This morning when leaving the Munich underground, I could hear Ivan – the best accordion player in the world. There are numerous videos at YouTube, so listen if you like (Show me more…)

The BBC headline yesterday is close to the famous quote of Neil Amstrongs’ with reporting the United States blocking now genetic discrimination.

Or as Kennedy put it forward “the first new civil rights bill of the new century”. Unfortunately, we are lagging behind in Europe. My recent initiative to promote such a legislative in Germany was futile; the most recent goverment proposal only earned a lot of criticism.

The 2006 document on perspectives of the German Protestant Church (EKD) briefly touches also the relation to science on p. 44 (Show me more…)

Laborjournal 4/2008 reports a new software tool for DNA addicted people: the Personal Genome Explorer which is based on SNP annotation by SNPedia. So, what I tried to institutionalize on a sound level as “Genome Explained” possibly within the framework of HGVS is now being done by a street initiative fueled by early adopters like Cross, Arlington, Halamka and Smolenyak. It looks very much like an unholy alliance of profit interests and technical curiosity than good science and responsible counseling, yea, yea.
Addendum: If you believe in support vector machines, you can even let your laptop screen the medical literature for genetic associations with GAPscreener. <irony> No more lengthy training in genetics, statistics, epidemiology and bioinformatics, no more years of collecting all relevant papers & abstracts, just let your laptop score your DNA variants </irony>