I could see how ordinary all this will one day become, how declaring whether you had the version of the APOE gene that correlates with late-onset Alzheimer’s might one day become as normal as slapping a pub shot up on your blog or discussing your Zoloft dosage at a dinner party. So much is already happening that it’s hard to imagine that some variation on all those things is not going to come true. They were at best marketing a thumbnail synopsis, or better, an index of a book no one really knows how to read.

The Book of Me, 2nd Edition (Autobiographical Journal) The Book of Me, 2nd Edition (Autobiographical Journal)

I ask why anyone would want to run out and get his genome sequenced if all he can learn is all the probabilities of things going wrong.The beads are bathed in nucleotide bases, each A, T, G, and C tagged with a corresponding uorescent marker. I might learn of susceptibilities for ALS or Crohn’s disease or schizophrenia or prostate, bladder, or lung cancer. As I feel myself turning from scrawny to pre-obese, Conde says good-bye, and we agree to meet in a couple of weeks. I spend all spring and summer in medias res, keeping my head down, trying to live my life, knowing that the next page turn is about to throw The Story So Far up for grabs.

The Book of Me - Leder, Meg; Kempster, Rachel 9781492641940: The Book of Me - Leder, Meg; Kempster, Rachel

In addition, where our elected officials are now at war with science, the BGI is funded handsomely by the Chinese government, including support for such popular projects as sequencing the giant-panda genome and the rice genome. Their faces display a bewildering rainbow of phenotypes, but any one of their genomes is likely to differ from mine at no more than one in 1,000 data points, most of which make little difference in development. Knowing a person’s genes, Kucherlapati hopes, will help turn drug prescription into something much more evidence-based, narrowly targeted, and exact, greatly improving outcomes and reducing side effects. I’ve become another person, someone other than I thought I was, giving blood in Wellesley, last spring. But association studies are revealing more and more about what kinds of genetic makeups will respond to which medications at what dosages.Contains hundreds of guided questions organised into sections about your past, present, and future, family history, and inner self. But few people saw the potential of that revolution early on: “Just like with personal computing, until there are some compelling stories involving real products, the only people who are going to get what’s happening are the ones who can imagine things that aren’t yet there. Among an exhausting list of other responsibilities, George Church directs the Lipper Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He grows excited when he envisions clients matching their personal genomic information against all of the world’s available genetic findings and letting the coordinating software find relevant news stories, treatments, suggestions for behavioral change, specific advice about personally tailored medications, professionals you might profitably consult, specialists you might want to meet, foods you should seek out or avoid… Knome, it seems, is in a race to become a genomic combination of Google, Bloomberg box, and WebMD.

Book of Me: Do-It-Yourself Memoir (Notebook, Diary)

I point to naive public discussions about single genes that supposedly cause alcoholism, aggression, or homosexuality.With undergraduate work in computer science and biology as well as graduate work in business school, Yoo is well suited to serve as a Virgil through my dark wood of genetic information. I have in mind the novelist’s territory, those mysterious components—warmth, spontaneity, humor—that, however uncomfortable it makes us to admit, seem to be somewhat to largely heritable. But what that story means—the live links to the growing online literature, the changing interpretations of these variations, and the response I choose to take to them—is changing by the moment.

The Book of Me, 2nd Edition (Autobiographical Journal The Book of Me, 2nd Edition (Autobiographical Journal

He tells me about going from a childhood in Miami, the son of a Peruvian doctor father and Cuban mother, to a biology degree at Johns Hopkins and a Harvard MBA. Most impressive of all, the sequencing would be free, provided the volunteers made their information publicly available. As I pick out the historical landmarks, I think of how my genome will reveal the kernel of past incarnations. That means five passes across my entire sequence will yield the accuracy of ten reads, equaling or sometimes even exceeding the accuracy of the human reference genome.

China is embracing the genomics revolution with much less religious and social ambivalence than North America. Kiirikki points out that more people have walked on the Moon (twelve) than have had their full genomes sequenced (nine).