, forensic or criminal justice, ancestry or genealogical genetics, and genetic analysis that might be used in a family court setting for family paternity's testing. when i talk to people is that the way that individuals understand genetic testing blurs these boundaries. genetic has a social life and social power because it has the ability to work sometime simultaneously in all of these domains at once. a woman i call sarah says to me, we think breast cancer runs in our family. now that i understand my african ancestry test which is that genetic ancestry company all talk about this evening, the difference difference between a mother's line of father's line and all of that and has a better sense of what the genetic counselor at my doctor's office is telling me. martin said to me i was never really interested in genetic science or the genome or whatever until i heard about the genetic genealogy test. after i took my test i wanted to learn everything about genetics. i started to reading everything i could. so what i want to suggest here briefly is because i want to tell you more about the

even if they end up with a genetic manipulation, genetic alteration he wants they-- those cells cannot be put in the ground and grown into a plant. so, a very unnatural process referred to as tissue culture has to be employed in which a series of hormone-- plant hormones and new churches are added and the plant-- that cell can be coaxed actually forced to grow into a mature plant, but the process through which that happens is not precisely the same as the process to which a seed will grow into a mature plant and in fact it's a disruptive process. tissue culture is known to be highly mutagenic and has been used to create mutations to see if they could find something good and some scientists have referred to the effect it has on the organism as a genomic shock, so no matter how precise the crispr technology can be on the manipulation side, as long as they use tissue culture to get their creation into a plant there is no way they can claim as precise. it's highly mutagenic and it's irresponsible to ignore tissue culture and most promoters of ge foods try to pretend it doesn't exist and no

so again, we do not need genetic engineering. what we need, and if just a small amount of the massive research that's been directed to genetic engineering since genetically-engineered food started being developed in the early '80s, we would, there would be so much better knowledge and so much more food being produced in the third world. because very little money, relatively speaking, is still being given to organic and agro-ecological. it's really a shame, but that's the case. so there should be a diversion of funds. the bill and melinda gates foundation should be stopping, should stop funding the development of yes genetically-engineered foods. you know, he is the richest man in the world -- or used to be. he now, i guess, is seesawing with other people, but he's one of the richest. his wealth has come from software development, and yet he is using a significant part of that substantial, massive fortune to fund a technology that is violating the basic principles of software development. i mean, it's one of the most ironic of the

forget about genetics. genetics has a mistake about it but think about bio markers in general supposed to be providing tools for risk assessment. we are all there yet. the eve of the literature as you heard th of us present we may be there next year. i did the clinical the levity will devolve more quickly. for clinical utility there has to be tiles at some poi to evaluate whether or not and that additional information to the system whetherou do more good than harm and those things will take years. i am not sure i follow the prediction within five years or ten -- i don't know what numbers you gave but i think it is going to take more time to study the impact of this information on clinical and health-related outcomes and just to put it out for the consumers androviders to figure out what to with it is a major burden no matter how much you educate the providers and consumers, this stuff is hard the numbers are changing on a day-to-day basis and i think we need enough oversight to ensure that the consumers and

this is obviouslyelevant to genetic testing and all genetic test.so if my genetic test reveals that i need or would benefit from care or protectionr treatment or some kind of specialized health care or health management, who's going to pay for that care? do they promise tt that care is going to be covered? it's not clear in gina that it does. and it's much more likely to think those are issues that aren't going to be resolved through more decisions about health insurance can and can't cover. example, positive genetic test can result in recommendation from a personal physician for increased counseling, surveillance, surgery, gina doesn't require that insurance y for that early intervention or those preventive measures. so it's fair to say that the question of follow-up care is going to be one i would think utmost in the mind of dtc client or consumer deciding whether or not to opt into some of these test that may indicate a need for further medical care. and at the very at least when a consumer is deciding to go forward knowing the extent to which th

now, even if they end up with the genetic manipulation, the genetic alteration they want, they don't have -- those cells can't be put into the ground and grown into a plant. so a very unnatural process referred to as tissue culture has to be employed in which a series of hormone, plant hormones and newt rahtives are added, and the plant grows in -- that cell will, can be coaxed, actually forced to grow into a mature plant, but the process through which that happens is not precisely the same as the process through which a seed will grow into a mature plant. and, in fact, it's a disruptive process. tissue culture is known to be highly mutagenic. in fact, it's been used just to create mutations in order to see if they could find something good. and some scientists have referred to the effects that it has on the organism as a genomic shock. it imparts a genomic shock. so no matter how precise the crisper technology had been on the upside -- technology can be on the upside, on the manipulation side, as long as they're going to have to use tissue culture to get their creation into a plant,

the revisions are genetic engineering are imprecise and highly disruptive. in light of these enormous differences, it would be reasonable to think that genetic engineers should exercise far greater caution than do software engineers, but the unfortunate reality is they exercise far less, shockingly less. software engineers recognize the inescapable risks of altering complex information system and they deal with them responsibly. >> even the regulators have discounted them and assume there's little need for rigorous testing. the united states food and drug administration claims that foods so safe they don't need to be tested at all and although regulators in the e.u. and most other regions required some testing it has been minimal. for almost 20 years, g.e. foods aloud on worldwide markets based solely on superficial showing of substantial equivalence to counterparts. something that is never allowed in the case of life critical software despite the fact that a toxic tomato could cause far nor human harm than a malfunctioning x-ray machine. and although the e.

-- single genetic testing question. we do not have good oversight mechanisms for the benefit of thinking abo group harm of many research procts. and it's coming up in community-based participatory research. we don't have good regulations or oversight o common rule doesn't address it. so this is something that i think we have to taken proactively as an issue well beyond the genetic. >> it's much broader than geneticoo. p any own area of wk, environmental law in part, the stigma attached to persons living who have drunk the water or breathed the air in your site for a generation or so and they feel like they have -- they are tainted by that community experience and resrchers and others wt to address their situations. and that leads you to the same problem. it has nothing to do with genetics. >> i do want to go back to one comment that you made, tim, in passes. the uk is now protectg t ability of parents to enlist their children for genetic testing and that that should, one mu wait -- one must wait til they are at an age o

and i was taking that out on the genetics counselor. i almost started to shout and then i was very quiet the rest of the session. my daughter is fine. [laughter] >> but it is a burden so if you talked about the possibility can also have a weight. >> i think a long time heredity has a lightness and a darkness to it so the title of the book tries to speak how we look at children and what we find delightful and then where that came from. so there can be that anxiety maybe you are are bringing a legacy you may not even know about. so to preface in 2000 when my wife was pregnant the technology for the sequence of genes is so primitive compared to now. there is no way they could know anything except a few genes. but now it is totally changed. >> we will dig further into the concept of heredity. we talk about it often but yet it is also vague that you can refer to a lot of different things we believe we inherit. so can you talk about this concept of heredity and where did it come from? how should we think about it today? >> the word heredity i

is genetic in foxes. so she knows who's who. and let me just show you one example of what lyudmila found, and this was typical. here's her description of a clutch of pups born to an aggressive mom. so half are her biological offspring, half are foster offspring. this is lyud america ila describing what happened. the workers, they're all waiting for these foxes to give birth, and they're waiting for the pups to get old enough that they can just watch them, and and here's what lyudmila said happened. the it was fascinating. her foster came offspring were barely walking, but if this was a human standing by, they were already rushing to the cage doors and wagging their tails. she, the mother, was punishing her foster offspring for such improper behavior. she growled at them, grabbed their neck, through them back into the corner of the nest and what did they do but get up, walk over to the front of the cage and start licking the hands of humans. this is exactly what you would expect if tameness is due to genet

we would not be here and catch today were it not for genetics and genetic engineering in particular.>> thank you. how much promised the field there is in that area? >> it depends on which the rainy. antibody therapies for cancer one of the most striking therapies these days. we are doing more and more. again, would not be possible without genetic engineering. we would know what an antibody was, how our immune system work if it wasn't for genetics. genes underlie all of these really miraculous advances. >> yes spent another example. remember the distinction breast cancer? guess what those are. genes. it's a marker for certain kinds of cancer. if you did know the you would not retreat breast cancer. >> and the doctors, physicians have had tremendous very quickly. >> absolutely. very, very quickly. >> what do you make or how close to think we are to potentially get a cure for cancer, eddie think efforts like the president's cancer moonshot and others to try to get towards picture, how close do you think we might be? >> searcher is a coveted word in cancer. because it depends on the kind

and so even the best scenario of genetic counseling, i think, it's still -- a genetic counselor would never be able to completely overcome the problem of how in the world a woman is supposed to decide what sort of risks to live with. it's, it doesn't seem to me particularly empowering at all. the other thing that is misleading, i think, about the way angelina jolie was talking about this was she said i've now eliminated my risk for cancer, and i can tell my children i will never get cancer, and i don't know how anyone could say that's true. and so there is -- you don't get that kind of certainty even if you elect to have these preventive surgeries. there's actually a lot of debate in the early '90s of whether to commercialize the test. the braca researchers, those early researchers just wanted to keep the testing within research settings, but they weren't able to control that. and so -- and now that myriad has lost its patents, it is a lot cheaper now and might very well become more common. >> last question

worked without genetics. genes underlie all of these really miraculous advances. >> yes. >> so another example, remember this distinction in breast cancer, guess what those are, genes. estrogen and progesterone. it's a marker for certain kinds of cancer. the people didn't know that we would know how to treat breast-cancer. >> and the physicians have had to learn this very quickly. >> absolutely. they had learned very quickly. >> thank you, what do you make up or how close do you think we are to getting a cure for cancer [inaudible] >> so cure is a complicated wording cancer because it depends on the kind of cancer that were talking about. it has a very rich history detailed in the book. if you ask me what i think, i think they're helpful in some ways and can be hurtful and others print i think they're they're helpful because they refocus our attention at a time when our attention span seems to have degenerated and i think there are issues we should be focused on on how to help ourselves and help the economy a

we would not be here in cancer today were it not for genetics and genetic engineering in particular. >> thank you. how much promise do you feel are in that area? >> depends on the arena. we are using anti-bodies more and more. genetics was used to figure what an anti-body was. we would not know how the immune system works if it were not for genetics. genes underlie these advances. the most obvious example. remember the breast cancer distinctions? they are genes. estrogen receptor genes. we would not know to treat breast cancer with the concern drugs if we didn't know this. >> host: doctors and physicians had to learn this quickly. >> what do you make or how close are we to getting a cure to cancer and do you thing the efforts like the president's shot and others by silicone valley to get to the cure, how close do you thing we might be? >> cure is a complicated word in cancer. depends on the cancer we are talking about. it has a rich history detailed in another book. [laughter] >> guest: if you ask me about what i think all of these moon shot efforts, i think they are helpful in some

remind us, who who came up with the term genetics?psalmody gets credit for that. >> remember he doesn't even have that word in his vocabulary but he knows he stumbled on something. >> he sent copies of his report, he condensed it to 40 some pages and sent it to the scholarly centers but it was dismissed. everyone said what is he writing about and why should i be reading this and he went on describing and then in the 1900s he gets rediscovered and soon after in 1909 we find the word gene because botanists and biologists begin to say to himself we have to have a word for this. it's abstract, we don't know what it is, is a molecule or a structure, but something carries this information. we know it's important and so we've got to have a word for it. william, one of his great defenders, i talk about him and there's a great picture of him in the book and points to the word genetics from genius, generation, all of these words coming together and he coins the word gene for genetic and then his colleague says we have to name that thing and the

is there a distinction between genetically modified and genetically engineered? >> as a technical matter, gmo refers to an organism as opposed to genetic engineering which we think of as having to do with modern biotechnology. >> one of the concerns that i have and want to know if it is a concern for you, i come from a family where just about half of us have some kind of food allergy. if you are changing proteins around and you have things that ought for the general public are recognized as safe, and you able in what you do to distinguishes a protein that someone added to a product that they may not know the protein has been included. >> that is part of the evaluation process and if there were to be an addition that might prompt an allergic reaction that one would not expect, we would require a label disclosure. >> you would pick those things which people are highly allergic to or there is a significant percentage of folks that have a problem with and you can't put the strawberry ingredient into this? >> or we would require disclosure most likely would be. >> i a

if two siblings are in fact half genetically similar but a quarter genetically similar that says something about whether they generally shared the same genetic parents are not. that's another area of privacy involving family relationships that i think we have to lease think about when we consider genetic privacy. >> when you made your presentation you talked about the statistics with a number of different loci one which was won in 50 and another another which was won in 70 and then based on the presumption that if you multiply them together there would be won in 3500 that an individual would have the same to loci. that gives the assumption that there is no overlap. in that context in that particular light of the king case there is concern with regard to the coda system which is completely controlled by the fbi and the government and which is not made readily available for general research that there is a bias within that system that isn't being disclosed are evaluated and i know that dr. k wrote an article called what is the fbi afraid of? in that context, is there a need to make this coda

one of his great defenders into point to the word genetics. and 2.the word she nor genetics and then his colleagues says that is the discipline to say that is the genes so they need it "the gene". en teetoo an amazing job to bring to life that led the an extraordinary life but then you fast forward to the '50s but before you get to that point things go badly off-track. why did that happen? >> is important to remember because scientifically the desire to manipulate heredity comment was an england that darwin's cousin invented the term eugenics. he had a terrible very actually it was actually homunculus. but it is a fascinating character. he also lived in the shadow of darwin all his life. healing between darwin and mental. can you imagine? with the important contributions but he coined the term regardless of the gene, to use human heredity and they point though word eugenics' as good genes or good genetics. to selectively breed the human beings to read the parasols and it is astonishing to have the incredibly progressive idea. to have a very he

it's not the genetic variance. i would be curious to hear what you think from a geneticist at stanford's like the four elements or fire and water. we've moved on and we don't want you to force us to go back and talk about it in the era of high air and water. we are past that. >> in other words, there is a basis perhaps. >> there are more fundamental things to talk about. >> that would reflect what i'm thinking about these days in how we have the categories of concept that we thought along from the colonial period and it's best if we move beyond it and go back to some of these take-home tests. it actually brings back some of the terminology an and these ids in the category that are kind of a critical analysis. there is something to lament about that. but i talked him about about if you take a continent, any content. i talk about europe in particular because there has been a lot of interesting work done on it. it's not just like there was a group of people from 50,000 years ago that have been there and have been euro

advances in genetic genetics and neuroscience gives new tools that will enable us to take giant strides in understanding human behavior, human society, policies and economies. we are like physicist, i'd like to say at the outset of the 19th century, poised at a moment in history that would protas faradays in the coming years. so people like me and dalton are to be excited and i think we both are. but a lot of social scientists are not. why? because for almost a century now the social sciences have been in the grip of an orthodox events straits and tran scared stiff biology. at the moment takes the form of three widely and loudly proclaimed truths. gender is a social construct, races and social, class is a function of privilege. i have stated this tenants very boldly. if you go on to university campus and check privately with faculty members who have researched on these issues you will find many of them have a nuanced view of that. they acknowledge that biology plays a role, but only a few of them, dalton conley being one of them is willing to say so in their lectures, articles or books.

it functions as we know races but there's no genetic basis.e's former homeland the former yugoslavia where you can't imagine a more racially charged or ethnically charged conflict in the 1990s including genocide but there are basically no there is no genetic distinctions between those groups that are literally merging during each other in the form of yugoslavia. on the other hand, a place like rwanda where there is genocide at the same time, there are very distinct genetic signatures between the tutsi and hutu populations there. a lot of times there is a biological a very clear biological correlate of race but sometimes there is not. i don't think you would disagree majorly with that. i think the bigger issue is what do we make of those differences and here we get into a lot of complicated science. i will try to explain there's four bases of dna or possible to go with two and the other two go with the other two. there is variation across the genome in which base individuals might have in a particular location. what we do to create apologetic s

we want to see if the difference in Ãbhas a genetic component.ybody's being reasonable not saying it's entirely genetic but he runs through this long list of ways in which it's very difficult to figure it out. i think adulting is more on both sides than on gramps. certainly more on my side then the congress school. it is a very well-known eminent psychologist behavior geneticist named eric durkheim or, he is joined by many others and he says Ãbhe makes the case great detail he saying something like divorce or marriage as an heritability we know that from twin studies it has substantial heritability. but not a specific genetic etiology and the way that the huntington's disease does. i'm of the view that bottom of a rapidly rising i was going to a conference in galapagos i think in 2014 and i wanted to find all the snips that have been associated with a specific trait or behavioral trait. that was six years ago. that's extraordinary progress. a great deal of what dalton said that i thoroughly agree with and i'm just saying, it's a very exciting adv

arc genetics based on ancient dna. a specialist for the united states military at fort detrick once told me ancient dna is dna that's not walking. so it really does bring us down to the present day plays a very important part in the american military for identifying missing were particular really thrilled that today's presentation is able to occur in black history month of 2024. we hope that this brings special joy to all of you to see the kind of work that the size of the human past is able to do today on this wonderful occasion, i myself, as many of you know, have a background in economic history. and so i'm familiar with the the first stages of the total industrial revolution in new england with in which water power and then steam power were harnessed to machines and largely young women were harnessed to the machines to produce the textiles. and it's only through this project that i learned that in the 18th century, in many in some parts of america, human power was also harnessed to those machines, but not through w

is really an exciting time to be studying and looking at the field of genetics. for the next part of the talk, i would take a little closer look at jeans and dna themselves. what do genes do? the basic idea is that genes control body traits so you have a gene that controls the body train and if you change the genius end of changing that body trade. that is the general idea. and jeans change when they get damaged or suffer mutation or something like that. that is basically what happens, why you get changes to body trades. why we are not all the same and the really exciting thing to me about dna and jeans is that they work the same basic way in all those forms of life, in all creatures dna and genes work the same basic way. with you are talking about tulips, and guinea pigs, bacteria, toads, toadstools, slime molds, members of congress, what ever, they work the same way, all of these strange creatures, it is the unifying idea of biology and i find that absolutely fascinating. and because they work the same basic way in all creatures we often study them in animals f

and then to be much more certain of the genetic affect. will take a few years before we get to those more pure estimates of those effects. with the ancestry groups and there is evidence against that. there is a paper that just came out yesterday that i think coincidentally with your book. [laughter] that talks about the education or iq promoting genes that if you take those wheels from african and asian populations. all that research done in european populations to limit those confounding environments but that probably genic score predict variation if you take the apologetic score and then you predict them to be 6 inches shorter than they are so that doesn't work for biological reasons. and what they are tagging and we have a paper and ethnic homogeneous group and vice versa of all that genetic stuff so the prediction falls apart we are at the infancy of this i'm excited about it as well and genetics to do more straight social policy and the best example of how fast you can go from ideas to policy. to have welfare reform in 1996 and then t

here he is controlling the genetic address by changing the genetic address. the data gets even deeper as it turns out they have these. if what you have in these areas is a genetic address it turns out we have these, too in the formation they are active in a lot of different organs whether a you can answer the question. if a. if you look at the normal development of the mouse, there's a genetic address for each kind. it. it turns out that genetic address. we have the joint address with the red hour showing. but if we build the same experiment and a that is exactly what happened. the there is a commonality. it is just the tip of the iceberg as all of these other structures in all sorts of other things have to go on the. the lungs this is one of the greatest characters in all of the compared anatomy. there were two passions in life. the. at least walk around new york city with samurai armor and various tones of a. they would go to the circus and build their. they would force it into their mouth and then into their lungs. it turns out in this is another, there ar

, forensic or criminal justice genetic, ancestry/gene ya logical genetics and genetic analysis that mighte used for family verification or paternity. what i found in the course of talking to people about genetic testing more generally and genetic ancestry testing is that the way that individuals understand genetic testing really blurs these boundaries, right? and that genetics have a social life and social power because it has the ability to work sometimes simultaneously in all of these domains at once. so a woman i call sarah said to me we think breast cancer runs in our family. now that i understand my african ancestry test, which is a genetic company that i'll talk about this evening, the difference between the mother sign and the father sign and all that, i have a better sense of what the genetic counselor at my doctor's office was telling me. martin said to me, you know, i was never really interested in genetic science or the genome or whatever until i heard about these genetic genealogy tests. after i took my test, i started reading genetics articles in the newspaper, science magazi

that's when genetic engineering was invented. you may also be surprised there are actually human beings walking around that are gm owes. that is a fact, they are only alive because i have a gene in them they didn't have when they were born because they were born with a lethal disease, most of you may be surprised that if you use insulin or other drugs, they are made that have human genes that were injured engineered in them. if you are wearing blue jeans, the blue color was reengineered. there are a lot of different organisms that are gm owes. from a plant point of view, those of us who do these things to try to improve agriculture, we would consider genetic modification the classical way or the modern way by adding genes or tweaking them. >> okay. >> that's what's so exciting >> i will come back to you about some more excitement. so ted, the next natural question would be, has there been work and how do we know these things are safe >> well you never know for sure because you can't prove a negative. science doesn't prove anythin

so the enormity of the rise of the genetics market relating to ancestry. i take a dim view of these companies so then of course 2020 happens this book was published in february just before covid-19 struck we had six weeks before lockdown on --dash lockdown happened and i got it pretty seriously and was seriously ill during that period. but it was racialized instantaneously with a separate distinct ways the first was the origin of the virus itself in china. we knew it was coming in 2013 that a pandemic was coming and i predicted it would likely come from east asia and probably from a food market but when dad apocalyptic prediction is right to but when this virus has been racialized in that way i don't want to go on about trump but he does refer to it as the chinese virus which i technically is correct and the spanish flu is incorrect it's called that because the first world war spain was the first country to report when in fact we don't know the origin of the pandemic itself but we think it came from kansas or from france but certainly not from spain have b

forget about genetics. genetics has sort of this mystique about it but think about biomarkers in general that are supposed to be providing tools for risk assessment. we are not there yet. i think the evolving literature, as you heard both of us but didn't, we may be there next year. i think the clinical validity will involve more quickly. for clinical utility there has to be some randomized clinical trials at some point to evaluate whether or not if you add that additional information to the system, whether you do more good than harm. and of those things will take you two timing, i don't -- i'm not sure i follow your prediction that within five years or 10. i don't know what numbers you gave on this, but i think it's goingo take more time to study the impact of this information on clinical and health related outcomes. and just to put it out for the consumers and providers to figure out what to do with it, it's a major bird. i mean, no matter how much you educate the providers and consumers, this stuff is ha

men are the genetic disadvantage. they are at the genetic advantage. no man has ever been hospitalized as a result of sperm donation. egg harvest is expensive, unpleasant, dangerous, 1% of the 200,000 american women every year go through it end up in the hospital. it hasn't happened from sperm harvest. as far as we know. life is unfair. goating eggs is the problem that has limited ivf. it's going it change. we will be able to stake stem cell and turn them in to liver cells, brain cells, and eggs and sperm. not the human embryonic stem cells you have heard about. a lot we can do it with them. six years ago in japan invented what they're called induced stem cells. you take normal cells. you take skin cells, you hit them with a cocktail of things and start acting like embryonic stem cells nape can become heart cells and brain cells and lung cells and kidney cells and eggs and sperm. in fact, a different japanese scientist made it work. he has done mice in-vitro vertlyization using mouse egg derived from mouse stem cell and mouse sperm derived from mouse s

the enormity and rise of the commercial genetics market related to ancestry. i take a pretty dim view of these companies or the products they are selling, i will be talking about that in just a minute and 2020 happened. this book was published in the uk in february, just before covid-19 struck i had my six weeks before lockdown in the uk occurred, and was seriously ill during that period but covid-19 itself was massively part of the conversation of race we are currently having. .. >> origin of the virus in china has meant it's been racialized in that way, and again i don't want to good on pout trump but he refers to it as the chinese virus which i know is technically correct, came from china. and then the spanish flu. that is an incorrect reverence. the spanish flu is call that because during the first world war, spain wasn't censors its journalists was the first country to report on this new pandemic when fa fact we don't in the origin of the pandemic itself. but we think either came from kansas, from a chicken farm, or possibly from france but certainly didn

you -- quote produced with genetic engineering and foods labeled as, quote, partially produced with genetic engineering. what's the difference? >> this is part of the flexibility the vermont law has it in. if a product contains less than 70% ge material by weight, then a producer can choose to use the statement, partially produced. otherwise, the standard statement is produced with genetic engineering on any product. >> i submit that we need to make sure that labels are clear and informative for consumers, and hr1599 falls short of the standard. i hope we can work together to find the right balance that works for both consumers as vermont has done, or is doing, and industry as well, and i -- with that yield back the balance. thank you, mr. chairman. >> chair thanks the gentle lady and now recognizes the gentleman from indiana, five minutes for questions. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i i support he consumers' right to know what's in their food products but also think it should be based on science, and i support congressman's legislation. i know it's been said but i want to reiterate for the r

before women submit to genetic tests, have genetic counseling, before she's given a test to determine whether she is a candidate for it, and what the test is going to mean. available to a woman who tested positive for a genetic mutation or some other gene. the decisionmaking is limited by the nature of the information. who told us she is a risk for cancer. and something can be overcome is an inevitable feature of risk. and social knowledge. even larger and more profound conceptual questions, how the meaning of healthy and diseased undergone fundamental transformation with the advent of genetic testing, what does it mean to ask congress? is risk the disease? consider for a moment, the problem with this scenario, the ads in a genetic testing women elected have their breasts removed and this is more radical than women with breast cancer. and addressing ovarian cancer, worked through something that has to be understood on the conceptual transformation. and also how we think about risk, cultural values and gender. and preventive bracketing, and considerable news coverage this past summer w

i clinical genetics. i am a commissioner for that u.k. genetics commission.shod just like to say that i am representing the first. the views that i am giving are not my personal views. there have been several reports and much activity over the past six or seven years in the u.k. the human geneticsuestion initially considered the question directed consumer testing in 2003, and this was at about the same time as the government produced but said a major impact on the way that genetics was used. much more recently there was an update on the human genetics report. and the present caldar has been back consultation, initially an internal consultation by the human genetics condition directs and the consultion, the public consultation for this. it will be ublicly available. that genomic medicine was quite far reaching. it dealt with the w in which all the genome technology and genome knowledge could be applied to clinical practice. one particular chapter referred to direct consumer testing specialists. so in an area as complex as this we have had already the fda. ther

the problem is we in the genetics community have been identified most of the genetic causes of those diseases of people it's in their dna it different companies and gotten very different results depending on which particular test those companies happen to use. i would take it with a grain of salt. it's kind of fun but it is ultimately recreational. >> sometimes and criminal cases there are accusations when you collect a sample from a suspect. if that is a sample that somehow is then taken and claims to be the evidence sample, so my question is, is there a difference between -- are you going to find the difference between the evidence sample and the collected sample and if there really was too much similarity with that he is suggestion that there actually has been some contamination of the collected sample with the supposed evidence sample? >> the question was if you are comparing an evidentiary sample code and -- collected the crime scene with the sample you have taken from the suspect, could there be suspiciously too great a resemblance between them such that might suggest contamina

remind us, who who came up with the term genetics?psalmody gets credit for that. >> remember he doesn't even have that word in his vocabulary but he knows he stumbled on something. >> he sent copies of his report, he condensed it to 40 some pages and sent it to the scholarly centers but it was dismissed. everyone said what is he writing about and why should i be reading this and he went on describing and then in the 1900s he gets rediscovered and soon after in 1909 we find the word gene because botanists and biologists begin to say to himself we have to have a word for this. it's abstract, we don't know what it is, is a molecule or a structure, but something carries this information. we know it's important and so we've got to have a word for it. william, one of his great defenders, i talk about him and there's a great picture of him in the book and points to the word genetics from genius, generation, all of these words coming together and he coins the word gene for genetic and then his colleague says we have to name that thing and the

genetic studies have led to a revolution in the understanding of this disorder. more than 100 deeds hundred genes identified as a new therapies and industry and academia ancestry plays a big role in genetic risk such a different ancestry has different contribution to disorders like autism very little work has been done to genetic causes of autism and african-american or african population studying ancestry outside of the group study has substantial advantages of pinpointing the genetic causes in reducing the rate of genetic misdiagnosis in the general population. in summary of a few major recommendation our understanding of autism has changed remarkably due to growth and advances in research and clinical treatment continuing that trajectory is essential to decreasing societal and economic burden, the vast majority of research has been done in white european population and a need to increase the diverse population especially black americans who are severely underrepresented in research in general same for hispanic americans we must lower structural barriers with a

we have two sets of genetic software in the cell. what we think happened as soon as we put the new chromosome in the cell, like with the file next genome, it's been they started being read, it's are producing proteins right away. some of these proteins included the restriction enzymes that actually recognize the dean as for indian a and chewed it up. so now we have the body and the type of one species and the genetic software of another species. so what happened? in a very short put a time we ended up with these bright blue cells, and when we interrogated them they had only the dna that we transplanted, and all the counter mistakes of the other so the we put the dna into work on. this cell by any and all measurements was now -- this is very critical and historical understanding evolution because it helps show that dna software, life is a dna software system, and that if you change the software you change the species. this is put into context, in fact, why restriction enzymes evolve in the first place. because if you're a bacterial sp

so they come up with this notion that there is an entity and hands-on genetic information.s out to be this acid, some molecule in our system called dna and you look at the structure of the dna, fourth letters. it was like a coating machine, it's a molecule so with those letters, three billion in the genome and the curves all the genetic information. the patternin here, 2000 were ae to sequence the gene. it's the human genome project. i thought that was pretty amazing, on the cover of "time" magazine and the important thing is they rewrite the genes that's what they did. >> the human genome project made the roadmap and now it's one of those many you talkth about in e book spearheaded and found the root to gene editing so in then book you get detailed, it's comprehensive but if you can walk us through because i think crisper is a little confusing to people because you're talking about dna but messenger rna, mrna, proteins, give us a lehman version if you don't mind laying out the science behind it. >> what they do is they take what attacks them and we look at the snippet of t

it's obviously partly genetic. couldn't have it without some special genes but you have to polish it off with some pretty special nurturing and that's the common consensus these days. but listen to a couple of quotes from how scientists now talk about genes and let's see if we can advance that public understanding a little bit today. and try to improve on the language rather than just saying it's nature plus nurture. this is mcgill university michael meany. quote, there are no genetic factors that can be studied independently of the environment and there are no environment factors that function independently of the genome. a trait emerges only from the interaction of the gene and the environment. and here's another quote from cambridge university biologist patrick baitson whom i rely quite extensively in my book. the individual starts its life with the capacity to develop in a number of distinctly different ways. like a juke box the individual has the potential to play a number of different developmental tunes. but

to detect any genetic material.t's very personalized to me and we could have a personalized treatment that is designed and i think coded to go after that. do you think that it would be a big deal as well because they can come up with medications and treatments and protocols that can cite very specifically like i remember years ago they knew that it would penetrate and disarm that basically and so now they know physically then what they are looking at instead of sometimes you can throw everything at it and hope it works instead of throwing things around it. do you think that this will help the company? >> this is the new era. to go after exactly what we want. cancer is not a disease. you can sequence that and have a way to target that genetic material specifically that brings us to a new era. you do talk about the labs and rivalries and everybody moves around and she said places like uc berkeley that have an ovation, nobel prize access to first jen and college students under threat with state budget cuts so how can w

so this just shows when we did genetic counseling, that the genetic counseling session outreach where we actually pick up the federad reserve chairman alan greenspan -- up the phone and called individuals, it increased the uptake of services three fold and the majority of people that we were actually left a message, so we still don't know what the impact of leaving a voice message is. some of those individuals called us bang and scheduled a genetic counseling session, some did not. but the feedback that we really got was that most o most of theo idea that this service was available, that it was integrated, at no additional charge. the majority said speaking with a genetic counselor was helpful, reassuring, helped them understand the results. they really felt like they knew what to do in terms of taking this information to their physician or taking any kind of nexttep. they were enthusiastic about testg overall. and they were very enthusiasti many of these individuals it just so happened, when scripps released a large number of results, there were scripps participants, that they were r

itll codes all of my genetic information. the thing about it is 2000 they were able to sequence the human gene. that's called the human genome project. that was pretty amazing i was on the cover of "time" magazine. but it did not do much all they had to do is read the gene the important thing is to rewrite the genes is a t bad problem. with the gene editing tool d called crisper. >> human genome project laid the roadmap down. one of the many they talk about in the book found that route to gene editing. in the book you get very detailed it's really comprehensive. if you could walk us through i think crisper is a littlee confusing to people because you talk about dna but messenger rna. give us the lehmans version if you don't mind laying out the science behind it. >> there's bacteria and they're not much smarter than we are. they took a mug shot which they will take a snippet of the genetic code. weave it into their own dna. so we have these repeated sequences sequences get called crisper. at the wait for bacteria to remember t

ancestry plays a big role in genetic risk. different may have different contributions to disorders like autism. however very little work has been done to illuminate to the causes of autism in african-americans or african populations rated ancestries outside of the group study, have substantial advantages by enabling pinpointing the actual genetic causes, and reducing the rate of genetic misdiagnosis in the general population. in summary, a few major recommendations. our understanding of autism is changed markedly the last two decades due to growth and advances in research and clinical treatments. continuing thattm trajectory is essential to decreasing societal and economic burden. the vast majority of research has been done by populations and a need to increase inclusion of diverse populations especially black americans were severely underrepresented in autism. and rain disease research in general. the same holds true for hispanic americans. we must lower structural barriers in the treatments and under resourced communities pr

[laughter] i think genetically modified.[laughter] >> me too. >> for you sir, what is the most interesting you been lately? it can be raw or at a fine dining experience. >> i don't know. most interesting thing. you know i did something this is totally off-topic. but i'm working on a book with somebody who is one of this kind of very advanced, norton that weird, he is advanced in that weird way that weird perfection way. he is the coach for the american -- a big cooking competition it takes place. he was second last time and he is the coach this year. >> is a gavin? >> no. he did it three or four times ago. -- did it to. i was up at the lab. protecting their dishes and watching them sharpen carrots with life this great big pencil sharpener. every carrot was exactly the same size. and then, gluing together the skin of the chicken breast with the chicken meat and then horsemeat and different things put together. it was very weird and in its own way gmo exciting. [laughter] dishes that were not intended in nature.it sounds unnat

and to carry out the genetic patterns, and increased resistance. a smart decision, developing vaccines, maybe we can do it in a year, i was talking to very senior, smart scientists in los angeles, he didn't know if we could ever achieve -- george is on this call, george the scientist, developing surveillance systems in them last passage. the incredible science that we have the science comes with very significant ethical challenge, every technology could be abused. the onus is on us to figure out how to optimize the benefit before the harm. that will be hard enough. we live in an abstract world where we could make the smartest decisions possible. we live in a world, i write about this in the book, defined by the political context in which we live. we see that in the political failures, the first 3 weeks of this outbreak to get on top of this crisis, the failure in the united states, tests to have adequate information that could be provided to the american people. there is a failure over decades to build a world health organization that would resourc

with all that genetic information and all that genetic and computational tools we now see dna is a highly active molecule, crumbled inside the nucleus itself but opens and closes as the genes become activated in different ways. it is marvelously complex, the origins of different genes are amazingly wondrous. that we look at other aspects. let me give you a striking example about the hidden mysteries of dna. it begins with this. jason shepherd. doctor shepherd is a professor of neurobiology, interested in the genes the control the formation of memories in humans, we have similar genes in this regard to mice. this particular gene, art is an interesting gene. a mutation is a problem. they can solve them but don't remember the solution the next day. when it is disrupted it disrupts memories that plays a role, they have many cognitive deficits like schizophrenia and other development of disorders. it is an important gene to understand the function. jason was studying that. like any biochemist studying a gene he was studying the protein the gene makes. what he did is popped under a microscope.