“Success in sight: The eyes have it!” Thus the scientific journal Gene Therapy greeted the news, in 2008, that an experimental treatment was restoring vision to 12 people born with a congenital disorder that slowly left them blind. Healthy genes were injected to replace the fau… [More]

As I listened to President Obama run through his checklist of proposals during the State of the Union speech the other night, I felt a bit of déjà vu at his mention of the promise of personalized medicine. Here’s what he said: “I want the country that eliminate… [More]

  In the fall of 1999, a young chemical engineer named Todd Zion left his job at Eastman Kodak to enroll in the Ph.D. program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While looking for a subject to research, Zion noticed a grant proposal, never funded, that another graduate student had … [More]

  Last November, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a “cease and desist” order to 23andMe, a major purveyor of direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing. In its letter to the company—issued after three prior warnings—the FDA reiterated its view that 23andM… [More]

            New Issue of GeneWatch Magazine:    Privacy in the Age of Genomics   We are at a critical time in the development of medicine:  the mapping of the human genome has p… [More]

The gold standard of modern genomics studies, the results of which guide thousands of investigations into the genetic roots of disease and development, are based almost exclusively on people of European ancestry. Unless that changes, most of humanity might miss out on the genomic revolution. … [More]

A funny thing happened on the way to the ribosome. That’s the essence of a controversial paper concluding that messenger RNA — the molecular middleman that carries information from a cell’s DNA to its protein-making machinery — is routinely and systematically altered by unknown mec… [More]

The social media wave is being followed by a big data tsunami.   Ok, the imagery is getting a little outlandish, but the flood of information that must be stored and analyzed is generating excitement, especially in Boston, where many in the tech world worry that they were at the beach w… [More]

The loss of the HHS Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Genetics, Health and Society (“SACGHS”) will leave a void in the personalized medicine policy landscape.  Since its inception in 2002, the SACGHS has served a unique and important purpose—it was the central foru… [More]