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This summer, the university’s College of Letters and Science -- home to three quarters of Berkeley’s 25,000 undergraduates -- will ask freshmen and transfers to return a cotton swab covered in cells collected from their inner cheeks in an effort to introduce them to the emerging field of personalized medicine.
“Science is moving so fast right now,” said Alix Schwartz, director of academic planning for the college’s undergraduate division. “If we assigned them a book, it would be out-of-date by the time they read it.” Last year's assignment for the program, called "On the Same Page," was Michael Pollan's account of food chains, The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
This year, said Mark Schlissel, the college’s dean of biological sciences, a look at personalized medicine made sense. “For now, it’s mostly a research tool, but in the coming years it’s going to become part of everyday medical practice, based on your very personal genetics.”
Geneticists will analyze each sample for three genes: metabolism of folate, tolerance of lactose and metabolism of alcohol, all relatively innocuous and perhaps useful in students’ daily lives. Students will be able to use that information to learn if they should eat more leafy green vegetables, steer clear of milk products or limit alcohol intake.
The idea is not to identify potentially dangerous genes in students' samples, but to point out traits that can be managed through behavior, said Jasper Rine, a professor of genetics, genomics and development. “We want to get people to appreciate that there are things you can do that enhance your health based on the genes you have,” he said. “There are concrete, actionable, specific steps that do enhance quality of life. This is the message of the post-genomic era.”
Samples will nonetheless be kept confidential. Students will be sent two barcode stickers, one to attach to the submitted sample and the other to keep. “This is all going to be done with institutional safeguards for privacy,” Schlissel said. The university’s Committee for Protection of Human Subjects scrutinized the plans closely to ensure that the project would be “ethical and private and the like.”
...incoming students are in no position to make a “voluntary choice” as to whether to participate in such testing when being offered by the University that just admitted them. Indeed, a number of incoming students will even be below the age of consent to legally make such a decision. Which raises the question of whether you passed this solicitation of freshman DNA with the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of your university.Additionally there remains serious questions within the scientific community over whether genetic information
can be properly de-identified and to put such “de-identified” information on the Internet is highly troubling, not to mention any clear statements on the retention of the genetic samples themselves.
Originally posted by Kailassa
reply to post by sonjah1
I expect the university is profiting from this, and it's being used as the thin end of the wedge.
The project is part of UC Berkeley College of Letters and Sciences “On the Same Page” program, which asks incoming freshmen and transfer students to read the same book or view the same movie. This year, it will instead send out cheek-swab kits so that students can collect and return a DNA sample. It will also sponsor a contest in which entrants can win further DNA testing from direct-to-consumer genetic testing company 23andMe. Professor of Genetics, Genomics and Development Jasper Rine, who is playing a lead role in the project, is a co-founder of several biotech companies including VitaPath Genetics, a genetic testing start-up company.
“This program may be good for the direct-to-consumer genetics industry, but it is an abuse of the trust that thousands of young students should be able to place in the university they’ve chosen,” Reynolds added.
Originally posted by Portugoal
reply to post by sonjah1
It's actually completely voluntary.
Originally posted by CSquared288
reply to post by sonjah1
hmm that is most definitely sketchy. i understand, yknow, emergency surgery so she probably wasn't in the right state of mind to think of something like this, but did she voice an objection to the swabs? I'm not saying that the doctors may not have been pushy or even uncompromising, nor would i doubt them doing something like that on the sly just to get her into a database. it only takes once lolz