permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

This article takes the typical journalist "gotta get a controversial angle" 
stance and gets a lot of it wrong. For example,

"The human genome sequencing project was based on a huge, but calculated, 
gamble. The then leaders-to-be of the project believed that faulty genes 
inherited from our parents were probably the cause of most disease." 

But then they quote the leader of the federal genome project who agrees that 
there have been no significant cures. And the leader of the private project, 
Craig Venter, always said it was more for the sake of doing it, to see the 
patterns that reside in the genome, rather than to find cures. Every 
geneticist I worked with for years understood that the correlation between 
any single gene and a disease was going to be very murky. But the power of 
DNA sequencing tools is immense, and is rewriting botanical taxonomy and 
evolutionary relationships, among many other things, even if the practical 
payoff, in terms of products and cures, is never going to amount to much. 
What we're learning about the patterns of inheritance and evolution is 
enormous.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com



On Apr 28, 2011, at 6:17 PM, Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [SANET-MG] The Failure of the Genome
> Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2011 12:40:55 -0400
> From: jonathan latham <jrlatham@BIOSCIENCERESOURCE.ORG>
> To: SANET-MG@LISTS.IFAS.UFL.EDU
> 
> This may look like it's not relevant to you but sustainable farmers,
> processors, supporters and researchers need to know about this and
> they need their customers, their funders, their friends and their
> neighbours to know about it too.
> As one of the comments notes, medical genetics got its start from the
> tobacco industry, and its second wind from the food and
> pharmaceutical industries. They know how to tilt the playing field.
> Sustainable farmers now have a chance to tilt it back. Send this to
> everyone you know (and every listserv you know).
> 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/17/human-genome-
> genetics-twin-studies
> 
> sincerely
> 
> Jonathan Latham (PhD)
> Executive Director
> The Bioscience Resource Project
> jrlatham@bioscienceresource.org
> 001-607-319-0290
> 
> http://www.bioscienceresource.org/
> 
> PO Box 6869
> Suite 132, 215 N. Cayuga St.
> Ithaca 14851 NY
> USA
> 
> 
> 
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