“I’m back to magical thinking,” the woman emailed. She was expecting a devastating medical report after a series of tests. The reply I sent back came after a moment of pondering. “I’m imagining the doctors have misread the original data. It happened to me.” To give false h

FINDING YOUR ROOTS AND GETTING TANGLED IN THEM Today, so many ways exist to invade our privacy without our knowledge, it’s almost comic to think how freely we volunteer these intimate details ourselves.  Without batting an eye, we do it to find romance or search our family history.

Scary as it sounds, we humans have the capacity to change the course of evolution.  That’s the opinion of Jennifer Doudna, one of the discoverers of CRSPR technology.  (The Ultimate Life Hacker,” by Gideon Rose, Foreign Affairs, May/June, 2018, pg. 158.)  CRSPR is the ability t

Crispr is a technique that has added a large body of knowledge to our understanding of the human genome. (Click) (Click)  It is a gene-editing technique which allows human DNA to be altered in the hope of ending deadly diseases like cancer and sickle-cell anemia. Two women worked tog

23andMe was founded by Anne Wojcick and named for the  23 pairs of chromosomes that comprise the human  DNA.  She created the company because she believes people should have access to their biological  data.  The FDA disagrees and now her company is in a tussle with the governmen