What a week for Americans . . . What a week for genomics!
The Supreme Court rulings that Americans can keep their Obamacare and can all get married - no matter what state they live in - added the final good news to a week of genomics festivities around the country.
But it's not all positive news this week. The New York Times featured a diagnostics company under review by Medicare for fraud. Allegedly, the New Orleans based Renaissance Rx has been paying doctors to sign up patients for a huge trial of genomic based tests, even when the patients didn't qualify.

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Art Caplan is a prodigious writer on the topic of medical ethics. How prodigious? How about thirty-two books and over 700 peer reviewed papers on ethical conundrums ranging from organ donation to end of life care.

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The international BIO convention is all about seduction.  All fifty states sent representatives to Philly this week to make the case that their state was the best for biotech. Seventy countries were there touting their awesome awesomeness.  
Does all this seduction really work?
A new class of drugs for cardiovascular disease was reviewed recently at the FDA.  Will they become blockbusters like Pfizer’s Lipitor?

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Before Bobby Sebra became the Director of Technology Development at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt Sinai in New York he worked at Pacific Biosciences, helping to develop their single molecule, long read (SMRT) sequencing technology.

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It’s a week of finding out again what we already knew. First that a nobel laureate can also be a total ***hole. And second that creative people really are crazy.

It’s also been a week for going into the future. This week Team Mendelspod attended IndieBio’s Demo Day. Twelve, mostly very young, founder/geeks pitched their new ideas for making the world a better place to a room of investors in downtown San Francisco. We saw some amazing technology, but the real question seems to be, how will they sell these new synthetic biology products?!?.

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Gene and Tonic for June 5, 2015
What does genomics have to do with a hippie rock music event?  A few things.  Find out in today’s humorous preview of the Festival of Genomics, happening later this month in Boston.  
Yes, there are the sports genes everyone knows about.  But what about those less studied that might affect your career in sports?  Do you know what is written on the sports page of your genome?
And what has Ben Carson considering brain surgery?  Tune in to this week’s wrap of genomics news - it’s another Gene and Tonic from Mendelspod.

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Jeremy Koenig is a molecular biologist and an athlete. His interest in both led him to found a new direct-to-consumer genetic testing company called Athletigen.

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If you haven’t already, check out the inaugural Festival of Genomics being held in Boston later this month.

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Gene and Tonic: May 29, 2015
Did you hear?  The Age of Genomics has come to an end.  
According to science journalist, David Dobbs, after 110 years of studying genomics, we have come up with almost nothing to improve human health, or as Dobbs put it so elegantly, we ain't got  "diddly-squat."  
What will all of our geneticist friends do?  They don't want to be known as "diddlly-squaticists."

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By 2050, there will be 9 billion people on the planet. What will they eat?
This is the question that led Rod Wing, Director of the Arizona Genomics Institute, into the field of plant genomics. What has been accomplished so far in the mission to come up with some super green crops?  And how does Rod see anti-GMO sentiment and the recent trend toward gluten free diets factoring in?

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