It’s your fault that I cry at every @storycorps, can’t sleep in if it’s sunny out and value my library card more than my credit card.
Thank you.
Happy 30th.
(Anniversary, that is. Though I might believe it if you said birthday.)
Turning Up the Awesome
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Category Archives: genetics
Awkward and uncomfortable: A theatrical commentary
Recommended viewing: Photograph 51 at Central Square Theatre.
It’s a quick 90-minute (pee first, no intermission) play by Anna Ziegler that tracks the period in 1951-53 leading up to the publication of Watson & Crick’s paper on the structure of DNA. I feel like most people by now were at least taught the basics of the story – a number of labs were working out the structure of DNA, but Watson and Crick got there first and shared the Nobel prize with Maurice Wilkins. This prize completely left out Rosalind Franklin, who did most of the x-ray crystallography that eventually proved out the model.
image from centralsquaretheatre.org
It’s a clear injustice, amplified by the fact that Dr. Franklin died of ovarian cancer shortly after Watson and Crick’s paper was published. Despite this, Rosalind Franklin is far from a sympathetic character. She’s actually fairly horrible. The male characters repeatedly insist that they’ve been nothing but “nice” and have done all the appropriate things that “women always like” but she remains hostile and defensive.
Of course it’s clear that acting like a woman isn’t an option – the men have no real regard or respect for any other women in the play, all of whom exist only referentially in vague off-stage locations.
But she can’t be one of those boys either. Watson and Crick are portrayed in a raucous bromance starkly contrasted to Dr. Franklin’s scientific tunnel vision. They share similar backgrounds, similar work styles and have a similar sense of humor. It’s clear that nothing in Dr. Franklin’s upbringing would have prepared her to be a woman in the boy’s club. She’s left in an isolated lab of her own making.
At one point Jim Watson does approach Rosalind to suggest that maybe they’d find the answer sooner working together. But by that point Dr. Franklin has already hermetically sealed off her science.
Photograph 51 was about more than gender, I think, and as we become more gender- and color- and nationality-blind as a society (hopefully) we still have to remind ourselves – maybe even more strongly – that it’s important to actively seek out people with different life experiences, different backgrounds and different points of view. Dr. Franklin was ostracized because she made the men feel uncomfortable and awkward in their own world.
It’s easy (and fun!) to find a tribe and then sit around self-congratulating each other all day. While historically interesting, (and mad props to all the ladies who paved the way in science and business) I left Photograph 51 with a more modern reminder to strive for uncomfortable and awkward situations as often as possible. If it feels easy, I’m probably doing it wrong.
i’m here for the profits, i mean patients.
most excellant freudian slip around 6:30.
‘ello illumina
it’s like reverse space exploration. is that good or bad?
kids these days
The class of 2014 at Berkeley will be welcomed to campus their freshman fall with year long seminar type program called “Bring Your Genes to Cal. As part of the program, students can choose to submit their personal DNA and have it screened for three specific gene variants that affect how the body metabolizes and uses alcohol, folic acid (vitamin B9) and lactose.
Obviously this program has stirred up a cauldron of controversy – the three main points of which are nicely framed by Scientific American here.
Beyond this initial controversy, it will be absolutely fascinating to see how many students participate and hear their reactions to the program – we’re talking about a group of 17-18 year olds who are used to sharing personal information almost constantly with their peer group via Facebook, text messages, status updates, etc. Privacy barriers for this group of students are much lower than they were even five years ago. Many have probably been challenged to consider ideas of eugenics and genetic discrimination in their biology classes but are unlikely to have fully consider their comfort levels around their own genetic data, particularly when encouraged to do so as part of college orientation. Will the students see this as an invasion of their personal privacy or just an extension of the social media share-fest already so ubiquitous in their lives?
This issue is critically important and its imperative that we each examine and understand where to draw lines when it comes to sharing personal health information. Done prudently and judiciously, the socializing and electronic aggregation of health information may provide a means to tackle previously intractable public health issues. However, technological advances clearly won’t slow down for policy makers to hash through the legal implications around the tidal wave of genetic information already available. Critics are correct that students are ill-prepared to make decisions about their genetic privacy and are even less ready to handle the information. However, with the pace of technology showing no signs of slowing, the process of rapidly evaluating, adapting and aligning ones ethos to new technology is a critical skill. I have no idea if the Berkeley administration was trying to give students a crash course in this kind of challenge or if they truly believed they were creating an ethical, measured, controllable program about personalized medicine. Their failure to achieve the latter however, and the ensuing reactions of the students and public, will provide a much broader (and perhaps even more valuable?) case study on the pitfalls of even the most well-intentioned genetic testing programs.
jorge conde on getting to know your genome
It would be an interesting job to figure out how to entertain people with their genomes:
“We have to make sure they are not overwhelmed and don’t misunderstand the information,” says Conde. “This hadn’t been done before, so we wanted to be responsible, informative, and entertaining.”
Also: probably not overly unhappy about the recent Gates debacle:
Dan Stoicescu, a millionaire living in Switzerland who was profiled last year in the New York Times, was the company’s second client. Knome recently signed up two new customers, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and his father, Henry Louis Gates Sr., as part of a new documentary series slated to run on PBS next year.
social networking + genetic analysis
So with these exciting new services comes a blurring of the line between consumer and research participant. This creates a tension, Lee says, between policies that allow people who want to actively participate in research to do so while still protecting people who may become unwitting research subjects. “Finessing this balance will be a central challenge as direct-to-consumer genomics expands,” she says.
