DNA Consultants Home of the DNA Fingerprint

Preparing for the Future of Genetic Medicine

Alan E. Guttmacher et al.

Nature Reviews Genetics 11, 161-65 (February 2010)

Four experts with different insights into the field of genomic medicine answer questions about the prospects for using this type of information. The issues range from scientific to ethical and logistical.

Book:  Past Human Migrations in East Asia. Matching Archeology, Linguistics and Genetics, ed. Alicia Sanchez-Mazas et al. Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2008.

According to the reviewer of this compilation of interdisciplinary studies, Frank Roels, writing in European Journal of Human Genetics 18:262f., the three approaches are incommensurate because of differing timeframes and rates of change. Their models cannot be harmonized with sufficient reliability to write a comprehensive, persuasive history of human migrations and settlements in East Asia.

Abdallah S. Daar in reviewing this new book by NIH director Francis Collins maintains that “we have entered the era of rapid, inexpensive genetic testing and genome sequencing” and must simply come to terms with the phenomenon of personal genomics and consumer genetics. In the next decade, he predicts, the cost of sequencing a human genome will drop to a few hundred dollars. The cost for the Human Genome Project was about $3 billion over 13 years.

The Language of Life:  DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine

By Francis S. Collins

Harper/Profile. 2010. 368 pp/288 pp.

$26.99.