The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 25: The $1,000 Genome
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 25: The $1,000 GenomeCitation: Rodrigo MartinezIf you haven’t, please fill out The Insight listener survey.This week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Podcasts) Rodrigo Martinez of V…
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 17: Polygenic risk scores and diversity
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 17: Polygenic risk scores and diversityThe risk for coronary heart diseaseThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Podcasts) we discuss “polygenic risk scores” (PRS) and genetic diversity …
The dearth of diversity in genomics
Citation: Martin, Alicia R., et al. bioRxiv(2019): 441261.One of the curious things about genomics is the field has exploded in the 21st century so fast, with such explosive growth and increase in power, that it is hard to keep up if you blink. The fir…
Vaccination, and social information networks
If you have not read Julia Ioffe’s story about getting whooping cough at the age of 31 (also see follow up), you might want to. Here’s some further context, Vaccine Refusals Fueled California’s Whooping Cough Epidemic. This topic has been covered and dissected in great detail by many writers and scientists, so I won’t repeat what […]
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Doctors are apparently gods, get used to it
Here’s a caption from a Time article, What Your Doctor Isn’t Telling You About Your DNA:
Nice to know that two physicians in Philadelphia not only have medical degrees, but specialize in mind-reading the parents of this nation! Above the capti…
None dare call it eugenics!
Well, almost no one:
“The unspoken central reason for the societal taboo and the penal ban on incest is the possibility of hereditary defects — a factor that Strasbourg only hinted at. But the intention behind the eugenic argument is one th…
Doctors and life expectacy
A friend pointed me to the following infographic on the concentration of doctors per county. The orange represents “very high need,” and dark blue “very low need.”
Now let’s compare it to life expectancy by county:
American medicine & American red-tape
I just attended a presentation where a researcher outlined how epigenomics could help patients with various grave illnesses. Normally I don’t focus on human medical genetics too much because it always depresses me. I don’t understand how medical geneticists don’t start wondering what hidden disease everyone around them has. In any case the researcher outlined […]
“Doctors don’t cure nothing”
NSFW As I observed before, modern medicine is subject to some of the same statistical issues as social science in its tendency to put unwarranted spotlight on preferred false positive results. Trials and Errors – Why Science Is Failing Us: This doesn’t mean that nothing can be known or that every causal story is equally […]
Eggs: quantity and quality
In my post below on selection for the “better” zygote Michelle observes that “This would be relatively easy for the father, not so much for the mother.” I took her to mean either of two things, 1) Extraction of eggs is a major surgical affair. Extraction of sperm is not. 2) Males generally have many […]
Up with nurses! Down with doctorates!
In light of growing health care costs and the demographic reality of an aging profession stories like this one in The New York Times are both depressing and hopeful. Calling the Nurse ‘Doctor,’ a Title Physicians Oppose: But while all physician organizations support the idea of teamwork, not all physicians are willing to surrender the […]
Getting better sperm donors
The British newspapers have been reporting on a bizarre story about a Dutch sperm donor who hid a history of mental problems from recipients. I didn’t pay much attention to it because of the British tabloid media’s tendency to sensationaliz…
Crohn’s disease is about barely keeping you alive
The Pith: Natural selection is a quick & dirty operator. When subject to novel environments it can react rapidly, bringing both the good and the bad. The key toward successful adaptation is not perfection, but being better than the alternatives. T…
Dominance, the social construct that confuses
A story in The Los Angeles Times seems to point medical implications of being a sickle cell carrier, Sickle cell trait: The silent killer:
At least 17 high school and college athletes’ deaths have been tied to sickle cell trait during the past 11…
Bacteria tell the tale of human intercourse
The Pith: the genetic relationships between bacteria in our stomach can tell us a lot about the relationships between various groups of people. Additionally, the distribution of different strains of bacteria may have significant public health implicat…
You are a mutant!
The Pith: You are expected to have 30 new mutations which differentiate you from your parents. But, there is wiggle room around this number, and you may have more or less. This number may vary across siblings, and explain differences across siblings. …
When the doctor is a patient….
So I’ve been seeing headlines like this today: Physicians Recommend Different Treatments for Patients Than They Choose for Themselves, Study Finds. Here are the numbers:
A total of 242 physicians returned the colon cancer questionnaire (response …
Fair & balanced on circumsion
When Michelle mentioned on Twitter that she was going to write about circumcision, I told her to expect some angry people to come out of the wood-work. Today she has a post up at Scientific American, What’s the deal with male circumcision and fe…
Who are those Houston Gujus?
The figure to the left is a three dimensional representation of principal components 1, 2, and 3, generated from a sample of Gujaratis from Houston, and Chinese from Denver. When these two populations are pooled together the Chinese form a very homogen…