Books About DNA: DNA: Promise and Peril

by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei
Posted May 23, 2008 in DNA Quotes and Excerpts

DNA: Promise and Peril by Linda L McCabe and Edward RB McCabe

The genetic revolution has provided incredibly valuable information about our DNA, information that can be used to benefit and inform–but also to judge, discriminate, and abuse. An essential reference for living in today’s world, this book gives the background information critical to understanding how genetics is now affecting our everyday lives. Written in clear, lively language, it gives a comprehensive view of exciting recent discoveries and explores the ethical, legal, and social issues that have arisen with each new development.

Here is Kathy Johnston’s impression of the book as originally posted at GENEALOGY-DNA:

As I am sitting here thumbing through the book, I get the impression that it is well written. It touches on forensics, ethics, race, gender, patents, cloning, reproductive medicine, gene testing, engineering and health insurance policies. However, I think they completely missed the impact that genetic genealogy is having right now and will have in the future as more of us order tests on ourselves.

Dr. Edward McCabe is a co-director for the UCLA Center for Society and Genetics so if anyone should know about the social impact that amateur DNA research is having, he should know. But I think they missed the boat on this one. The authors stressed that recreational DNA research represents “an extremely small part of the genome” but I don’t think they realize how many tests are actually being ordered on extended family members.

These academicians never seem to get it when it comes to understanding pedigree collapse, extended family and surname research projects and how the Internet and globalization will be revolutionizing genealogy through DNA search engines and pedigrees as more and more people are tested. Think of all the retired people who are spending their money on this hobby and helping labs to build branches on the phylogenetic trees that previously only universities could do. In addition, I should think a major university with a huge public policy department like UCLA would be looking at the social and medical impact of genetic genealogy. Well, it may be good thing that we are not on their radar screen right now. We can grow undisturbed.

This is what the McCabes think about genealogy DNA testing:

These laboratory analyses are expensive. Studies indicate that an individual’s knowledge of his or her ancestry is relatively accurate. In medical genetics, we know that one of the least expensive and most powerful genetic tools available to us is a good family history. The decision to carry out DNA testing for ancestry will be up to the individual. A far less expensive and excellent alternative available to many of us is to learn about our ancestry from the elders in our families. In addition, relatives’ stories will have far more cultural meaning than biological measures of ancestry.

I was just surprised that they have not seen the explosion of DNA studies being performed by us so-called amateurs. Genealogy will eventually make its way into the academic circles as the researchers figure out they need better pedigrees to help them figure out the more complicated mechanisms of inheritance especially when they look more at epigenetics.

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DNA Quote: Kevin Kelly on Zillionics

by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei
Posted May 16, 2008 in DNA Quotes and Excerpts

From Kevin Kelly’s The Technium:

When you reach the giga, peta, and exa orders of quantities, strange new powers emerge. You can do things at these scales that would have been impossible before. A zillion hyperlinks will give you information and behavior you could never expect from a hundred or thousand links. A trillion neurons give you a smartness a million won’t. A zillion data points will give you insight that a mere hundred thousand would never.

…Zillionics is a realm much more at home in biology—where there have been zillions of genes and organisms for a long time—than in our recent manufactured world. Living systems know how to handle zillionics. Our own methods of dealing with zillionic plentitude will mimic biology.

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Books About DNA: Coming to Life by Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei
Posted May 9, 2008 in Books About DNA, DNA Quotes and Excerpts

Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development by Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, winner of The Nobel Prize in Medicine, gives a concise and illustrative overview of genetics, evolution, and cellular processes as well as a discussing of current ethical issues in human biology.

An excerpt from the American Scientist review of the book:

The subtitle of Nüsslein-Volhard’s book is How Genes Drive Development. That’s really the essence of her conception of developmental biology, a view that guides the organization of the book. She begins with chapters that introduce the genetic machinery, heredity, chromosomes, genes and proteins. She moves on to a brief discussion of the role of model organisms that have been crucial in developmental genetics and proceeds to the first of these, D. melanogaster.

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Books About DNA: Tomorrow’s Table

by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei
Posted May 2, 2008 in Books About DNA, DNA Quotes and Excerpts, Genetically Modified Foods and Organisms

Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food by Pamela C. Ronald and R. W. Adamchak

From Dr. Ronald’s blog:

One of the major themes of our book “Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics and the Future of Food” is that the judicious incorporation of two important strands of agriculture—genetic engineering and organic farming—is key to helping feed the growing population in an ecologically balanced manner. We are not suggesting that organic farming and GE alone will provide all the changes needed in agriculture. Other farming systems and technological changes, as well as modified government policies, undoubtedly are also needed. Yet it is hard to avoid the sense that organic farming and genetic engineering each will play an increasingly important role, and that they somehow have been pitted unnecessarily against each other. Our ambition in this book, therefore, is not to be comprehensive, but to identify roles for both GE and organic farming in the future of food production.

Another theme of the book is that the broader goals of ecologically responsible farming, and the adherence to those ideals, are more important than the methods used to develop new plant varieties. To this end, we have generated a list of key criteria
to help guide policy decisions about the use of GE in food and farming.

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Books About DNA: The Century of the Gene by Evelyn Fox Keller

by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei
Posted April 25, 2008 in Books About DNA, DNA Quotes and Excerpts, DNA in General

The Century of the Gene by Evelyn Fox Keller

In a book that promises to change the way we think and talk about genes and genetic determinism, Evelyn Fox Keller, one of our most gifted historians and philosophers of science, provides a powerful, profound analysis of the achievements of genetics and molecular biology in the twentieth century, the century of the gene. Not just a chronicle of biology’s progress from gene to genome in one hundred years, The Century of the Gene also calls our attention to the surprising ways these advances challenge the familiar picture of the gene most of us still entertain.

In a CBC Radio interview, Dr. Evelyn Fox Keller talks more about genes and public perception. (HT: Women in Science)

For more discussion on what is a gene, see this Genome Research article – What is a gene, post-ENCODE? History and updated definition.

…we propose a tentative update to the definition of a gene: A gene is a union of genomic sequences encoding a coherent set of potentially overlapping functional products.

DNA Network member Sandra Porter at Discovering Biology in a Digital World gave her definition of a gene last year.

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DNA Quote: Marked

by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei
Posted April 18, 2008 in DNA Quotes and Excerpts

Dr. Robert Green, professor of neurology, genetics and epidemiology at Boston University School of Medicine, in Genome scans go deep into your DNA by Anna Gosline:

Genetic information has a special power. It has a feel of fate about it, a sense of inevitability, that sense that, “Oh, you are marked.”

Image: People with DNA finger prints, Dan Salaman via Wellcome Images under Creative Commons

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Two Books About Breast and Ovarian Cancer Genetics by Masha Gessen and Jessica Queller

by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei
Posted April 11, 2008 in Books About DNA, DNA Quotes and Excerpts, DNA in General

Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene by Masha Gessen

In 2004 genetic testing revealed that Masha Gessen had a mutation that predisposed her to ovarian and breast cancer. The discovery initiated Gessen into a club of sorts: the small (but exponentially expanding) group of people in possession of a new and different way of knowing themselves through what is inscribed in the strands of their DNA. As she wrestled with a wrenching personal decision—what to do with such knowledge—Gessen explored the landscape of this brave new world, speaking with others like her and with experts including medical researchers, historians, and religious thinkers.

Pretty Is What Changes: Impossible Choices, The Breast Cancer Gene, and How I Defied My Destiny by Jessica Queller

Laura Landro of the Wall Street Journal reviewed both Blood Matters and Pretty Is What Changes.

As we learn more about our risks of developing a wide range of cancers and diseases, how and when should we use that information in making life-altering decisions?

That is the question tackled in two books, both of them written by women in their 30s who are of Ashkenazi Jewish descent and who learn that they carry the BRCA breast- and ovarian-cancer gene mutation that is common to their ethnic heritage. When Jessica Queller, a television writer, and Masha Gessen, a journalist, are confronted with the prospect of imminent prophylactic mastectomies and the future removal of their ovaries, they find themselves weighing the elevated cancer risk against their unrealized personal goals and their fear of disfiguring surgery. The women also have to contend with the often conflicting advice they receive from genetic counselors, scientists, physicians and fellow patients.

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DNA Quote: Merchants of Immortality by Stephen S. Hall

by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei
Posted March 28, 2008 in DNA Quotes and Excerpts

This was keyboard biology: you could type in the DNA letters of the gene for telomerase found in yeast or Euplotes just as you would type a word or phrase into a search engine like Google, punch a button, and send supercomputers electronically scurrying through vast digital tracts of human DNA sequences, looking for a proximate match – that is, for homology.

~Merchants of Immortality by Stephen S. Hall

Tags: genetics, genes, dna, life extension, quotes

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Books About DNA: Life As It Is by William Loomis

by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei
Posted March 21, 2008 in Books About DNA, DNA Quotes and Excerpts, DNA in General

Life As It Is by William F. Loomis

Book Description:

“This concise, accessible book considers from a biological perspective the controversial issues of our day: abortion, euthanasia, engineered evolution, cooperativity, and the future of sustainable life on this planet. Exploring in fascinating detail the processes by which cells come into being and multiply, Loomis clearly and simply explains the latest in complex biological research. He reviews recent insights into molecular and human evolution, the role of DNA sequences in determining traits, and the biological basis for consciousness, all of which, he argues, need to be considered when making life-and-death decisions and wrestling with questions about the limits to intervention.”

via Philip Manning’s Science Book News #97

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DNA Quote: Steven Pinker

by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei
Posted March 14, 2008 in DNA Quotes and Excerpts

“With constitutional factors (genes and chance) being important but invisible, people tend to blur cause and effect in thinking back on supposedly formative childhood vignettes. …Rather than childhood experiences causing us to be who we are, who we are causes our childhood experiences.”

~Steven Pinker, experimental psychologist at Harvard University, in Curious Minds.

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