[WSJ] The quest to harness the power of DNA to develop personalized medicine is on the threshold of a major milestone: the $1,000 genome sequencing.
Life Technologies Corp., a Carlsbad, Calif., genomics company, plans to introduce Tuesday a machine it says will be able to map an individual’s entire genetic makeup for $1,000 by the end [...]

[GenomeWeb News]- The National Human Genome Research Institute will provide up to $10.8 million in grants next year to fund three new programs that will support investigators seeking to develop new high-throughput technologies for identifying, validating, and characterizing sequence encoded elements in eukaryotic genomes.
The goal of the new grant program is to build upon and [...]

[LA Times]- A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel said Tuesday that genetic tests directly marketed to consumers should be allowed only under a doctor’s supervision.
Personal testing, which is mainly available online from firms operating outside traditional medical institutions, can produce ambiguous or misleading results without proper analysis, panel members said.
“I would suggest that we [...]

[mlive]  new testing method developed by Van Andel Research Institute researchers triples the amount of genetic information that can be obtained from dried spots of newborn blood preserved by the state Department of Community Health.
The archived newborn blood, which comes from a poke in the heel a day or two after birth, can be used [...]

[Reuters] – Most people who have used direct-to-consumer genetic tests bought them to improve their health and say they found the tests easy to interpret, but some do not fully understand their results, U.S. researchers said on Friday.
A team led by David Kaufman of Johns Hopkins University did a random online survey of 1,048 people [...]

[Reuters] A $37 million international collaboration by major research bodies in the United States, Britain and Africa wants to take the fruits of the genetic revolution to a continent it has largely bypassed until now.
The project, named Human Heredity and Health in Africa or “H3Africa,” will use genetic techniques developed in the West to explore [...]

In 1951, doctors removed Henrietta Lacks’s cells without her consent. More than half a century later, companies have made millions from her cell culture, while few of Lacks’s descendants can even afford insurance.
[Newsweek] The unsettling story of Henrietta Lacks begins with an everyday occurrence: a trip to the doctor’s office. The 30-year-old African-American’s 1951 diagnosis [...]

[AP] Britain is using genetic tests on some African asylum seekers in an effort to catch those who are lying about their nationality, drawing criticism from scientists and provoking outrage from rights groups.
The United Kingdom Border Agency launched the pilot project in September amid suspicions there might be a large number of asylum applicants lying [...]

[NYT] Baseball scouts are agog over Miguel Sano’s hands — strong, supple and deft. But he still had to place them under a bone-scan machine, just in case.
Sano, a shortstop roundly considered the best unsigned prospect from the talent-rich Dominican Republic, twice underwent such a procedure to help assess whether he actually is 16 years old [...]

A study involving higher-resolution genetic screening suggests that healthy embryos may be wasted during IVF.
[Technology Review] Genetic tests designed to weed out embryos that are unlikely to grow into healthy babies after in vitro fertilization (IVF) are often administered to couples receiving treatment even though it seems to have little impact on pregnancy rates. A new [...]