Genetics for Dummies

[skadistic]

How? Without sounding too flippant, it won't help them pay their taxes, buy their homes or raise their children...?

How about when legislaters pass laws that are backwards and ramble on about things people don't understand (including them selves) thus pulling the wool over the eyes of the sheeple.

Or when their kids see a doctor and they are discovered to be a genetic defect they can better understand whats wrong and how to treat it. Or before the kid is born an understanding of genetics will prepare them posible problems and maybe they will go see a genetisis. A healthy child is a cheaper child saving money to put into the house.



Knowing more is always better.

 

[El_Machinae]

How? Without sounding too flippant, it won't help them pay their taxes, buy their homes or raise their children...?

Because it will give people a great deal of predictive knowledge about themselves: mental health, personal health, your kids health, etc. And that there will be more and more knowledge available each year.

Just on the physical health side, having knowledge about how to drastically increase your physical health will allow you to plan your lives better and thus be a better parent/home owner/etc.

Heck, just finding out that you *don't* have genes associated with lung disease can change your life: never mind finding out that you *do*

I'd think it would definitely help them raise their children, at least from a medical, food, and possibly even prod into the proper field of study POV. Though, looking at that graph, even once it hits $0.01 per base pairs, at 3 billion base pairs in the average human, we're still talking only multi-millionaires being able to afford it.

Another frightful possibility is what can happen if an enemy gets your base pair. What hard to detect poison would our President be most suseptible to? Well, now our enemies will be able to figure that out if they can get their hands on our CIC's DNA.

We're currently at about 100 base pair per two pennies (the OP was wrong). Think about it for a second, your eyeballing of the graph led you to predict a 2007 price about 50x greater than it currently is. It's similar to thinking about getting a $20,000 second degree from a local University, and then finding out that the same knowledge is actually available for $400 and is just as reputable.

It's currently less than a million dollars for the whole genome (which, tbh, is a pretty good investment for anybody with more than a hundred million dollars, giving the predictive power that is coming online and the advantage of applying predictive power sooner rather than later. Additionally, metapopulation studies would be using your data as a significant sample source, meaning the data is being applied to you first.).

But you needn't get your whole genome done. We're soon going to be moving into a market where you can get 'packages' of genes sequenced. Getting your specific alleles for 'only' ~6,000 genes will be something that almost anybody can afford.

And finally, there are people that assume the line will trend downward. Note that the graph is logarithmic.

Seriously, we're on a cusp. And the average, careered adult needs to be well informed of this - else they're missing a huge opportunity. If a person has time for Prime Time TV, they have time for this. And the rewards of knowing about genetics is much higher than knowing who won whatever is showing on reality TV.

 

[bhsup]

Ah, okay. I kind of took the shotgun approach and assumed you'd need to do the whole thing. I didn't even think about targetting a particular section. I guess that would be a bit cheaper.

 

[El_Machinae]

I'm going to bump this, and I'm going to emphasise how important this is for people to spend some time thinking about.

Here's a 20 minute talk from three years ago. If this doesn't get it into people how important this is, I don't know what will.
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/80

Okay, and just for emphasis, I'm El_Mac, the nutbar who thinks that aging can be cured. Even with that caveat (I'm clearly an optimist), I will declare that there's a graph shown and described between minutes 16-17 that blew my mind. I wasn't ready for it.

Everyone who's NOT interested in science or genetics needs to see this talk.

 

[blackheart]

Another frightful possibility is what can happen if an enemy gets your base pair. What hard to detect poison would our President be most suseptible to? Well, now our enemies will be able to figure that out if they can get their hands on our CIC's DNA.

If you're close enough to poison the president, you'll probably be able to use some good old arsenic anyways.

 

[skadistic]

@ El MAc


That guy was awesome.

 

[Masquerouge]

While I believe that better knowledge of the genome is a good thing, I have one concern.
First I'll explain what's going on with cancer: we've become better and better at detecting cancers in their early stages. As a consequence, more and more cancers are found, and treated.
However, the death rate from cancer is relatively stable.
What this means is that most of the new cancers we're detecting are actually harmless, and thus people undergo intensive treatments for pretty much nothing, costing a lot of money and time that's wasted.

I hope it will not become the same once we can easily decode the genome, meaning we will start treating people for genetic anomalies that are sometimes harmful.
And my cynical side is telling me that the pharmaceutical companies and others in the same industry would LOVE to have more reasons to provide treatments, medications and care to people.

 

[El_Machinae]

The cancer death rate is going down. The awesomeness of this can only be realised when we remember that cancer is an aging disease and that the population is getting older.

Skadistic: thanks. I thought so too. In fact, I'd say he blew my mind.

To all: I think that people living at home should get their parents to watch that video. The world is changing, and most people have no idea.

 

[Atlas14]

@El Mac: The guy is great for those who essentially know nothing about genetics. I found him very interesting and able to express genetics clearly, but lacked some depth. I'm not sure if he never intended to go too deep, but meh its just my opinion.

Great find though! I wish my parents/friends would watch it.

 

[El_Machinae]

The main goal of getting people to watch that video is to show them how much the field has progressed and is going to progress. Basically, when trying to show someone how a basic knowledge of genetics is going to be vastly useful, you show them the video.

The trick around minute 17 is that that's a logarithmic graph. I sputtered when I realised that.

 

[StarWorms]

First I'll explain what's going on with cancer: we've become better and better at detecting cancers in their early stages. As a consequence, more and more cancers are found, and treated.
However, the death rate from cancer is relatively stable.
What this means is that most of the new cancers we're detecting are actually harmless, and thus people undergo intensive treatments for pretty much nothing, costing a lot of money and time that's wasted.

Bad conclusion. The population is rising and cancers are staying stable: good sign. Secondly, people are living longer and longer and so more people live long enough to get cancer. Again, it's good that's it's staying stable.

Personally though, I think cancer will still be around many centuries/millennia into the future. Evolution doesn't make a neat and tidy genome, it's makes something completely scrambled and messed up. It would not be unusual to find one protein eg. that was produced in the presence of red light that would affect something completely unrelated. This is because if it's only a small effect and not beneficial, it will still probably hang around. People seem to assume cancer is just one thing, like AIDS. In fact, there are many, many different types caused by many, many different factors and has also emerged independently in plants and fungi. The cancers that are easier to treat are caused by things like viruses and bacteria. Those that are difficult to treat are caused by mutations and changes in gene expression. To get a cure for those, we'd probably have to change our genome entirely so that it's nice and orderly, or find some way to change them back, which is not easy: It's not just one gene that mutates, there are many, many genes which can mutate.

 

[El_Machinae]

I think that most people would consider cancer 'cured' if you could detect the cancer before negative symptoms started and then could kill the cancer without negative symptoms. Targeted drugs really seems to be the trick here.

 

[StarWorms]

I think that most people would consider cancer 'cured' if you could detect the cancer before negative symptoms started and then could kill the cancer without negative symptoms. Targeted drugs really seems to be the trick here.

Early symptoms are extremely general for pretty much any disease, unless they are checked thoroughly in a hospital. Detecting cancer by early symptoms is very difficult because symptoms only really appear once the tumour is getting quite big, at which point it may be too late for some people. Unfortunately, it's not possible to scan the DNA of all our cells for any changes that could cause the cells to become cancerous.

 

[El_Machinae]

Ah, you're forgetting excreted biomarkers! It seems that many cancers excrete proteins that can be detected with a handy-dandy protein finder.

These protein finders are only going to become cheaper and more efficient. And, as new biomarkers are found, they can be added to the databases.

Finally, there are potentially drugs that can home in on cancers that express novel surface proteins. While I doubt we'll be 'shotgunning' people with various anti-cancer drugs, there's opportunity there for combining some type of detection protocol with a system of detecting novel surface proteins.

 

[El_Machinae]

I'd think it would definitely help them raise their children, at least from a medical, food, and possibly even prod into the proper field of study POV. Though, looking at that graph, even once it hits $0.01 per base pairs, at 3 billion base pairs in the average human, we're still talking only multi-millionaires being able to afford it.

I'll quote Agentman, because he'll make my point the best.

The most recent figures for sequencing a human genome are $60,000 in about six weeks, as reported by Applied Biosystems last month. (That's down from $3 billion for the Human Genome Project, which was sequenced using traditional methods and finished in 2003, and about $1 million for James Watson's genome, sequenced using a newer, high-throughput approach and released last year.) But scientists are still racing to develop methods that are fast and cheap enough to allow everyone to get their genomes sequenced, thus truly ushering in the era of personalized medicine.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20640/

Exponential trends, FTW. The current price is now about one five hundreth the price VRWCAgent saw when he read that graph.

 

[Kozmos]

Good news. Now all we need is medical nanites and we can all live healthily forever.

 

[El_Machinae]

So, here's my update. My OP had a log10 graph. So does this one. There's been a massive acceleration in our ability to sequence DNA. I can now get my DNA sequenced for between $4k and $20k dollars (depending on my circumstances).

This is becoming nuts. And amazing. I think there's real opportunity for people with programming skills, because there will certainly be an opportunity to create apps for people's genetic data. An app that compares my sequence to new research? That would be awesome! An app that compares my sequences to known historical records? That would be awesome. Other ideas that I haven't thought of? That would be even more awesome!

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

This is just the acceleration of the technology to sequence the genome, but not to learn what any of it means. Although naturally, it will lead to further dscovery, it has only done so haphazardly. So I dispute the premise that sequencing your genome currently or even soon will have uses. Maybe when it becomes more predictive of phenotypes then it will be more useful.

 

[El_Machinae]

Yes, it's the learning that I am recommending. As you say, the amount of utility one can gain from their genome will increase (haphazardly), but it certainly will increase. And people who create ways of examining that data will certainly have a huge market available to them. And people who understand how to examine that data will have a huge advantage and huge opportunities. As the data come in, people who have a grasp of the underlying principles are going to be able to integrate those data. People who can create apps that examine relative risks, or people who understand relative risks, or people who have questions about 'how does this discovery apply to me?' are going to be 'normal' people! They'll be regular joes who're going to move the field forward, and create great utility for what's coming out of the research labs.

For example, there are common polymorphisms that determine whether 3 cups of coffee increases or decreases your risk of heart disease. Like, 1/3 of people should be drinking coffee, and 2/3 should not. That's huge! And it's just one example.

Polymorphisms for IQ and diet will come out. Metabolism. etc.

It's the beginning of making massive amounts of data available for any normal person who's just curious. And, like the OP says, learning how to use the data will create huge opportunities for advantage.

 

[Kozmos]

http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_resnick_welcome_to_the_genomic_revolution.html