Whatever the reason for the end of your relationship with the Weeds, please consider starting your own podcast. I've really enjoyed your run as the Weeds host.
whoa, this feels like "shots fired" to have you & The Weeds drop episodes with the same author at the same time... I'm definitely going to listen back-to-back and compare...
I am frequently infuriated by technology not working as intended. Every time I have a printer issue I lose my mind and remark on how we put a man on the moon more than 50 years ago but I somehow can’t print from the printer that is connected to my computer.
But adding this podcast feed to the Apple podcasts app worked astonishingly well. I am content.
Seems like I'm late to the game on this thread, but I must say that I don't love aspects of how genetics were sold by Dr. Harden.
She went kind of hard on a view of genetics that has come somewhat into vogue these days that we have done hundreds of GWAS studies and found links to thousands of genes so probably there aren't a small number of genes that control things but instead things are determined by the complex interaction of thousands of small differences. I think there is little evidence that this is true.
1) We don't know what most genes really do. Back in the day predicting planetary movements probably seemed super complicated with a bunch of esoteric rules where this one constellation moves one way unless another constellation stops then it moves the other way and the whole thing is reversed in winter. Then we discovered gravity and other explanations of planetary movement and it turns out predicting basic celestial movement is actually super explainable and follows reasonably simple rules. The same thing is happening with genetics - we don't know what all the genes do, so we talk about how a huge array of complicated and unrelated genetic forces are probably working to connect a bunch of GWAS hits in un-explainable ways, but we might figure out how one of the genes works tomorrow and suddenly it will all make sense and be super explainable and the crazy complicated hysteria will seem silly in retrospect.
2) GWAS studies look at these spots in the genome where people tend to differ by a single DNA letter, which actually tells you very little about what is happening biologically. Sometimes the change in DNA letter matters itself, but rarely in biology does a single letter change matter an insane amount (it happens, but not often). More often we track these single letters because bits of DNA that are close to each other are more likely to be inherited together so if a disease is always associated with a letter change then it is probably at least associated with a gene that lives close to that letter change in the genome. But there are a TON of things that could live close to that spot and figuring out the relevant difference is really hard and is usually only done for GWAS hits that are super gangbusters (like high risk alzheimer's GWAS hits). So when people say that we get a ton of hits and can't use them to explain certain traits, they are looking at reasonably low resolution data - data that basically says what chunks of the genome might be correlated with a trait - and it's not surprising when low resolution data can't explain why stuff works the way it does.
When people hear about GWAS studies, I think they often think we are looking at the genome, when in reality we are really looking at a relatively small number of hand-picked single letters throughout the genome. Sometimes scientists do something called "whole exome sequencing" and look at all the DNA that makes proteins, but that is much more expensive that the stuff GWAS uses and thus much rarer. Whole genome sequencing, which might actually get you somewhere, is more expensive yet. Epigenetic sequencing, which can tell you an extra level of complexity on top of whole genome sequencing, adds even more cost.
So all in all, I find it weird to claim that traits are the result of super complicated relationships between tons of genes when we are currently doing the genetic equivalent of super old school celestial mapping and wondering why it seems so complicated...
Insightful conversation. Genetics is one of those conversations that starts out with near-existential dread but then if you stick with it, everything turns out mostly fine and philosophically reassuring.
It's mega annoying that so much of life is outside our personal control, but the awesome part about acknowledging the massive role of sheer luck is the immense gratitude it engenders. Maybe more importantly, it lets us sidestep a lot of infurating and complex debates over who "deserves" what and just focus on improving outcomes for everyone across the board.
Whatever the reason for the end of your relationship with the Weeds, please consider starting your own podcast. I've really enjoyed your run as the Weeds host.
I'm really looking forward to hearing more about the end of Matt's time with The Weeds, and maybe some further reflections on Vox...
So happy to hear Matt’s commentary in podcast format again. Please continue to do audio podcasts as frequently as possible.
"Cut short"? That's a shame, it seemed like you were ready to move on and the new crew are great. Hope there's more of this to come.
whoa, this feels like "shots fired" to have you & The Weeds drop episodes with the same author at the same time... I'm definitely going to listen back-to-back and compare...
surprised how few comments there are here.
I have yet to actually listen, but I preemptively hope that you do lots more of these.
Friendship ended with the weeds
Now slow boring audio is my best friend
Will there be a "primarily audio" feed of primarily audio Slow Boring stuff (e.g. not the audio versions of the morning e-mails)?
I am frequently infuriated by technology not working as intended. Every time I have a printer issue I lose my mind and remark on how we put a man on the moon more than 50 years ago but I somehow can’t print from the printer that is connected to my computer.
But adding this podcast feed to the Apple podcasts app worked astonishingly well. I am content.
Seems like I'm late to the game on this thread, but I must say that I don't love aspects of how genetics were sold by Dr. Harden.
She went kind of hard on a view of genetics that has come somewhat into vogue these days that we have done hundreds of GWAS studies and found links to thousands of genes so probably there aren't a small number of genes that control things but instead things are determined by the complex interaction of thousands of small differences. I think there is little evidence that this is true.
1) We don't know what most genes really do. Back in the day predicting planetary movements probably seemed super complicated with a bunch of esoteric rules where this one constellation moves one way unless another constellation stops then it moves the other way and the whole thing is reversed in winter. Then we discovered gravity and other explanations of planetary movement and it turns out predicting basic celestial movement is actually super explainable and follows reasonably simple rules. The same thing is happening with genetics - we don't know what all the genes do, so we talk about how a huge array of complicated and unrelated genetic forces are probably working to connect a bunch of GWAS hits in un-explainable ways, but we might figure out how one of the genes works tomorrow and suddenly it will all make sense and be super explainable and the crazy complicated hysteria will seem silly in retrospect.
2) GWAS studies look at these spots in the genome where people tend to differ by a single DNA letter, which actually tells you very little about what is happening biologically. Sometimes the change in DNA letter matters itself, but rarely in biology does a single letter change matter an insane amount (it happens, but not often). More often we track these single letters because bits of DNA that are close to each other are more likely to be inherited together so if a disease is always associated with a letter change then it is probably at least associated with a gene that lives close to that letter change in the genome. But there are a TON of things that could live close to that spot and figuring out the relevant difference is really hard and is usually only done for GWAS hits that are super gangbusters (like high risk alzheimer's GWAS hits). So when people say that we get a ton of hits and can't use them to explain certain traits, they are looking at reasonably low resolution data - data that basically says what chunks of the genome might be correlated with a trait - and it's not surprising when low resolution data can't explain why stuff works the way it does.
When people hear about GWAS studies, I think they often think we are looking at the genome, when in reality we are really looking at a relatively small number of hand-picked single letters throughout the genome. Sometimes scientists do something called "whole exome sequencing" and look at all the DNA that makes proteins, but that is much more expensive that the stuff GWAS uses and thus much rarer. Whole genome sequencing, which might actually get you somewhere, is more expensive yet. Epigenetic sequencing, which can tell you an extra level of complexity on top of whole genome sequencing, adds even more cost.
So all in all, I find it weird to claim that traits are the result of super complicated relationships between tons of genes when we are currently doing the genetic equivalent of super old school celestial mapping and wondering why it seems so complicated...
Insightful conversation. Genetics is one of those conversations that starts out with near-existential dread but then if you stick with it, everything turns out mostly fine and philosophically reassuring.
It's mega annoying that so much of life is outside our personal control, but the awesome part about acknowledging the massive role of sheer luck is the immense gratitude it engenders. Maybe more importantly, it lets us sidestep a lot of infurating and complex debates over who "deserves" what and just focus on improving outcomes for everyone across the board.
I wish there was a way to download this for those of us who use Spotify and don't want to download another podcast app.