The Broad Institute, which was created in 2003, aspires to construct new powerful tools for genomic medicine. It is a collaborative project between MIT and Harvard, and the Institute’s researchers are involved in the Dog Genome Sequencing Project. Here is a brief description of that project from their website:

The genome of the domesticated dog, a close evolutionary relation to human, is a powerful new tool for understanding the human genome. Comparison of the dog with human and other mammals reveals key information about the structure and evolution of genes and genomes. The unique breeding history of dogs, with their extraordinary behavioral and physical diversity, offers the opportunity to find important genes underlying diseases shared between dogs and humans, such as cancer, diabetes and epilepsy.

The latest issue of Nature has an interesting News item on the Institute’s research entitled “Dogs help sniff out genes”. Here is a brief excerpt:

Man’s best friend is becoming the geneticist’s too. Researchers have made good on the dog genome’s promise: a quick-and-dirty way to find the genes responsible for physical traits using just a couple of dozen pooches and a gene chip.

Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, of the Broad Institute of Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and her colleagues have devised a method of locating the genes responsible for specific traits that requires as few as 10 animals with the feature and 10 without — as long as they are all the same breed. The team has also identified the genes that give the Rhodesian ridgeback breed its ridge but additionally predispose the dogs to a crippling developmental disease called dermoid sinus. Such feats were predicted when Lindblad-Toh’s team mapped the dog genome but this is the first time they have been achieved.

….Dogs lacking the duplication of genes are unridged; those with one copy have a normal ridge; but having two copies also carries an 80% risk of dermoid sinus. The mechanism paves the way for geneticists to use the dog genome to help identify genes involved in disorders such as diabetes that also affect humans.

Cheers,
Colin

I’m still working on the Singularity Summit writeups…two more installments in that series, and then it will be finished. Between working on that series, writing my recent Madeleine L’Engle memorial piece, and trying to parse all this stuff on superlativity, keeping up with the usual civil-rights/neurodiversity pages I read, and wondering what to say next about healthy life extension (oh yeah, and the day job, which has been rather intense lately), I think it’s safe to say that my bandwidth is fairly saturated.

Briefly, though, for the moment I’ll say that I’ve been thinking a lot (again) about the “proper” way to approach discussing the subject of healthy life extension. Sometimes the approach is difficult because I never really know what “knee-jerk” reactions I’m going to end up getting from people. My desire to promote longevity medicine is based on the very simple reason that a person can only have experiences, and be happy, as long as they are alive.

I realize that as biological organisms we are all vulnerable (and always will be vulnerable) to potentially being smacked down at any time (by disease, by a bus, by an errant meteorite…), but medicine has always been about responding to this vulnerability as best we can. Longevity medicine is, fundamentally, simply an extension of general medicine that includes the elderly within the sphere of “lives worth saving”.