Note: If you’re here for the annotated links to other perspectives on the 23andMe/FDA dust-up, you should go instead to I Got Your 23andMe – FDA Food Fight Links Right Here, to which I’ve moved my ongoing curation on the subject. Below, however, you’ll still find first take on this dust-up, written Nov 25. My longer piece at […]
Continue reading →I’ve a new feature, “The Social Life of Genes,” in Pacific Standard. It involves bees, birds, monkeys, and how our social life and our genes constantly converse, reshaping us (and our social life) as they go. One of the main characters is a young UCLA psychoneuroimmunologist named Steve Cole, who in the 1990s, reviewing the health […]
Continue reading →I’ve a feature on “The Social Life of Genes” coming out in Pacific Standard next week Tuesday 3 Sept, which I discussed yesterday on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show. Here, while that feature is in queue, is a look at one aspect of genetics the feature addresses: The need to understand the importance of gene expression, not […]
Continue reading →Can Genes Send You High or Low? The Orchid Hypothesis A-bloom by David Dobbs Originally posted March 2012* A few years ago, Arial Knafo, a psychologist at Jerusalem University, wanted to see if three-year-olds would share their bonbons. Snack time would come amid a bunch of other activity at Knafo’s lab — drawing, games, […]
Continue reading →Prof. Steve Jones: ‘Nature or Nurture?’ from The Lost Lectures on Vimeo. “The most dangerous words in genetics,” says geneticist Steve Jones, “are ‘the gene for.’ It’s just one pithy and wise insight in a talk stuffed with them — an essential warning against hubris, an appeal to humility, and a very funny 20-minute romp […]
Continue reading →When I first heard that the medical examiner for the Sandy Hook shooting had asked for a genetic profile of the apparent shooter, Adam Lanza, I suggested on Twitter that this would end badly: The results will almost certainly be close to meaningless, but any variants formerly associated with particular behaviors, rightly or wrongly, will […]
Continue reading →Virginia Hughes is “sick of reading about the dangers of the genome.” So she complains over at Slate, eloquently, and I’m sick right with her. Hughes, who blogs at National Geographic and is among our sharper followers of genetics, doesn’t mean “dangers” as in hazardous habits of actual genomes: She means the overhyped danger of “The […]
Continue reading →Ask not what your genes have done to make you smart, but what they’ve done to make you stupid. That’s the gist of an idea offered recently by neurogeneticist Kevin Mitchell in a “The genetics of stupidity,” a fun, provocative post at his blog, Wiring the Brain. Today I unpack this idea a bit in a piece in […]
Continue reading →Someone should have warned Naomi Wolf what slippery material she’d get encounter by taking a neuro angle into Vagina: A New Biography. As Zoe Heller explains in her smart, raucous, ripping review in The New York Review of Books, [Wolf’s] original plan was to write a book surveying cultural representations of the vagina through the ages. […]
Continue reading →Many in the genetico-literary science world have been gnashing their teeth over a recent New York Times story that remarks the unremarkable: a Study Says DNA’s Power to Predict Illness Is Limited>. (The article elaborates on a Science Translational Medicine paper, The Predictive Capacity of Personal Genome Sequencing.) Erika Check Hayden (a must-follow for good writing on genomics […]
Continue reading →