The Hypo-Allergenic Cat

From Allerca: A cat that just does not make you sneeze. But is it just hype?

It is probably possible to create cats that do not produce the most common protein allergen, says Thomas Platts-Mills, director of the Asthma and Allergic Disease Center at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, US. But he adds that cats produce many more allergens, and that blocking production of the protein could damage the cat's health. Moreover, Allerca's claims that a technique called RNA-induced gene silencing can work in cats are "unfounded", says Greg Hannon at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state, and author of the book RNAi: A Guide to Gene Silencing. So far the technique has been used only in mice.

DeCode Funded by NIH to Study Genetics of Infectious Disease

Jon Merz pointed us to this amazing piece on the funding of Iceland's for-profit genomics company, DeCode, which has official authorization to conduct population-based genomics research using the health histories and gene samples from Icelanders. NIH is funding a study of the genetics of infectious disease and vaccine response, which would access genome-wide scans of Icelanders. But does funding from NIH, though, imply the Fed's assent - or might anyway - to DeCode's "presumed consent" model?