The good gene: “With the mutated gene, people break down triglycerides unusually quickly. And, the investigators find, they also have low levels of LDL cholesterol, which at high levels increases heart disease risk. They have high levels of HDL cholesterol, which is associated with a decreased risk of heart disease. And they appear to have arteries relatively clear of plaque.”
The bad gene: “This is among the strongest human evidence we have that APOC3 is bad…. People with diabetes have high levels of APOC3, high levels of triglycerides and an increased risk of heart disease.”
Stephen Pinker, the prominent psychologist and author, is one of the volunteers in the Personal Genome Project, a study at Harvard University Medical School. [link]
The goal of the project, which hopes to expand to 100,000 participants, is to speed medical research by dispensing with the elaborate precautions traditionally taken to protect the privacy of human subjects….
In exchange for the decoding of their DNA, participants agree to make it available to all – along with photographs, their disease histories, allergies, medications, ethnic backgrounds and a trove of other traits, called phenotypes, from food preferences to television viewing habits….
"There are costs to keeping things secret," said Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. "There's a much better chance that you will learn something useful if you are not trying to hide it."
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