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Much swell stuff out of this weekend's SciFoo conference. But probably the coolest thing that I saw was Jonathan Eisen's presentation on the Microbiome. As the genome is to genes, the microbiome is to microbes - the comprehensive catalog of all the microbes in an ecosystem - in Eisen's talk, the human body. As Eisen describes it on his blog:

A clarifying poll from a couple UK organizations I've never heard of - Cancerbackup and Genes Reunited - shows that the overwhelming preponderance of people (in the UK, at least) think that cancer is largely hereditiary/genetic. In fact, this story says, 90 percent of cancers are entirely random. The biggest risk factor for cancer is not family history, as 60 percent of those polled believe, but age.

At SciFoo. If the rules allow, I'll be posting when I can.

  My latest story in Wired is all about the race to develop the ultimate diagnostic tool, a handheld gizmo that will might diagnose infectious disease based on the presence of just a blip of DNA material. It so happens, though, that last week I was in Seattle and visited Microsoft Research to hear about what they're up to in health care. One conversation turned me on to what may be the real ultimate tool in medicine - and there are already 3 billion of them in use around the world. It's the cell phone.

The new issue of Wired has a story I wrote on a new breed of molecular diagnostic tools - small, portable devices that detect telltale segments of DNA, that could be used at the point-of-care (from the doctor's office to a Saharan village) and be a major weapon against infectious disease, from XDR TB (which is why the WHO is interested) to anthrax (which is why the DoD is interested). I focus on Akonni Biosystems, a small startup out of Maryland that's crafting one promising microarray tool based on technology developed at Argonne National Lab. Here's the gist:

A counter-intuitive story in Friday's NYTimes about hospitals that are successfully fighting drug-resistant infections. At the Pittsburgh VA Hospital, cases of drug-resistant infection have dropped 78 percent since 2001, when they instituted certain disease prevention measures.

Missed this last week: a nice report from NPR's Science Friday on genome-wide association studies with some bigshots including Lawrence Brody from the National Human Genome Research Institute. Picking up on the recent reported associations for breast cancer, restless leg syndrome, and so on, they try to explain what to make of these associations. The second half of the program gets into the first genome-assocation study of infectious disease. Researchers from the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology found that certain genetic variants can affect vulnerability to HIV infection (some people who are infected with HIV are asymptomatic, in that their immune system appears to control the virus). In other words, depending on your genes, you can be more vulnerable to certain infectious diseases.

Just heard that Donald Koshland, a biochemist at UC Berkeley, passed away earlier this week at age 87. The former editor of Science magazine, Koshland was an expert in enzymes and an early supporter of genetic engineering. I had the opportunity to hear one of Dr. Koshland's last lectures at Berkeley, and he struck me as a great teacher and innovative thinker (indeed, that lecture inspired a forthcoming feature in Wired magazine). Addressing a room full of usually inattentive undergraduates, Koshland was engaging, insightful, and enthusiastic; at lecture's end, he had a crowd of students around the podium asking him more questions (including me). Here's a fine obituary from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Much in the news about this study in this week's New England Journal of Medicine about obesity being contagious. Two tiny comments:

1) Nice to see that the researchers used retrospective data from the Framingham Heart Study, my favorite study. Framingham is one of the longest ongoing epidemiological studies ever; as the authors note, the study started in 1948, when 5209 citizens of Framingham, Massachusetts, were signed up. The study moved into a second generation of 5124 subjects in 1971, and a third generation of 4095 people in 2002, all direct descendents of the original cohort.

Here's a question: When people agree to donate their body to science, will their genome be part of the deal? And will that make people even less inclined to donate? Note: Google "leave your body to science" and three paid ads come up, including one for LifeLegacy.org, an organization that organizes and encourages whole body donation. Curiously, there's a link to "Testamonials". Uh, how is that possible?