Genetics’ Rite of Passage
        
            By David Dobbs, 
                Slate
             | 10. 27. 2013
        
                    
                                    
                    
                                                                                                                                    
                                                                            
                              
    
  
  
    
  
          
  
      
    
            If you want a look at a high-profile field dealing with a lot of humbling snags, peer into 
#ASHG2013, the Twitter hashtag for last week’s meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, held in Boston. You will see successes, to be sure: Geneticists are sequencing and analyzing genomes ever faster and more precisely. In the last year alone, the field has quintupled the rate at which it identifies genes for rare diseases. These advances are leading to treatments and cures for 
obscure illnesses that doctors could do nothing about only a few years ago, as well as genetic tests that allow prospective parents to bear healthy children instead of suffering miscarriage after miscarriage.
But many of the tweets—or any frank geneticist—will also tell you stories of struggle and confusion: The current list of cancer-risk genes, the detection of which 
leads some people to have “real organs removed,” likely 
contains many false positives, even as standard diagnostic sequencing techniques are 
missing many disease-causing mutations. There’s a real possibility that the “
majority of cancer predisposition genes in...
 
 
  
 
    
    
  
   
                        
                                                                                
                 
                                                    
                            
                                  
    
  
  
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