Health NewsHeading into Summer
School’s out and Canada Day is coming up this week. We know that we will probably be all out soaking up the rays. It has been a very long winter. It is a good time to consider our exposure to the sun. According to an Alberta Health Services fact sheet, there are close to 68,000 cases of skin cancer in Canada each year. Additionally, there are 4,500 new melanoma cases, and in 2006 there were 880 deaths from melanoma in Canada.
My Week at Canada-Wide Science Fair 2009
guest blog: Julie Xu – Calgary Youth Science Fair
Julie Xu and her partner Annie Wang won this year’s Genome Alberta Senior Genomics prize at the Calgary Youth Science Fair. Here Dr. Gijs van Rooijen presents Julie and Annie with the award.
My week in Winnipeg was surprising and unforgettable.
Snakes on the Plains
Millions of garter snakes seem to live in the Manitoba Interlake Region. At least that is what it seemed to be when I walked through the Narcisse Snake Dens, a wildlife management area north of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Lucky for me, I met up with Rocky Parker, a PhD student from Oregon State University on the trail. His field studies have brought him here. I was very interested to hear from him how the study of these snakes brings together a wide variety of fields from ecology and physiology to genomics.
All fired up!!
A couple of days ago, my colleague Mike sent me a link to the GenomeWeb Daily News report on the Draft Genome of a Bee Parasite. I got all excited when I read that the team of scientists used pyrosequencing to determine the eight million bases. I started imagining a cascade of fireworks in the fume hood. This important research provides insights into how genes contribute to the parasite’s virulence. Scientists believe this parasite plays a role in the bigger problem of colony collapse disorder. Mike sent me this article as he knew that I had an interest in honey bee genomics and blogged it in the past.
Decoding the Social Networking Genome
I read a piece on Genome Web Daily News yesterday headlined "Ethicists Call for Research on DTC Genomics Social Networking" .
Apparently a paper in the American Journal of Bioethics ( http://bioethics.net/ ) raises questions about some of the problems and issues that come up as more people have direct-to-consumer testing and share the information online. Stanford University Researchers Sandra Lee and LaVera Crawley want to analyze social network use to understand some of the hows and whys of DTC testing and sharing.
In the world of social media, the study is a good idea because social media use in general tends to lack any research rigour applied to it and instead often becomes a world of zealots, raw numbers, and anecdotal evidence. When it comes personal genetic testing issues the study is needed and it may even be overdue.
But if also begs the question of exactly what bioethicists with an interest in DTC have really been doing for the last couple of years and then poses that challenge of what to do with the results from studies of personal genetic testing.
U of M Science Day Activities
Daniel Ramage of Genome Prairie hosted a series of lectures at this year’s Canada-Wide Science Fair (CWSF). The lectures by University of Manitoba faculty who are renowned world experts in their field were part of the U of M Science Day Activities. At this year’s CWSF there were approximately 475 high-level science students from across Canada, along with a guest contingent from Taiwan and Australia. Unfortunately this year, the science fair students from Mexico did not participate out of concern for the H1N1 flu. Coincidentally, one of the lab tours available on the Science Day activities was to the very lab where the H1N1 flu virus was sequenced.
I was writing as fast as I could to make some brief notes. A lot of valuable information was conveyed.
