Narrative Genetics Seminar: Making Sense of the Increased Prevalence of Autism?

NEW DATE!! Monday, May 3 (changed from May 6)
Guest Presenter, PETER BEARMAN, Columbia University.

Director of the Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences, the Cole Professor of Social Science, and Co-Director of the Health & Society Scholars Program.

6-8pm, Room 801, International Affairs Building, Columbia U

Peter Bearman was the founding director of ISERP, serving from the Institute's launch in 2000 until 2008. A recipient of the NIH Director's Pioneer Award in 2007, Bearman is currently investigating the social determinants of the autism epidemic. A specialist in network analysis, Bearman co-designed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and has used the data extensively for research on topics including adolescent sexual networks, networks of disease transmission, and genetic influences on same-sex preference. He has also conducted research in historical sociology, including Relations into Rhetorics: Local Elite Social Structure in Norfolk, England, 1540-1640 (Rutgers, 1993). He is the author of Doormen (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

This event is free and open to the public. For details on schedules, locations, speakers, and topics, visit our full calendar of events at www.iserp.columbia.edu.The Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) is the research arm of the social sciences at Columbia University. Its core mission is to catalyze and produce pioneering social science research and to shape public policy by integrating knowledge and methods across the social science disciplines.

Breast Cancer Gene Patents Invalidated

I just received a link to today's Our Bodies Ourselves blog post announcing a decision by a judge in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan that invalidates the patents held by Myriad Genetics for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. The US Judge said in the ruling that the "isolated DNA is not markedly different from native DNA as it exists in nature” and thus aren’t novel enough to qualify for patent protection. OBOS had joined the suit brought last summer by the ACLU against Myriad, the US Patent and Trademark Office and the University of Utah Research Foundation. Read the blog post for links to the decision and more information about the lawsuit.

Rachel Adams, a participant in our Narrative Genetics seminar, will be giving a talk on disability and prenatal testing at Columbia on March 9. All are welcome.

Rescheduled: GENES AND PLAYS

April 19, 2010

6:10-8pm, Case Lounge, Columbia University School of Law


Genes and Plays: Using theatre to enhance understanding of the ethical, legal, and social implications of genetics. Scenes from the recent play "Distracted" will be used to enhance discussion on the implications of ADHD on the child, parents and society.

KAREN H. ROTHENBERG
Karen H. Rothenberg, J.D., M.P.A., is the Marjorie Cook Professor of Law, founding Director of the Law & Health Care Program, and she served as Dean of the University of Maryland School of Law from 1999-2009. Professor Rothenberg is a leading national expert on legal issues in health care. She is spending her current sabbatical doing research as a Scholar-in-Residence at Columbia Law School and at Columbia’s Center for the Study of Law and Culture, as well as at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University.

JEFF SELTZER
Jeff Seltzer, Ph.D., J.D., is a child psychologist and mental health coordinator for the Head Start and Pre-Kindergarten programs of the Montgomery County, Maryland public schools. He received his J.D. from Georgetown University and his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He lectures widely on the delivery of mental health services and the legal rights of children with disabilities and he served as the Expert Mental Health Consultant at the University of Maryland, providing region-wide training and technical assistance to Head Start programs.

Readings for the seminar will be available on the public Narrative Genetics Google Site, http://sites.google.com/site/narrativegenetics/Home

The Narrative Genetics seminar at Columbia is sponsored by ISERP http://iserp.columbia.edu/workshops/genetics. The seminar is open to faculty, students, and others in the Columbia University community and in the New York metropolitan area. Presenters discuss work in progress and welcome participation in the discussion.

Autism Battlefield--Ageism, Clusters, Diagnosis

Autism, it seems, is a contemporary paradigmatic stadium in which genetics, parenting, social factors, environmental toxins compete for causal authority. This past month, autism—or autism spectrum disorder as the draft DSM-V proposes to redefine the condition--has received a great deal of attention. In 1998 The Lancet published a study based on research by Andrew Wakefield that linked autism in the UK to the MMR vaccine. As a result of the study’s publication, many parents in the UK refused to have their children vaccinated. In January of this year a British panel found that Wakefield had failed to disclose a conflict of interest—as a paid advisor to attorneys for parents suing the vaccine manufacturer--and that the study itself was conducted without adherence to proper ethical standards of consent. Following the panel’s report, The Lancet retracted the 1998 paper from publication. Meanwhile, a number of recent studies have focused on rates of autism in California. The online journal Autism Research examined yet again the question of whether and how parental age has contributed to the increase rates of autism. A 10 year study of births in California concluded that maternal and paternal age each contribute independently to higher rates of autism, accounting for 4.6% of the increase over the decade under study. Two other studies found clusters of autism in California cities. One, out of UC Davis found 10 clusters in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas, and associated these higher rates with high rates of parental education. The other study of autism prevalence in California was done by Columbia University based researchers led by Peter Bearman, Jonathan Cole Professor of the Social Sciences and our May 6 Narrative Genetics seminar guest. This group found a primary cluster in the West Hollywood area and secondary clusters in other parts of LA. While they did not attempt to identify cause, they linked higher rates to local variables, such as environmental toxins or social influences. We look forward to discussing all this in May.

In Fashion and Style: Turner Syndrome

Alone on a Path Shared by Many

By ALLISON AMEND

Published: January 29, 2010. An article about love, infertility, text message break ups.

NY Times reviews Skloot's “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”

"A thorny and provocative book about cancer, racism, scientific ethics and crippling poverty, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” also floods over you like a narrative dam break, as if someone had managed to distill and purify the more addictive qualities of “Erin Brockovich,” “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and “The Andromeda Strain.” More than 10 years in the making, it feels like the book Ms. Skloot was born to write. It signals the arrival of a raw but quite real talent." - Dwight Garner

read full review here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/books/03book.html?scp=1&sq=skloot&st=cse

In the Health section, Denise Grady writes: "Fifty years after Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in the “colored” ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital, her daughter finally got a chance to see the legacy she had unknowingly left to science. A researcher in a lab at Hopkins swung open a freezer door and showed the daughter, Deborah Lacks-Pullum, thousands of vials, each holding millions of cells descended from a bit of tissue that doctors had snipped from her mother’s cervix."

read full story here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/health/02seco.html?scp=3&sq=skloot&st=cse

Karen H. Rothenberg, J.D., M.P.A.

Fordham Law Lincoln Center presents the

2010 Robert L. Levine Lecture

FROM EUGENICS TO THE "NEW" GENETICS: THE PLAY'S THE THING

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 | 5:00 p.m.

Karen H. Rothenberg, J.D., M.P.A. Marjorie Cook Professor of Law, University of Maryland School of Law Scholar-in-Residence and Senior Sabbatical Fellow, Center for the Study of Law and Culture, Columbia Law School Visiting Professor, Berman Institute of Bioethics, John Hopkins University.

What can plays tell us about the power of hereditary science and the power of the state? How does the work of playwrights, capturing the era of eugenics and the advent of the Human Genome Project, dramatize and enhance our understanding of the implications of genetics on race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability?

This lecture will examine how plays both reflect and try to influence public opinion and social policy over time. The Fordham Law Review will publish the contents of the lecture in the fall of 2010.

Fordham Law School, 140 West 62nd Street

New York, NY 10023

Registration encouraged: law.fordham.edu/levinelecture

Applications Being Accepted for Young Scholar Award in Perinatal Bioethics

The American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) and the March of Dimes are pleased to announce the annual Young Scholar Award in Perinatal Bioethics.

Who is eligible? To be eligible for this award, applicants must be early in their career development, including those who are actively enrolled in graduate school, post-doctoral programs or no higher in their career achievement than the assistant professorship level.

Applicants should submit proposals in the 'Perinatal Ethics' topic category in the ASBH Call for Proposals. Proposals that would fall into the perinatal ethics topic category include but are not limited to topics such as pre-conception health, reproductive decision making, pregnancy, pre-natal genetic testing, labor and delivery, newborn screening, neonatal decision making and other topics related to the perinatal time frame. Proposals may address clinical decision making, research or other bioethical or humanities-related topics.

Deadline. Submit an abstract to the ASBH Call for Proposals on the ASBH Web site no later than March 3, 2010 at /meetings/annual/callguidelines.html. To be considered for this award, submit your proposal under the 'Perinatal Ethics' topic category where indicated.

From those submitted abstracts, a select group of applicants will then be asked to submit a full paper for review by the March of Dimes/ASBH review committee.

The Award. The award will be presented at the ASBH Annual Meeting in October to the applicant whose paper is selected to be of the highest quality and intellectual rigor among the submitted papers. The award winner will receive an honorarium of $1,000 and will present the paper at a plenary session at the ASBH Annual Meeting, which will feature an invited lecture by a distinguished scholar from the field of perinatal ethics.

For more information, please contact Alison Saylor at asaylor@Connect2amc.com or Ann Umemoto at aumemoto@marchofdimes.com

NARRATIVE GENETICS SEMINAR: Thursday, February 25

The Social Life of DNA

6-8pm, Room 801, International Affairs Building
www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/international_affairs.html

The Social Life of DNA: Traditional and genetic 'root-seeking' and the implications of these practices for contemporary understandings of race and ethnicity, diaspora, ancestry, and memory. Alondra Nelson, Ph.D., Columbia University, Sociology. http://www.sociology.columbia.edu/fac-bios/nelson/faculty.html

Professor Nelson joined the Columbia faculty in July 2009 after teaching sociology and African American studies at Yale. She will talk about aspects of her current project, “Reconciliation Projects: Slavery, Memory and the Social Life of DNA,” which traces how claims about race and ancestry are marshaled together with genetic analysis in a range of social ventures, including family genealogy and ancestry, reparations politics and the formation of public and collective memory. “Bio Science: Genetic Ancestry Testing and the Pursuit of African Ancestry” (2008) is a recent publication of Nelson’s addressing the effects and implications of direct-to-consumer genetic testing. It is available on the Narrative Genetics Google site http://sites.google.com/site/narrativegenetics/ . Watch the site for other readings.

The Narrative Genetics seminar at Columbia is sponsored by ISERP http://iserp.columbia.edu/workshops/genetics. The seminar is open to faculty, students, and others in the Columbia University community and in the New York metropolitan area. Presenters discuss work in progress and welcome participation in the discussion.

SEMINAR ON GENETIC DISCRIMINATION 2/9/2010

Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry
Department of Psychiatry
Columbia University Medical Center
Seminar series on Legal and Ethical Issues in Psychiatry and General
Medicine

Jessica L. Roberts, JD
Associate-in-Law, Columbia Law School
Assistant Professor of Law (Fall 2010), University of Houston Law Center

Bahrad Sokhansanj, PhD
2nd year student, Columbia Law School

Introducing the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act: Civil Rights in the Post-Genome Era

Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2010
4:00 - 5:15 p.m.
Room 3002
New York State Psychiatric Institute

Sequencing the human genome provides a powerful tool for advancing personalized medicine but, at the same time, brings with it the potential for discrimination. Despite few reports of genetic discrimination, the public remains wary of genetic tests, fearful that a result showing the risk for disease and disability would lead to being denied health insurance and losing their job. To address these fears, scientists and biotechnology industry lobbyists advocated federal legislation to prevent genetic discrimination. After almost thirteen years of legislative debate, Congress passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) in May 2008.
GINA prohibits health insurers and employers from discriminating on the basis of genetic information. We will describe the role of scientists in shaping GINA, its current protections, and the implications of enacting fear-based antidiscrimination legislation.

Upcoming Speakers

March 16: Judge Donald Volkert, Superior Court of NJ, Passaic Vicinage

April 20: Nancy Dubler, LLB, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva Univ.

May 11: Lynn Jansen, PhD, Bioethics Institute, NY Medical College

June 15: Forensic Psychiatry Fellows, Dept. of Psychiatry, Columbia University

For further information or to convey suggestions about future speakers, contact Paul S. Appelbaum, MD, Director, Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, at 212-543-4184 or psa21@columbia.edu.

MARCH OF DIMES' Archives Grand Rounds

Date: Thursday, February 4, 2010

Time: 12:30 to 1:30 pm

Location: West Conference Room

March of Dimes

1275 Mamaroneck Avenue

White Plains, NY 10605

Speaker: Rebecca Skloot

Title: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: The Story of HeLa Cells

Rebecca Skloot is an award-winning science writer in the subjects of science and medicine. She teaches creative nonfiction in the MFA program at the University of Memphis. Her articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, NY Times Magazine, Discover Magazine, and other magazines and journals. Her new book to be released in February, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, tells the story of the African-American woman Henrietta Lacks and her cell line – known as HeLa cells – that have been used in biomedical research since the 1950s. HeLa cells were instrumental in the development of the Salk polio vaccine and have been used to advance research in in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping. The bioethical implications of the use of HeLa cells in scientific research have paramount significance today as we grapple with a host of complex issues in medicine, genetics, and reproduction. Ms. Skloot used the resources of the March of Dimes Archives for a portion of her research, and an article accompanying the release of her book appears in the February 2010 issue of Oprah Magazine. For more information, see http://rebeccaskloot.com/.

POSTPONED! January 21 Narrative Genetics seminar. POSTPONED!

The Narrative Genetics Seminar, “Genes and Plays,” scheduled for Thursday, January 21, 2010, has been postponed due to a family emergency. This compelling program of dramatic reading and discussion of the play “Distracted,” led by Karen Rothenberg and Jeff Seltzer, will be rescheduled for later in the spring semester. We will let you know day/date/time ASAP.

For those interested, Karen Rothenberg be giving the Levine Lecture at Fordham Law School on “From Eugenics to the ‘New’ Genetics: The Play’s the Thing.” Narrative Genetics seminar participants are welcome to attend. The lecture will be on March 10 in the early evening and we will keep you posted on details.

POSTPONED! Narrative Genetics Seminar: Thursday, January 21. POSTPONED!

GENES AND PLAYS

6-8pm, Room 801, International Affairs Building
www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/international_affairs.html

Genes and Plays: Using theatre to enhance understanding of the ethical, legal, and social implications of genetics.

Scenes from the recent play "Distracted" will be used to enhance discussion on the implications of ADHD on the child, parents and society.

KAREN H. ROTHENBERG

Karen H. Rothenberg, J.D., M.P.A., is the Marjorie Cook Professor of Law, founding Director of the Law & Health Care Program, and she served as Dean of the University of Maryland School of Law from 1999-2009. Professor Rothenberg is a leading national expert on legal issues in health care. She is spending her current sabbatical doing research as a Scholar-in-Residence at Columbia Law School and at Columbia’s Center for the Study of Law and Culture, as well as at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. www.law.umaryland.edu/faculty/profiles/faculty.html?facultynum=103

JEFF SELTZER
Jeff Seltzer, Ph.D., J.D., is a child psychologist and mental health coordinator for the Head Start and Pre-Kindergarten programs of the Montgomery County, Maryland public schools. He received his J.D. from Georgetown University and his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He lectures widely on the delivery of mental health services and the legal rights of children with disabilities and he served as the Expert Mental Health Consultant at the University of Maryland, providing region-wide training and technical assistance to Head Start programs.

(Optional) readings for the seminar are available on the public Narrative Genetics Google Site,http://sites.google.com/site/narrativegenetics/Home

The Narrative Genetics seminar at Columbia is sponsored by ISERP http://iserp.columbia.edu/workshops/genetics. The seminar is open to faculty, students, and others in the Columbia University community and in the New York metropolitan area. Presenters discuss work in progress and welcome participation in the discussion.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Modern Language Association annual meeting Los Angeles, 6-9 January 2011 Literature and Science Division

REPRODUCTIONS: EUGENICS AND GENETICS

Literary engagements with eugenic and genetic theories and practices. How do literary texts reproduce or rewrite scientific discourses of disability, deafness, immigration and ethnicity, disease, breeding? 250-word abstracts to gardenr@upstate.edu by 5 Mar. 2010.