Perfect People: the Grudge Match

Perfect people: is it a good aim? Art Caplan and Carl Elliott debate in Public Library of Science. It is fun to read but the argument is pretty much what you expect. Caplan discharges the debate as somewhat silly:

Beating up on the pursuit of perfection is silly. As Salvadore Dali famously pointed out, “Have no fear of perfection—you'll never reach it.” Critics of those who allegedly seek to perfect human beings know this. While often couching their critiques in language that assails the pursuit of perfection, what they really are attacking is the far more oft-expressed—albeit far less lofty—desire to improve or enhance a particular behavior or trait by the application of emerging biomedical knowledge in genetics, neuroscience, pharmacology, and physiology.

And Elliott responds that it isn't a conservative defense of human nature that motivates him, rather he is concerned about misplaced energies devoted to enhancement instead of more important aims; in particular Elliott is as always primarily fighting against big pharma's promotion of enhancement:

Caplan does not defend medical enhancement so much as attack its critics. Or rather, he attacks a small group of conservative critics who want to preserve “human nature.” He dispatches those critics with admirable precision, but I am not sure why he believes that group of critics includes me. My worry about enhancement technologies has little to do with human nature. My worry is that we will ignore important human needs at the expense of frivolous human desires; that dominant social norms will crowd out those of the minority; that the self-improvement agenda will be set not by individuals, but by powerful corporate interests; and that in the pursuit of betterment, we will actually make ourselves worse off.

Still, it is a fun read. And maybe it will get a few more copies of Better than Well and The Perfect Baby into circulation. Come to think of it, maybe we could stage a series of these wrestling matches ... yeah ... that's the ticket ...

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.

Global Genetic Epidemiology Initiative UPDATED

Data on population health has become the most important component of research into genetics and disease. In this CDC Genomics article, Muin Khoury, one of the key bioethics people within the CDC, makes the argument that something roughly analagous to the human genome project should be developed for the globalization of genetic epidemiology. It is an extraordinary proposal that follows on Francis Collins' earlier proposal for an intra-US program. UPDATE: Voice of America reports on a Canadian argument for essentially the same initiative, sponsored by the U Toronto bioethics group.

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?

Nanotech Redux: Geneballs and Drive Through Genetic Testing

Wired has a great piece this month on the role of tiny particles of silica, which provide a kind of barcode readout of thousands of genetic tests at once. The technology is not yet ready for clinical testing, but revolutionary for computational clinical genomics. It will be interesting to see which if any of the new ELSI core grant centers would be looking at that. Anybody know (please comment)?