The message is not “Here’s your destiny. Get used to it!” Instead, it’s “Here’s your destiny, and you can do something about it!” Diseases result from a combination of genetic vulnerability and lifestyle. If you know you have high risk of certain diseases, it’s in your interest to know and practice the lifestyle that reduces your risk—and the younger, the better.
George M. Church, making the case for having your genes sequenced.
I had this ‘Oh my God’ moment, thinking, how many kids have been produced?” he says. “I thought the doctors were keeping track of each birth, but when I realized they weren’t, I began to worry. What if they start dating one another?” He also began to worry about their genetic health. “I wanted to know if I have anything totally lethal or deranged or recessive in my genes that I may have passed along.
Kirk Maxey, who donated his sperm at a Michigan clinic twice a week for for 15 years. The whole story is pretty great.
The fact that Republicans and Democrats differ on whether health-care reform should include a public option is no surprise. That they differ on setting a date for exiting Afghanistan, sure. On Sarah Palin, of course. But on physics? And biology? That the growing list of issues where there is a partisan divide now includes the accuracy of scientific findings may be lamentable for a democracy (if we can’t agree on facts, how can we agree on policy?), but it’s a gold mine for research on how personality and other psychological factors influence political ideology.
The red-blue split on mammograms is particularly striking. In a recent poll, the Pew Research Center asked 1,002 American adults about a preventive-health task force’s conclusion that most women can safely begin mammograms at age 50, not 40, and have one every two years, not annually. (Large studies have found that earlier mammograms save almost no lives; since the radiation can cause cancer, it therefore makes sense to minimize them.) Among Republicans, 15 percent agreed with that. Among Democrats? Twice as many.
Begley, on Red Brains vs. Blue Brains
tanya77:
How Will You Die?
Interesting. One depressing bit stands out: HIV is the leading cause of death among black men and women age 25-34.
Research has linked genes to intelligence, social skills, neuroticism, risk taking, impulsivity, and more. In most cases, “linked” means determining that the behavior is partly inherited, but not how the gene brings about the behavior. What if the gene affects a trait known to be strongly heritable, such as appearance or temperament, and what if that trait in turn elicits particular behaviors from parents and teachers: behaviors such as responsiveness, paying attention to, interacting with, speaking to—things that affect how a child turns out academically and socially? If so, we are mistakenly attributing these outcomes to genes “for” intelligence and the rest, when in fact all the genes do is give a child looks or temperament that elicits, for instance, IQ-boosting responses from adults.
Begley, on why it’s not all the fault of your genes.
