Tag Archives: bioethics

Google Knows What’s in Your Inbox, But It Shouldn’t Get Your Genome Without Consent

Posted on by

Originally posted in the Timmerman Report

I once had an idea for a science fiction story where everyone was paranoid about their genetic information getting out because of a misguided belief that genes equal destiny and that the burden of privacy is all on the individual. People would wear protective suits and carefully guard against leaving any iota of tissue out in public—not a single follicle or skin flake. All to prevent anyone else—potential employers, rivals, even potential lovers—finding out information about their genes.

I planned the story as a satire, taking our current world where Precision Medicine and cheap genome sequencing and not-quite-as-cheap genome interpretation are real things, and extrapolating to an absurdity. I wanted to highlight the kinds of more realistic challenges we might face as we learn more about our genes and face increasing questions about privacy and access to health care services. Of course, I thought this was completely speculative; I’d just be building a straw man story to make a point. I knew something this extreme would never really happen.

But maybe I was wrong. Continue reading →

The potential for “Found Research” in fecal transplant treatments

Posted on by

All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk.

A few days ago the New York Times ran a nice article discussing a recent test of whether fecal transplants can be done using a pill format delivery system. The research, reported (and free, no less!) in the Journal of the American Medical Association, was peformed by physicians at Massachusetts General Hospital who had formulated human feces in an encapsulated pill format to see if that would be effective as a kind of fecal transplant. Fecal transplants  appear to overcome infections by Clostridium difficile in patients. However, the conventional method for providing a fecal transplant is to deliver a liquid slurry either nasopharyngeally or via an enema-like procedure, neither of which is easily scalable. Also, yuck.

The current work, in which 14 of 20 patients responded to initial treatments using the poop pills, and an additional 4 responded the second time around, provided a proof of concept that a frozen, pill format delivery system may be a workable alternative to the current standard.

But as I was reading this article, I was struck by another thought. Are we missing a great opportunity for research into the interplay between the microbiome and human physiology?

Continue reading →