(no subject)
Preparing for the tutorial today. I thought I would get lots of work done this morning, but it's already time for me to trek up to North Campus Building. I still have to finish marking, staple and have a shower.
We're doing genealogies in one of my courses, and I've been having fun trying to trace my ancestry. It's hard to do it via the internet, however, because the last names of my grandparents are 'Edwards' and 'Fritz'. Not rare names, surely.
However, I accidentally came across Robespierre's genealogy a few moments ago. I can't believe that they were able to trace him through 18 generations! That's well over 400 years, I think.
There's been a huge conflict recently over the NIH GWAS databases. In September, a group found a way to detect individuals in complex mixtures using only SNPs.
Suddenly, the genetic community is getting nervous. Why? Because this apparently extends to databases. If your sequence is contained in a medically sensitive directory, a person can determine whether you are there are not if they have your genome sequence.
Similarly, there is the worry that law enforcement officers will move past crime database, and scour medical databases for possible perpetrators.
When I first heard about these issues, I sort of scoffed at them. However, the amount of discourse that they've opened up is astounding. I don't think anybody expected that these debates would explode so quickly.
It's snowing. I don't want to leave the house today >_
We're doing genealogies in one of my courses, and I've been having fun trying to trace my ancestry. It's hard to do it via the internet, however, because the last names of my grandparents are 'Edwards' and 'Fritz'. Not rare names, surely.
However, I accidentally came across Robespierre's genealogy a few moments ago. I can't believe that they were able to trace him through 18 generations! That's well over 400 years, I think.
There's been a huge conflict recently over the NIH GWAS databases. In September, a group found a way to detect individuals in complex mixtures using only SNPs.
Suddenly, the genetic community is getting nervous. Why? Because this apparently extends to databases. If your sequence is contained in a medically sensitive directory, a person can determine whether you are there are not if they have your genome sequence.
Similarly, there is the worry that law enforcement officers will move past crime database, and scour medical databases for possible perpetrators.
When I first heard about these issues, I sort of scoffed at them. However, the amount of discourse that they've opened up is astounding. I don't think anybody expected that these debates would explode so quickly.
It's snowing. I don't want to leave the house today >_