieces and eat her raw over the next 2 weeks does not improve your chances. People are rightly suspicious when they hear someone state explicitly that they are not planning on doing something evil. Economists are always coming out with nonsense like this.
It's still important research, and I think it's counter-intuitive that the more you talk about safegurading people's data the more nervous they get about revealing it. When we try to recruit people for observational medical studies we send the potential particpants ever increasing details of the safeguards we are going to use to protect their data. At the same time particpation rates are dropping, and a natural response has been to try and make people feel even more secure about our use of their data. Maybe this research suggests we're making it worse.
Thanks for posting, that was interesting. I have a lot of respect for humanities and classics, and I regret not studying them at school. It's also a shame that our commercially motivated government doesn't seem to value any education that doesn't contribute directly to your value in the jobs market.
..and this sort of thing is way cooler and more interesting than the next [RI|MP]AA story with a bunch of tedious hypocrites re-explain why it's OK to pirate entertainment because it sucks so much they don't even want to pirate its sucky ass, for the fifty trillionth time ;-)
That was quite nicely put.
Ummm...I think that WAS layman's terms. For you math geeks, try being a history major and looking at all that. It just looks like a cat walked on the keyboard to me...
Are you reading slashdot as some kind of anthropological study?
Scholarpedia is something a bit like this I think, but I don't know a lot about it.
There are actually Creative Commons projects focused on providing free textbook materials on lots of subjects. If you contributed to such a project, the project coordinators would take on the role of the publisher, without gouging their clients.
Thanks I'll look into it, and then try to persuade my boss that it's a worthwhile use of my time.
That's an interesting point, and the answer is I don't know. I suppose the job of the publisher or maybe the editors in that regard is to identify the need for the book, decide on the contents, to identify suitable authors and to make sure the whole book makes narrative sense. They then ask the authors to contribute their chapters. The authors and their parent institutions then get their names and perhaps more importantly their points of view published and read.
Of course there was nothing to stop me writing my chapters on my own and self publishing them, but there would be no guarantee they would ever be read, and quite simply without being asked it would never have occurred to me to do it.
Academics often contribute to textbooks without being paid. I wrote a chapter for a textbook recently and am currently working on another, and I won't get any financial return for either - I consider it a part of my job. Having said that the books do turn out to be quite expensive, I put that down to the low numbers the publisher expects to sell.
Writers of very popular course books will get some return, but for most of us writing specialist texts this isn't the case.
The summary seems to imply that they are creating embryos which combine genetic material from humans and pigs. The article, on the other hand, says that they are taking 100% human DNA and implanting them into pig egg cells which have had their DNA removed. I think it's safe to to say that there is a huge difference between the two ideas.
They would still have pig mitochondrial DNA, even if the nuclear DNA was all replaced.
...but I think that cancer is likely to be triggered by some psychological conditions. Well, it might not be the *only* cause, but certainly the psychological aspect should never be underestimated when dealing with *any* illness.
Depression is certainly associated with increased mortality. There have been studies linking psychological states to subsequent cancer incidence, but their findings have been mixed.
The negative physical effects of perceived loneliness has had almost no attention in the scientific literature (as opposed to clinical depression, which gets a lot). I know this because I've recently been looking as part of my own research programme. I'm planning a study of the adverse effects of loneliness in the elderly, and I'm hoping to be able to separate the effects of loneliness and depression caused by neuronal changes, which is surprisingly hard in the clinical setting.