‘If you walk out into the street and tell someone that a company owns their genes, they’ll look at you strangely,” said Barbara Brenner, executive director of Breast Cancer Action. “But that is exactly what has happened.” Brenner’s group is one of several plaintiffs in a lawsuit recently filed in federal court challenging patents controlled…
Conventional wisdom dictates that runners, like most athletes, improve with experience. A promising freshman cross-country runner might become the school track star by senior year. But that didn’t happen for Vera Pesotchinsky. As a high school student in California, Vera saw the opposite trend: She peaked as a freshman, then spiraled confusingly downward. “I began…
The United States recently got its first genetic screening program targeting a non-Ashkenazic Jewish community. On July 12, the Medical Genetics Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles launched its Persian Jewish Genetic Screening Program. The program kicked off with an afternoon of education and free screening at Sinai Temple, a local Conservative synagogue…
Dakota Jean Bihn started dropping things at age 3. That’s how Ohio accountant Ken Bihn begins telling the story of his daughter, a tale that has led him down the unexpected path of starting his own foundation. Dakota spent years bouncing between puzzled doctors. “She was clumsy, then she stuttered a little bit,” Bihn said….
Depending on how you look at it, Masha Gessen’s “Blood Matters” (Harcourt) is either an unusually philosophical memoir of a cancer diagnosis or an unusually personal account of the complex ethical questions surrounding the issue of genetic testing. What do we want to know, and what don’t we want to know, about our own fates?…
‘It’s important to be calm, not to get excited. It’s not good for the heart,” centenarian Fred Feuerberg said. “And I never ate much. I never overate.” Feuerberg, who turned 100 in May, was sitting in his spacious apartment in Fort Lee, N.J., explaining what has allowed him to reach such a ripe old age…
When Carly White was an infant, her parents, Jim and Dolores, noticed that she had trouble controlling the movement of her eyes. Three years later, a ballet teacher observed that Carly did not have much control over her legs. Trips to the pediatrician yielded no answers, but a visit to a neurologist ended in a…
Jacob’s Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History By David B. Goldstein Yale University Press, 176 pages, $26. News articles in recent years have brought a steady stream of revelations about genetic studies of Jewish ancestry. The new data indicate that Kohanim (the “priests” among the Jews) are largely descended from a single ancient ancestor;…
