Besides traditional and expensive epidemiological studies to compare disease prevalence over time, the net offers also some nice research tools – click on the thumbnail to see Google asthma trend results by today. The query counts are largely consistent with most recent scientific papers seeing the asthma epidemic now at a (high) plateau. Did the environmental risk now saturate all individuals at risk?

It is a fact that the best climbs are performed by famous mountaineers before they became famous (Doug Scott in “Mountain” according to an inscription at Firmian/Messner Mountain Museum). (Show me more…)

May 29, 2008 Nature has an interesting commentary by Peter Lawrence (66) about the archaic? practice of retirement of active scientists at a determined age. It may be a quite luxurious habit of the science business – people who want to work longer than a certain age – which can be understood by the freedom of “Doing what I like”. Having a mostly pleasant life here on earth as a scientist, it may be a quite logical wish of a 66 year old to prolong the scientific career. (Show me more…)

Wolfram Henn, Vorsitzender der Kommission für Grundpositionen und ethische Fragen der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Humangenetik, warnt im Interview mit Technology Review (Ausgabe 07/08 [...]) vor persönlichen Genomanalysen, die über das Internet angeboten werden. So bietet beispielsweise das Unternehmen 23andMe seit kurzem eine Genomanalyse für nur 999 Dollar an.

Welcome in the club! Just to let you know that 23andme has been stopped 2 days ago as reported by Spiegel magazine.