breast cancer
razib | May 15, 2009Rebecca Skloot has a piece up in Double X, Slate's new webzine, on the controversy around Myriad Genetics.
rskloot | May 15, 2009
Earlier this week, the American Civil Liberties Union and several other groups filed suit against Myriad Genetics -- the company that holds the patent on the breast cancer gene. They're hoping to get the breast cancer gene patent revoked, but more than that, they're aiming to stop gene patenting all together.
Today, in my new column in Slate's Double X Magazine, I go into the story of the breast cancer gene and the impact the ACLU claims it's had on science and patient care (a hint: it's not good). I also look at the suit itself, the cases that have come before this one, and what they say…
dgmacarthur | March 23, 2009This casual aside on a recent post on personal genomics company 23andMe's corporate blog caught my eye:
Mutations in several other genes have also been associated with
Parkinson's disease, but these are extremely rare. Many have been found
only in one or two families. While these mutations are so rare that
they are not covered by 23andMe (to date we have found no customers
with any of them), studying them could help scientists better
understand the mechanisms of Parkinson's generally... [my emphasis]
In other words, the company already has probes on its custom chip targeting these variants,…
oracknows | March 23, 2009Has it really been that long?
More than two years ago, I wrote a post entitled Death by Alternative Medicine: Who's to Blame? The topic of the post was a case report that I had heard while visiting the tumor board of an affiliate of my former cancer center describing a young woman who had rejected conventional therapy for an eminently treatable breast cancer and then returned two or three years later with a large, nasty tumor that was much more difficult to treat and possibly metastatic to the bone, which, if ture, would have made it no longer even possibly curable. My discussion centered on…
oracknows | March 9, 2009
PZ's muscling in on my territory. Apparently, ruling the Darwinian, creationist-destroying atheist cephalopod blogging world isn't enough, and he has to start moving in on medicine. No problem, given that this time around he brought some rather interesting woo to my attention, suggesting it as perhaps a suitable topic for Your Friday Dose of Woo called God's Answer to Cancer. Besides, it's PZ's birthday; so as a birthday present, instead of reposting the same silly picture that I have for the last two years, I'll simply link to him now and add, oh, perhaps 1% to his traffic total for today…