DISQUS

You could probably do this, Kevin, if you had the technical ability, a PCR machine, and knew which primers to order...

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There was a brief outage as of a minute before this message.

Steve, please don't, "The Master Plan" is well-polished crap. What is Google doing that this video claims is so bad? Oh no, the announcer said "don't be evil" with suggestive intonation? Oh no, they used currency symbols in the names of the founders? Oh no, let's sacrifice a goat and purge away this great evil!

So what if Google is getting into health care? Give me one concrete fact why Google in health would make my life objectively worse. Show me evidence of this impending Google malice that threatens me personally.

What, because of "privacy?" That's a nonsense word like "patriotism" or "democratic." Yes, it would be wrong if somebody didn't treat me for cancer because they knew I had cancer. But isn't that the fault of the health care establishment, you know, the system that doesn't treat what it knows about, and not the service that tries to learn what about me can be improved?

Just repeat that to yourself again: "Yes, it would be wrong if somebody didn't treat me for cancer because they knew I had cancer." Isn't that just insane? Yet, that's exactly how health care works today.

Give me one good reason why I should defend the status quo of health care. Because it's foolishly funded by risk ignorance, and its only impetus is health emergency? What crap. Instead of me paying to pumping crones full of drugs for two more years of semiconscious Jerry Springer, how about I get health care that improve the lives of young people like me who already seem healthy today? I can see Google providing services like that in exchange for referring my health profile to, for example, drug companies. Fine. Great.

And... this is bad... because I'm only supposed to buy health care that I don't think I'll use to fix diseases that I could prevent?

Yes, I find insipid marketing blather like "democratizing" insulting to my intelligence, but "annoying" isn't "wrong."

But, as far as I can tell, my life has only gotten much better thanks to Google and its satellite projects. Does that mean that Google as a company is rewarded, too? Yes... and? So? Good for them.

Haha, Steve, it's not my fault you asked for a $600 dollar refund on a product you didn't even buy. I do think it's a bit silly that you love to lambaste 23andMe. Take them for what they are: how I described them here. You can bing them when they play Internet Doctors, but otherwise, lighten up. I don't see a picture of a doctor on their home page, and royalty can do whatever they want. Get used to it.

Is Helix Health in the same category as other genomics businesses? I thought that Helix Health was a more of a physician practice (consulting service) than product business. What I've stated applies most to product-centric businesses.

Chris,

Texts may only describe facts; they are not facts themselves. That's why experimental details and citations are necessary in scientific texts. Then, one may test how well a texts describes reality.

You are welcome to submit any relevant Biblical text for publication. If an independent party can confirm its physical veracity, we will publish it to your credit. However, if you have something scientifically important to say about the Bible and biology, I recommend submitting it to Nature first (or we will and steal your credit!)

neandrothal: Yes and yes. I will make a note of that because it's a good point.

Palonek: Why 7 bits? That's 2⁷ = 128. You may be thinking of ASCII, which is 7 bits, to write the literal letters "A G C T." If ASCII is the encoding your biotech or lab uses for massive DNA files, you are over 3.5 times the data (so 3.5 the bandwidth, 3.5 the storage, and sometimes 3.5 the processing power.) That's bad.

Haha, I'm not sure that's the metaphor I remember from the movie, Steve. :D

I remember hearing about some study that linked myopia with intelligence. Is anyone aware of that study (and can send me a link?)

Haha, I don't know, are you a bored 30-something billionaire?

For such a heritable (40%) and research-targeted (NIMH $5MM pledged) disease , it's surprising that so little in the genome is known about schizophrenia. Here's a paper a month ago which suggests rare-variant "microdeletions and microduplications": Rare Structural Variants Disrupt Multiple Genes in Neurodevelopmental Pathways in Schizophrenia

If the gene is used in a procedure, that procedure may be patented. I think what is happening is that a template of common procedures regarding genes in laboratory work is patented with the specifics regarding actual gene sequence used in the procedure the "novelty."

So, I can't patent a gene itself, but I can patent every known procedural permutation of "a method for diagnosing, identifying, or manipulating a phenotype using gene X." The problem is that I think practically, patenting every known procedure regarding a gene is effectively patenting gene the itself (without actually doing so).

I'm not a legal expert in this by any stretch of the imagination, so additional comments by experts are welcome.

Disclosure: Josh attended U. Pitt for undergrad. ;)

I think both GINA and ACOE, if they provided and administrated vital, long-term social infrastructure, would be great.

But they don't, they're both short-term political tools, and neither achieves anything lasting... Health care, levies, etc.

The solution isn't to better hide information, but to fix health care. I mean, really, what kind of system is so broken that we feel obligated to laud legislation to make sharing information about one health with one's health care providers... illegal? That's as backwards as to make sharing information about one's income information with one's government illegal because taxes are too high.

So, yes, GINA is important like a sandbag on a New Orleans levy: it may address a fringe immediate problem, but don't bother patting yourself on the back because the basic infrastructure needs to be replaced. It will be expensive and politically inconvenient, but... well, New Orleans isn't patting itself any more.

"YOU MANIACS! How many men will lose their lives in a vain attempt to hunt down this mouthwatering killing machine?"

7.

Don't forget the best video game to make fun (Half Life) and the best video game to make fun of (Second Life).

I was just about to leave that same comment.

This is interesting from an informatics perspective. It's not the gene encoding itself causing a problem, it's the number of copies.

A programming analogy would be like defining a "BRAF factory" class once is OK, but defining the class twice causes errors, yet class definitions themselves are the same.

I like how this is our biggest story by page views. Truly, we have tapped a latent yet popular demand for manbearpig news.

"Where do the initial ingredients come from?"

From the complete paper:

"A population of billions of RNA enzymes with RNA ligase activity was made to evolve continuously, with real-time monitoring of the population size and fitness."

and

"The RNA enzyme that was chosen for this study is a descendant of the class I RNA ligase, first described by Bartel and Szostak [ref]"

Further, "Ligase" is a class of enzymes that helps links two molecules together.

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Notice: Please keep discussion on topic to biology and genomics and contribute intelligently. This isn't Digg, and this isn't Thursday's evening teen Bible study in Wichita, Kansas.

There are more than three companies selling SNP chip tests, but these are the three leaders.

SeqWright, for example, though I have heard nothing positive about this company. My inability to know positive news about SeqWright doesn't necessarily make them inferior, but others including David Hamilton at VentureBeat are not impressed.

My personal opinion is that deCODEme, as part of deCODE, should be the leader as they are the only company with any capacity to conduct real research. However, as this is a consumer market, I feel that this is is a first marketing game, and deCODE does not do good consumer marketing in my opinion. Maybe that will change. I hope so.

Remember, deCODE is a publicly traded company with a track record of published genetic research, and both 23andMe and Navigenics are startups with product release histories still measured in days.

Daniel, I've read your blog, and it's excellent. Thank you for your comment.

Daniel is referring to a new genomic testing technique called Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) which was used in this study. Rather than comparing entire genomes to find associations between DNA sequences and diseases ---which is too expensive with current technology--- researchers compare "representational SNP sample sets."

A very crude analogy would be that GWAS is like looking for differences between novel editions by comparing every 13th letter of each copy.