PLoS Genetics, New Open-Access Journal
As you may have read in the Genetics and Public Health Blog disclosure, I am not currently affiliated with any academic institution, government agency, NGO, or pharmaceutical/biotech company. This sometimes makes it difficult to evaluate recent news because I don’t have access to the complete original scientific publications. I’m able to search millions of citations from medical and science journals using PubMed, but I am usually limited to the the abstracts.
Public Library of Science journals, however, are completely free and open-access. Their newest journal, PLoS Genetics, looks promising although it probably won’t be as useful for the general, non-scientist public. But, never fear, I am here and will point you to whatever information I think is applicable to your everyday life.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of PLoS Genetics will be the reviews and interviews that “summarize a particularly interesting, hot, or forward-looking aspect of genetics and genomics research, and include the authors’ unique perspective on it.” This month’s interview is of Neil Risch, Professor of Human Genetics and Director of the Center for Human Genetics at the University of California, San Francisco, California, United States.
Neil Risch’s take on how similar, yet how different we are genetically from one another:
I have a strong problem with the way politicians use this information. [Former President] Clinton, for example, when the first draft of the human genome sequence came out, made a statement about how all people in the world, in terms of their genetic makeup, are 99.9% the same. His intent–to reduce conflict among peoples–is noble. People on the left, anthropologists and sociologists, do the same thing. They use the 99.9% figure as an argument for social equality. But the truth is that people do differ by that remaining 0.1% and that people do cluster according to their ancestry. The problem is that others could use that information to create division.
And how sex and age can be just as difficult to define in genetic terms as race:
You’ll like this. In a recent study, when we looked at the correlation between genetic structure [based on microsatellite markers] versus self-description, we found 99.9% concordance between the two. We actually had a higher discordance rate between self-reported sex and markers on the X chromosome! So you could argue that sex is also a problematic category. And there are differences between sex and gender; self-identification may not be correlated with biology perfectly. And there is sexism. And you can talk about age the same way. A person’s chronological age does not correspond perfectly with his biological age for a variety of reasons, both inherited and non-inherited. Perhaps just using someone’s actual birth year is not a very good way of measuring age. Does that mean we should throw it out? No. Also, there is ageism–prejudice related to age in our society. A lot of these arguments, which have a political or social aspect to them, can be made about all categories, not just the race/ethnicity one.
Other PLoS journals that may be of interest - PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine.
Pointer from Gene Expression.
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POSTED IN: General Genetics and Health
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