Jul 31 2008
Even as the genetic studies on schizophrenia released this week illustrate our progress toward the ultimate goal of personalized medicine, they also bring to mind the challenges that still lie ahead.
All three studies focus on identifying the genetic bases of schizophrenia, a mental disorder characterized by hallucinations, delusions and the decreased ability to plan and [...]
Jul 30 2008
Two years ago Stephen Colbert, host of the news-parody show, “The Colbert Report” coined the word “wikiality” to describe a reality defined by the majority.
“Nation, it’s time we used the power of our numbers for a real internet revolution,” Colbert told his audience. “Together we can create a reality that we can all agree on [...]
Jul 28 2008
Cary, a software engineer at 23andMe, works on a wide variety of systems, from processing raw data from the lab to working on the customer-facing website. Most of the site is developed in Python on top of MySQL and Apache, all running on Linux. Cary has mostly worked on the backend of the [...]
Jul 27 2008
SNPwatch gives you the latest news about research linking various traits and conditions to individual genetic variations. These studies are exciting because they offer a glimpse into how genetics may affect our bodies and health; but in most cases, more work is needed before this research can provide information of value to individuals. For that [...]
Jul 25 2008
This guest post is by Roy King, who is a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University and a research colleague of Stanford geneticist and 23andMe scientific adviser Peter Underhill. Roy and Peter have been using genetics to trace the spread of agriculture from the Near East to Europe.
The question of how agriculture first arose and [...]
Jul 24 2008
“Sometimes I feel like Sir James Murray must have felt while he was grubbing away at writing the Oxford English Dictionary,” the Washington Post once quoted Victor McKusick as saying. “He managed to complete the first 17 letters before he died.”
When McKusick, University Professor of Medical Genetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the [...]
Jul 24 2008
SNPwatch gives you the latest news about research linking various traits and conditions to individual genetic variations. These studies are exciting because they offer a glimpse into how genetics may affect our bodies and health; but in most cases, more work is needed before this research can provide information of value to individuals. For that [...]
Jul 23 2008
On the heels of his previous paper finding that participating in political activities such as voting is influenced in part by genes, political scientist James Fowler and his graduate student Christopher Dawes announced that they’ve identified two genes that are associated with voting itself.
In the current issue of The Journal of Politics, Fowler and Dawes [...]
Jul 22 2008
Last week in the Spittoon we reported on a new study that identified an interesting genetic trade-off — a genetic variant known that has one effect on a person’s vulnerability to malaria, and the opposite on susceptibility to HIV infection. The “Duffy negative” version of the gene, which is common among Africans and African Americans, [...]
Jul 21 2008
In a recent paper, Southern California researchers announced that political involvement has a genetic component. Though they stopped short of identifying a gene or genes at work, the researchers concluded that the decision to go out and vote was genetically determined by up to 50 percent. Genes, they also noted, were partially involved in other [...]
