The New York Times is fronting a story that combines two of my favorite subjects – DNA and baseball. Unfortunately, the story is ridiculously alarmist, and either willfully or ignorantly conflates DNA paternity/maternity tests with tests designed to extract other information from a person’s genome. The plug for the piece is that Major League Baseball [...]
While I was poking around for stories about ACTN3, I came upon this Slate piece from the usually reliable Will Saletan about the ACTN3 test and race. The story has a generally accurate discussion about ACTN3 allele frequencies and race, and I agree with most of what he has to say. But Saletan makes a [...]
A lot has been written about the genetic test for ACTN3 being marketed by ATLAS Research as a way to direct ones children towards the appropriate athletic endeavors since a story on the test appeared in the NY Times last week. Daniel MacArthur, in particular, has done a great job explaining the science behind the [...]
A reader sent me the following letter sent out by Fresno County Superior Court judicial court candidate Jim Kelley in his campaign against Douglas Treisman: October 28, 2008 Dear Voter: My name is Jim Kelley and I am a candidate for Fresno County Superior Court Judge. Judges play an important role in our community, yet [...]
A study published last week in the Journal of Fish Biology confirmed that an earlier report of parthanogenesis in sharks was not a fluke. Chapman DD et al. (2008). Parthenogenesis in a large-bodied requiem shark, the blacktip Carcharhinus limbatus. J. Fish Biol. 73(6):1473-1477. (No link – I only link to open access articles). This is [...]
Also posted in cool science |
Most people who participate in genetic studies do so with the expectation that their participation – and more importantly their phenotype – will be anonymous. To preserve this anonymity, raw data (individual’s genotypes and phenotypes) are not made publicly available. However, to enable validation and further research, pooled data – the average allele frequencies in [...]
I'm an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. My research focuses on the evolution and population genomics of gene regulation in flies. I am also very interested in promoting various forms of open science. And most importantly, I am a Red Sox fan.