教材は自分の遺伝子
米国発 教材は自分の遺伝子 | 海外ニュース | ニュース | ミクスOnline
スタンフォード大医学部の授業で、生徒自身の遺伝子情報を教材にして、医学的遺伝子情報の読み取り方を学ばせているそうです。これは面白そう。SNP読み取りは23andMeに依頼し、生徒は自身のATCGから各種の遺伝子情報を読み取るのですが「学ぶのは診断ではなくリスク測定」という姿勢がとても気に入りました。記事の中では、低学歴アル中の父親ではなく、別の男性（医師）が生物学的父親だと判明したケースとか、「ブロンド遺伝子」を持っているけど実際は黒髪の女子学生の話が出ています。そうだよ、遺伝情報とはいえ、100%確定のお告げじゃなく、膨大なデータを読み取って現状と照らし合わせる知識と姿勢が重要なんだよ。日本でも同じような講義は…難しいでしょうが、いつか実現することを祈ってます。
“I am teaching something they need to know,” said Stuart Kim, a professor of developmental biology and genetics who co-founded the course. “These are future scientists who need to understand the underlying concepts behind this exploding field.
“We are preparing them to do cutting-edge biomedicine. This makes it very real.”
The testing is confidential and voluntary. They use a cotton swab to get a specimen from inside their cheek, then mail it to the Mountain View company 23andMe for processing. If students don’t want to study their own genes, they can use a public reference sequence.
What they learn is not a diagnosis, but an estimate of risk.
It is not a complete sequence of all 3bn nucleotides in their genome, but a snapshot of 1.1mn better-understood variants linked to thousands of conditions and traits.
It is the statistics behind that analysis ― and the interpretation of what the data means ― that become the centrepiece of heated classroom debate. Students also discuss classroom trends and surprises....
The course introduction two years ago, however, triggered intense controversy at Stanford, leading to the creation of a 29-member task force ― lawyers, physicians, ethicists, philosophers and other faculty members ― who worried that the findings might trigger student stress.
They feared harm to students “from either what they learned in genetic testing, or in possible breaches of privacy ... if they started chatting about results in class,” said Stanford law professor Hank Greely, director of Stanford’s Center for Law and the Biosciences and a member of the task force.
Students now have access to genetic counselling and psychiatric care, and they must attend several “informed consent” sessions about the implications of their findings.
