from Mike
I wanted to reflect on two noteworthy science stories from the past couple of weeks.
First, a study in JAMA found that adjustable gastric banding (essentially having surgery to put a tight belt around your stomach) decreased Type II diabetes in obese patients more than diet and exercise. The take home message that is being sold by the media to the American public is that gastric banding is better than living a healthy lifestyle. This is a tough story to swallow. While the data are convincing, they most certainly do not apply to all individuals (the study only consisted of 60 people). Moreover, I just think that this is the wrong message to be sending to the public. How is it that we, particularly in the US, are always looking for a quick medical fix to our problems? While there are always special cases, it comes across that we do not have to be accountable for how we treat our bodies and that the medical community will figure out how to solve our problems.
Second, The J. Craig Venter Institute reported in the journal of Science that they have completed building the first bacterial synthetic genome. In a demonstration of sheer brute force, they were able to stitch together the genome of a 582,000 base genome (the human genome has more than 3.2 billion bases). This story is so notable because it has numerous potential implications for creating synthetic life (inserting a synthetic genome into a host organism and getting it to 'boot up') for useful purposes (e.g. ethanol production). Despite the potential implications, all they have shown so far, as my current advisor puts it, is that “ they can buy a bunch of DNA and put it together”. The work supposedly cost upwards of 10 million dollars. Incredible. Even though this was extremely expensive, I do appreciate the significance of a landmark report that pushes the frontiers of the field.
