The Nature of Things

There may come a time, perhaps even within our lifetimes, when treatment for our illnesses will depend upon our very own unique genealogy. At least, that is my take away from a fascinating story about human genomes that is in the news today. The New York Times detailed how scientists have decoded the complete genomes of five individuals from southern Africa. The Africans included four Bushmen hunter-gatherers and one member of the Bantu tribe. None of the Bushmen would likely be known outside of their own communities, but the Bantu individual is very well-known indeed. He is Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Archbishop Tutu is said to have been selected because he has a very keen interest in medicine and in the human genome project and he fit the profile that was needed for the research. His parents came from the two largest Bantu groups in South Africa, the Sotho-Tswana and the Nguni. African genomes are of particular interest to scientists because they have more variation in their DNA ...

My beautician is a conscientious mother who tries to do what is right for her two kids. In January, 2009, she had her second child, a boy. Since then, she has engaged in an ongoing battle with her conscience about whether she should have him on the regular schedule of preventative vaccines for young kids. You see, she has heard rumors and seen rants on the Internet about how vaccines are the cause of autism in children. The last time I talked to her about it, she was still delaying. The source of the rumors and the concern about a link between vaccines and autism is a study authored by a Dr. Andrew Wakefield and published in the British medical journal, The Lancet , twelve years ago. In his article, Wakefield maintained that he had found such a link. That was enough for some of the paranoiacs who are always looking for conspiracies and postulating that all authority figures are trying to pull the wool over our eyes. That paranoia has been further fed by people like Glenn Beck and...