The volunteers are all participating in the Personal Genome Project, a Harvard study, which as we’ve mentioned before, is attempting to create a database of 100,000 human genomes. Although other services collect genomes as well, PGP has come to public attention for taking personal information in lieu of payment:

In exchange for the decoding of their DNA, participants agree to make it available to all — along with photographs, their disease histories, allergies, medications, ethnic backgrounds and a trove of other traits, called phenotypes, from food preferences to television viewing habits.

So what has prompted these volunteers to make so much of their personal lives publically available? Each possesses, in PGP head George Church’s estimation, the equivalent of at least a master’s degree in genetics, and many have an academic and/or financial interest in furthering genetic research:

• George Church, PhD, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Sciences & Technology at Harvard and MIT, and head of PGP.
• Esther Dyson, technology entrepreneur and commentator, philanthropist, and future space tourist.
• Misha Angrist, PhD, Science Editor at the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy and author of The Genome Revolution: DNA, Health and Society.
• Keith Batchelder, MD, founder and CEO of Genomic Healthcare Strategies.
• Rosalynn Gill, PhD, founder and Chief Science Officer of Sciona.
• John Halamka, MD, MS, Chief Information Officer of the CareGroup Health System and Chief Information Officer and Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School.
• Stanley Lapidus, Chairman and CEO of Helicos BioSciences Corp.
• Kirk Maxey, MD, manages the Donor Sibling Registry and the Cayman Biomedical Research Institute.
• James Sherley, MD, PhD, Senior Scientist at the Boston Biomedical Research Institute.
• Steven Pinker, PhD, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

While the “PGP 10” understand the benefits and consequences of posting this sort of information online, some fear that those who follow their lead won’t be so savvy:

“I’m concerned that this could make it seem easy and cool to put your information out there when there is still a lot of stigma associated with certain genetic traits,” said Kathy Hudson, director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University. “There will be new uses of this data that people can’t anticipate — and they can’t do anything to get it back.”

But some have already been lured in by PGP’s promise of a free genetic screening, which could tell them if they are predisposed toward certain diseases. In the latest issue of GQ, University of Illinois professor Richard Powers shares his own journey through PGP’s gene mapping process, including his decision to join the genetic database and what the geneticists found.

[Personal Genome Project]
Taking a Peek at the Experts’ Genetic Secrets [NY Times]
The Book of Me [GQ]

Although the tortoises vanished from the Floreana, a handful were preserved by the very sailors who contributed to their extinction. When they didn't need the tortoises for food, the sailors would drop the tortoises off at their whaling grounds, notably the Galapagos island of Isabela. There the Floreana tortoises interbred with the native tortoises, allowing their DNA to live on:

"The [living tortoise] samples were collected in 1994, but we had no idea what was in there because we didn't have Floreana data," said Gisella Caccone, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. "OK, now we have genotypes for 15 to 25 animals from the museums, so we did the analysis and boom!"

Sadly, the biologists won't be staging any Jurassic Park-style cloning to revive the reptile, as is being planned for a baby mammoth fossil discovered in Siberia last year. Instead, they will determine if there are enough tortoises carrying the Floreana DNA to begin a selective breeding program.

Extinct Giant Tortoise Could Be Revived [LiveScience]

1. Preserve your DNA sequence on a CD. To store the data contained in the strands of your DNA, you'd need about 750 megabytes; that's just a little larger than the average compact disc. And if you forget about introns, non-coding RNA, regulatory sequences, and the as-yet-mysterious "junk DNA," you'll see that only between 20,000 and 25,000 human genes code for the proteins that make you who you are. That might even fit on a thumb drive.
2. Tell your doctor exactly what medication you need. As Discover Magazine reported, SMRT DNA sequencing means that super-personal medical care is not too far away:

   As DNA sequencing becomes faster and more affordable, it should allow the building of a more complete database of genetic information. “Once we can build that sort of database for the human organism, it helps us much better understand disease, how to diagnose disease, how better to treat disease,” says Richard Wilson, the director of the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University in St. Louis. With that information, he says, personalized medicine will become commonplace. Visits to the doctor could then produce treatments tailored not just to your lifestyle and family history, but also to your genetic profile.

3. Befriend a fruit fly version of yourself. Creepily enough, humans and fruit flies share about 60% of their genes. Once you've got a full map of your genes, why not find a fruit fly whose genes make it 60% exactly like you? And don't stop there — you can also turn your comparative genomics approach to the honey bee, the African elephant, and the Platypus.
4. Commission a wall poster that fully encompasses your identity. You might already have the Human Genome Landmarks poster, which maps out all the traits associated with the 22 autosomal chromosome pairs in your body — and that controversial gender one, too. Now, with a SMRT sequence of your specific genome, that poster can get up-close, personal, in your face, and all through your body.
5. Send your DNA sequence into space. Okay, so maybe you're not famous enough to have a sample of yourself added to the Immortality Drive. But you can still make sure aliens will recognize you from a light-year away; just scrawl down the configuration of your base pairs on a long piece of paper, roll it up, and stick it into that rocket your aunt gave you last holiday season. If you can get your DNA details through the atmosphere, they'll drift practically forever in the vacuum surrounding the stars, just waiting to be discovered by some sexy weird-eared extraterrestrial friend.
6. Go to parties in a necklace you know no one else will be wearing. Though it's advertised for pets, Perpetua's life jewel pendant could be a great way to honor humans as well. This bit of jewelry can "purify" your DNA "into a fine, silky web that captures a luminescent color tincture of your choice." Sounds like the indispensable accessory I've always wanted.
7. Meet your children before they're born. "Mommy, What Will I Look Like?" may not have worked for Lindsay Bluth, but it sure can for you. Line up your DNA sequence next to that of your long-term significant other (or your favorite celebrity), and know immediately if your children will be attractive and non-alcoholism-prone. But remember — Ethan Hawke kicked ass in Gattaca, and his heart-disease-y astronaut was conceived in a hurry in the back of a car.
8. Figure out your ideal diet. If you can't lose weight just by avoiding carbs, perhaps there's a genetic reason for your troubles. The emerging field of nutrigenomics might have an answer for you, especially if you show up at an expert's door with your entire genetic sequence.
9. Become a killer Acrophobia challenger. This multiplayer acronym game was one of the best things about being online in the '90s, and it's long past time for Acrophobia to make a comeback. See if the other players can come up with any brilliant and hilarious expansions for the super-long string of Gs, As, Cs, and Ts that is your genetic code. You'll be testing their thesaurus prowess for sure.
10. Perform a search across Earth to find people just like you. We're already storing a wealth of information about genomes in databases like GenBank and the International HapMap Project. Once people can easily procure their own DNA sequences, it seems like just a hop, skip, and a jump to the Facebook or MySpace where your genome is your personal profile. Instead of searching for people in your high school graduating class, you could search for people whose chromosomal details match your own — I wonder how high up Sarah Palin would be on Tina Fey's similarity list. There probably isn't a gene for comedy, is there?

Gattaca image from SciFlicks.

DNA sequencing is slow and takes a lot of computational power. To put it into Homer Simpson terms, the DNA is replicated, torn into little pieces, sorted out and analyzed bit by bit, then reassembled by a computer. The SMRT sequencer improves on the process because it "watches" the DNA as it is being replicated by the polymerase, reading each piece of DNA in something called the Zero-Mode Waveguide. The ZMW is a "nanophotonic visualization chamber" made by making a hole just a few tens of nanometers across in a metal film just 100 nanometers thick. Chemicals introduced into the reaction give off tiny flashes of colored light, which are detected by the highly parallel optics system (pictured). The CCD can detect the lights, and computers use that information to figure out which base pairs are in which ZMW window, decoding long strands of DNA in real-time. You could be running down to the DNA-Mart for a quick DNA scan as soon as 2013. Image by: Pacific Biosciences.

Long Reads, Short Run Time, and High Quality Data at Lower Cost. [Pacific Biosciences]

Colbert is reportedly delighted by the prospect of his off-world immortality:

I am thrilled to have my DNA shot into space, as this brings me one step closer to my lifelong dream of being the baby at the end of 2001.

But he won’t be alone. Garriott seeks to preserve certain portions of humanity in the event that the Space Station becomes mankind’s final legacy:

The Immortality Drive is a digital archive of mankind's greatest achievements and a snapshot of humanity itself. This archive will be stored on the International Space Station to serve as a remote "offsite backup" of humanity, should we suffer a disastrous fate.

Garriott has enabled players on his newest MMORPG, Tabula Rasa, to upload their characters and personal messages to the Immortality Drive, and has chosen a select few whose DNA, like Colbert’s, will be digitized and preserved. So what does it take to have your genome sent to space? Below are the current Immortality Drive inductees:

Entrepreneurs:
• Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, Pownce, and Revision3
• Tim Draper, venture capitalist and viral marketing innovator
• Robert Scoble, technology evangelist and business blogger

Athletes:
• Scott Johnson, Olympic gold medal gymnast
• Matt Morgan, American Gladiator and professional wrestler

Musicians:
• Joe Ely, singer, songwriter, and guitarist
• Stephen Bruton, producer and blues guitarist
• Eric Johnson, guitarist and instrumental composer
• Patrice Pike, singer, songwriter, and reality show participant

Writers:
• Tracy Hickman, novelist and game designer (Dragonlance, The Darksword Trilogy, The Death Gate Cycle)
• Scott Murphy, television and screenwriter (Angel, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Flash Gordon)
• Clifford Green, screenwriter (Spacecamp, The Seventh Sign)
• Christiana Miller, television writer (General Hospital, Star Trek: Voyager)
• Daniel Fiorella, television and radio writer, magazine contributor (Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers, A Prairie Home Companion, Mad Magazine, Cracked)
• Doug Molitor, television writer (Sliders, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, X-Men: Evolution)
• Ian Abrams, television writer and producer, director of the screenwriting and playwriting program at Drexel University.
• Melvyn B. Sherer, television writer and Andy Kaufman collaborator (Married with Children, Happy Days, Small Wonder)
• Steven Melching, television and screenwriter (Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Men in Black: The Series, X-Men: The Animated Series)
• Heather E. Ash, television writer (Stargate SG-1)

The post-human future, it seems, will be ruled by the television writers.

Image by Todd Lockwood.

Stephen Colbert to have his DNA sent into space [AP]
Operation Immortality

Though we can't be sure what their everyday interactions were like, scientists now have one more piece of evidence that homo sapiens and Neanderthals weren't mixing their DNA.

A group of Italian researchers published a new study today in PLoS One comparing the DNA from early human bones from about 28,000 years ago with DNA Neanderthal bones. What's cool about the new study is that the early human bones are quite recently discovered, and therefore very unlikely to have been contaminated by DNA from humans who have handled them.

The researchers sequenced DNA from these bones, testing to see if there was significant overlap with Neanderthal DNA, which would indicate that homo sapiens' DNA had been changed by interbreeding with Neanderthals. Many anthropologists have long believed that the two species interbred because there are a few ancient skulls whose morphology seems to be a perfect blend of human and Neanderthal.

But tests of the fossilized DNA revealed no matches. The early human DNA from the Italian researchers' sample looked very much like modern DNA, not like Neanderthal DNA. So it looks like humans weren't getting busy with Neanderthals after all. Or if they were, they didn't have a lot of babies.

28,000 Year Old Cro Magnon Sequence [PLoS One]

Panspermia theories often argue that Martian mircobes hitched a ride on an Earth-bound meteor, then thrived and evolved into the life we see here on Earth. But the new findings from researchers at Imperial College London suggest the building blocks of life rather than life itself arrived from outer space. They figure that since the Murchison meteor fell to Earth bringing the molecules uracial and xanthine — precursors to DNA — there must have been a lot of this stuff pelting the planet billions of years ago.

Early life may have needed the space-born material to get started, or it could've incorporated the meteorite bits because they conferred some kind of evolutionary advantage:

Lead author Dr Zita Martins, of the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London, says that the research may provide another piece of evidence explaining the evolution of early life. She says:

“We believe early life may have adopted nucleobases from meteoritic fragments for use in genetic coding which enabled them to pass on their successful features to subsequent generations.”

Between 3.8 to 4.5 billion years ago large numbers of rocks similar to the Murchison meteorite rained down on Earth at the time when primitive life was forming. The heavy bombardment would have dropped large amounts of meteorite material to the surface on planets like Earth and Mars.

Either way, it looks like we're made of space stuff.

Source: Imperial College London

Apparently, Identigene lays claim to being the first home DNA testing kit, which might in fact be true. It's only recently that companies like 23andme.com have started offering more extensive home DNA testing, offering to chart your ancestry or identify whether you've got a genetic predilection for depression. The thing that makes me think "scifi" when I see the Indentigene site, which you really must check out, is the way it feels like a cheesy ad from 2040. Just because they treat what still seems like cutting-edge technology as if it were as cheap and simple as a home pregnancy test. Which it is.

This is the consumer biotech, future kids: It begins not with a bang but with a cheesy website and late-night TV infomercials. Also, I love how the Identigene test comes in a box that looks like it's for condoms.

Identigene [actually real website for actual service you can buy]

Church has good reasons for wanting piles of genomic data. As a Bloomberg article on the project says:

By matching genetic data from each person with his or her health history, Church would build a database that would link DNA variations and disease for scientists and drugmakers, the first step in deciding on treatments that can block the mutations or adjust how they work within the body.

Church also said he'll explore other human traits under genetic control. Participants will give facial and body measurements, tell researchers what time they get up in the morning, and detail other behaviors, he said.

Church has already partially sequenced genomes from 10 people, and the jump to 100,000 is under review by a Harvard ethics panel. The project ``only stops when we stop learning things,'' Church said.

We should note: there's no evidence of wrongdoing here, and Google has never explicitly said "we want to organize genetic information." True, they are major investors in the personal genomics company 23andMe, but we have every reason to believe that Big brother "don't be evil" Google will play it straight, keeping any information they have access to safe and anonymous.

But still you've got to wonder, does Google want direct access to DNA information? And if so, why?

Source: Bloomberg via SciGuy

Graphic: Personal Genome Project (Church's outfit)

Today there are about 6.6 billion people on the planet and climbing fast (remember when we got to 6 billion...nine years ago??). It's hard to read the news and not come up with a laundry list of ways to destroy our civilization, if not all humanity.

So it's nice to know that humanity's a little more rugged than we thought. Here's what researchers from National Geographic Genographic Project had to say on the findings, which was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics:

Previous studies using mitochondrial DNA — which is passed down through mothers — have traced modern humans to a single ''mitochondrial Eve,'' who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago.

The migrations of humans out of Africa to populate the rest of the world appear to have begun about 60,000 years ago, but little has been known about humans between Eve and that dispersal.

The new study looks at the mitochondrial DNA of the Khoi and San people in South Africa which appear to have diverged from other people between 90,000 and 150,000 years ago.

The researchers led by Doron Behar of Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel and Saharon Rosset of IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and Tel Aviv University concluded that humans separated into small populations prior to the Stone Age, when they came back together and began to increase in numbers and spread to other areas.

Eastern Africa experienced a series of severe droughts between 135,000 and 90,000 years ago and the researchers said this climatological shift may have contributed to the population changes, dividing into small, isolated groups which developed independently.

Paleontologist Meave Leakey, a Genographic adviser, commented: ''Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction.''

Source: Associated Press, via PhysOrg

Basically Brody and Polley create a human-animal hybrid creature that gets out of control. But we've been there, done that. Why not get really nasty, ala Bela Lugosi in 1930s shocker Murders in the Rue Morgue, and have our demented scientists trying to implant a naked lady with gorilla blood? (Yeah, the 30s were a crazy time.) Or how about going the more realistic route, dealing with what it would be like as a human-animal hybrid, with no civil rights due to that pesky nonhuman DNA? Sadly, Splicers will give us nothing more than another monster flick with a DNA twist. [Cinema Blend]

• 
  
• The film was originally supposed to the called The Eighth Day, but a Belgian film with that title forced the film-makers to change theirs. In the film, the center where Vincent's parents go to genetically engineer another baby is called "The Eighth Day." It's a reference to the biblical line "And on the Seventh Day, God rested." Presumably, on the eighth day, man started tinkering around on his own.
• 
  
• The production budget for the movie was $36 million, but it only grossed $12 million. Sadly, there is no genetic testing for a box office hit.
• 
  
• The film boasts a fairly impressive cast: Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Jude Law, Alan Arkin, Ernest Borgnine, Loren Dean and Gore Vidal.
• 
  
• Jude Law's character Jerome starts referring to himself as his middle name, Eugene. Perhaps a sly reference to eugenics.
• 
  
• Uma Thurman's character is named Irene Cassini after the 17th century Italian astronomer. He discovered the gap in Saturn's rings, along with several of its moons.
• 
  
• They didn't have a large budget for the futuristic look and feel of the movie, so they modeled the "near future" after the past. Men wear dark suits with fedoras, women wear form-fitting dresses, cars are retro models, like Vincent's 1963 Studebaker Avanti, outfitted with electric engines (just an electric whine on the soundtrack).
• 
  
• The government agents/detectives in the film are called "Hoovers," not only as a nod to J. Edgar Hoover, but to the fact that they vacuum up hair and skin cells when they collect evidence.
• 
  
• When promoting the movie, Sony placed fake ads in newspapers around the country offering "Children made to order." The ads looked so real that they got thousands of phone calls, and The American Society for Reproductive Medicine asked Sony to change them to make it clear they were fake advertisements.
• 
  
• Sony knew the film would be under close scrutiny from scientists, so they hired human-gene-therapy researcher French Anderson as a science consultant, and had test screenings for The Society of Mammalian Cell Biologists.
• 
  
• Scientists seemed to love the movie for the most part. In fact molecular biologist Lee M. Silver said "Gattaca is a film that all geneticists should see if for no other reason than to understand the perception of our trade held by so many of the public-at-large." Too bad there weren't a ton of geneticists hitting the theaters back then.
• 
  
• Bioethicist James Hughes wasn't so fond of the movie, however. His book Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future railed against the genetic testing in the movie.
• 
  
• The original ending of the film featured images of people who may have never been born if we'd had genetic testing: people like Albert Einstein (dyslexia) , Abraham Lincoln (Marfan syndrome), Jackie Joyner-Kersee (asthma) and John F. Kennedy (Addison's disease) were shown over a background of stars with their afflictions listed. It then ends with the statement "Of course, the other birth that may never have taken place is your own." People in test screenings said it made them feel inadequate.
• 
  
• As a lesson in the DNA-uninformed (like me), the tile of the film comes from the four DNA bases: Adenosine, Guanosine, Thymine, and Cytosine. They sometimes line up to form GATTACA in a DNA sequence.
• 
  
• The announcements that come over the PA system in the Gattaca building are in Esperanto.
• 
  
• Frank Lloyd Wright's futuristic Marin County Civic Center was used as the exterior of the Gattaca building. It's got that sort of hipster-50s retro cool look. It was also used extensively in George Lucas' THX-1138.

Here are some more things that Sony might be trying to say about itself with this ad:

Most of our organization has no immediate obvious purpose . . . A lot of pieces of the organization resemble decayed portions of other pieces of our organization . . . Some pieces of our organization are non-functional, though they closely resemble functional pieces of related organizations . . . Our corporate practices are not the best designed, but rather reflect an accumulation of historical accidents . . . We retain bits of those who invade our corporate DNA, though with not much rhyme or reason.

Corporate DNA [Omics! Omics!]

What is this, James Cameron's next movie? It's not like you drive away potential research scientists by leaking spoilers about your kickass new sequencer. In fact, if the sequencer actually existed, I'm guessing IBS would be sharing pictures and stats about it like mad. So why all the weird cloak-and-dagger crap in a field that's hardly known for publicity stunts?

Partly this is about the latest X-prize, which will be awarded to the first group who can sequence a genome for under $1000. Obviously, IBS is throwing their hat into the ring, and VCs are listening. The company took home some hefty bags of loot in a first round of funding.

More importantly this is about the transformation of biology into a flashier, more consumer-oriented field. The age of dot-coms is long over, and the age of bio-coms has begun. I can't wait for the first gene-sequencer viral marketing campaign on YouTube.

$5000 Genome by Next Year [VentureBeat]

According to Times reporter Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe, who has the interview on tape:

He says that he is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really", and I know that this "hot potato" is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true". He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because "there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don't promote them when they haven't succeeded at the lower level". He writes that "there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so".

Should we let this guy's foolish remarks undermine our admiration for the science he pioneered? Yes. There has always been a strong element of racism and sexism in the study of genetics, a field whose history is deeply bound up with the eugenics movement (which was, after all, a "scientific" movement). Leaders in the field like Steven Pinker and E.O. Wilson routinely make comments about how people are "hardwired" to behave in certain ways based on their genetic heritage, which is often linked to their racial backgrounds or sex. Genomics and evolutionary biology studies on the genetic inferiority of female intelligence are what motivated former Harvard President Larry Summers to claim that there are so few women in science because we just aren't smart enough. Back in 2003, I saw Harvard professor Steven Pinker give a lecture at MIT where he speculated that perhaps Jews are just genetically more intelligent than other groups.

These guys give science a bad name, and they derail good work that might get done in their fields by bringing sex and race bias into the lab. I'm glad that Watson has finally gotten a good spanking for a lifetime of asswipage. Too bad it didn't happen earlier.

Here's the article from the London Times where Watson stuck his foot in his mouth for the last time.