Talk

Stalking Strangers’ DNA to Fill in the Family Tree: How far would you go to find out about distant relatives and common ancestry with strangers? Many of the situations described here seem a little, shall we say, outside the bounds of propriety and into the realm of CSI. Have we all been watching too much crime TV?

ACS Recommends Regular Breast MRIs for Women at High-Risk for Breast Cancer: Listen to Elizabeth Morris from Memorial Sloan Kettering discuss the new guidelines on NPR’s “Science Friday with Ira Flato“. Women should consider annual MRIs if they’ve got a strong family history, if they’re a BRCA mutation carrier, if they’ve had chest radiation treatments for conditions such as Hodgkin’s Disease. As a caller on this program points out, recommendations are inevitably two steps ahead of the medical establishment and insurance coverage. If you’re interested in pursuing MRIs, head to the big cities and major medical centers for radiologists who can perform and accurately read these MRIs. Now, to call my doc for a referral for an MRI…. (Update: Check out Emily DeVoto’s Antidote for counterspin on these recs.)

Chimeras: A New Kind of Twin: For the first time, researchers have identified twins that are identical on their mother’s side (same egg), but share only half of their father’s DNA (different sperm). Dr. Vivienne Souter, lead investigator in the journal article reporting this finding, says that while the term semi-identical provides some idea of how the twinning occurred, it is “an oversimplification.” I’ll bet! But I can’t wait to hear more.

Technorati Tags: ancestry, nonpaternal events, dna testing, family tree, genealogy, medical guidelines, american cancer society, breast cancer, MRIs, screening, high risk, genetic chimera, twins, genetics, intersex, hermaphrodite

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Ancestry, Breast Cancer, What We're Talking About. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.