Here Is a Human Being Read Online Free

boring.” 31
    Nor was SNPedia trying to turn a profit like the personal genomics companies. It has been free and open-source from the beginning. It does not perform experiments and it does not offer its own interpretations. It simply mines the literature and reports conclusions drawn by others.
    After Marco Island, I got my Affy500 SNP data—five hundred thousand markers—from George and sent it on to Mike. All three of us were gung ho, perhaps a little too much so. George was keen to send it to me because the PGP was still trying to figure out the interpretation part of the equation and he thought maybe I could do some of the legwork to see what was out there. Mike was keen to get his paws on PGP data and anything else people were willing to share—more data points for SNPedia could only help the site to grow and be taken more seriously. And I was jazzed because I would finally get a glimpse of my own genome. Mostly jazzed anyway:
    ———Original Message———
    From: Misha Angrist
    To: cariaso
    Sent: Saturday, March 1, 2008 7:23:57 PM
    Subject: Fw: Drum roll please
    Hi Mike:
    If you’re still willing to run a report, here are my SNP data. You are free to add me to the roster of public genomes, though, I don’t know, maybe I should take a day or two to look the data over first? I can’t imagine redacting anything. Anyway, maybe the thing to do is to run the report and we can talk. Would there be anything to gain by sending it to Scheidecker or anyone else? I guess if they care they can get it from SNPedia.
    Thanks again,
    Misha
    From: cariaso
    To: Misha Angrist
    Sent: Saturday, March 1, 2008 8:13 PM
    Subject: Fw: Drum roll please
    ok, the report is being generated. I’ll probably send it to you later this evening. You can review it before taking any action on the rest of this email. If you decide you’d like to share it I have to point out. I have not shared my report with anyone, so I can relate to your concerns. But if you’re having second thoughts about sharing your SNPedia data, you should know you’re also one of the PGP-10. It’s not a question of if this will come out, only when.
    That night Ann and I went out to a benefit dinner. We were going through a rough patch. I was depressed, emotional, and on edge. I was living inside my head, as is my wont, and at that time it felt like an especially ugly place to be. I was feeling paranoid, constantly trying to parse what people said to me, taking every perceived negative, no matter how slight, to heart, and convinced that anything positive that came my way couldn’t possibly be sincere. There’s an old Loudon Wainwright III song that goes, “I wonder why you love me, baby/I hardly love myself at all.” 32 This was my theme song. I was sleeping badly. I was angry at Ann, angry at my kids, angry at my therapist, and most of all, furious with myself for being forty-three years old and such a miserable fuckup. Self-loathing was my specialty. As we got out of the car, I told Ann I would be the fourth public genome on SNPedia. She rolled her eyes and asked why. Why did I always have to act so impulsively? I said I thought we had gone over this: that I would be public, that this would be about demystifying DNA for everyone, that we were not our genomes. She didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “I don’t like how we’ve left it,” I said of our discussion. “Sometimes you won’t,” she said.
    When we got home I was still in a cantankerous mood; Ann fled to bed. I checked my email and saw that Mike had run my Promethease * report. With some trepidation I opened the file. As I scrolled through it, I knew I should be clinical, objective. I had been a genetic counselor, for God’s sake. I knew enough about statistics to know that having a risk ratio go from 1 to 1.6 or even 2 meant my absolute risk had only risen from, say, 1 in 10,000 to 2 in 10,000. But still, it was unsettling. And what about conditions where there were multiple alleles in multiple