by Tweet Cloud

That’s right, baby!

via Buzzfeed

Larry David found out last night on Lopez Tonight that he “fails as a European” being only 63% European according to a DNA ancestry test. David seemed genuinely surprised by the remaining 37% of his ethnicity. Watch the video to find out more about the 37% or click on this link from Twitter.

via Orlando Sentinel

Their Facebook fan page is even running a photo contest asking people to post photos of themselves with one of their DNA ads. Very fun to see DNA in the wild.

Here’s one of my favorites.

With a cameo from my favorite Stanford professor, Robert Siegel.

• Technology Review BioTech News
• Blogging to Get Girls Interested in Science at Murray Women’s Center Graduate Women, a New Jersey Institute of Technology blog
• Uncertain or Uninformed and An Extra Layer at Genome Technology’s Daily Scan
• Tracing the Tribe: The Jewish Genealogy Blog
• The Decision Tree, a new blog from Thomas Goetz that is sort of a rough draft for his upcoming book about predictive medicine

Also, congratulations to Dr. Val on her move to Better Health. Check out her interview with Dr. Joanne Armstrong, senior medical director for Aetna, and assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, about the current state of genetic testing. Here’s an excerpt:

Dr. Val: In your view, what are some legitimate and appropriate genetic tests?

Dr. Armstrong: There are about 1200 genetic tests available now, and most of them are not medically appropriate or clinically valid. “Medically appropriate” tests have a few common characteristics: 1) they have to be useful for the direct treatment or prevention of an illness. Some tests on the market are medically trivial – they test for things like eye color for example. 2) The information from the test should affect the course of treatment of the disease or condition, and 3) treatment should improve the outcome of the disease.  Those are the characteristics of a genetic test that would be useful or appropriate in a healthcare setting.

There are 100s of useful and appropriate tests, and they’re used for the prediction of diseases like hereditary colon cancer, breast cancer and its recurrence, and metabolic diseases that affect people as infants.

My six-year-old’s reading and mark-up (in purple) of a paper in Nature Genetics authored by my friend, Dr. Linda Kao.

Press Release – New gene variant identified for nondiabetic end stage renal disease in African-Americans

Scientists at Johns Hopkins schools of Public Health and Medicine have, for the first time, identified variants in the gene MYH9 that are associated with increased risk for non-diabetic end stage renal disease (ESRD,) which is the near-loss of kidney function leading to either dialysis of transplant. MYH9, located on the 22 chromosome, is the first gene identified for common forms of kidney disease. The study was published online September 14 in the journal Nature Genetics and will be published in the October print edition. In a separate study published in the same issue, researchers at the National Institutes of Health reported similar findings.

The Silicon Valley celebrities participating are:

• Kevin Rose of Digg
• Robert Scoble of Scobleizer
• Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson

Draper’s desire for his DNA:

My hope is that aliens get a hold of my DNA so my clones can spread entrepreneurship to galaxies throughout the universe.

Some might wish for peace throughout the universe but I guess entrepreneurship ain’t too bad.

Photo credit: feastoffools