Projo Subterranean Homepage News

It's a free Blogger blog (owned by Google) called too. Sergei Brin, co-founder and President of Technology at Google, explains the name in an inaugural post :

While Google is a play on googol, too is a play on the much smaller number - two. It also means "in addition", as this blog reflects my life outside of work.

His second post, LRRK2, is devoted to a discussion of a variant of the gene LRRK2, associated in some ethnic groups with Parkinson's disease. He and his mom both have the variant, discovered because Brin's wife, Anne Wojcicki, is a cofounder of DNA startup 23andMe, and the family's genes have been scanned.

Related: Geneticist: Can't find nuthin', by Steve Sailer, can't be summed up easily. The idea is that knowing about your genes isn't going to help you much:

David B. Goldstein of Duke University, a leading young population geneticist known partly for his research into the genetic roots of Jewish ancestry, says the effort to nail down the genetics of most common diseases is not working. "There is absolutely no question," he said, "that for the whole hope of personalized medicine, the news has been just about as bleak as it could be."

...The reason for this disappointing outcome, in his view, is that natural selection has been far more efficient than many researchers expected at screening out disease-causing variants. The common disease/common variant idea is largely wrong. What has happened is that a multitude of rare variants lie at the root of most common diseases, being rigorously pruned away as soon as any starts to become widespread.

Sailer notes,

This is what Greg Cochran predicted back in the 1990s would be found. Contrary to the impression you'd get from reading the newspaper... your genes didn't evolve to kill you. They evolved to help you survive and reproduce. (Here's the February 1999 cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, "A New Germ Theory," on Cochran and his research partner Paul Ewald.) The Cochran-Ewald theory predicts that germs -- bacteria and viruses -- will be found to be the causes of many major diseases.

Interesting stuff.

(The Sailer link is via Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom)