PolITiGenomics

I’ve been getting a lot of spam comments on the blog so I added a CAPTCHA to comment posting. Specifically, I have added CAPTCHA’s from the reCAPTCHA project which uses CAPTCHA’s to help digitize old books. Adding the CAPTCHA’s was greatly facilitated by the WordPress reCAPTCHA plugin. So rest assured, every time you post a comment, you are helping to enlarge the freely available intellectual commons.

Sen. McCain has recently released his technology platform. Sen. Obama has had his technology platform available for while. Sadly, Sen. McCain’s proposals seem to favor moneyed, entrenched interests by opposing common sense patent reform and net neutrality.

Update: Lawrence Lessig has posted his response to Sen. McCain’s technology platform.

One warning, it is nearly 17 minutes long.

Journalist Leroy Sievers, who kept a daily blog entitled My Cancer, passed away last Friday. His daily entries and periodic stories on NPR are a sobering reminder of the toll of cancer.

This election, in this year where we have a struggling economy, high energy prices, housing woes, and two wars, we were promised a campaign that focused on big differences on big issues. Sen. McCain promised a respectful campaign. What we have gotten is a media focused on minutiae and candidates bickering back and forth about nonsense. The McCain campaign is complaining about the amount of media coverage Sen. Obama is receiving (even though the majority (72%) of the coverage was negative), blaming Sen. Obama for high gas prices, spreading false information about Sen. Obama’s cancelled visit with the troops (which was later retracted by the campaign blogger), linking Sen. Obama and Fidel Castro, and, perhaps most ridiculously, comparing Sen. Obama to “celebrities” (apparently angering the Hilton’s who have contributed over $50,000 to his cause). Doesn’t anyone running for president qualify as a celebrity? And now, they are sniping back and forth about the race card, or is it the ‘race card’ card? Either way, it seems Sen. McCain and Sen. Obama have short memories when it comes to race and politics.

As usual, The Daily Show has a humorous take on recent events.

If you are actually interested in the candidates’ positions on issues, check out ProCon.org.

Recently I was asked to join the Young Professionals Board of the St. Louis Crisis Nursery. The Nursery is a terrific organization that provides safe, short-term shelter for children whose parents are in crisis. It is the only organization in St. Louis and one of the few in the country dedicated to preventing child abuse and neglect. It does this by taking a holistic and individually tailored approach to each family’s situation, partnering with other area organizations to help parents get their situations back under control.

Throughout the year, the Nursery has different events to raise awareness of its mission and to raise money so it can meet the needs of parents in the community. Today, 31 July 2008, the Whole Foods store in Town & Country is donating 5% of their sales to the Nursery. There will be fun activities throughout the store for children and they will also be having a baby food and baby care products drive for the Nursery. The store is near the intersection of 141 and Clayton, so if you are in the area stop by and do your grocery shopping.

On August 21^st, the Nursery will have its annual Celebrity Waiters & Waitresses Night at Monarch Restaurant in Maplewood. All the tips collected that evening go to the Nursery. Call 314-644-3995 to make make a reservation today.

There was an article in US News and World Report calling for a new war on cancer. A couple of the more far out comments on the article confirms my impression of your standard US News and World Report reader (you can recognize them on the street because they are wearing tin-foil hats). More recently, Science had a news item on the recent meeting of NCI’s Board of Scientific Advisors that included a report on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project. The report presented our progress in understanding glioblastoma, including some novel glioblastoma mutations discovered in our sequencing here at The Genome Center. It seems “big science” is once again teaching its critics a thing or two.

Update: Check out my colleague’s post on this subject: TCGA: The billion-dollar cancer project.

Want to give just the right present to your favorite genomicist, how about knitting a sweater made out of DNA? Japanese researchers have developed a technique that can manipulate DNA like thread (or yarn) without breaking it. Using optical tweezers (lasers) to place DNA extended by electroosmotic flow in microfabricated hooks, they were able to wind the DNA around miniature bobbins. After the DNA is localized on the bobbins, it can be probed for different genetic markers providing not only the existence of the desired DNA tag, but also the location. The full journal article was published in Lab Chip, On-site manipulation of single chromosomal DNA molecules by using optically driven microstructures.

Last night on NOVA scienceNOW there was a segment on the personal DNA tests currently being marketed to consumers (you can watch the segment on the website, unfortunately no ability to embed video on other sites). The host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, had his DNA tested by Navigenics and learned his “probability” as compared to the rest of the population for getting certain diseases; even deciding to learn the genotype associate with his APOE4 gene, the so-called Alzheimer’s gene (something James Watson decided not to do when his genome was sequenced). As all the scientists who do not work for one of these personal genomics companies said when interviewed, while these tests may provide some information about a person’s genome, we really don’t know what they are telling us about the person’s health, how the SNPs detected affect phenotype, how to use them to guide lifestyle, treatment, diet, etc.

Later in the program there was also an interesting segment on geneticist and rocker, Pardis Sabeti, who pioneered a statistical approach to determine if mutations in a population were random or enriched due to natural selection.

Speaking of Neil deGrasse Tyson, check out the tour of the Hayden Planetarium he gives to Stephen Colbert so Stephen can become an astrophysicist if the Colbert Report doesn’t pan out.

Lawrence Lessig has an interesting take on the recent dust up over Sen. Obama’s positions on campaign financing and telecom immunity. In short, the Obama campaign is attacking Sen. Obama’s strongest traits. I guess they don’t want to be outdone on any measure by the McCain campaign (reversals on campaign finance, torture, tax cuts, off-shore oil drilling, and Iraq).

Researchers in Japan have created the first DNA molecule made from entirely artificially created bases. While some are trying to manufacture artificial life by creating DNA molecules in the lab, the aim of this research is to take advantage of, and in this case expand on, DNA’s high information density to create a very dense data storage platform. Natural DNA has four different bases (A, G, C, and T) it can use to encode information. To expand DNA’s ability to encode information, these researchers created four new bases and integrated them in to a DNA molecule.