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I try to imagine the worst case, something like Huntington’s: a definitive prediction of a horrific monogenetic disease without any treatment beyond general symptom management. I might learn that I am a prime candidate for early Alzheimer’s. I might learn that my risk of macular degeneration is several times the base rate. I might learn of susceptibilities for ALS or Crohn’s disease or schizophrenia or prostate, bladder, or lung cancer. I guess I’m groundlessly hoping that my own red ags will be limited to elevated risks for things like heart disease or diabetes, odds that I might be able to tilt slightly in my favor by prophylactic intervention or behavioral changes. In any case, I’ll live with whatever I learn from here on out. No possible good news can be hiding in my genome except, at best, no definitive news at all. Strong's 4012: From the base of peran; properly, through, i.e. Around; figuratively with respect to; used in various applications, of place, cause or time. Then said I, Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written concerning me,) to do thy will, O God. Children love to explore, born with a boundless desire to understand the world around them. While most of the outside world has already been mapped, there’s a whole other world that has yet to be discovered, one that’s accessible only to them: their own minds. Our Family Station in St Pancras is open from 10.00-12.00 every Friday and we're continuing to welcome schools, as well as families and adult learners to our courses and access events. All our in-person and livestreamed events are going ahead. Other services
All those books wrestle with the limits of the human—whether to accept them nobly or rage against them all the way to death. As I walk through the Victory Gardens, I wonder what tomorrow’s novels will look like, when the limits to the natural course of human life will be up for grabs again.The next morning, as he fights a BMW Zipcar through insane traffic, Jorge Conde asks me, only partly in jest, how long I think we’ll have to wait before they invent the matter transporter. We’re on our way to the office of George Church at Harvard Medical School, but the snarl of rush hour is proving vicious. Conde, a congenital optimist, doesn’t see why teleportation isn’t conceivable. He mentions the recent laboratory successes with single-particle quantum tunneling. It’s just a matter of scaling up, he insists. I laugh, before remembering that we’re embarking on something that was once every bit as inconceivable. Conde and Yoo tell me that 4,652,848,316 of my DNA fragments have been reassembled against the human reference genome and verified for accuracy. The interpretation of my genome is under way. I’m suddenly unnerved at talking to these people; they’ve read my damn book, and I haven’t, yet. Conde asks me to return to Boston in mid-August, to join a daylong roundtable discussion with medical and genetic experts who will talk me through my genome and the susceptibilities it indicates. We spend two hours discussing the future of genomics and personalized medicine, during which I’m almost numbly calm. Kiirikki points out that more people have walked on the Moon (twelve) than have had their full genomes sequenced (nine). Rienhoff stresses the need for subtler association studies, working outwards from individual patient histories and environments. Church says that sequencing power and speed have increased ten-thousand-fold in four years, massively dwarfing Moore’s law, which would produce a mere quadrupling in the same period. The others call for major educational support if society is to have a prayer of keeping up. Then I said, 'Here I am, to do your will, O God, just as it is written of me in the book of the Law.'" Then I said, 'See, I have come to do your will, O God' In the volume of the scroll this is written about me."
AFTER 2,000 MAN-HOURS and 9,000 supercomputer CPU hours, my genome is ready. I return to Boston in mid-August, this time staying at the old nineteenth-century Charles Street Jail, recently turned into a twenty-first-century luxury hotel: old inheritances transformed into new variations. When I eat with Conde and Kiirikki again, it’s in a new restaurant. It has to be: I have the novelty gene. They’re bursting with excitement, trying not to give away tomorrow’s show. And I said, 'Behold, I come', because in the beginning of The Writings it is written of me, 'to do your will, oh God.'”Medically, all that my 6 billion data points will tell me are probabilities, most of them not actionable, but probabilities that are gradually becoming something firmer. Maybe chief among the other things my genome might tell me (if only briey) is what it felt like, for a while, not to know. What the sequence certainly will not tell me is anything about who I am, where I’m going, or how I got from childhood—let alone my young adulthood in the Boston Fens, head filled with the wildest of fictional books—to a man of 50 in a cab on Boylston Street, about to be told the sum total of the code that I was born with and that will take me on into the grave. Denouement I reach the Fens, where I once lived with a woman whom I’d talked into moving to this city. We broke up, in part, over the children issue. Neither she nor I nor the man she married nor the woman I married have ever procreated. At least 25 percent of us is a full-edged Supporter of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. But I think of all the couples, in the years to come, who will study their own genomes out of concern over what they might hand down to their offspring. There will be those who demand (or even steal) a copy of their betrothed’s full sequence before signing the prenup. Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.’”
I ask if genomicists will ever be able to look at a person’s alleles and deduce something about his or her temperament. 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. Will a genetic signature ever help us understand the origin of high-level behavioral traits? Church gazes off into the distance, with that look of pure experimental pleasure. “Well, I don’t think there’s a huge difference between high-level behavioral traits, low-level behavioral traits, and physical traits,” he says. “They’re all physical, in some sense.” So what about the enormous majority of the genome with no known function? It turns out that much of those vast, mysterious tracts that used to be called “junk DNA” have been faithfully preserved over eons and seem to have gene-regulatory functions. I’m guessing that if those stretches are junk, they’re the kind of junk that will come down out of the attic to fetch big prices on Antiques Roadshow. An object can belong to me, but it would never be of me, unless you are a pirate, or you were trying to state that the object came from your body (i.e., a piece of me), which isn't truly a possessive phrase. What happens once my DNA reaches China is subject to change. The few different possibilities are contingent on very rapid developments in hardware and software. Knome is improvising as uidly and continuously as the rest of us will have to once the revolution hits. We drive through an area of my old beloved Cambridge that has been transformed beyond recognition by a billion-dollar MIT construction program. Buildings from playful to sinister, many by prestige architects, spring up on every wedge of available land while cranes hoist up more of them by the month. The boom is fueled by a biotech industry that has yet to come near to fulfilling its much hyped promise. There seems to be no end of money that might be made from the molecularization of human health.Then said I: Behold I come: in the head of the book it is written of me: that I should do thy will, O God. That is, it's almost always "an X of mine", not "the X of mine". I don't think I've ever heard someone say, "That is the car of mine" or "She is the mother of mine"; it's always "That is my car", "She is my mother", etc. "The X of mine" would be grammatically correct, but no one says it.
then I said, Lo, I come, (in a volume of the book it hath been written concerning me,) to do, O God, Thy will;' Strong's 2400: See! Lo! Behold! Look! Second person singular imperative middle voice of eido; used as imperative lo! Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come— In the volume of the book it is written of Me— To do Your will, O God.’” My thing" and "thing of mine" are completely interchangeable, though there is a modern tendency to use "my". An engaging guided journal for developing children’s understanding of themselves and their emotions.I wonder out loud if personal genomics might ultimately force a single-payer system in this country; it’s hard to imagine how else society will be able to survive the definitive revelation of unequal, inherited risk. No one disagrees. The two proper ways to show possession are "my object" or "object of mine" — the use of the latter is often used to describe friends, but it is not limited to such uses: Strong's 1722: In, on, among. A primary preposition denoting position, and instrumentality, i.e. A relation of rest; 'in, ' at, on, by, etc. In the technique, the short fragments of prepared DNA are primed on each end and read simultaneously from both directions: two reads for the price of one. 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. I’ll be the first commercial subject to be sequenced with the method. My Google Earth map has just become a good deal crisper and more reliable across the board, and commercial sequencing has just halved in cost, once again.
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