Is Delta-FosB the Obama Gene?

The Atlantic featured a captivating fantasy in November about a scenario to assassinate the U.S. president in 2016 by using a bioweapon specifically tailored to his genetic makeup?a virus that targeted the genetic makeup of the commander in chief and no one else.

A great plot for a Hollywood thriller. But will we really see four years from now an engineered pathogen that could home in on just one? person?s DNA, a lethal microbe that could be transmitted from person to person by a sneeze?

The authors, including ?genomic futurist? Andrew Hessel and cybercrime expert Marc Goodman, both faculty at Ray Kurzweil?s Singularity University, acknowledge that the plausibility of a hit on the president by the time of the next election might be a tad ambitious.

A personal gene bomb monogrammed for Barack Obama is still beyond the technical acumen of the best genetic engineers. But there is one good use beyond? cloaks and daggers to which the president?s genes might eventually be put. As Obama begins his second term next week, he has begun to contemplate his historical legacy. For his third act?that is, once he leaves office?he might consider extending that legacy further by undertaking? a whole genome scan.

Obama?s genome, as much as that of anyone alive, might help a bit in the long-running search for genes associated with emotional and psychological resilience. Anyone who runs for president and gets the nomination has to display a measure of mental toughness, and so might carry a set of such genes. Romney was a toughie too?recall the first debate?but he was also to the manner born, doing what was expected for someone of his breeding. Obama is different. As a child, no one was handicapping ?Barry? as presidential material,? the guy who put in his high school yearbook a thank you to his pot dealer?and who emerged from a childhood (absent father and sometimes mother) that might have left others with more than just transient trauma. From the standpoint of human resilience studies, Obama is an extraordinary specimen.

The genetic analysis might, for instance, look at Obama?s Delta-FosB, 5-HTT or a slew of other genes.? Particular versions of each are purported to provide protection against life?s stressors?in other words, they?re? on various lists of possible resilience genes.? Behavioral genetics? has always had to confront conflicting findings in which one study finds a hint of an effect for a behavior like psychological resilience, whereas the next one finds nothing. An Obama gene test might furnish one of the strongest data points gathered to date. Of course, most statisticians would be duly unimpressed. Even a presidential genome is just one data point,? an ?n? of one, as they would say. But in a field where replication of results always remain elusive, an Obama gene scan might be as good as it gets right now in the search for the biological underpinnings that let some people roll with the hardest of punches.

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this is an area that has typically sucked light, but

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Source: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

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The FDA approved 39 drugs in 2012 and it?s more accustomed to an annual tally of? 20 or 30. The much-heralded era of personalized medicine?tailoring a drug to a person?s genetic makeup?is still in its infancy?a measure of how far we are from athe technology is from being able to . If painkillers and blood pressure medicines can?t be ?an indication of how far? needed for this level of? precision is still in its infancy.

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Maybe Kurzweil?s law of accelerating returns can work that old black magic and we?re about to enter some version of techno-hyperspace. But then again, maybe not. We?re definitely not yet in the heyday of genomic medicine?at least as conceived by the Singularity University?and it may be a while. I?d devote my energies to the crafting of a Hollywood script rather than trying to get into the details of policy contingencies for personalized bioweapons transmissible by a sneeze.

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I knew immediately after that momentary lapse of the first debate that he would come out swinging in rounds two and three. No tortured soul-searching in the interim. What

could be accomplished by doing an Obama gene dump? It probably would be a little like looking at Einstein?s brain, which actually not that revealing but did show Maybe a clue to spatial intelligence with that bump on the , but maybe too just a random anatomical artifact.

I would venture that negotiating the psychological and emotional travails of a national election campaign rivals in its own way any other feat that tests the limits of human performance, whether that be beating the 100-meter world record or unifying relativity with quantum mechanics. So I still think it would be worth a look.

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Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=2d7bf3fabf646740268eb17f6b4cd7b8

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