About 10 years ago, Žiga Avsec was a PhD physics student who found himself taking a crash course in genomics via a university module on machine learning. He was soon working in a lab that studied rare diseases, on a project aiming to pin down the exact genetic mutation that caused an unusual mitochondrial disease. […]
Read MoreBorder and his colleagues are not the first to raise the possibility of spurious genetic correlations. When designing studies, geneticists can control for the effects of factors like parental traits and childhood environment by comparing people who have those things in common—that is, siblings. Earlier this year, statistical geneticist Laurence Howe and a team of researchers did just […]
Read MoreThe company said the price was determined with consideration of the “clinical, societal, economic, and innovative value represented by this novel gene therapy.” Earlier last month, the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, a Boston-based nonprofit research institute that estimates the value of drugs and other medical services, said Hemgenix would be fairly priced at upward […]
Read MoreAt 18 months old, Aurea Yenmai Smigrodzki is inquisitive like any other toddler. She likes peanut butter, the beach, and mobile phones—or any toys that look like phones. She likes to copy her mum and dad, Thuy and Rafal, when they are using theirs. Aurea doesn’t know it yet, but her birth was very special: […]
Read MoreAs wildly diverse as life on Earth is—whether it’s a jaguar hunting down a deer in the Amazon, an orchid vine spiraling around a tree in the Congo, primitive cells growing in boiling hot springs in Canada, or a stockbroker sipping coffee on Wall Street—at the genetic level, it all plays by the same rules. […]
Read MoreThe first step to fixing the lack of diversity, the researchers argue in their paper, is to better engage underrepresented communities. Western researchers have a long history of exploiting people in low- and middle-income countries for their own scientific gain: They drop in, grab the data, and run back to analyze it in labs in […]
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