One step closer to national health insurance.

A significant advance towards finding the Nasty Piece of Work gene?

Dr. Watson has said he will make his entire genome available for researchers to study, with the single exception of his apolipoprotein E gene, the status of which he does not wish to know because it predisposes a person toward Alzheimer’s disease.

won't they be able to guess via LD and hapmap?

This is most certainly a landmark event in the history of biotechnology!

I, of course, welcome this! Such an advance is necessary for the fruition of the new eugenics! I am especially excited with embryo selection as described by Richard Lynn in Eugenics.

I am quite disappointed with one aspect of embryo selection; it is only able to increase intelligence by 2/3 - 1 standard deviation unit per generation. This is way too small as it will be unable to close the black-white intelligence gap. Unfortunately, it would take many generations to extricate humanity from the morass of low intelligence. I am curious, though, I think one hundred embryos are required for this meager boost, but does anyone have references to the IVF literature that argues it is possible to formulate a way to make a women ovulate about a hundred eggs to make Lynn's proposal feasible?

off-topic:

BBC made a news story about ancestrality of Brazil's most famous negros: artists, racial activists, etc.

Some of them got angry (and most of them got disappointed) to know that they are not "100% Negro" (a controversial and common t-shirt motif among Brazilians).

Others could not believe that they are more European than African.

Check the google translation site in:
http://translate.google.com/ tran...Flanguage_tools

The original page is at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/portuguese/ ...projetocg.shtml

Just to check if you can guess by looking at someone's face what % they have on African, European or Amerindian ancestrality.

won't they be able to guess via LD and hapmap?

just looked in hapmap, and there's not a whole lot of LD around APOE, and only one genotyped SNP.