Medical advance coming
Whole genome sequencing, reading all your DNA, is entering the local doctor’s office.
If you are ever in the situation where you get this medical advice: “We need to wait and see what develops,” it is time for WGS.
It’s not a medical standard of care yet, but it is coming. I know of its use clinically locally.
I have been following WGS sequencing for several years while advocating for newborn screening adoption of WGS and advocating WGS use in rare disease analysis.
The price for WGS has dropped dramatically. It is now $1,000 or less for everything needed for initial medical clinical use, including a report giving variant — which means DNA changes from a known standard whole genome — classifications as “pathogenic,” “likely pathogenic,” “uncertain significance,” “likely benign” and “benign” for doctor’s use. Insurance is now more likely to cover it, also.
The time required for getting results from labs, with associated reports, is decreasing as use of artificial intelligence in the analysis process has increased. When needed rapidly, WGS results can be obtained in days, but at a higher cost.
This is most needed, and best developed, in newborn intensive care diagnosis.
We do not know everything about all variants, but our knowledge dramatically increases daily. This added information is rapidly assimilated, with vetting, to databases used for classifying variants in reports supplied to doctors.
Here is a limited, simplified presentation of WGS. The link below is to a recent online seminar about the clinical importance of WGS:
https://www.youtube.com/atch?v=UqD7F1Mp30M
Eric K. Peterson
Lewiston
What would Church do?
“WWFCD?” should be the question before us.
That is, “What would Frank Church Do?” Or Otis Pike for that matter.
In the 1970s, these legislators headed, respectively, the Senate and House committees investigating spying on Americans by the intelligence agencies of their own government.
The multipart Senate report can be found here:
https://archive.org/details/ChurchCommittee/Church%20Committee%20Book%20I%20-%20Foreign%20and%20Military%20Intelligence/
The House report is here:
https://ia600602.us.archive.org/29/items/PikeCommitteeReportFull/Pike-Committee-Report-Full-ourhiddenhistory_dot_org.pdf
The suppressed and, thus, lesser-known House report notes the CIA’s insensitivity to planted news stories deceiving Americans and the FBI justifying its COINTELPRO’s abuses as “dictated by the mood of the times.”
Sound familiar?
Today, journalist Matt Taibbi has been covering two new iterations of “anti-Americans” federal intelligence operations.
One is intelligence gathering by the FBI without a criminal predicate (act or plot) present — directly violating the rules put in place post Church-Pike.
Listen to Taibbi’s “The FBI’s Transformation, from National Police to Domestic Spy Agency”:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/listen-to-this-article-the-fbis-transformation
The other concern is our intelligence agencies directing social media companies to suppress information and those posting said information. In this matter Taibbi is just one of the reporters to whom Elon Musk opened the “Twitter Files.”
For more on these files’ significance, please read these articles from two reliably left-leaning sources.
l The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/01/the-twitter-files-should-disturb-liberal-critics-of-elon-musk-and-heres-why
l Jacobin magazine:
https://jacobin.com/2022/12/twitter-files-censorship-content-moderation-intelligence-agencies-surveillance
And, after reading, ask yourself, “WWFCD?”
Thomas A. Hennigan
Asotin
