Uhhh ok fair enough. There is always emigration to China when it gets intolerably oppressive in the US.

I said it a few comments down... but I will take lawyers, polisci majors, bankers, and economists who support liberal democracy in a heartbeat over scientific leaders who endorse prison camps, massive censorship, brutal suppression of political dissent, for some reason want to crush the most non-threatening people on the face of the planet, and who (at the very minimum tolerate) endorse forced sterilization!

>Did you know that China doesn't have a "President" in any meaningful sense of the word? President Hu Jintao is an "organ of the state" who is a figurehead for the National People's Congress, a largely powerless body selected by the Chinese Communist Party.

So, he's a figurehead not a president. That's not a slam against presidents (or figureheads of repressive oligarchies) but I believe that the two outlooks are very different.

I will take liberal democracy by lawyer any day of the week when the alternative is communist oligarchy by scientist.

Oh SNAP the government really CAN spur innovation! No one would have ever built this machine without the government of PA. How can we thank you!?

..."is looking for 10,000 volunteers" to monitor for all kinds of stuff.

...in this presentation.

... I was kind of wondering why the hell terrorists needed VIM on an *IED*

It would be completely illegal without informed consent. They would have had to go to their Internal Review Board (IRB) and get approval and would be required to follow federal guidelines. This is a highly regulated part of medical privacy and IRBs do not screw around with the rules because the institutional consequences are massive. They range from massive lawsuits to federal crimes. The scientists doing the SNP arrays would also be forbidden from knowing any patient information. Only the doctors involved with patient treatment would know any identifying information.

Now one of the interesting caveats to this is that the doctors involved with the patient's care are privy to the results of the SNP array. Presumably they would be told "Patient X Y and Z have mutations correlated with early onset Alzheimers and Huntington's Disease. They would be obligated to tell their patients and begin any appropriate care. My guess is that is why they decided to study patients around 65 years old. Any genetic predispositions would already have manifest themselves. I am curious if it was done to avoid any ethical concerns with "diagnoses" arising from the study.

This is not the same as sequencing their genomes. This will not provide a full sequence of each person's genome. It will look for specific mutations that have already been identified and tell us who has certain point mutations.

Think of it as the difference between having the full text of the file in the case of sequencing and having a count of the number of times the writer wrote "teh" instead of "the"

This is not to say that this study is without merit but it is not gene sequencing or genomic sequencing.

For more information on SNP arrays wikipedia is helpful and if you really want details you can talk to Affymetrix (I bet these are the arrays they will use).