Tag Archives: genetics

On Disease Association

Hello again, my loyal blogventurer. The hectic nature of my life continues, though to my joy genomes are starting to fall into place (computationally, that is, not by insemination. Though doubtless that has also been going on. If not, god help us all). However, I think all this business is leading to general mental decline. Yesterday, in a fit of flustered Britishness, I thanked an ATM after using it, an event which, on retelling. triggering a ‘not-adapted-to-the-modern-world five’ from a quick-witted colleague.

Rambling introductory material aside, a few things have occured in the past week that have rekindled my passion for medical genetics. A few of us put together a talk on monoclonal antibodies (an awesome medical technology, which if you are lucky I may talk about in the future), and I signed up to work on disease gene association in the coming months. The latter I have a special affection for, an affection which I shall now point at you.
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On Eugenics

I hope that you will tolerate this post, as it is mostly me thinking out loud. Thinking out-loud, whats more, about a potentially distressing subject, namely that of the relationship between the history of biology, genetics and statistics (which are, after all, tied tightly together) and eugenics – the project of increasing the fitness of the human gene pool, by controlling the breeding or death rates of various parts of the population.

The problem I have is that many people that I would call my heroes, or at least people along whose intellectual footpaths I wander (Ronald Fisher, Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, John Maynard Keynes) supported the eugenics movement. Am I to assume that all these people, while intellectual giants, were monsters or fools? Can we (you and I, for by embarking on this journey with me you too, kind reader, must shoulder my burden) find where these people went wrong, and what can we learn by looking at those people who shunned eugenics?

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