Genetic code yields few cures, more complicated than predicted

jimpeel

jimpeel

Well-Known Member
Wasn't this supposed to be t4e end-all, be-all? It seems that the Human Genome Project was a bit more complicated than it was thought to be by scientists. We grunts out here in flyover country likely knew better.

SOURCE

A Decade Later, Genetic Map Yields Few New Cures
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: June 12, 2010

Ten years after President Bill Clinton announced that the first draft of the human genome was complete, medicine has yet to see any large part of the promised benefits.

For biologists, the genome has yielded one insightful surprise after another. But the primary goal of the $3 billion Human Genome Project — to ferret out the genetic roots of common diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s and then generate treatments — remains largely elusive. Indeed, after 10 years of effort, geneticists are almost back to square one in knowing where to look for the roots of common disease.

One sign of the genome’s limited use for medicine so far was a recent test of genetic predictions for heart disease. A medical team led by Nina P. Paynter of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston collected 101 genetic variants that had been statistically linked to heart disease in various genome-scanning studies. But the variants turned out to have no value in forecasting disease among 19,000 women who had been followed for 12 years.

The old-fashioned method of taking a family history was a better guide, Dr. Paynter reported this February in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

In announcing on June 26, 2000, that the first draft of the human genome had been achieved, Mr. Clinton said it would “revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases.”

At a news conference, Francis Collins, then the director of the genome agency at the National Institutes of Health, said that genetic diagnosis of diseases would be accomplished in 10 years and that treatments would start to roll out perhaps five years after that.

“Over the longer term, perhaps in another 15 or 20 years,” he added, “you will see a complete transformation in therapeutic medicine.”

The pharmaceutical industry has spent billions of dollars to reap genomic secrets and is starting to bring several genome-guided drugs to market. While drug companies continue to pour huge amounts of money into genome research, it has become clear that the genetics of most diseases are more complex than anticipated and that it will take many more years before new treatments may be able to transform medicine.

“Genomics is a way to do science, not medicine,” said Harold Varmus, president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who in July will become the director of the National Cancer Institute.

The last decade has brought a flood of discoveries of disease-causing mutations in the human genome. But with most diseases, the findings have explained only a small part of the risk of getting the disease. And many of the genetic variants linked to diseases, some scientists have begun to fear, could be statistical illusions.

The Human Genome Project was started in 1989 with the goal of sequencing, or identifying, all three billion chemical units in the human genetic instruction set, finding the genetic roots of disease and then developing treatments. With the sequence in hand, the next step was to identify the genetic variants that increase the risk for common diseases like cancer and diabetes.

It was far too expensive at that time to think of sequencing patients’ whole genomes. So the National Institutes of Health embraced the idea for a clever shortcut, that of looking just at sites on the genome where many people have a variant DNA unit. But that shortcut appears to have been less than successful.

The theory behind the shortcut was that since the major diseases are common, so too would be the genetic variants that caused them. Natural selection keeps the human genome free of variants that damage health before children are grown, the theory held, but fails against variants that strike later in life, allowing them to become quite common. In 2002 the National Institutes of Health started a $138 million project called the HapMap to catalog the common variants in European, East Asian and African genomes.

With the catalog in hand, the second stage was to see if any of the variants were more common in the patients with a given disease than in healthy people. These studies required large numbers of patients and cost several million dollars apiece. Nearly 400 of them had been completed by 2009. The upshot is that hundreds of common genetic variants have now been statistically linked with various diseases.

But with most diseases, the common variants have turned out to explain just a fraction of the genetic risk. It now seems more likely that each common disease is mostly caused by large numbers of rare variants, ones too rare to have been cataloged by the HapMap.

Defenders of the HapMap and genome-wide association studies say that the approach made sense because it is only now becoming cheap enough to look for rare variants, and that many common variants do have roles in diseases.

At this point, some 850 sites on the genome, most of them near genes, have been implicated in common diseases, said Eric S. Lander, director of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and a leader of the HapMap project. “So I feel strongly that the hypothesis has been vindicated,” he said.

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There was a very large scandal at the FBI over various lab tests but I don't think that DNA was involved.

My question has always been, and I have seen no study to refute the contention, that DNA could change over time. The only way of actually finding out if this is so would be to conduct a lifetime study of subjects from infancy to old age.

We always hear of the wrongfully convicted person getting out after DNA showed he was not the one. Would it have shown any difference if the technology had existed at the time of the crime? Who knows.
 
It's a long code and a LOT of information to look through. What did you expect? It's gonna take time. Doesn't discount the research being done whatsoever.

Autism is being looked at seriously for genetic flags, for instance.
 
jimpeel said:
My question has always been, and I have seen no study to refute the contention, that DNA could change over time. The only way of actually finding out if this is so would be to conduct a lifetime study of subjects from infancy to old age.
Click to expand...

ROFLMAO.

Back to school jim. Back to school.
 
While we're at it, how many cures have happened due to embryonic stem cell research?
 
Gonz said:
While we're at it, how many cures have happened due to embryonic stem cell research?
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we'll never know.
They wouldn't release any kind of data that would actually be a full cure for anything.
There's not enough money in that.
 
MrBishop said:
It's a long code and a LOT of information to look through. What did you expect? It's gonna take time. Doesn't discount the research being done whatsoever.
Click to expand...

The predictions and the amount of money spent have not lived up to the expectations. Read the article and pay attention to what the proponents were saying about how long it would take to see results. Their predictions were wrong, their shortcuts were unproductive, their best guesses produced nothing.
 
Genetic code reveals whites are better than everyone else.

How or why would he question anything when he already has all the answers?
 
yeah, why question anything i learned in my 10th grade biology class?

you guys crack me up.

seriously jim, you don't want to play... all you've got is this bland "QUESTION NOTHING!!!" response? come on, google it. see if you can dig up some wacky shit about DNA that has been poked at more recently than when i was in the 10th grade.

hey how about you start with phenotypic plasticity and suggest that it is inscribed, hmmm? lamarck is lonely these days... but only sort of...
 
The question is mine, and mine alone. There has never been a study of the type I cited so how would you know that the possibility does not exist? There has not been a lifetime lived since the discovery and use of DNA. So how would anyone, least of all you, know that there is no change over time?

It is a valid question of an unknown aspect of the technology. I, as opposed to yourself, do not simply accept everything I am told as being etched in stone.

Continue marching.
 
jimpeel said:
The question is mine, and mine alone. There has never been a study of the type I cited so how would you know that the possibility does not exist? There has not been a lifetime lived since the discovery and use of DNA. So how would anyone, least of all you, know that there is no change over time?

It is a valid question of an unknown aspect of the technology. I, as opposed to yourself, do not simply accept everything I am told as being etched in stone.

Continue marching.
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1) "accept everything I am told as being etched in stone" is such a lame cop out. would you make the same comment if i asserted that the majority of cars on the road today use gasoline as fuel? it seems bloody obvious to anyone who has ever driven a car, no?

2) no jim, the question is NOT yours alone but since you are content to simply be suspicious of something you (obviously) don't understand and are completely unwilling to look into further, i'll just be done with it.
 
I dunno nuthin'

All I needed to know about genetic engineering I learned in the 19th grade.
===============================================
OK fine, I went back and re-read this thread
(most if not all of these threads aren't worthy of more than a cursory glance)
yeah Jim you are completely ignorant on this subject
if you think 'DNA could change over time'.

You might want to reduce your exposure to the infrared radiation
being emitted from those Wal-Mart laser scanners, they may be damaging
molecular structure of your neuro synapses.
 
jimpeel said:
The predictions and the amount of money spent have not lived up to the expectations. Read the article and pay attention to what the proponents were saying about how long it would take to see results. Their predictions were wrong, their shortcuts were unproductive, their best guesses produced nothing.
Click to expand...

Where's my flying car???! I was sure that I had parked it on the roof of my floating transparent mars condo... damn! Now, I'll have to take the teleporter home for my lunch pills. :drink2:
 
Re: I dunno nuthin'

Winky said:
You might want to reduce your exposure to the infrared radiation
being emitted from those Wal-Mart laser scanners, they may be damaging
molecular structure of your neuro synapses.
Click to expand...

Negative. Infrared is low energy.

There are a couple main reasons they use it.
Heating - many organic compounds and common materials absorb infrared, so it can keep your french fries hot. It can also "burn" CDs.
Communication - fused silica fiber has a very low group velocity dispersion at 1.315 and 1.550 microns. Infrared radiation at those wavelengths can travel through fiber for a much longer amount of time without down-chirping and becoming incoherent than can visible light. Less repeaters = faster, cheaper interwebs
Night vision - it's easy to make visible light filters that pass infrared, so you can make a bright IR source with just a standard tungsten-halogen bulb and the correct filter. Towelheads can't see us, but we can light 'em up in IR.

But as for harmful health effects? Not really. It's too low energy to do anything. Ultraviolet gives problems because it is high energy, and the large amount of energy can damage DNA and cause skin cancer. And, of course, X-ray and the stuff that is more energetic than UV can damage you even worse. But infrared is pretty safe.
 
sarcasm is his middle name

Seriously? snowblower boy?

You'd best reduce your exposure to the gamma radiation
from that home made synchrotron you've got in the basement.

Would you have approved if I claimed the interferon was to blame?

and the long wave energy from the US Navy is used for mind control!
 
Re: sarcasm is his middle name

Winky said:
Seriously? snowblower boy?

You'd best reduce your exposure to the gamma radiation
from that home made synchrotron you've got in the basement.

Would you have approved if I claimed the interferon was to blame?

and the long wave energy from the US Navy is used for mind control!
Click to expand...

I don't have a synchrotron. Although my buddy was trying to make a cyclotron last year, and I was helping him build the vacuum chamber. He got it down to 20 millitorrs, but the ancient pump the school gave him just wasn't good enough to go any lower, and then the semester ended before he could get a better pump. It was a good enough try to get him a summer internship at Stanford's linear accelerator, so I guess it all worked out for him in the end.

I don't know what an interferon is. I looked it up and it's some organic chemistry thing. I knew a tiny bit of organic chemistry like three years ago, and forgot most of it.
 
2minkey said:
1) "accept everything I am told as being etched in stone" is such a lame cop out. would you make the same comment if i asserted that the majority of cars on the road today use gasoline as fuel? it seems bloody obvious to anyone who has ever driven a car, no?
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We aren't talking cars. We are talking about genetics which may or may not evolve over time. Just because I have a question does not make me ignorant. It simply means that I am curious about what could happen over time.

2minkey said:
2) no jim, the question is NOT yours alone but since you are content to simply be suspicious of something you (obviously) don't understand and are completely unwilling to look into further, i'll just be done with it.
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I understand the science. Apparently you disallow anyone from positing any question that does not fill your niche.

Einstein's theory of relativity has been proven numerous times yet they still call it the theory of relativity not the law of relativity. You would accept Einstein's theory at face value and without question, yet there must be those out there who still question this proven "theory". I believe that it has been proven quite adequately and beyond question. I do not, unlike yourself, ridicule those who still have questions.
 
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