Two timely issues call into question our use of genetics, both in science and popular usage: CRISPR technology used in the pre-natal state to genetically edit-out/repair potentially fatal genes, and the Google controversy.

CRISPR Clustered Regularly Interspersed Short Palindromic Repeats technology, discovered by scientists at UC Berkeley and modified by those at MIT, will almost certainly result in a Nobel Prize. Berkeley scientists discovered that these repeats were used by bacteria to protect themselves against viral infections. Between the repeats, they found pieces of the viral DNA that had previously attacked the bacterium. If, and when, the same virus again attacked, the intruder viral DNA would be compared to the DNA stored between the repeats. If it is recognized as a repeat offender, the bacterium sends in proteins to destroy the viral DNA. They additionally noted that in non-virally infected bacteria, CRISPR could be used to delete some bacterial genes and replace them with others.

Our use of this technology in human cells allows injection of the DNA-modifying proteins into a human egg while it is being fertilized in a test-tube. Fatal genetic conditions identified in the mother or father in the recent report this was a cardiac abnormality, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy can potentially be corrected pre-natally and, after the correction, the fertilized egg implanted into the mother. An incredibly promising technology, it may allow, as with this cardiac abnormality, children at-risk for sudden death to grow old.

Of course, there are ethical concerns related to this technology. Will it be used to create perfect people, eliminating the diversity that makes us better and stronger? That is up to us. A head-in-the-sand refusal to engage with this is not the answer.

The scientific use of genetics and the concept of diversity, above, is tied to its non-scientific use in the Googles James Damore controversy.

Damore spent 3,400 words to say three things: Women and ethnic minorities are genetically different than (select) men; Those genetic differences are why there are more men than women (and minorities) in positions of power; Refusing to acknowledge this creates all sorts of difficulties and controversy, and is bad for business.

Google, he argues, doesnt allow ideas such as his from being discussed, as people are shamed into silence.

The differences between men and women in the workplace are due to inherent, genetic differences, he claims. What?

There are differences between men and women phenotypic (hair color, eye color) and genotypic (a slight variation in genes coding for gender) for which I am always pleased. Do these explain workplace differences? Pay differences? IQ? No. What we term Intelligence Quotient is heavily influenced by surroundings and upbringing, including social class. Not that inherent ability is meaningless, but environment matters. It is not nurture versus nature, it is nurture and nature.

There is a thoughtful part of Damores thesis, meriting consideration. Diversity is right because it makes us better and stronger; we should welcome diverse voices. He muddles this logical point by claiming women are paid less than men for the same job because they spend more money and, somehow, this is genetic; so much for diversity.

Genetics both does and does not make us who we are. Yes, there are genetic elements within us that make us phenotypically what we are: Brown eyes rather than green; black hair rather than blond. But brilliance? Thoughtfulness? Humanity? Empathy? The ability to work together to solve a problem? To work on a problem day after day until the solution appears?

If there is a genetics to this, it is the ability of multiple genes to be turned on by stimulation in a young person. These on-switches are flipped by parents and a society that loves and provides for the child, allows the child to explore and ask questions. A society that takes the child seriously. A society that does not think of the child, the sum of her phenotype, what she looks like.

The danger from CRISPR technology is it could be used to create the perfect human, eliminating the diversity that makes us better, and our world more beautiful. Damores paper, without using such technology, does just that. He turns women and ethnic minorities into caricatures of themselves, while asserting that it is he who is not appreciated or valued.

Peoples opinions vary, but facts suggest we are surrounded by conservative voices, of which I am a multi-faceted one.

CRISPR technology has downsides; we need international guardrails for its use. But the misuse of genetics to explain our societys flaws is an error of the highest magnitude. Much more dangerous than the CRISPR tool-set, we see it in action every day. In papers such as Mr. Damores, and in the way we think of, and treat, our children, boys and girls.

Our world view, ideology, is like the air we breathe: invisible, almost indescribable. It is this ideological view that allows Damore and sometimes us to simultaneously argue for diversity, while doing all in our power to eliminate it.

Follow Dr. A. Joseph Layon on Twitter @ajlayon or on his health blog, also titled Notes from the Southern Heartland (ajlayon.com). Letters may be sent to: LettersNFTSH@gmail.com.

Continue reading here:
Does genetics make me what I am? - Sunbury Daily Item

Warwickshire-based investor Mercia Technologies has injected 2m into a business that produces virus and protein-based biologics for therapeutic companies.

The direct follow-on investment into Oxford Genetics brings Mercia's equity stake in the business to 40.5 per cent.

The 2m from Mercia formed part of a 7.5m funding round, which included Invesco Asset Management.

Proceeds will be used to bolster Oxford Genetics' operation in the US with the opening of a new office in Boston. The company will also expand its research and development facility in the UK.

Chief executive Ryan Cawood said: "The next few years for Oxford Genetics will be exciting. The industry for complex biologics has taken such huge steps forward to delivering real patient benefit and we are pleased to be providing our technology to many of the companies tackling some of medicine's most important unmet needs."

Mercia has worked with Oxford Genetics since 2012 and has ploughed a total of 4.7m into its development.

Mark Payton, chief executive of Mercia and board director of Oxford Genetics, added: "This sector is growing rapidly, driven by pharma and biotech companies' relentless drive for new therapeutics.

"The commercial validity of the business has been recently supported by a string of technology licence agreements. This syndicated investment alongside Invesco reflects our confidence in Oxford Genetics' strong position and its ability to deliver shareholder value in the medium term."

Read more here:
Mercia invests further in Oxford Genetics - Insider Media

This weeks headlines were filled with news from Charlottesville, Virginia, after a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of people opposing a march of supremacists and noe-Nazis, killing one woman and injuring many others. Which leads one to ask: how white are American white supremacists?

For most of them, the most convincing way to prove their whiteness is DNA tests from companies like 23andMe.com and Ancestry.com. To their consternation, the results are often not what they expected. White supremacist Craig Cobb was outed on daytime TV in 2013 as 86 percent European, and 14 percent Sub-Saharan African.

Whats interesting is how the white supremacists respond to these disconcerting test results. Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan, sociologists at UCLA, studied online discussions of genetic ancestry test results on the white nationalist website Stormfront. They found that the participants used fairly sophisticated reasoning to challenge the results and regain their whiteness.

Cobb, for instance, denounced his test as statistical noise and described it as a Jewish conspiracy to spread junk science whose intent is to defame, confuse and deracinate young whites on a mass levelespecially males. Using a test from another company he was able to claim that he was European, apart from a 3% Iberian thing.

Panofsky and Donovan conclude that genetics cannot refute racist views. Even though mankind probably came from Africa and even though the notion of racial purity is absurd, racists can manipulate and interpret data for their own purposes. They conclude:

clear communication, simple forms of education, and collective denunciations of scientific misuses, scientists preferred forms of anti-racist action, are insufficient for the task. Challenging racists public understanding of science is not simply a matter of more education or nuance, but may require scientists to rethink their research paradigms and reflexively interrogate their own knowledge production.

More here:
Can genetics refute white supremacist theories? - BioEdge

August 17, 2017

Photo credit: Dreamstime

What makes humans different from chimpanzees? Evolutionary biologists from Howard University and the Yale School of Public Health have developed a unique genetic analysis technique that may provide important answers.

Michael C. Campbell, Ph.D., the papers first author and assistant professor in the Howard University Department of Biology, and co-author Jeffrey Townsend, Ph.D., the Elihu Associate Professor in Biostatistics at Yale, published their findings in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

Their methodModel Averaged Site Selection via Poisson Random Field (MASS-PRF)looks at protein-coding genes to identify genetic signatures of positive selection. These signatures are actually DNA changes that contribute to the development of beneficial traits, or human adaptations, that emerged during human evolutionary history and that are shared across the human species.

It's a quantum leap in our statistical power to detect selection in recently diverged species.

Other approaches have examined this question but analyses have focused on whole genes, typically missing focused evolution that often occurs in small regions of genes. The method Campbell and Townsend created identifies selection within genes, pinpointing sets of mutations that have undergone positive selection.

Our method is a new way of looking for beneficial mutations that have become fixed or occur at 100 percent frequency in the human species, Campbell said. What we are concerned with are mutations within genes and traits that are specific to humans compared to closely related species, such as the chimpanzee. Essentially, we want to know is what are the mutations and traits that make us human and that unite us as a biological species.

Townsend said the technique has far-reaching implications. It helped the research team discover several genes whose evolution appears to have been critical to the divergence of humans from their common ancestor with chimpanzees. The genes play roles in neurological processing, immunity, and reproduction, and the method could eventually help scientists identify many more. It's a quantum leap in our statistical power to detect selection in recently diverged species, Townsend said.

Campbell began the research project with Drs. Zhao and Townsend while they were associate research scientists in the Department of Biostatistics at the Yale School of Public Health, before he arrived at Howard University in 2015. Dr. Zhao, currently a research scientist at The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine, co-authored the paper.

This article was submitted by Elisabeth Ann Reitman on August 17, 2017.

Read the original:
Evolutionary Biologists Probe Long-standing Genetics Mystery - Yale News

Deutsche Bank upgraded Myriad Genetics, Inc. (NASDAQ: MYGN), as it believes the risk/reward is now balanced following the company below-consensus sales and earnings per share guidance for 2018.

The firm upgraded the rating from Sell to Hold, with the price target at $28.

At time of writing, shares of Myriad Genetics were rallying 3.19 percent to $28.75.

Analyst Dan Leonard said he was earlier concerned that the Street numbers were too high and didn't sufficiently reflect downside in the company's Hereditary Cancer Testing, or HTC, business, which accounts for 74 percent of the total sales. The company's sales guidance for 2018 was 4 percent below the Street estimates at the midpoint, the analyst noted.

See also: August PDUFA Dates: Biotech Investors Stay Tuned To A Month Of Plenty

Deutsche Bank believes the price erosion in the core hereditary cancer testing business is likely to be metered post 2019, given that cost of HCT isn't a large portion of spend at any given payer.

Additionally, the firm noted that payers have historically used prior authorization as the primary lever to limit genetic testing spend, rather than price. The firm said payers may not prefer discriminating between providers, given the challenge posed by getting acquainted with the evolving medical practice, the firm said.

Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank also indicated Myriad Genetics is able to convince payers that the other HCT options aren't perfect substitutes for its tests due to its variant database and the FDA approved status of its BRCAnalysis test.

The firm also sees opportunity for volume gains to continue.

Deutsche Bank believes the Street estimates through 2020 now appear more appropriate, while opining that its estimates are largely in line save some timing differences.

"We would be more constructive on greater conviction in MYGN's efforts outside of hereditary cancer testing and/or greater volume growth in hereditary cancer testing," the firm concluded.

View More Analyst Ratings for MYGN View the Latest Analyst Ratings

Posted-In: Deutsche Bank - Dan LeonardAnalyst Color Upgrades Analyst Ratings Best of Benzinga

2017 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

View post:
Increased Confidence Earns Myriad Genetics An Upgrade - Benzinga

The white-nationalist forum Stormfront hosts discussions on a wide range of topics, from politics to guns to The Lord of the Rings. And of particular and enduring interest: genetic ancestry tests. For white nationalists, DNA tests are a way to prove their racial purity. Of course, their results dont always come back that way. And how white nationalists try to explain away non-European ancestry is rather illuminating of their beliefs.

Will the Alt-Right Promote a New Kind of Racist Genetics?

Two years agobefore Donald Trump was elected president, before white nationalism had become central to the political conversationAaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan, sociologists then at the University of California, Los Angeles, set out to study Stormfront forum posts about genetic ancestry tests. They presented their study at the American Sociological Association meeting this Monday. (A preprint of the paper is now online.)After the events in Charlottesville this week, their research struck a particular chord with the audience.

For academics, there was some uneasiness around hearing that science is being used in this way and that some of the critiques that white nationalists are making of genetics are the same critiques social scientists make of genetics, says Donovan, who recently took up a position at the Data and Society Research Institute. On Stormfront, the researchers did encounter conspiracy theories and racist rants, but some white-nationalist interpretations of genetic ancestry tests were in fact quite sophisticatedand their views cannot all be easily dismissed as ignorance.

If we believe their politics comes from lack of sophistication because theyre unintelligent or uneducated, says Panofsky, I think were liable to make a lot of mistakes in how we cope with them.

Panofsky, Donovan, and their team of researchers analyzed 3,070 Stormfront posts spanning more than a decadeall from forum threads in which at least one user revealed the results of a DNA test. Some of the results were 100 percent European, as users expected. But oftensurprisingly often, says Panofskyusers disclosed tests results showing non-European ancestry. And despite revealing non-European ancestry on a forum full of white nationalists, they were not run off the site.

While some commenters reacted with anger, many reacted by offering up arguments to explain away the test results. These arguments largely fell into two camps.

First, they could simply reject all genetic ancestry testing. Genealogy or the so-called mirror test (When you look in the mirror, do you see a Jew? If not, youre good) were better tests of racial purity, some suggested. Others offered up conspiracies about DNA testing companies led by Jews: I think 23andMe might be a covert operation to get DNA the Jews could then use to create bio-weapons for use against us.

The second category of explanation was a lot more nuancedand echoed in many ways legitimate critiques of the tests. When companies like 23andMe or AncestryDNA return a result like 23 percent Iberian, for example, theyre noting similarities between the customers DNA and people currently living in that region. But people migrate; populations change. It doesnt pinpoint where ones ancestors actually lived. One Stormfront user wrote:

See, THIS is why I dont recommend these tests to people. Did they bother to tell you that there were whites in what is now Senegal all that time ago? No? So they led you to believe that youre mixed even though in all probability, you are simply related to some white fool who left some of his DNA with the locals in what is now Senegal.

Panofsky notes that legitimate scientific critiques are often distorted by a white-nationalist interpretation of history. For example, the mixing of DNA in a region would be explained by the heroic conquest of Vikings. Or a white female ancestor was raped by an African man.

The team also identified a third group of reactions: acceptance of the genetic ancestry test results. Some users did start to rethink white nationalism. Not the basic ideologyStormfronts forums are not exactly the place you would do thatbut the criteria for whiteness. For example, one user suggested a white-nationalist confederation, where different nations would have slightly different criteria for inclusion:

So in one nation having Ghengis Khan as your ancestor wont disqualify you, while in others it might. Hypothetically, I might take a DNA test and find that I dont qualify for every nation and every nations standards, though I'm sure that at least one of those nations (and probably many of them) will have standards that would include me

Another user dug deep into the technical details of genetic ancestry testing. The tests can rely on three different lines of evidence: the Y chromosome that comes from your fathers fathers father and so on, the mitochondrial DNA that comes from your mothers mothers mother and so on, and autosomal DNA that can come from either side. One user suggested that a purity in the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA were more important than in the autosomal DNA. But others disagreed.

Sociologists have long pointed out the categories of race are socially constructed. The criteria for who gets to be whiteItalians? Arabs? Mexicans?are determined by social rather than biological forces. And DNA is the newest way for white nationalists to look for differences between the races.

In these years of posts on Stormfront, you can see users attempting to make sense of DNA, figuring out in real time how genetics can be used to circumscribe and preserve whiteness. The test results are always open to interpretation.

Go here to see the original:
When White Nationalists Get DNA Tests Revealing African Ancestry ... - The Atlantic