Let’s take a break from the US and head over to the UK, home of the world’s largest single disease medical research charity.
Cancer Research UK (CRUK) raises five hundred million pounds a year for research and drug discovery into any and all of the two hundred plus types of cancer. The charity is extremely well integrated into U.K. culture, and uniquely English in that the donations are mostly small and come from all corners of society. A third of CRUK’s funding comes from donations averaging £10 or less.

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Are you lactose tolerant? If you’re of Northern European ancestry this is because of a stretch of DNA in a gene enhancer that developed some 9,000 years ago. That's the same time Northern Europeans began domesticating cattle for milk. If you’re of African ancestry, you may have one of three mutations which appeared independently of the European mutation--and of each other--about 6,000 years ago, again when dairying began.

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Today’s show was recorded on Halloween, which now feels so yesterday. Forgive us for some spookiness.

What doesn’t feel so yesterday is the launch this past month of Helix, a company spun out of Illumina that aims to add exomes to the lineup of direct-to-consumer testing. Nathan points out their model for delivering data incrementally through various apps. Laura questions how Helix will vet the apps.

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There’s a basic assumption in our field today that has been around for some time. We think of medicine as on a direct and even continuum with science. That discoveries in genomics, for example, will lead directly to breakthroughs in medicine. But the breakthroughs on the medical side have been much more rare to date than those coming from the study of biology and genomics.

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As we get closer to the election and the end of 2016, the debate over LDT regulation has gone quiet. At this time last year, there was one hearing after another, first in the Senate, then in the House. The FDA’s Jeffrey Shuren was called before congress and drilled over the nuances of the guidance as well as asked when it would be released. He said, in the first half of 2016.

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A couple months back, we reported on a study showing that genetic tests for an inherited heart disorder were more likely to come back with false positive results for black Americans than for whites. The study provoked many in our industry to urge scientists to incorporate more ethnic diversity in their studies. So far, biology has been too Eurocentric—the databases are implicitly racist, they argue.

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There were many headlines this past week heralding the first three parent baby to be born. But in fact, as our commentators point out in today’s look back on last month’s genomics news, three parent babies have been around for some time. So why are couples going to Mexico for mitochondrial transfer today? Why is it not legal in the U.S.?

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There is tons of life science journalism. Our coffee tables and inboxes fill up each week with that quarterly or that daily. We sift through headlines and product advertisements to assess what’s going on in our industry. It’s our job to know. In this age of several-times-per-day newsletters and 24 hrs a day Twitter, we catch what we can.

And occasionally, we come across a carefully written piece or a well done interview, and we take a moment to realize with some awe the history that is being made in our industry.

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Most of the time, when we talk about personalized medicine, it’s not that personalized. What we’re really talking about is population-based medicine. However, there is a growing number of clinical/research groups around the world, including the folks at the Finnish Institute for Molecular Medicine (FIMM) who are combining an older method of functional profiling with new molecular profiling to come up with what the Fins call 'Individualized Systems Medicine.'

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The history of science is also a history of toolmaking. And nowhere is this more true than in modern biology. New instruments in the lab allow biologists additional modes of discovery, new levels of quantification, and the opportunity to pursue new and old questions with more data.

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