At The Awl, Russell Brandom talks about everything he didn't learn from having his genome sequenced. After taking 23andMe's personal genome test, Brandom learned that his risk for becoming addicted to heroine is 2.9 times higher than average, and that he's a carrier for hemachromatosis. But, he says, despite the occasionally useful result, it's hard to figure out what the significance of these tests really is. "After a decade of research, our data is a jumble of conflicting facts, and no one seems ready to make sense of it," he says. Brandom quotes Duke geneticist Misha Angrist, who wrote the book Here Is A Human Being after having his genome sequenced. "It turns out to be just a total fucking mess. So instead of having this linear icon representing human biology, the most potent symbol now is the hairball," Angrist said. So, Brandom adds, when sites like 23andMe try to make sense of this tangled data, "They don't have any straightforward truths to offer users, just a flood of vague and often frightening ambiguities."
At his Genomeboy blog, Angrist responds, saying that the "under-delivery of personal genomics" is a "familiar meme," but not always a fair one. Angrist says that while he can empathize with the people who think there has been too much hype surrounding personal genomics, the field shouldn't be judged solely on what it can't deliver, but rather what it does well, like give information about carrier status for heritable diseases. "It's a mess and a hairball and a bushel and a peck. And so not destiny," Angrist says. "But that doesn't mean that some of it isn't useful and fascinating. Of course it's fascinating: it's about us."
23andMe does not sequence the
23andMe does not sequence the genome but provides genotyping data from a limited number of SNPs.
Oh, this childish whining is
Oh, this childish whining is getting old. I think GenomeWeb sends these news items out as troll bait for increased hits. Worked perfectly on me.
23&me analysis costs about as much as a couple of months of cable TV and delivers very high quality data on 1 million of your own genotypes. If this is not interesting to you then I call you both a moron and a Luddite.
If you are surprised that we cannot yet predict from constellations of 1 million SNPs what your precise disease risks are going to be, then you are again an ignoramus and I suggest you spend some time reading books, essays, and research articles, many of them decades old, that point out that life is every so slightly complex and so is the genome and its interactions with the environment. What do people actually expect: a 1-to-1 mapping of SNPs to complex disease risk? Come-on.
Bingo! Rob
Bingo! Rob
SNP mapping is like telling
SNP mapping is like telling "this SNP is in bed neighborhood". Thus I am waiting for 1 million markers that test disease locus directly, but not just SNPs that are in its neighborhood. But the way from "neighborhood" to exact place is not via massive sequencing projects (loved so much by politicians and cluless investors), but hard work of hundreds of small research labs.
@dglubb In addition to SNP
@dglubb In addition to SNP arrays, they are sequencing exomes. You're welcome to look at the one I received for your own curiousity,
I love how people are now
I love how people are now entitled to protect the bullshit marketing of 23andme, its fair game, scientists like us are trained into bulshit discovery marketing, just ask Francis Collins view of the medical world in 2010. We must survive on funding and scientific trends. The reality is that when you look at the money spent, you would do much better investing in prevention awareness rather than this crap. Stop acting like offended virgins, personnal genomics is exectly where it should be: no where. Now let's get back to companion markers, simple vaccins, cancer characterization and resistance mutations, they save lives now, thank you.
Rob, are you calling Francis Collins an ignoramus ? Go back in time and you will see a bunch of mediatic crap, not even yesterday I am sure 3-4 labs around the world found some kind of drastic cancer tumor repressor...