Some of the work I did for the FBI on satellites and their foreign investor reached the President’s desk early in his Administration. The heavens, I’ve long suggested, belong to America but I’ve become increasingly of the view that so, too, does the microscopic. You know that all seeing eye on the dollar bill? It wants to see everything. And perhaps it should.
To be sure, the CHIPs Act and the cleaning up of the satellite industry were important but I think we will look back on this era as the era of the microbe and the genome sequence and how critically important it is that we work on those types of technologies.
The America I believe in is the one of the Vance family where some nephews’ love of their uncle compelled them to take a DNA test and recover their WWII veteran uncle’s remains from France. Imagine so loving someone that you’d do anything to bring them home to be buried in the family plot. If that isn’t the American story I don’t know what is.
Of course all the remains in American government custody should be genetically sequenced. If we say this enough it might well come true.
Reading the headlines gives us a sense that this stuff is really going to get exciting.
A new approach to environmental DNA collection is getting attention. Among the more interesting bits?
[York University Professor Elizabeth] Clare is now spearheading a new application for another continuous monitoring system — leveraging existing air-quality monitors that measure pollutants, such as fine particulate matter, while also simultaneously vacuuming eDNA out of the sky. In late 2023, she only had a small sample set, but had already found that, as a byproduct of routine air quality monitoring, these preexisting tools doubled as filters for the material she is after. It was, more or less, a regulated, transcontinental network collecting samples in a very consistent way over long periods of time. “You could then use it to build up time series and high-resolution data on entire continents,” she said.
In the U.K. alone, Clare said, there are an estimated 150 different sites sucking a known quantity of air, every week, all year long, which amount to some 8,000 measurements a year. Clare and her co-authors recently analyzed at a tiny subset of these — 17 measurements from two locations — and were able to identify more than 180 different taxonomic groups, more than 80 different kinds of plants and fungi, 26 different species of mammal, 34 different species of birds, plus at least 35 kinds of insects.
Certainly, other long-term ecological research sites exist. The U.S. has a network of such facilities. But their scope of study does not include a globally distributed infrastructure that measures biodiversity constantly — including the passage of migrating birds overhead to the expansion and contraction of species with climate change. Arguably, eDNA will likely complement, rather than supplant, the distributed network of people, who record real-time, high-resolution, tempo-spatial observations on websites such as eBird or iNaturalist. Like a fuzzy image of an entirely new galaxy coming into view, the current resolution remains low.
“It’s sort of a generalized collection system, which is pretty much unheard of in biodiversity science,” said Clare. She was referring to the capacity to pull eDNA signals out of thin air, but the sentiment spoke to the method as a whole: “It’s not perfect,” she said, “but there’s nothing else that really does that.”
One wonders if you could build such a system for tracking the human population as well and its underlying traits… 😉
“They Called Him Mostly Harmless”: HBO releases a documentary featuring Othram’s use of forensic genomic genealogy to identify Vance Rodriguez. Here’s The New York Times review.
Watching the film the other night I was struck by how much toil and trouble went into identifying Rodriguez — and it took only $5000 to break open the case with forensic genomic genealogy. The possibility of every crime being solved with DNA sequencing isn’t as remote as you might think.
The end of human trafficking with DNA sequencing? Sarah Unsicker, candidate for governor of Missouri, highlights the use of sequencing to cut down on child and baby trafficking.
Organs are being harvested from prisoners in Alabama without consent. You might ask about the global trade in illegal organ harvesting and which groups benefit from it but I don’t want to frighten you.
BBC’s Jenny Kleeman asks interesting questions about the 23 & Me hack. For what it’s worth I’ve more or less concluded that it was a state actor who hacked the material. It’s certainly interesting how Vladimir Putin brought up genomics — unprompted — in his interview with Tucker Carlson. The hacker named Golem (naturally) supposedly had Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese DNA…and then the next day Hamas attacked Israel on Vladimir Putin’s birthday. I don’t think that the hack was an anti-Semitic attack but perhaps it was an anti-Israeli one.
What would a world look like where everyone’s DNA was already public? Would it be all that terrible? I’m not so sure it would be. Maybe the responsible thing would be to buy all the hacked 23andMe data. It’d be surprising if this wasn’t done already.
“Genetics may account for anywhere from 30% to 70% of one’s chance of getting COVID-19,” write academics at Cedar-Sinai. “We don’t know what the specific genetic variants are yet, but we do know there are other genetic variants that confer some sort of susceptibility, which might explain why some people are reinfected multiple times and others seem resistant even if they are family members living together,” says Nicholas Tatonetti, associate professor of computational biomedicine at Cedars-Sinai and senior author of the paper.
This is why we released the covid risk predictor at Traitwell.com. You might wonder what a world looks like where everyone gets genetically sequenced.
Maybe that’s what Novo Nordisk could invest in now that it has a $7B annually in dividends.