privacy

Our two favorite commentators are back for our February 2019 month-in-review show, and to give our own twist to Valentine's Day celebrations we take on the topic of family surprises due to DNA testing. This is a phenomenon taking the world by storm in 2019. The Boston Globe had a great headline this past week, "First came the home DNA kits. Now come the support groups."

The month began with the New York Times's Editorial Board issuing a rebuke of 23andMe's cancer genetics testing. Nathan says it's similar to the paper's tech consumer reports section giving a bad grade. Theral says, no, it's the press filling in for a lax FDA.

Laura joins her colleagues, the authors of a STAT opinion piece, in raising alarm over the possibility of companies soon profiling for high IQ in the preimplantation genetics arena. She also questions whether Thermo's move to stop selling sequencers to one small region in China to protest surveillance by the state can be anything more than a PR stunt. "Don't they have trucks in China?"

Join us for another monthly romp through the genomics headlines.

Nathan Pearson and Laura Hercher are back for a look over a busy month of headlines.

May took us into the era of the free genome as Geisinger planted the genomic medicine flag on an even higher peak. And did you know California was keeping a genetic database for every baby born?

Meh. . . says Laura. Every state does it. Old news.

And mosaicism is old scientific news, says Nathan, but he likes the way Carl Zimmer brings it to light in a new book. Nathan and Laura then go above and beyond with their own elucidation.

It’s our final month-in-review before the break. Happy summertime!

After decades on the loose, it’s cool the cops finally caught him. But is it cool how they caught him?

Nathan Pearson and Laura Hercher are back for April’s headlines. AACR had some more good news about Keytruda, and we take a look at the cancer prediction space.

DNA Day, the first cannabis based therapy to be recommended for FDA approval, the Zuckerberg hearing—there’s lots in here today.

Though recent guests at Mendelspod say we're not quite to the $1,000 genome, we're close enough to use that benchmark in genomics discussions. But what are we getting for that almost $1,000?

Mark Gerstein is the co-director of the Yale Computational Biology and Bioinformatics program where he focuses on better annotation of the human genome and better ways to mine big genomics data. He has played a big role in some of the large genomics initiatives since the first human genome project, including ENCODE and the 1,000 Genomes Project.

“I’m very enthusiastic, of course, about the thousand dollar genome, but I don’t think that a true human genome has arrived for a thousand dollars,” Mark says at the outset of today’s interview. "The great excitement of next generation sequencing—which is deserved—has also obscured that there are a lot of very deep technical questions in terms of really assembling the tricky parts of the genome and really being able to conceptualize the more complex bits of human genetic variation that need to be tackled.”

So what are those tricky remaining parts? Mark shares his interest into the importance of structural variation, and says there is much more to learn from the overlooked non-coding portion of the genome. He’s particularly interested in pseudogenes.

We took some audience questions for Mark which lead us into a discussion of how best to query and mine big genomics data. As with several other leading bioinformaticians on the show, Mark agrees that privacy is the big issue for genomics and for society at large.

 Art Caplan is a prodigious writer on the topic of medical ethics. How prodigious? How about thirty-two books and over 700 peer reviewed papers on ethical conundrums ranging from organ donation to end of life care.

He spends about half his time as a public figure, engaging the lay audience, for example, through op-eds like his recent piece for the Washington Post arguing that doctors who oppose vaccination should lose their license. The other half of his time he spends developing materials meant for an academic audience.

In today’s interview, Art begins by saying that ethical issues around the genome editing of plants and animals are much more pressing today than the current furor over human germline editing. That we can leave to our grandchildren, he says. What we must pay more attention to now is the introduction of genetically engineered mosquitos into the ecosystem.

Well versed in all of the major ethical issues which have surfaced here at Mendelspod, including the rise of prenatal diagnostics and abortions and the evolution of privacy, Art is pro science and technology, yet still sees himself like a “biblical prophet."

Just what is the role of a bioethicist? Is it possible to slow down science and technology?

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Guest:

John Wilbanks, Senior Fellow , The Kauffman Foundation Bio and Contact Info

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