Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
China Daily is reporting that the Chinese police are starting to put together a national DNA database to help combat child trafficking and help lost children; 107,000 kids and 35,000 from anxious parents. The database is composed of blood samples taken by the police from missing children’s parents, children suspected of having been abducted or [...]
http://www.newsweek.com/id/225492/page/1 The Power of Two: http://www.newsweek.com/id/225098 Photo gallery of the kids, etc. The Intro picture is particularly stunning. This has been in the works since spring. Newsweek came in with a Pulitzer-award winning photographer who was fresh from covering the White House and Obama and Bush to do the shots. The interviews mostly were around [...]
Child stealing and smuggling rings in China, including a bust in the twins’ home town. Shanghai Daily _ 上海日报 — En.. (PDF. 28 k – pdf’d version of story)
Actually, to clarify…I don’t *have* twins, I have half of the set. Story is about a woman who had fraternal twins with two different dads (her husband and a seekrit boyfriend) – which means (1) She Do Get Around Don’t She, (2) and she’s fertile as a turtle (since she’s now pregnant again). I will [...]
I despair at the idea of people doing this sort of madness; sex-selective abortions and fetal selection by immigrant families in America because – well, their culture prizes boys over girls. Part of cultural selection norms many hundreds of years old that prize boys over girls as breadwinners in older age for you, and so [...]
Having a much less immediately lethal form of leukemia and being an adoptive dad of a Chinese girl, this story hits home: a kid in Ohio adopted from China has a nasty version of leukemia, and is in desperate need of a bone-marrow transplant. There’s this little problem, however, about finding a genetic match from [...]
NYT: The cost of determining a person’s complete genetic blueprint is about to plummet again — to $5,000. That is the price that a start-up company called Complete Genomics says it will start charging next year for determining the sequence of the genetic code that makes up the DNA in one set of human chromosomes. [...]
First off, there’s a link here to a translation of the latest SPOORLOOS and a link to the actual show on-line. As noted previously, my Dutch is nonexistent, and I (and others) had asked her to help out on a translation of the show about the reunion of a Chinese adoptee in the Netherlands with [...]
I got this comment on the LJ branch of the site yesterday: I just ran across this blog entry and I was wondering (although it’s none of my business, of course) whether you guys have given any thought to searching for Meredith’s birth family, or if you’re going to let the girls decide when they’re [...]
For all of you guys out there who think that DNA analysis is a closed, perfected book, and the FBI are the whiz-bangs at it, I got news for you – wrong on both counts. 85% of all samples taken since 9/11 have yet to be processed. And it’s not likely to get better soon.
wapo: Among the ethics questions raised by the prospect of people posting their genomes is whether they have an obligation to kin who may not want their familial patterns put on display. Asked if he had consulted his living parent, his three siblings or his 30-year-old son before posting his genome, Venter said: “I’ve not [...]
Right after I got back from DC in mid-January, I posted the following: And there’s something surprising I can’t talk about going on; very complicated, very very big and very important that we’re looking into. Very good news if true. It’s had us tied in knots thinking about it, and it’ll be a little while before we can openly [...]