50/50: Choice About Huntington's Disease on Film

Ok why not. An all YouTube day. We roll like that.

This one is a preview of a documentary from filmmakers Ted Bogosian, Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, with the preview hosted by Danny DeVito; the film, 50/50, explores the dilemma that a carrier of Huntington's Disease faces when she realizes that she has a 50/50 chance of passing the devastating illness to her offspring. [Hat tip to someone named Teddy Bogosian, who emailed us from ClickStar about this "film about bioethics"]

German Workplace Genetic Testing

The Germans are well on the way to creating the most comprehensive workplace genetic testing regulations, according to a report in Der Spiegel. Ethics is very much involved in the debate, with a likely outcome a total ban.

Nanotech Redux: Geneballs and Drive Through Genetic Testing

Wired has a great piece this month on the role of tiny particles of silica, which provide a kind of barcode readout of thousands of genetic tests at once. The technology is not yet ready for clinical testing, but revolutionary for computational clinical genomics. It will be interesting to see which if any of the new ELSI core grant centers would be looking at that. Anybody know (please comment)?