The DNA Dilemma: A Test That Could Change Your Life

"The problem with genome sequencing is that everyone could have incidental findings."

Recently in class we read the Time's article "The DNA Dilemma: A Test That Could Change Your Life."  It's very interesting to read articles like these and to hear about new technologies. Most people probably don't know about genome sequencing and how much we can tell from  them. In case your one of those people, genome sequencing gives doctors the ability to read your genes and see "down to every last typo on a chromosome". The article describes the procedure as : "...lab technicians need less than a teaspoon of blood, which is chemically treated to burst open the cells so the DNA inside them can be collected. Those microscopic strands are then fed into sophisticated machines that read each of the 3 million bits of information, called base pairs, that make up a persons genetic alphabet. Computers scan the data for the equivalent of spelling mistakes. Some mistakes cause disease; others don't."  Along with the technology to discover these things comes the tricky questions like : Should doctors tell patients everything they learn, even about the risk of diseases for which there are not yet cures? and Should parents tell their children what might await them as adults?
The article brings up the results of a study where parents were asked if they would want to know everything that's wrong with their child and shockingly, "nearly all the parents said they would want to know about every disease risk, even if there's no treatment available." Unlike the parents, the group of bioethicists, lab directors, geneticists,  pediatricians and genetic counselors felt the opposite. The majority of them believed only results that could be immediately acted on should be shared with families; personally, I would have to agree. If I was a doctor, I wouldn't tell my patient or the parents anything that doesn't affect them now. Part of my beliefs is that I believe in living in the present and worrying about what matters now. The future is a big issue in genome sequencing. Its the doctors actions of whether to tell or not that affect the child's future. For example, the results could show that a child has the possibility of getting a disease as an adult. Most people right away would want to know what disease it is, but its only a possibility. The disease hasn't formed yet and they don't know for sure that it will. Accidental findings like things aren't 100% correct. Tom Murray has an interesting opinion on this, he said : "Great, we can sequence the genome of a fetus. What the hell does it tell us? Much less than most people probably believe. Probabilities are not the same as guarantees." I wouldn't want to know about anything I might get in the future and even as a parent I wouldn't want to know if it was my child. The times article features a story about a woman named Laurie Hunter who had her children sequenced. She talks about waiting for the results of her own genome sequencing when she says "Sometimes what you don't know is easier. I feel completely overwhelmed with information. Now it just feels like a waiting game." The problem with finding out everything is that once you know there's not much you can do, not every disease has clear instructions on how to prevent it. People argue that knowing is overall beneficial because later in life there may be a cure to the disease but you have to keep in mind that things change. The typo may not affect you/your child after all, anything could happen, and if you're told you might loose all your memory at age 50 you'll live your whole life with that in the back of your mind. Imagine telling a child they could develop cancer as a young adult, that child will have that weighing them down. 
In conclusion, we may have more technology than what is good for us. Its great that you could stop a child from getting diabetes but there's always uncharted territory " and patients entering this territory with imperfect maps need to reckon with the odds of getting lost."

Reflections and Resolution 2012

Reflect: I hadn't really thought about the past year and resolutions when New Year's came around. I guess I'm not huge on the thought of having to write 13 instead of 12 on all my papers(that's going to take some getting used to). I started to think back to the beginning of 2012, and it crossed my mind that the year started way before the first day of high school(which for me is my own personal New Years). I realized the start of 2012 was when I was halfway through 8th grade. It seems like ages since I've walked those halls and attended Rogate. Since then, I supposed I've learned more about myself. I've discovered that I'm a huge procrastinator and that I spent (still do) too much time on the computer rather than outside. I also have seen a change in what I like. For instance, for a good chunk of the last half of 2012 I began to get into books again. I've made some new friends, lost some old. Most importantly, I've started to look at the world through different perspectives. Realizing there's more to life than just the small town of Mansfield. I've spent hours thinking about my future and others and the little things in life that make it so much better. Right now your reading my post but somewhere across the world, great things are happening. I've learned this year that bad things happen(obviously) but we should always focus on the good. Like I may be regretting procrastinating right now because its like 10:30 and I still have tons of homework to do but somewhere out there a newborn is crying and at the same time a couple is breaking up  while another is confessing their love. Its important not to get to caught up in the bad because there's always good . 

Rebuff: I'm not one that believes in New Years resolutions. I'm glad for the people who do accomplish there goals but most people just leave empty promises. I think that if you have a goal you want to accomplish you should start right away. I feel as though people wait until the New Year to start and then don't follow through. This reminded me of a quote I read from Looking for Alaska "You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth  thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present." I feel like people hope for changes in their lives because they want to be happier, but they never take the first step. They don't act on it so its just stuck as a daydream rather than an actual resolution. But today, like everyday, is the perfect day to do something great. So, Happy New Years! Now go do something to make this year better than the last. 

The Ethics of Social Media After Death

There are many questions dealing with what should be done (if anything)  with our online identity when we die. And ,of course, there are many different ethical perspectives we could use to attack these questions. Recently, I've read a New York Times article about life after death. I've also seen a TED talk by Adam Ostrow who also questions if our online identity should live on even long after we're dead.

Some of the questions asked are: "What happens to our online personality after we die? Could it...live on?"(-Adam Ostrow) Should it live on? What should happen to our social media accounts and blogs after we die? Should our families get to be in charge of our internet identities?

The should part is where different answers and perspectives of ethics and right vs.wrong comes into play. To answer Ostrow's question, our online personality can live on. He even says later in the video"But today we're creating this incredibly rich digital archive that's going to live in the cloud indefinitely years after were gone,". But the real questions that need to be asked is should we allow them to live on. Personally, I think its important to preserve these online profiles, but others may not want their life to stay on the web forever.

Many people haven't thought about this topic yet. As Rob Walker says "Not many people have given serious thought to these questions. Maybe that’s partly because what we do online still feels somehow novel and ephemeral, although it really shouldn't anymore. Or maybe it’s because pondering mortality is simply a downer." But, I think people should start taking this topic more seriously.  Most people see these questions as silly topics because its just Facebook, but whats on there Facebook is important. I think Facebook profiles should be memorialized ( along with other sites) because our online profiles are the equivalent of the scrapbooks, photo albums, and diaries we never made in person but are online. Going back to what Adam said, ".. we're creating this incredibly rich digital archive that's going to live in the cloud indefinitely years after were gone," By memorializing we are allowing the option of other loved ones to share pictures of the deceased.  The ability to do this is more amazing than it seems. Before websites were created things were hand written and pictures printed instead of stored on phones. And, although they may seem to be more precious, there made out of material, meaning they will fade and be destroyed. The NY Times article comes across this by saying "Something else happened at the same time: the family realized that a big batch of slides in his grandmother’s possession had faded beyond recognition. Hunt was stunned. 'Memories that were precious to me — not just living them, but after that going back and revisiting them — and now it’s gone,' he recalls. 'I thought: I really need to do something.' ” This makes a valid point that the things we put online(unless deleted) will stay in perfect condition forever.

Think about it; if I were to write out this post instead of typing it,eventually it will fade, but maybe many years from now my grandchildren can stumble across this site, in the pile of trash that is my online identity, and read this very post. It is somewhat of a morbid thought to think about death, but with death comes new life and its cool to think that even though I never met my great grandmother, my great-grand-kids can look at my profiles and get an idea of the person I was and hear about my life without me having to be there to tell them.
Questions like "Should our families get to be in charge of our internet identities? Should it live on?" cant be answered with a general yes or no, these types of questions have different answers for every person because everyone has different morals. The deceased should tell what they ant done to their profiles,  like an addition to their will, because the family may have different opinions. The New York times article talks about a situation where a web pioneer lost her digital legacy due to the family wanting people to remember her for her. But its possible she would have wanted different, the article writes “Her work is her legacy,” one admirer, Rogers Cadenhead, wrote to Harpold’s niece, Melissa Krauskopf, an attorney who served as the personal representative of Harpold’s estate. “I have corresponded with several of Leslie’s friends about her sites all disappearing from the Web. For what it is worth, all of us believe that she would not have wanted that to happen.” There are ways for this to be prevented: there are sites Adam talks about that help you decide what you want done with your personal identity.

In conclusion, even though I believe our identities should be able to live on forever in the cloud, not everyone feels the same way. Everyone has different opinions and views on whats right and whats wrong.

Google 20% Project

For my Google 20% Project I plan to learn about the moon.Here is a link to the video I made to pitch my idea to the class. I don't know much about the moon so I plan on learning things from the basics(like the distance from the earth) to discoveries found on the moon to things like eclipses and blue moons. I chose this topic because I'm interested in space. Like every 5 year old, I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up.But my fear of the soul-sucking darkness of space has temporarily slowed down my career of being a successful astrounout and walking on the moon so, instead I will learn about the mysteries of the moon from my computer. I won't need much materials to do this project other than access to the Internet. I plan to take my information and present it in a prezi thats pretty and awesome looking. Some road blocks I may run into are not having enough information. If this does occur, I will expand my research to other things like if the moons on other planets have the same properties as earths moon. Also, I will discover the reasons for the similarities and differences in these properties.

Is Chris Langan successful?

Recently in class we read about Chris Langan and saw him appear in the game show 1 vs. 100. Chris Langan is said to be "the smartest man in America" and he has an IQ of 195. There's no doubting that Chris Langan is smart but he hasn't been able to use his intelligence to become successful.  My personal definition of success is someone who makes an impact on the world and others. In the book the Outliers (where we first heard of Chris Langan) we are learning how different factors affect our success. If success was simply being happy and content with your life, Gladwell would've wrote things like "do what you love and love what you do." But being happy isn't success. I wouldn't say I'm successful because I'm happy when there are people out there earning millions of dollars and making a difference in the world. Those people that change lives are what I call successful. Chris Langan is currently married, raising his farm animals and is happy, but I wouldn't call him successful because he's happy. He had the ability and responsibility of sharing his ideas with the world. But, since Chris didn't go to college, people don't take his ideas seriously. There are plenty of people who haven't gone to college and don't have very good jobs and are considered unsuccessful, but Chris Langan is one of those people and he is considered (by some) successful because he's happy. Why should Chris Langan be called more successful than those people just because he has a higher IQ? I do believe people should be happy with their lives but when it comes down to the point, Chris Langan is no more successful than the average man.

THE KINDERGARTEN DEBATE

After reading Gladwell's opinion and the opinion of Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, I'm stuck in the middle. Depending on your child, delaying kindergarten can be either a good or bad thing. Like Gladwell states, delaying kids from kindergarten make them the older kids in their grade, automatically giving them an accumulative advantage. Those kids may often be perceived  as gifted and above average.  Just like in sports, red-shirting your child puts them a step ahead. On the other hand, the young children of the grade start off with a disadvantage that carries with them onto college and grows in the process. But, like Wang and Aamodt say in "Delay Kindergarten at Your Child's Peril", after awhile, the older kids get bored and start to careless and become less motivated. Meanwhile, the younger kids in the grade do better than the kids the same age in the lower grade because they had more time in school. This is where I'm stuck. These assumptions don't apply to everyone and I  can even see some counterexamples in our class. Unlike what Wang and Aamodt say, the older kids in our G&T class work hard and try to get good grades. In contrast, Gladwell states that the younger kids have a disadvantage and don't do well because they are far behind but in our class the younger kids do just as well as the older kids for the grade. Overall, I don't think there's any specific way to go. Delaying your child isn't necessarily better. I think the best a parent can do is base their decision on the needs of the child because every child is different.

The Truths and Myths of Being Gifted

Being gifted has it’s ups and downs and misconceptions. There are a lot of things people assume about  gifted students , most of them being myths. There’s more to being gifted than what meets the eye.

Being gifted comes with its ups and downs. When you’re gifted certain things are easier for you to learn than others. Learning is quicker and clearer. Also, if you’re in a gifted and talented program, you get new experiences and projects. I still remember some of the cool projects and trips I took in elementary school when I was in a gifted and talented program. But, being gifted has its cons too. When you’re gifted people start to make assumptions and high expectations for you. I’m always expected to be perfect, to get all A’s, to be a role model for others, and to not mak mistakes. Eventually, there’s a lot of pressure and it feels like people are waiting for me to mess up. Another downside is that people make fun of you. People are always saying I‘m in all the “smart kid classes” and make other remarks. Now that I’m older most of my friends know that I’m smart and don’t tease me but I don’t like telling people I’m in G&T because of how they will react and how they’ll expect me to know everything.

There are many myths about Gifted kids.  Some myths according to the National Assosiation for Gifted Children are that gifted students make everyone else in the class smarter by providing a role model or a challenge and that gifted students don’t need help;they’ll do fine on their own. I agree with NAGC that these are myths. The truth is that most students don’t even pay much attention to gifted kids. They think we know too much already so they don’t try to be like us because our expectations are high. The only time people come to me in class is to ask if they can copy my homework, I highly doubt they’d try to be like us or that we have that much of an affect on them. Second, just because a student is gifted or talented doesn’t mean they are gifted at everything. There are classses that I do better in than others. Gifted kids don’t know everything  and need help just like any other student. Another similar myth that goes along with this is that gifted kids are self-directed, they know where they are heading.This isn’t always true. Lastly, another myth given by familyeducation is that all gifted kids are high acheivers; they don’t have to work for grades. This is far from true. I work hard on my school work and if I don’t study for a test I’ll fail just like any other student would.

There are some people, though, who understand the needs of gifted children. For example,  family education states “Gifted kids who do well in school may define success as getting an "A" and failure as any grade less than an "A." By early adolescence they may be unwilling to try anything where they are not certain of guaranteed success.”  When I first read this I was surprised because it was like they read my mind. Ever since 3^rd grade when we started to get letter grades, I was expected to get good grades. “Good grades” meant that I had to get an A and anything less was a disappiontment. Once again, like the words were taken right out of my mouth, family education wrote “Gifted kids are often perfectionistic and idealistic and may equate achievement and grades with self-esteem and self-worth. This can lead to fear of failure and can interfere with their achievement in and out of school.” Whatever I’m doing I always try my best in fear of failing and disappointing. I get even more nervous when I play sports because if I don’t succeed and I make a mistake, I’;m not only letting myself down I’m letting my team down.  The last truth was written by byrdseed and it sums up my thoughts pretty well: “Not only are they dealing with the usual trials of growing up, they are often doing it with an increased awareness of their faults, a frustration with being unable to do everything well, and a world that often doesn’t know what to do with them. Worse, they often lack the emotional tools to accompany their increased awareness.”

In conclusion, there’s more to being gifted than getting good grades. Being gifted comes with high expectations and great amounts of pressure. Based on this post, being gifted doesn’t sound like much fun but it can be. Even though I have a burden on my shoulders, I use the high expectations and set goals for myself and even though I’m pressured I don’t know if I would be getting as good of the grades I do know if I wasn’t pushed to excel. Being gifted comes with its difficulties but I get to see life in a different perspective and I with classes like this I get to learn and experience new and exciting things.