Transcript Chapter 5

Sidebar
• Early on, some Human Genome Project
researchers insisted that only a single
person needed to be sequenced as a
template for all others
Question: With respect to this
idea, where do you stand?
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A. Strongly agree
B. Agree
C. Not sure
D. Disagree
E. Strongly disagree
Some Context
• Humans share over 99% of their genes in
common
• All people are pretty much the same
• Avoids the bug-a-boo of race seen in
Eugenics movements
• Dr. Robert Swartz (Tufts University), “Race
is a social construct not a scientific
classification.”
More Context
• Humans share 98.4% of our genes with
chimpanzees and almost two-thirds of our
genes with drosophila fruit flies
Even More Context
• Dr. M. Anne Spence, University of California,
Irvine; on HGP’s ethics committee
• Reported that there was a widely shared feeling
that gender ought not to matter and should be
ignored in initial sequencing
• Most drug research carried out on white, middleaged men
• People, especially women, often have radically
different responses to the same medicines
Question: With respect to this
idea, where do you stand now?
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A. Strongly agree
B. Agree
C. Not sure
D. Disagree
E. Strongly disagree
The Devil’s in the Details
• Yes, humans are very similar to each other (99%)
• Highly significant small differences, though
• Dr. Neil Risch (Lamond Distinguished Professor
and director of the Institute for Human Genetics at
University of California, San Francisco): “What
we are going to find is precisely that the other
percent plays a role in determining why one
person gets schizophrenia or diabetes while
another doesn’t, why one person responds well to
a drug while another can’t tolerate it.”