Now that the Thiel Fellows have been announced the media has been pouncing. If you don’t know, Peter Thiel is giving a bunch of bright-young-things some money to drop out of college (or not go to college). Here are the details:
As the first members of the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship, the Fellows will pursue innovative scientific and technical projects, learn entrepreneurship, and begin to build the technology companies of tomorrow. During their two-year tenure, each Fellow will receive $100,000 from the Thiel Foundation as well as mentorship from the Foundation’s network of tech entrepreneurs and innovators. The project areas for this class of fellows include biotech, career development, economics and finance, education, energy, information technology, mobility, robotics, and space.
I’ve been pretty vocal about the impending specter of genetic paternalism in relation to personal genomics, which I believe to be futile in the long term, and likely to squelch innovation in the United States in the short term. Like any new product category there’s a lot of hype and confusion in the area of personal genomics, but I think it’s important that we allow some mistakes and misfires to occur. Innovation and creativity isn’t failure-free.
With that said, I also think it is incumbent upon the personal genomics community, if there is such a thing, to “police” the flow of information. I have seen references in the media to a new personal genomics kit, Sports X Factor, selling for $180, from AIBioTech. My initial intent was to ignore this, as there is real science and tech to be covered. This is just another case of a biotech firm trying to leverage public confusion and gullibility into revenue. But if I think such a thing, I should make my opinion known, shouldn’t I?….
My intent was to come up high on Google searches for the firm and product which they’re selling. I don’t want to drive the firm out of business or anything like that, and I’m not a lawyer so I don’t know if I think what they are selling with Sports X Factor kit is technically fraudulent (though I don’t think it is). But I wouldn’t recommend this to my friends. $180 is not a trivial sum in my world. Unlike some I don’t think genetic information is horrible or incredibly precious information which only “professionals” should have access to. I just don’t think that the price is right. Too many of the media stories have a tendency to focus on the terror of people finding out about their genetic predispositions, but I think the truth of Sports X Factor kit is more banal: it is just not a product with results worth the money you are shelling out. Standard economics, not bioethics.
Today I got this strange comment from someone who works for AIBioTech, the firm which produces Sports X Factor, defending the product:
There is a paradox at the heart of behavioural and psychiatric genetics. On the one hand, it is very clear that practically any psychological trait one cares to study is partly heritable – i.e., the differences in the trait between people are partly caused by differences in their genes. Similarly, psychiatric disorders are also highly heritable and, by now, mutations in hundreds of different genes have been identified that cause them.
However, these studies also highlight the limits of genetic determinism, which is especially evident in comparisons of monozygotic (identical) twins, who share all their genetic inheritance in common. Though they are obviously much more like each other in psychological traits than people who are not related to each other, they are clearly NOT identical to each other for these traits. For example, if one twin has a diagnosis of schizophrenia, the chance that the other one will also suffer from the disorder is about 50% – massively higher than the population prevalence of the disorder (around 1%), but also clearly much less than 100%.
I’ve been taking about ‘meat things’ for nearly 10 years, so I was really excited by the new Michael Specter piece in The New Yorker about artificially grown meat, Test-tube Burgers. You can’t read most of it online, so I want to copy this small section:
…One study, completed last year by researchers at Oxford and the University of Amsterdam, reported that the production of cultured meat could consume roughly half the energy and occupy just two percent of the land now devoted to the world’s meat industry….
I say real factories because we are all aware I assume by this point of the nature of ‘factory farming’. But mass production of animal stock is an ad hoc kludge. Domesticated animals have been bred for meat production, but they remain organisms with all the range of activities and ends which the term ‘organism’ entails. Raising raw tissue in cultures may seem ‘yucky,’ a point Specter covers in assessing the reaction of some environmentalists and animal-rights activists who don’t seem as excited by the shift from conventional livestock raising to growing tissue as one would expect if they ran the numbers, but it is probably inevitable if it is feasible. The article makes the point that most of the focus on this area seems to be in the Netherlands, but thank god the Chinese are paying attention to this!
On DNA Day, 23 and Me had a sale on their personal genomics service. They’d do their standard scan of your genome for free, as long as you paid for a year’s worth of their online subscription service.
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For the price (nearly free up front, and a modest cost for the online community provided), my wife and I jumped on the deal. Since I got the results back two weeks ago, I’ve been exploring not only the services and information provided by 23 and Me, but the various other tools that individuals have started producing to help analyze and investigate this insight into my ubiquitous but invisible DNA.
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My genome, for instance, revealed a genetic predisposition towards late-onset Alzheimers. The odds of getting Alzheimers are still quite small, but elevated because of this particular mutation to the APOE4 gene. This wasn’t a total surprise, given my family history, and as a healthy, young guy with a background in biology and biostatistics, it wasn’t hard for me to put that information into a context and move on. Down the road, I’ll probably keep an eye out for new research on Alzheimers medicines and look into tools for early detection, but I’m not going to kill myself if I forget my keys. (Thanks to the federal Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act and the Affordable Care Act’s prohibition on “pre-existing conditions” – not to mention the inherent uncertainties in translating this genetic result to a specific outcome – I’m not especially worried about discussing that result in public)
We need to demystify DNA. It’s pretty obvious to me that people perceive genetics to be in the domain of magic, when in reality it manifests itself in the banal realities of correlations within the family, which we’re intuitively aware of. But Josh’s post is more than just personal, he reviews the book Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life:
Steve Hsu points me to this essay which discusses ‘high-frequency trading’, How to Make Money in Microseconds. This might elicit a takfir from my friends at the Singularity Institute, but that piece makes me less ill-disposed to a Butlerian Jihad. A lot of this stuff on the margins and frontiers of finance reminds me of intragenomic conflict or cancer; entities and phenomena which are generally proposed to serve as means toward particular ends develop their own internal logic and ends through a co-evolutionary “arms race” in their own domains.
I am less sanguine about their results for Europe. They show a gradual period of growth associated in time with the Younger Dryas (around 12,000 years ago), which could make sense in the archaeology. But I am not convinced that the “European” haplogroups here are really European to that time depth. We know that the Neolithic and post-Neolithic saw some large-scale shifts in the frequencies of mtDNA haplogroups in Central and Western Europe. Some Upper Paleolithic Europeans probably contributed mtDNA to this later population, but I have no confidence that the proportion was great enough to accurately infer the demography of that pre-Neolithic population. (This is also a problem with the current paper in Current Anthropology by Peter Rowley-Conwy. I’ll discuss this sometime soon.)
The next frontier in reconstructing the population history of Europe will be ancient DNA. A good sample of Neolithic and pre-Neolithic whole mtDNA genomes would settle this question and allow inferences about the kind of demographic recovery Europe underwent after the Last Glacial Maximum….
Since most international migration is apparently between “developing nations”, I thought the Iran-Iraq-Turkey-Syria border would be interesting to look at in terms of differences in economic and social indices.
The Pith: Honorable intent and punctilious adherence to proper form and method does not guarantee a set of results which flesh out a genuine phenomenon. Much of science is tragic.
Most of the time I point to and review papers on this weblog which excite me. But in the interests of “balance” and dampening the bias toward material I find interesting and salient I thought it would be interesting to look at a paper which I thought wasn’t too interesting. It’s in the Journal of Human Genetics, part of the Nature Publishing Group empire. Also, it is open access, so you can read it yourself and make your own individual judgments.
India’s role in the dispersal of modern humans can be explored by investigating its oldest inhabitants: the tribal people. The Soliga people of the Biligiri Rangana Hills, a tribal community in Southern India, could be among the country’s first settlers. This forest-bound, Dravidian speaking group, lives isolated, practicing subsistence-level agriculture under primitive conditions. The aim of this study is to examine the phylogenetic relationships of the Soligas in relation to 29 worldwide, geographically targeted, reference populations. For this purpose, we employed a battery of 15 hypervariable autosomal short tandem repeat loci as markers. The Soliga tribe was found to be remarkably different from other Indian populations including other southern Dravidian-speaking tribes. In contrast, the Soliga people exhibited genetic affinity to two Australian aboriginal populations. This genetic similarity could be attributed to the ‘Out of Africa’ migratory wave(s) along the southern coast of India that eventually reached Australia. Alternatively, the observed genetic affinity may be explained by more recent migrations from the Indian subcontinent into Australia.
To be blunt about it I think the researchers here just randomly stumbled onto a weird result which happened to align with some plausible preconceptions. This happens all the time, and is responsible for the unfortunate confirmation bias which plagues science. Researchers know very well what the expected results are, and may unconsciously or consciously sift through their data for a set of facts which align well with their theoretical preconceptions. In this case it isn’t quite so bald, as there are no orthodoxies, but a set of alternative hypotheses which go back a century or so.
