The Mount Sinai Health System began an effort this week to build a vast database of patient genetic information that can be studied by researchers — and by a large pharmaceutical company.
The goal is to search for treatments for illnesses ranging from schizophrenia to kidney disease, but the effort to gather genetic information for many patients, collected during routine blood draws, could also raise privacy concerns.
The data will be rendered anonymous, and Mount Sinai said it had no intention of sharing it with anyone other than researchers. But consumer or genealogical databases full of genetic information, such as Ancestry.com and GEDmatch, have been used by detectives searching for genetic clues that might help them solve old crimes.
Vast sets of genetic sequences can unlock new insights into many diseases and also pave the way for new treatments, researchers at Mount Sinai say. But the only way to compile those research databases is to first convince huge numbers of people to agree to have their genomes sequenced.
Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...
By Elizabeth Dwoskin and Zoeann Murphy, The Washington Post | 10.01.2025
Aggregated News
MEXICO CITY — When she walked into an IVF clinic in June, Alin Quintana knew it would be the last time she would try to conceive a child. She had prepared herself spiritually and mentally for the visit: She had traveled to a nearby...
Scientists have created human eggs containing genes from adult skin cells, a step that someday could help women who are infertile or gay couples have babies with their own genes but would also raise difficult ethical, social and legal issues...
The Center for Genetics and Society is fiscally sponsored by Tides Center, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
Please visit www.tides.org/state-nonprofit-disclosures for additional information.
