We all know how Abraham Lincoln died in 1865, but what about the way he lived during the final years of his life?  Just maybe the 16th president suffered from a rare genetic disorder called multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2B.

Dr. John Sotos–author of ‘The Physical Lincoln‘ and a consultant on the TV series ‘House‘–would like to run DNA analysis of the president’s blood.  He believes Lincoln was already dying, before the assassination, from cancer.

Why such speculation?  (more…)

According to the NYTimes:

The era of personal genomic medicine may have to wait. The genetic analysis of common disease is turning out to be a lot more complex than expected.

With a quote from my colleague David Goldstein:

“With only a few exceptions, what the genomics companies are doing right now is recreational genomics,” Dr. Goldstein said in an interview. “The information has little or in many cases no clinical relevance.”

He’s referring to two real BIG challenges of linking genes to human diseases:

1. Lots of genes are probably responsible for many of the diseases (e.g. 1,000 genes for schizophrenia)
2. Disease alleles are often quite rare.  Association studies (that have become the bread and butter of human disease genetics) have trouble detecting such rare alleles.

Goldstein has a point.  By sequencing whole genomes of carefully selected individuals, we’ll get more bang for our buck (meaning many millions of dollars annually).  However, the folks over at DeCODE–who may have the most to lose if he’s right–argue that more complex phenomena (i.e. epigenetics) may be responsible for many human diseases. And regardless, they’re likely to march ahead even if they might be chasing genomic windmills.