Apple is "collaborating" with scientists to help collect customers DNA for use in medical research, the MIT Technology Review reports — a move that could have massive implications for genetic research.

Apple isn't going to harvest customer DNA itself however: In the "two initial studies planned," it will be researchers that send out sample pots, collect, and analyse the subsequent material.

The pilot project will be powered by ResearchKit, a new suite of medical research tools that Apple launched in March this year. ResearchKit lets users collect health data about themselves and send it off to researchers in studies. The five initial apps collected data on asthma, Parkinson's, breast cancer, diabetes, and heart health.

The intention is to leverage Apple's vast install base to give researchers access to a far broader pool of subjects than they would otherwise have. At the launch, Dr. Yvonne Chan from Mount Sinai, who works with Apple on the asthma app, said her team was hopeful that it could potentially become "one of the — if not the — largest real world epidemiological studies in asthma ever."

More than 11,000 people signed up for the heart health study in the first 24 hours alone.

MIT Technology Review's report indicates that Apple is now planning to broaden its scope, collecting users' DNA so it can be used for research purposes. One of the initial studies "would study causes of premature birth by combining gene tests with other data collected on the phones of expectant mothers," Antonio Regalado writes. But on a longer timeframe, "it's even possible consumers might swipe to share 'my genes' as easily as they do their location."

If Apple can tap into even a tiny fraction of its install base, it will have massive implications for genetic research. It will provide scientists with a data set vastly larger than they have ever had before — as well as an easy way to contact subjects if additional data or clarification is required.

This isn't the first attempt to leverage modern tech to broaden the scope of DNA research. Earlier this year, BuzzFeed News reported on Genes For Good— a medical study using a Facebook app to attract sign-ups.

But Facebook wasn't actively involved in that project — researchers were just making use of its app platform to extend their reach. In contrast, Apple is actively "collaborating"with scientists on ResearchKit, according to MIT Technology Review.

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For the past 15 years, crime investigators have employed a type of sophisticated DNA testing to determine the source of genetic material, such as hair or skin, recovered at a crime scene.

That testing is the most accurate way to analyze material from a crime scene — especially small or damaged samples.

Despite the availability of this DNA testing, however, the FBI recently revealed that some jurisdictions around the US were still relying on an outdated technique called hair microscopy.

Hair microscopy — which uses a microscope to compare two different hair samples — is cheaper than DNA testing, but a 2009 report in the National Academy of Sciences called the technique "highly unreliable."

"When it comes down to it, it's one human being eyeballing one hair compared to another hair,"Lindsay Herf, post-conviction project counsel at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), told Business Insider.

Problems with hair microscopy

As such, the technique is prone to human error. While conducting a review of former cases, the FBI recently dropped the bombshell that most of the experts in a major forensic unit dedicated to hair microscopy gave flawed testimony during a 25-year period, potentially affecting more than 3,000 defendants. Thirty-three inmates now on death row were convicted using the technique.

About 22% (74 of 329) of DNA exonerations have involved faulty microscopic hair analysis, Paul Cates, communications director of the Innocence Project, told Business Insider.

In one particularly egregious case, two FBI forensic experts confused a human hair with a dog hair. The defendant in that case, a man named Santae Tribble (pictured above), served 28 years in prison before DNA evidence exonerated him, according to the Innocence Project.

Examining this cat hair and dog hair (courtesy of the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics) gives a sense of the problems present in hair microscopy. A lab technician would have to visually compare similar hair samples like these and determine whether they matched hair found at a crime scene.

While the "eyeballing technique" is already subjective, additional problems exist. For example, no national standards exist for what constitutes a "match" between two samples, Herf said. One expert might find 18 similarities between hair found at the scene and the suspect's, while another might require 24 before calling the two samples a "match."

This subjectivity leads to three basic types of errors in cases, according to Herf:

• Error Type 1: An analyst erroneously determines the hair matches a specific person and no one else.
• Error Type 2: The analyst might give a statistical probability that the hair came from a specific person when, in fact, there's no way to quantify that likelihood. "This leads the jury to believe that a particular statistic can be assigned to hair microscopy," Herf said. "But rather, it's a pool of unknown size."
• Error Type 3: Analysts might cite their experience as a way to convince the jury by making a comment like: "Over the last 12 years ... I've only had two occasions out of the 10,000 people where I had hairs from two different people that I could not separate them."Because hair microscopy doesn't have a strong scientific basis, the expert's experience shouldn't necessarily serve as a way to bolster his or her opinion.

DNA testing as a proven alternative

Unlike hair microscopy, mitochondrial DNA testing uses objective scientific analysis. Because mitochondria are inherited maternally, siblings would share identical mitochondrial DNA, providing more opportunities to find a match.

"Mitochondrial DNA analysis looks at the genetic makeup of the hair and the type, and the DNA profile that comes from the sample would be exactly the same as that of the person who would be the donor of the hair,"Dr. Terry Melton, founder and former laboratory director of Mitotyping Technologies, told Business Insider. "Instead of looking at something subjectively, you have actual data."

DNA testing also has to meet national standards set by the FBI and other accreditation groups.

"It's very uniform across all labs, across the country, and even across all countries," Melton said. "It's the same no matter who examines."

DNA testing is expensive, though. Because the risk of contaminating samples is high, labs must follow specific guidelines when conducting DNA tests that require a lot of manpower.

"When a single hair is tested, it's the only thing the laboratory technician is doing for two to three days," Melton said.

Despite the challenges, Melton said a case that relies only on microscopy should never go to trial. While federal law authorizes the FBI to maintain a national DNA database, none exists that requires DNA testing in criminal cases. Grants do, however, assist state and local jurisdictions with the costs of forensic testing.

"That's not acceptable. Every case that goes to court should have DNA testing as well," Melton said. "There's no law that says [a prosecutor] has to do that ... but the defense should challenge that. An informed attorney, group, judges, and so forth, would know better."

'Mass disaster'

But the problem doesn't stop at hair microscopy. Other so-called eye-balling techniques for determining evidence still exist — such as bite marks, ballistics, and even fingerprints.

"This is a mass disaster, but it is one that judges have been largely indifferent to and lawyers have had halting success in revisiting," Brandon L. Garrett, professor of law at the University of Virginia and author of "Convicting the Innocent," told Business Insider via email.

As of March 2015, the FBI had reviewed about 500 of the 3,000 cases involving hair microscopy.

While the FBI noted that "some jurisdictions" continue to use hair microscopy when they deem DNA testing to be too expensive, the federal government has stopped the practice. Mitochondrial DNA testing on hair has been routine at the agency since 2000.

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Ever wonder where colds get their name? Or why we're all coughs and sniffles during the winter but are rarely sick in the summer?

Turns out our genes change with the seasons, just like the weather.

During the winter months, our bodies pump up the levels of many of the genes linked with inflammation, triggering the tell-tale signs of swelling and discomfort that our bodies use to protect us from colds and the flu.

In the summer, on the other hand, an altogether different set of genes get more highly expressed, including some that help regulate our blood sugar, potentially curbing cravings and helping us burn off excess fat.

A quarter of our DNA shifts with the seasons

All this is the finding, at least, of a study published May 12 that finds that roughly 25% of all the chunks of DNA that code for various behaviors and traits in our bodies, otherwise known as genes, shift significantly with the seasons.

Many parts of our immune system, which kicks into action to fend off an infection or cold, shift too.

"I wasn't expecting to find that many,"Chris Wallace, a researcher at the Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory at Cambridge University and an author of the new paper, told Business Insider.

The researchers combed through data from previous studies looking at people's DNA until they had information on roughly 1,000 people living in six different countries: Australia, Germany, the US, the UK, Iceland, and Gambia, a small West African country between Senegal and Guinea-Bisseau.

This way, they could get a look at people's genes and how they changed (if they did at all) over time and according to their location and exposure to sunlight.

Our changing gene expression likely helps us fend off illness

In Europe they found the expression of inflammatory genes got ramped up during the winter months. Here's a chart showing the difference in gene expression during the winter and summer months from a sample of German children whose data was gathered in 2013:

But in Gambia, where there is virtually no winter, these inflammatory genes followed a totally different pattern: They were amplified in the rainy months, when mosquitoes are virtually everywhere and the risk of malaria is the highest.

Previous research has found similar seasonal changes in various components of the immune system. A study from last year, for example, found gene expression in red blood cells shifted with the seasons. This study, however, is one of the first of its kind to look at the whole picture, looking also at white blood cells and genes that play key roles in our immune response.

Wallace and her team think this finding might shed some light on how evolution affected the way we respond to potential sources of infection or illness.

"It could be that our inflammatory response developed as a means of fighting things that are more abundant at certain times," said Wallace.

So perhaps we’ve evolved that immune response in response to those threats of certain seasons — activating those inflammation-associated genes — and making us more likely to feel sick in the winter, but also making our immune system more active to fight off threats.

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Last fall, two scientists reached out to tech policy expert Kenneth Oye and his colleagues for some advice.

The scientists had elucidated nearly every step to a pathway that would end in the use of genetically engineered yeast to convert sugar to morphine, and they wanted guidance from Oye on how it should be regulated.

A yeast-based morphine production method was imminent, the scientists reasoned, and it would lead to less expensive, less addictive, and more effective painkillers.

But the scientists—John Dueber and Vincent Martin—and now Oye, worried that the method would also be a boon to the illicit opiate market, making it easier for amateurs to produce their own "home-brewed" morphine.

There are several, intermediate steps in the conversion of sugar to morphine, and by inserting various genes from poppy, beetroot, and even soil bacteria, research groups have engineered multiple strains of yeast that are capable of carrying out distinct intermediate steps.

But as it stands now, no single yeast strain can perform all of these steps. Now that the work has been published in a series of papers (the most recent of which came out this week in Nature Chemical Biology), a single strain capable of carrying out the entire pathway seems all but inevitable.

"In principle," Oye and his colleagues write in a Comment for Nature, "anyone with access to the yeast strain and basic skills in fermentation would be able to grow morphine producing yeast using a home-brew kit for beer-making." To prevent such a scenario, Oye and his colleagues outlined four areas of yeast-based morphine production that are prime for regulation:

1. Create yeast strains that amateurs can't use

Yeast is easy to grow, conceal, and distribute, which makes yeast-based morphine production appealing to illicit opiate producers. But, according to the authors, yeast strains could be engineered to make the microorganisms harder to work with. Oye and his colleagues suggest that scientists design yeast strains with specific nutrient dependencies and other characteristics to ensure the strains can't survive outside lab settings.

Another alternative: yeast strains that exclusively produce opiates without street value. An example here is thebaine, a toxic compound that can be converted to other opiates, but has no recreational or therapeutic value on its own. (Some poppy-producing countries already grow thebaine-rich varieties to discourage illegal activities.)

2. Keep the materials out of their hands

According to Tania Bubela, a professor at the University of Alberta's School of Public Health and a co-author on the Nature Comment published today, there are two obstacles that make creating yeast-produced morphine very difficult: access to yeast, and, more importantly, access to the DNA sequences that need to be inserted into their genomes to give the strains the capability of converting glucose to morphine.

The authors recommend warning commercial firms that synthesize the DNA to flag orders of sequences involved in this pathway for further screening. Currently, both the International Association of Synthetic Biology and the International Gene Synthesis Consortium screen requests for genetic sequences that involve dangerous pathogens, and they could easily do the same for sequences required to make opiate-producing yeast strains.

3. Amp up security where opiate-producing yeast strains are being researched or worked on

Securing strains with physical protections such as locks, alarms, and surveillance systems is a no-brainer, as is implementing extra security screening for laboratory personnel. Right now, so few labs work with the opiate producing strains that this has been an easy factor to regulate thus far, according to Bubela. "As the number of labs expands, then you may start to run into issues of potential for leakage [of the engineered strain] into the outside world," she says.

4. Update the law

The authors suggest that the Controlled Substances Act in the United States and its equivalents abroad should be extended such that the distribution of opiate-producing yeast, like the distribution of opiates, is illegal.

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If you've ever gargled with mouthwash, felt a canker sore with your finger, or rubbed the inside of your mouth with the tip of your tongue, you've played with the raw material you need to hack your DNA.

Provided you have the right equipment, you can use this material to learn some mind-blowing things about yourself, from where your ancestors came from to how susceptible you are to certain diseases.

A few months ago, I decided to do just that.

Collecting my DNA

At a community lab in Brooklyn, I collected a few of my genes by swabbing the inside of my mouth with a Q-tip. Once I had enough of my own DNA, I could test myself — right there in the lab — for a special mutation that meant I would be more resistant to HIV. The test is one of several that the lab, called Genspace, helps people do. It's mainly for fun, but the results can be life changing.

As I swirled the plastic stick around the inside of my mouth, Ellen Jorgensen, the lab's founder, came over: "Don't be afraid," she said. "You need to be pretty rough."

Mouth cells are constantly renewing themselves, making the moist, cavernous interior ground zero for recovering fresh DNA. After a few minutes of vigorous smearing, I spun the wet end of my Q-tip into a tiny vial of clear liquid that Jorgensen had brought out on a tray.

The liquid would help protect the DNA inside my cells when I subjected them to the next step in the process: boiling. Once that was done, I had to copy them so I'd have enough raw material to run the HIV-mutation test.

Using a touchpad at the front of a genetic copier called a PCR machine, Jorgensen punched in a sequence that would tell the machine to cycle through a series of three temperatures meant to coax my genes into copying themselves. When heated, my chunk of double-stranded, helix-shaped DNA unwinds so that its two strands float side-by-side. Then, using these unwound strands as templates, special proteins attach to the ends to help with the duplication process.

My strands, which I placed inside the machine that night, would continue to copy one another into the evening, long after the last of the lab’s workers left for home.

Checking for HIV resistance

The next day, we used a black light to look at my DNA, which I'd dyed blue and separated using electricity to pull the different-sized DNA strands apart. There, we could see if I was missing the telltale segment of genetic material that would tell me I had the special tweak in my genes (a mutation in a gene called CCR5) that would make me more resistant to HIV.

Holding up my strand of genetic material to the light, I felt a tinge of excitement. But as I squinted at the black light to try and make out my results, Jorgensen called out from behind me: "Looks like you're normal."

Perhaps sensing my disappointment, Jorgensen was quick to let me know we'd be looking at much more of my DNA soon, but not here. Since we were short on time, Jorgensen packaged up my DNA and drove it over to a company in New Jersey called Genewiz, where they'd analyze the rest of my genes for about $15.

This isn't whole genome sequencing, which looks at all of your DNA. Instead, the process Genewiz uses is a popular method called SNP (pronounced "snip") sequencing, which scans for single genetic variations that are linked to specific traits like hair and eye color, susceptibility to certain diseases, and ancestry.

We'd have our results the next night.

Finding out where my ancestors came from

Back at the lab the next day, Jorgensen projected our genetic results — which she'd saved on a USB drive — onto a screen at the front of the lab. We used the information to look at our genealogy.

This was exciting for me, especially because I know so little about my family history. My mom was adopted and my dad has very little information about his ancestors, so the genealogical trail pretty much dead ends at my grandparents.

My DNA suggested that my ancestors were likely members of the tribes of hunter-gatherers who settled in Scandinavia more than 4,000 years ago.

This was just the beginning of all the information I could explore. I could look at everything from my suggested likelihood of developing Parkinson's, for example, to my estimated chances of going bald.

For now, of course, these results are simply rough sketches. Exactly what certain genes can tell us about our risk of disease remains very limited. We know, for example, that certain genetic mutations are tied to an increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer and type 1 diabetes. But we still don't know how exactly these mutations influence these diseases, or why.

As the cost of opening up our cells and studying our genes drops and the science of interpreting the information contained inside improves, we will only learn more.

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A Virginia-based genetics technology company and a Hong Kong ad agency are using the DNA people leave behind on their litter to print computer-generated images of their faces on wanted posters.

The company's first project launched last month in Hong Kong, reports the South China Morning Post. Yet the science behind the idea has existed for years.

In 2012, New York City-based artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg used the same technology to make sculptures of complete strangers using only the tiny bits of DNA left on discarded cigarettes and chewing gum that she collected from the streets of New York.

Her exhibit, called "Stranger Visions," has been shown in galleries across the world.

Each piece of trash that Dewey-Hagborg collected was rich in genetic data, typically in the form of DNA encased in dried spit or inside pieces of hair and skin.

To isolate that DNA, she did a simple lab procedure (so simple, I've done it myself) at a small community lab in Brooklyn. Then, using a computer program designed by researchers at Penn State, she combed through all the DNA and picked out only the genes that code for physical traits, like hair and eye color.

Next, she used the trait information to create a 3D model of each person's face.

In addition to hair and eye color, these bits of our DNA dictates the shade of our skin, the width of our noses, and the distance between our eyes, but they can’t tell how old or physically fit we are, for example.

Using her computer's 3D modeling software and a 3D printer, Dewey-Hagborg printed sculptures of each face:

While the masks aren't exact likenesses of the people they're based on, they do display what Dewey-Hagborg calls a "family resemblance."

Unlike Dewey-Hagborg's artwork, which turns people's leftover DNA into three-dimensional sculptures, the Hong Kong campaign is using the genetic information they've collected to create giant, life-size wanted posters.

The project is a collaboration between marketing communications agency Ogilvy & Mather Hong Kong and the genetic technology company Parabon Nanolabs. Ogilvy collected pieces of local litter and sent them to Parabon Nanolabs, who used its technology to extract the DNA from each sample.

"It was intended to provoke a conversation to create positive social change for the people of Hong Kong," Ogilvy Cheif Creative Officer Reed Collins told the South China Morning Post. "The prospect of this idea alone, we hope, will be enough to make people think twice about littering."

SEE ALSO: I sequenced my DNA at a community lab in Brooklyn — and what I learned surprised me

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The Precision Medicine Initiative, announced by President Obama in his 2015 State of the Union address, is an incredibly ambitious project. Obama has called for $215 million from the 2016 budget to fund it, and the research involved will take years to complete.

It's supposed to transform medicine as we know it, removing much of the guesswork that comes from using medicines that are designed to treat the "average patient," and replacing that with treatments that — based on genetic information — are designed to work specifically for each individual.

Once we start to see the effects of this initiative, a patient will look at what we think of as modern medicine now "and say, 'Oh that was so crude and rough,' compared to what we'll be doing 10 or 20 years from now," said Dr. Eric Green, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, in an interview at Smithsonian magazine's "The Future is Here" festival.

But we've thought that new discoveries and scientific achievements would transform medicine in the past too, and they haven't always lived up to the hype — so how do we get from where we are now to this future of medicine?

You start with a really, really big study, says Green. We're already making a lot of progress by focusing a great deal of research on cancer treatments that are designed using genomic information.

Yet the upcoming study will be the key to moving medicine forward for all of us.

'The tip of the iceberg'

We first mapped the human genome 12 years ago, something that had been described as a project that would totally revolutionize medicine. While genome-based testing is already making a difference for some patients, results that trickle down to clinical care have been somewhat limited. That's because, according to Green, what we've seen so far is only "the tip of the iceberg."

The technology has moved faster than the science, and now we need to figure out what to do with that technological capability. We can map a genome cheaply and quickly — but what can we do with all that information? That's where the Precision Medicine Initiative comes into play.

To start, that really big study Green mentioned will genetically test and follow at least one million volunteers for years, allowing researchers to see their genomic data and also other health information that will help shed light on how genes interact with diet, exercise, and environmental factors.

A study that follows more than a million people is massive, "one of the largest research populations ever assembled," according to President Obama's 2015 State of the Union speech. Now, for the first time in history, we have an unprecedented ability to recruit volunteers and track data, and that many people (and perhaps more) will be necessary to get a grasp on how the genetic differences between people have an effect.

We each have about 3 billion letters in our genetic code, and on average, we differ from another person by one out of every 1,000 letters. On the one hand, that makes us incredibly similar — about 99.9% the same — and yet it also means there may be up to 6 million differences between you and the person next to you. The question is how understanding those differences will affect our health.

Green knows that even after we figure this out, it won't cure everything or end disease. But "it'll make us so much more sophisticated," he said. "We're just so much operating in the dark right now."

It's a daunting task and Green readily admits that we don't exactly know what's going to happen as we proceed. Scientists will almost certainly have to change gears and refocus their priorities as they learn more.

But launching a new initiative like this reminds him of a place we've been before.

As he said in his talk:

It was the spring of 1990 that we were just months away from launching the Human Genome Project. The scale of the project was almost overwhelming and the details about how were going to actually sequence the human genome were far from known. But the mission was compelling, and the project just struck like it was the right thing to do at that moment in time. Well, fast forward 25 years to today, and the Precision Medicine Initiative has the identical feel. The task in front of seems almost daunting yet it absolutely makes sense to get going and to capitalize on these exciting opportunities in front of us.

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A Chili's customer had a brilliant response to waiter who spit in his beverage, ABC News reports.

Ken Yerdon told ABC News that he suspected his drink had been tainted after his wife complained about undercooked food at a Chili's restaurant Clay, New York.

When he left the restaurant, the lid of his to-go cup popped off and he saw spit inside the drink. 

"It wasn't regular spit either. It was definitely a loogie," he told Syracuse.com.

After seeing the spit, Yerdon returned to the restaurant, where he received a refund and coupons from the manager, according to ABC News. But then he went a step further and got a DNA test on the saliva.

ABC News states Yerdon underwent testing for Hepatitis and HIV, and while he didn't contract either disease (HIV cannot be transmitted through spit), he still wasn't satisfied.

He had his mouth swiped for DNA to confirm who the offender was. The test determined that the DNA belonged to former Chili's employee George Lamica. 

Lamica ultimately admitted he was guilty back in February and received a "a one-year conditional discharge and a $125 surcharge, according to Clay Town Court."

Yerdon and his wife have since sued Lamica, Brinker International (Chili's parent company), and the manager of the respective Chili's in Clay, New York. (Unsurprisingly, Yerdon, a former frequent customer, told ABC News, "We won't be going back to Chili's.")

Waiters might retaliate when they feel slighted by diners — or perhaps by their low wages. We've heard all sorts of stories of poor employee behavior, from a Taco Bell employee who licked the taco shells to a Subway worker who inappropriately placed his own genitals on a sandwich. There have also been reports of fast-food employees neglecting hygiene.

But what these workers might not recognize is that customers have the ability to fire back and prove who the offenders are. So restaurant employees may want to think twice before spitting in a drink. DNA tests reveal all.

SEE ALSO: Fast food employees keep posting gross photos online

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc is in a race against Google Inc to store data on human DNA, seeking both bragging rights in helping scientists make new medical discoveries and market share in a business that may be worth $1 billion a year by 2018.

Academic institutions and healthcare companies are picking sides between their cloud computing offerings — Google Genomics or Amazon Web Services — spurring the two to one-up each other as they win high-profile genomics business, according to interviews with researchers, industry consultants and analysts.    

That growth is being propelled by, among other forces, the push for personalized medicine, which aims to base treatments on a patient's DNA profile. Making that a reality will require enormous quantities of data to reveal how particular genetic profiles respond to different treatments.

Already, universities and drug manufacturers are embarking on projects to sequence the genomes of hundreds of thousands of people. The human genome is the full complement of DNA, or genetic material, a copy of which is found in nearly every cell of the body.

Clients view Google and Amazon as doing a better job storing genomics data than they can do using their own computers, keeping it secure, controlling costs and allowing it to be easily shared.

The cloud companies are going beyond storage to offer analytical functions that let scientists make sense of DNA data. Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines are also competing for a slice of the market. The "cloud" refers to data or software that physically resides in a server and is accessible via the internet, which allows users to access it without downloading it to their own computer.

Now an estimated $100 million to $300 million business globally, the cloud genomics market is expected to grow to $1 billion by 2018, said research analyst Daniel Ives of investment bank FBR Capital. By that time, the entire cloud market should have $50 billion to $75 billion in annual revenue, up from about $30 billion now.

"The cloud is the entire future of this field," Craig Venter, who led a private effort to sequence the human genome in the 1990s, said in an interview. His new company, San Diego-based Human Longevity Inc, recently tried to import genomic data from servers at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland.

The transmission was so slow, scientists had to resort to sending disks and thumb drives by FedEx and human messengers, or "sneakernet," he said. The company now uses Amazon Web Services.

So does a collaboration between Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Pennsylvania-based Geisinger Health Systems to sequence 250,000 genomes. Raw DNA data is uploaded to Amazon's cloud, where software from privately-held DNAnexus assembles the millions of chunks into the full, 3-billion-letter long genome.

DNAnexus's algorithms then determine where an individual genome differs from the "reference" human genome, the company’s chief scientist Dr. David Shaywitz said, in hopes of identifying new drug targets.

Hosting for free

Showing how important Google and Amazon view this business, and how they hope to use existing customers to lure future ones, each is hosting well-known genomics datasets for free.

Neither company discloses the amount of genomics data it holds, but based on interviews with analysts and genomic scientists, as well as the companies' own announcements of what customers they’ve won, Amazon Web Services may be bigger.

Data from the "1000 Genomes Project," an international public-private effort that identified genetic variations found in at least 1 percent of humans, reside at both Amazon and Google "without charge," said Kathy Cravedi of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), one of the project's sponsors.

Other paying clients with a more specific focus are picking sides.

Google, for instance, won a project from the Autism Speaks foundation to collect and analyze the genomes of 10,000 affected children and their parents for clues to the genetic basis of autism.

Another customer is Tute Genomics, whose database of 8.5 billion human DNA variants can be searched for how frequently any given variant appears, what traits it's associated with and how people with a certain variant respond to particular drugs.

Amazon is hosting the Multiple Myeloma Foundation’s project to collect complete-genome sequences and other data from 1,000 patients to identify new drug targets. It also won the Alzheimer's Disease Sequencing Project, which has similar aims.

Amazon charges about $4 to $5 a month to store one full human genome, and Google about $3 to $5 a month. The companies also charge for data transfers or computing time, as when scientists run analytical software on stored data.

Amazon's database-analysis tool, Redshift, costs 25 cents an hour or $1,000 per terabyte per year, the company said. A terabyte is 1 trillion bytes, or 1,000 gigabytes, about enough to hold 300 hours of high-quality video.

Genetic Gold

Another part of the cloud services' pitch to would-be customers is that their analytic tools can fish out genetic gold — a drug target, say, or a DNA variant that strongly predicts disease risk — from a sea of data. Any discoveries made through such searches belong to the owners of the data.

"On the local university server it might take months to run a computationally-intense" analysis, said Alzheimer’s project leader Dr. Gerard Schellenberg of the University of Pennsylvania. "On Amazon, it's, 'how fast do you need it done?', and they do it."

Another selling point is security. Universities are "generally pretty porous," said Ryan Permeh, chief scientist at cybersecurity company Cylance Inc., of Irvine, California, and the security of federal government computers is "not at the top of the class."  

While academic and pharmaceutical research projects are the biggest customers for genomics cloud services, they will be overtaken by clinical applications in the next 10 years, said Google Genomics director of engineering David Glazer.

Individual doctors will regularly access a cloud service to understand how a patient's genetic profile affects his risk of various diseases or his likely response to medication.

"We are at that transition point now," Glazer said.

Matt Wood, general manager for Data Science at Amazon Web Services, sees cloud demand in genomics now as "a perfect storm," as the amount of data being created, the need for collaboration and the move of genomics into clinical care accelerate.

Experts on DNA and data say without access to the cloud, modern genomics would grind to a halt.

Bioinformatics expert Dr. Atul Butte of the University of California, San Francisco, said that now, when researchers at different universities are jointly working on NIH and other genomic data, they don't have to figure out how to make their computers talk to each other. In March, NIH cleared the way for major research on the cloud when it began allowing scientists to upload important genomic data.

"My response was, it's about time," Butte said.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft, Google, and Amazon haven't won the cloud wars yet

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Imagine walking into a doctor's office, getting tested for all the viruses you've ever encountered in your whole life, and getting your results before you left.

This would be game-changing for nipping contagious viruses without obvious symptoms (like Hepatitis C) in the bud and for illuminating how viruses (and our body's response to them) impact other diseases, like cancer. 

That's what Harvard genetics professor Stephen Elledge envisions for the doctors' offices of the not-too-distant future, and his new study outlines just how to make it happen.

Using a single drop of blood, he and a team of researchers were able to run a test that reveals nearly every virus a person has ever been exposed to. According to some rough calculations done by one of the study's researchers, Tomasz Kula, the test could cost as little as $25 a pop.

While numerous tests exist for specific viruses in the body, this test is unique because it can spot all of them at once.

How it works

When you get a virus, your immune system unleashes a defense of special white blood cells called T and B lymphocytes. While some of the T cells help detect and kill invading viruses, others help the B cells, which make special proteins called antibodies. Those tag an invading cell for destruction.

Once your body beats the virus and effectively clears it from your system, some of these specialist T and B cells stick around and keep a "memory" of the destroyed virus to keep you protected from it. 

You can think of these memories as harmless little photographs that your immune system carries around. The test the researchers made looks for these photographs and uses them to see the viruses you've had in your lifetime.

How it could change the future of medicine

If the test were incorporated into a regular doctor's visit, Elledge, the author of the new study, told Business Insider, it could help reduce the spread of contagious viruses that don't have obvious symptoms.

"There are people walking around with chronic Hepatitis C infections that have no idea they have them," said Elledge. "Now imagine if this was a routine test that was done every time you went to the doctor. With things like Hep C, the earlier you treat them, the better."

The test could also help illuminate how viruses (and our body's response to them) may impact other diseases.

In people with HIV who underwent the test, for example, Elledge found that their immune systems had responded far more intensely to almost every virus. That was a huge surprise, Elledge said, since HIV attacks and destroys the immune system. 

That suggests a far more complex relationship between viruses and disease than has been imagined before. "There are a number of diseases that could be initiated by a viral infection, so it's an interesting idea to have a patient come in with a disease and say, let's take a look at what viruses they've been exposed to," said Elledge. 

Other scientists who weren't involved in the research are pretty excited about it too. 

Adolfo Garcia-Sastre, for example, a professor of microbiology and medicine and co-director of the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York told the New York Times he thought the new technology was "really amazing." 

What they found

In addition to testing nearly 569 people across the US, South Africa, Peru, and Thailand, Elledge and his team of researchers did the test on themselves. "We all wanted to know," said Elledge.

They found that most people, over the course of their lives, encountered about 10 species of virus. Most of them were the ones that cause the common cold (rhinovirus), the flu (influenza virus), and diarrhea and respiratory illness (adenovirus). 

But a few people in the study had some pretty high exposures: In at least two participants, they found evidence of at least 84 viral species.

The researchers also discovered some striking differences between people's viral exposure between countries. While people in the US tended to have pretty low rates of viral exposure, for instance, those living in the three other countries they studied tended to be a bit higher.

The scientists aren't sure yet why that is, but Elledge suspects it could have to do with the the genetics of geographically-distinct populations or a result of a higher percentage of people living in urban vs. rural areas.

The test isn't quite ready for the doctor's office just yet, of course.

For one thing, it still takes weeks to complete. Plus, it's not perfect — it can still miss some viruses, including past infections that the body's immune system is only responding to on a very low level.

The hospital Elledge hails from, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, recently applied for a patent on the test, which the researchers named VirScan. Elledge is hoping a company will take on the test and streamline it to make it available to the general public.

SEE ALSO: I sequenced my DNA at a community lab in Brooklyn — and what I learned surprised me

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The following passage comes from "A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping Beyond Our Control" by Wendell Wallach. 

SOCIAL DISRUPTIONS, PUBLIC HEALTH AND ECONOMIC CRISES, environmental damage, and personal tragedies all made possible by the adoption of new technologies will increase dramatically over the next twenty years.

Some of these events will result in the death of many people. This prediction is not meant to be melodramatic or to generate fear. Nor am I interested in thwarting the progress of the many scientific paths of research that will improve our lives.

I offer this warning in the hope that, through a little foresight and planning, and the willingness to make some hard choices, many of the dangers will be addressed.

Unfortunately, there is little evidence that we or our governments have the will, intelligence, or intention to make those hard choices. Indeed, there are reasons to believe that such crises are inevitable, that the pace of calamities involving new technologies will accelerate, and that the opportunity to give direction to the future of humanity is slipping away.

Thalidomide babies, Chernobyl, the explosion at a Union Carbide chemical factory in Bhopal, India, the Challenger space shuttle, and the BP oil spill evoke images of tragedies in which technology was complicit. To this list add the use of harmful technologies consciously designed for destructive purposes: the gas chambers at Auschwitz, the firebombing of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subways, and the dangers posed by the proliferation of cruise missiles and biological weapons.

Many new risks are posed by technologies under development. A failure of, or a cyber attack upon, critical information systems will cause a major banking crisis or a sustained loss of electricity.

A nanomaterial used in many consumer products will be discovered to cause cancer. Students will suffer brain damage as they mix drugs, each of which is intended to give them a competitive edge in their studies. An enraged teenager will kill her father with a plastic gun produced on a $275 3D printer. In his home laboratory, a psychopath or terrorist will brew a designer pathogen capable of starting a worldwide flu pandemic. Autonomous weapon systems will kill civilians, and may even start new wars. An island nation, threatened by rising tides, will engineer local climate and cause a drought in neighboring regions.

In our 2009 book, "Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong", my co-author Colin Allen and I made a similar prediction about a catastrophic event caused by a computer system taking actions independent of direct human oversight.

We sketched a fictionalized example of how a disaster caused by computers might unfold. The scenario entailed a series of plausible incidents based upon present-day or near-term computer technology. Collectively, these occurrences triggered a spike in oil prices, a failure in the electrical grid, a Homeland Security alert, and the unnecessary loss of lives.

A real-life incident created by computers occurred at 2:45 PM on March 6, 2010. The Dow Jones Industrial Average took a steep dive and then recovered in a matter of minutes. What has been named the flash crash is the biggest intraday point decline (998.5 points, 9 percent) in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. High-speed automated trading by computer systems that buy and sell shares was a key contributing factor. At the time of the crash, high-frequency traders tendered at least 60 percent of all transactions.

By some estimates roughly half of all trades today are made automatically by computers that tender buy and sell orders algorithmically once mathematically determined thresholds are crossed. The percentage exaggerates the overall importance of computerized market activity in that high-frequency trades take the form of two transactions—a buy and a sell order occurring within a few minutes or even a fraction of a second of each other.

The flash crash unduly robbed some investors while rewarding others, and undermined confidence in the operations of the stock exchanges. To avert a future flash crash, additional circuit breakers that automatically kick in when errant trades are detected were built into the stock markets.

Nevertheless, on August 1, 2012 a “rogue algorithm” from Knight, a company that specializes in computer-driven trading, tendered buy and sell orders for millions of shares in 148 different companies before the circuit breakers halted trading. The major harm was to the trading company Knight and its clients, who lost $440 million in less than an hour. But this was just one more in a series of events that have reinforced an image in the minds of small investors that the robots are already in control of financial markets, and that the investment game is fixed.

The reliance on computers by financial markets goes well beyond systems responsible for high-frequency trading. They also played a role in the earlier real estate collapse of 2008. Computers enabled the assembly of complex derivatives that bundled bad loans together with good loans. Once the real estate market collapsed, it became impossible for anyone to evaluate the worth of the derivative shares held by banks.

Even heads of large banks could not determine the viability of their own institutions. What is interesting about the role of computers in the derivative crisis is that the machines did not fail. They functioned as critical infrastructure supporting a faulty banking system. Yet their very existence enabled the creation of the complex derivative market that helped cause the crisis, and certainly exacerbated its impact.

The role computers played in the real estate collapse was noted by a few analysts, but the emphasis has been more upon assigning blame to greedy bankers making bad bets and uncovering fraudulent activity by crooks such as Bernie Madoff. The flash crash and the “rogue algorithm” were initially attributed to human error. Computers have escaped blame.

From our present vantage point, it is impossible to know all the potential dangers. Bad agents intent on using a technology to pursue destructive and illegal goals will be responsible for much of the risk. Those risks range from individual tragedies to public health crises; from the societal and ethical impact of technologies that enhance human capabilities to the loss of privacy, property, and liberty; and from the collapse of critical infrastructure to the onset of a dystopian society.

The promoters of a cutting-edge technology submerge its dangers beneath enthusiasm for the potential benefits of the research. They boast that the blind will see and the lame will walk with the help of cameras and mechanical limbs wired into the nervous system.

Wars will be won with the latest in high-tech weaponry. Deciphering an individual’s genome will lead to personalized medical treatments for inherited diseases. Autonomous cars will have fewer accidents and free drivers to text message while traveling to and from work. Each of us will be happier, smarter, and even more moral if we elect to take a morning cocktail of cognitive enhancers.

Of course, we know that investment bankers, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and even a few inventors will get rich along the way. Politicians will receive the patronage of the powerful, contracts for industries within their districts, and support from voters who receive jobs. Scientists and engineers will be rewarded with tenured professorships, well-financed laboratories, bright research assistants, and the occasional Nobel Prize or other prestigious award.

Short of one catastrophe that threatens human existence, the greatest challenge would be the convergence of many disasters from different quarters occurring within a short period of time. Technological development is intimately entangled with health care, environmental, and economic challenges.

Usually technology provides solutions to these problems, but it can also create public health crises, damage to the environment, or, as discussed, economic disruption. If a confluence of disasters should occur, technology may not be implicated in them all.

While many other scholars and reporters ably cover the consequences of failing to address challenges in these other spheres, this book addresses the technology side of the equation.

Social systems can manage only so much stress. Reacting to multiple concurrent disasters taxes and quickly overwhelms even robust institutions. The government may or may not bear direct responsibility for a crisis, but when it fails to effectively respond, it loses the confidence of citizens.

In democratic countries, small failures in governance often lead to a turnover in the ruling party. But large failures undermine the public’s faith in its governing system. One very large crisis or multiple crises could potentially bring on the collapse of major social institutions and a government.

Finding a resolution to each challenge as it arises provides the best method for staving off a future situation in which multiple crises arise simultaneously. This usually entails putting in place precautionary measures that can be costly.

However, short of a self-evident instance in which a disaster is prevented, there is no good way to determine the efficacy of precautionary measures precisely because the disasters averted never actually occur. Furthermore, precautionary measures in the form of regulations and governmental oversight can slow the development of research whose overall societal impact will be beneficial.

Thus, legislators are reluctant to ask businesses and citizens to make sacrifices. In recent years, politicians have gone one step further by pretending that problems from global climate change to high-frequency trading either do not exist or cannot be tamed.

Without precautionary measures we are left with the often unsatisfactory downstream attempt to solve a problem after a tragedy has occurred. Disasters do focus attention. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, commonly known as mad cow disease, was a wake-up call for the European Union.

The meltdown of reactors at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant after the giant tsunami on March 11, 2011, alerted the Japanese people to failures that pervade their management of a potentially dangerous technology.

Unfortunately, responses to a disaster tend to be more reactionary than well thought out. Four million four hundred thousand cattle were slaughtered in the UK in the attempt to stem Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, the human variant of mad cow disease. Japan, which is heavily dependent on nuclear power generation, was forced to shut down all reactors by May 2012. After extensive testing, a few are slated to restart in 2015.

Governing in reaction to disasters is costly.

Whether the costs incurred from waiting until a tragedy happens are greater than the losses incurred by zealous upstream regulation is a matter on which policy planners disagree. Time, however, will answer that question.

If a convergence of multiple crises takes place, many of which result from unaddressed, foreseen problems, the answer could be the rapid onset of a dystopian future. 

Republished with permission from "A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping Beyond Our Control"  by Wendell Wallach with permission of Basic Books, Copyright June 2, 2015.

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NOW WATCH: Movies Of The Past That Correctly Predicted The Technology We Have Today

Researchers at France's Institut Charles Sadron and Aix-Marseille Universite have built binary data into a strand of synthetic polymer, a minuscule chain of chemical information about 60,000 times thinner than a strand of hair.

This technology promises to take the future of data storage down to nanometers in coming years, says researcher Jean-Francois Lutz, deputy director of Institut Charles Sadron and researcher on the article published in Nature Communications.

Right now, storing one zettabyte (1 billion terabytes) takes roughly 1000 kilograms of cobalt alloy, the material used in hard drives. A zettabyte of Lutz's synthesized polymer would be about 10 grams.

The process of building a polymer is like stringing a pearl necklace. As its simplest level, digital information is coded into zeros and ones. Researchers assigned certain chemical components called monomers to represent zero and one. To build the polymer, it's just a matter of chemically stringing those monomers together in a specific order, creating a polymer. Scientists use a mass spectrometer, a device often used to sequence DNA, to read the data later.

The technology is still in its infancy. Lutz says that research has been underway for about two years, and right now researchers can chain just a handful of bytes of information together. But Lutz has high hopes that they will be able to process kilobytes of information in the next five years. He looks to the recent advances in coding biological strands of DNA in a similar manner as a roadmap for how synthetic polymer technology can progress.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School and Technicolor have led the charge in storing data within DNA.

DNA, instead of having two binary options, has four, called bases (identified by letters: G, A, T, and C). So by reducing a digital file into binary, and then matching that binary to a DNA's bases, researchers have been able to encode 10 megabytes to a DNA sequence, and then decode it later in a matter of hours.

Harvard professor of genetics George Church previously used this DNA method to print 70 million copies of his book to DNA, fitting all that data in a drop of liquid, and debuting the technology on The Colbert Report.

Technicolor and Harvard are looking at this technique to store large quantities of media for archival purposes. DNA can fit petabytes of information in a drop of liquid, and survive more than 100,000 years in the right conditions, so it's much preferable than, say, a floppy disk.

The biggest limitation right now, however, is time. It currently takes days to encode 10MB, a tiny fraction of the size of a feature-length film, and about eight hours to decode that same 10MB. They expect to be able to encode feature-length movies in two to three years, at which time the technology will begin to become commercially viable.

Lutz, working on synthetic polymers, says that his process, while years away from being viable, is actually better suited for the task of storing data than DNA is.

"DNA was really designed by biology and evolution to work in biological situations, but if you want to work in nanotechnology it's is a very different environment," Lutz said. "Our idea is that the chemistry can provide something that's easier to synthesize and cheaper than DNA."

This article originally appeared on Popular Science

This article was written by DAVE GERSHGORN from Popular Science and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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NOW WATCH: The real 'Jurassic World' is in China — 17,000 dinosaur eggs have been found in the same city

The relatives of a much-debated 8,500-year-old skeleton found in Kennewick, Washington, have been pinned down: The middle-age man was most closely related to modern-day Native Americans, DNA from his hand reveals.

The new analysis lays to rest wilder theories about the ancestry of the ancient American, dubbed Kennewick Man, said study co-author Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen.

"There have been different theories, different mythology, everything from him being related to Polynesians, to Europeans, to [indigenous people] from Japan," Willerslev told Live Science. "He is most closely related to contemporary Native Americans."

Disputed identity

A couple first discovered the skeleton in 1996 on the banks of the Columbia River in Kennewick. The coroner analyzing the remains noticed an arrow tip lodged in the man's pelvis, and surmised he was a European felled by a Native American, said co-author David Meltzer, an anthropologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

But the man's bones revealed he was at least 8,000 years old.

At a news conference then, researchers studying the skeleton said the ancient man was "Caucasoid," an archaic, 19th-century term that includes a wide swath of people with origins in Africa, Western Asia and Europe. Reporters heard the word "Caucasian," and all of a sudden people were wondering how a European showed up in North America and was shot thousands of years before Europeans set foot on the continent, Meltzer said.

"That was the moment when all the wheels fell off and this became quite the mess," Meltzer told Live Science.

Meanwhile, five Native American tribes argued the Kennewick Man was an ancestor, and since native graves are protected under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), the prehistoric man should be reburied on their land, not studied.

A judge, however, concluded the Kennewick Man's Native American ancestry was in doubt, opening the door to more scientific research.

Rough life

The first efforts to analyze the man's DNA failed, so researchers tried recreate some of the ancient man's life. It turned out he was between 35 and 45 years old, with developed muscles as well as rib fractures and other injuries suggesting a life of hard work. Chemical analysis of his bones suggested he ate a diet of mostly fish.

Most surprisingly, anthropologists measured his skull and concluded its shape tied him more closely to the modern-day Polynesians or the indigenous Ainu people of Japan than to modern-day Native Americans.

Native American ancestry

In the new study, which was published today (June 18) in the journal Nature, Meltzer, Willerslev and their colleagues took a second look at DNA from a sliver of Kennewick Man's hand bone. They then compared that DNA with that of several modern-day Native American populations, as well as Ainu and Polynesian populations. The team also reanalyzed the skull and concluded that, because it was just one sample, it was well within the range of variation that could have been found among ancestral Native American populations. 

"There's no getting around it, Kennewick Man is Native American," Meltzer said.

The team also found the closest genetic match came from people living along the Northwest coast, particularly the Colville people, who were some of the first to claim Kennewick Man as one of their own. But because not all the tribes that claim the Kennewick Man as an ancestor submitted DNA, and few other Native Americans have submitted DNA samples, other tribes could be even more closely related to him, Meltzer added.

If the Kennewick Man did come from the ancestral population of the Colville tribes, that would mean the same people have occupied roughly the same region for thousands of years, Willerslev said. The Colville tribes were historically a nomadic tribe that migrated between different hotspots for fishing and gathering berries, but they have long lived around the Columbia River, according to their website.

The new DNA also sheds light on the ancient migrations that peopled the Americas. Last year, Willerslev and his colleagues analyzed the DNA from a 12,600-year-old skeleton, known as the Anzick boy, unearthed in Montana. That DNA revealed the first Americans split into two groups before the Anzick boy lived. One lineage migrated southward to populate Central and South America, while another branch headed north along the northwest coast of North America and into Canada. The new data suggest Kennewick Man's group formed a third offshoot that diverged from the southern lineage, but migrated back north. This lineage includes modern Native Americans such as the Colville and some other Pacific Northwest tribes. 

Still, with so few ancient American remains available for study, scientists can't completely recreate the history of these long-lost migrations, said Benjamin Auerbach, a professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, who was not involved in the current study.

"As exceptional and important a study as this is, and as much as it reveals about early populations and ancestry in North America, Kennewick Man is only one individual," Auerbach told Live Science in an email. "Only through aggregating more information from these earliest human remains globally will we be able to shed light on broad patterns of human ancestry and migration."

Despite the new findings, it may be a while before Kennewick Man is finally laid to rest.

"This is just the first step in the process," Jim Boyd, chairman of the Colville Business Council and a spokesman for the tribe, said in an email. Now that the Native American DNA ancestry question is settled, "this will begin the NAGPRA process that will logically lead to joint repatriation and reburial," he said.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter ;and Google+.FollowLive Science @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on Live Science.

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To get ahead, you want to play by the rules — to an extent.

But new research suggests that people who were moderate rule-breakers as teenagers  — we're talking about skipping class or breaking curfew, not engaging in serious crime — seem to have certain traits that may make them more likely to go onto leadership positions.

And, moreover, those traits may be written in your genes. Specifically, in DAT1, a dopamine transporter that's been shown to correlate with certain leadership characteristics.

Of course, it's more complicated than that. As it always does, the pendulum swings both ways: in this case, the same rule-breaking inclinations that can make someone a good leader can also get in their way.

"It's a mixed blessing," Wen-Dong Li, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of psychological sciences at Kansas State University, tells Business Insider. 

Here's what we know: based on Li's study, people who have a specific version of the DAT1 gene — the 10-repeat allele — were more likely to have been adolescent rule-breakers, and having pushed the boundaries as a teen positively correlates with assuming leadership positions as an adult. 

Your teen rebellion may have annoyed your parents, but it was setting you up for success. Except, the Li explains, there's a wrinkle.

While the 10-repeat allele positively correlates with teen rebellion, which in turn positively correlates with certain types of adult success, it negatively correlates with what scientists call a "proactive personality." And having a "proactive personality"— that is, being deliberate, good at planning, and considerate of risk — is also good for leadership.

In other words, the 10-repeat allele is a double-edged sword: like so many other traits, it's a boon, unless it's a liability.

The study is important because it suggests a possible relationship between genes and leadership. But, Li cautions, the mechanisms of that relationship "may be more complicated than people expect."

Rather than there being specific and definitive "leadership genes," he explains, it could be that environmental factors are what determines "the overall influence of specific genes on leadership." There are thousands of factors at play: individual genes and gene-environment interactions, but also interactions between genes. 

But while we're a long, long way from unpacking what Li calls the "black box of genetic disposition for leadership," the findings do suggest practical implications.

Individual differences are real, Li says, and organizations would do well to take them more seriously, adjusting their practices to "allow employees to fully realize their human potential"— potential that's likely related to their genetic makeup. 

Similarly, if people knew their genetic information and understood how to interpret it, they might be able to "seek out jobs and organizations that provide them with most suitable environments to optimize their development and potential."

For now, though, the main takeaway isn't that people with certain genetic codes should do certain jobs — and Li told the Washington Post he doesn't foresee employers ever using DNA testing to pick leaders, even if we understood genetics a whole lot better than we do right now. 

Instead, Li's research is an argument for taking differences seriously — and making the most of them. 

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Depending on your perspective, tinkering with genes to make so-called designer babies is a dream — or a nightmare.

With a couple tweaks to the genome, certain diseases, even ones that aren't genetic (like HIV), could become a thing of the past. We could usher in the next generation of augmented humans, with lower risks for diseases and extra-strong bones.

Scientists in China have already used a tool called CRISPR to edit human embryos — ones that couldn't result in live births. (They had only limited success in changing exactly the part of the genome they'd intended to change.)

The technology is at an early and imprecise stage, but it's plausible that someday we'll be able to produce genetically modified people. That of course raises questions about whether it's actually good idea.

Some scientists don't think so, especially since the science is so new. But bioethicist Dr. James Hughes of Trinity College argues that the decision to create genetically modified designer babies is not so different from other decisions parents already make about having kids. 

"Those kinds of choices will become inevitable, and we'll adapt to them relatively well," he told Business Insider. 

Hughes contextualizes the option to have genetically modified kids as one of many parental freedoms that are widely recognized. 

Starting at the most basic level, individuals have long had the right to choose whose DNA they want to combine with theirs to make a baby. 

Birth controls means that parents have the ability to choose when they have kids. And with prenatal testing, parents are already able to find out if their children might have defects, he said. 

It's pretty well accepted that forcing people to be sterilized or otherwise preventing them from having kids is wrong. That's all part of the widespread — if not universal — belief "that people have a right to control their bodies and to control the circumstances of their reproduction," Hughes said. 

Besides, the parents' decision to change a child's DNA would often be in the interest of a child, such as making them less susceptible to cancer. Any cosmetic changes, like choosing blue eyes instead of brown, wouldn't really affect the child's well-being in the long run, he said.

All of this is mostly hypothetical, of course, until CRISPR can be coaxed to work almost 100% perfectly, which is far beyond its current track record. But if the tool ever can be used to edit genes with acceptable accuracy and low enough risk, granting parents the right to make decisions about their children's genes might not be such a dramatic break from the past after all.

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Celebrity couple Kim Kardashian and Kanye West might not have simply wished for a boy when they found out they were expecting their second child — some sources claim the couple chose their baby's sex during an in vitro fertilization procedure.

The couple is denying the claim, but in any case, is such sex selection ethical, or is it a slippery slope toward designer babies?

Earlier this year, Kardashian and West underwent an IVF procedure in which an egg was fertilized in a lab dish and was then implanted in the uterus, after the couple had trouble conceiving.

During this type of procedure, it's possible for a fertility clinic to screen the embryos and determine their sex, and in the case of Kardashian and West, an unnamed source told US Weekly that the couple had only male embryos implanted. The couple already has a 2-year-old daughter named North.

"Kanye loves [North] more than anything, but to make his world complete, he wanted a little boy, an heir," the source said. The couple announced this week that they are having a boy, but a spokesperson for the couple said the report of sex selection is false, according to the Daily Mail.

The issue of selecting a baby's sex is controversial. Most organizations agree that if the goal of the parents is to avoid certain diseases linked to a child's sex — such as hemophilia, which occurs mostly in boys — then sex selection is acceptable.

But sex selection for nonmedical reasons is dicier, because there are concerns that the practice supports sexism, and that some parents would request a certain sex simply because they want only boys or only girls.

"When you just have preference for one sex over the other, you're kind of a sexist, as a parent," said Arthur Caplan, director of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University's Langone Medical Center. "That seems unacceptable."

But some parents already have a child and want their next child to be the opposite sex. This is known as "family balancing," and some experts view it as ethically acceptable.

"What we're really opposed to in gender selection is sexism, but there, the motive [with family balancing] is almost the opposite — it's to try to experience parenting both genders," Caplan said. "I think that probably would pass ethical muster because it's really trying to respect and celebrate both genders."

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine does not take a firm stance either way on sex selection, but instead encourages doctors to develop policies for their own practices about whether — and under what circumstances — they will conduct sex selection.

"Practitioners offering assisted reproductive services are under no ethical obligation to provide or refuse to provide nonmedically indicated methods of sex selection," the ASRM said in a recently released report from the society's ethics committee.

However, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists opposes sex selection for the purpose of family balancing. "Although [family balancing] is, in principle, consistent with the principle of equality between the sexes, it nonetheless raises ethical concerns," a statement from ACOG says.

For starters, it may be hard to ascertain parents' real motives when they request the sex of their child, because parents are unlikely to tell their doctor explicitly that they prefer one sex to another, ACOG says.

In addition, "even when sex selection is requested for nonsexist reasons, the very idea of preferring a child of a particular sex may be interpreted as condoning sexist values and, hence, create a climate in which sex discrimination can more easily flourish," ACOG says.

ASRM notes that there are other concerns about nonmedical sex selection, including that the long-term effects of the procedure that is done to determine an embryo's sex — known as preimplantation genetic screening (PGS) — are unknown.

Some people are concerned that sex selection might represent a "slippery slope" toward choosing other traits in children, like their eye color, height or intelligence. Because sex selection is already practiced, that line has been crossed, Caplan said. But in the future, he added, "I think we are going to have an enormous debate in how far to go" in selecting traits in embryos.

Regardless of the ethics of the procedure, doctors say they are getting more requests for sex selection.

Dr. Tomer Singer, a reproductive endocrinologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, said he is seeing more and more patients requesting PGS, including for family-balancing reasons. In the last year, Singer saw about 150 patients who used PGS, he said. Most used the procedure to screen for certain diseases or conditions, but a smaller fraction used it for sex selection alone, Singer said.

Currently, couples who want to screen their embryos to determine their sex must pay for the procedure themselves.

"There's no doubt in my mind that once preimplantation genetic screening will be covered by insurance companies, this will become a much more popular procedure," Singer said.

But right now, PGS is not the norm — only about 6 percent of IVF cycles done in 2013 involved the technique, Singer said.

Follow Rachael Rettner @RachaelRettner. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on Live Science.

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Researchers at the University of Chicago have identified many of the genes that are unique to the woolly mammoth and not shared with its closest relative — the Asian elephant. This information puts scientists even closer to resurrecting an actual woolly mammoth. But the issue of whether we should bring back a creature that hasn't roamed the earth in 10,000 years has yet to be tackled. 

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Preventing disease is a standard goal of medicine.

But a new technology takes it farther than we normally do by preventing a potential person with a genetic disease from being born at all, George Annas, a bioethicist and health lawyer at Boston University and author of "Genomic Messages," tells Business Insider.

"It's an extreme," Annas says.

The technology, called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), can be used in conjunction with in-vitro fertilization to test for genetic disease and genetic predispositions, and can even determine sex— all before a woman is actually pregnant.

How it works

In vitro fertilization (IVF) is a procedure in which eggs are taken from a woman's ovaries and fertilized with sperm in a petri dish. Then one or more fertilized embryos are placed in the woman's uterus, where one will hopefully implant and grow into a baby.

During the process of IVF, multiple embryos are created in the lab from a couple's eggs and sperm. Before transferring any embryos to the woman's uterus, doctors can perform PGD by taking one cell from each embryo and analyzing the DNA for disease-causing mutations.

In its practice committee opinion on genetic testing for embryos created through IVF, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine calls PGD "a major scientific advance" for couples whose children risk inheriting a terrible genetic disease. It means people with diseases like Huntington's don't have to worry about passing it on to their children.

That "major scientific advance" is pushing disease prevention farther than we've ever been able to before.

'An extreme' in action

One gene mutation makes the brains of approximately 30,000 Americans begin breaking down in their 30s or 40s, causing problems with movement, thinking, and mood, and initiating a progressive decline that can't be halted with any known treatment.

That's the gene mutation behind Huntington's disease, and parents who have it have a 50% chance of passing it down to each child they have.

Since the disease is caused by a mutation in a single gene, scientists can perform a DNA test to confirm a diagnosis or predict whether someone with a family history of the disease will have it too. But until recently, there's been no way to prevent Huntington's disease.

Some people with Huntington's in their family would roll the dice; many others simply decided not have children at all.

Today, if a couple affected by Huntington's disease doesn't want to risk passing the disease down to a child, they can try to conceive through IVF, using PGD. That special layer of genetic testing, however "extreme" it may seem, changes everything: It can all but ensure they won't have child who suffers from the disease.

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Anne Morriss got pregnant with her first child using donated sperm. 

But while she couldn't have been happier to have a child, her baby was born with a rare genetic disease. If she didn't feed her son every few hours, he would die.

Morriss is the co-founder and CEO of GenePeeks, a Boston-based startup that aims to help parents using a sperm or egg donor have healthy babies. GenePeeks is doing something no other company has done before: By taking a look at the DNA of a prospective parent together with that of a potential sperm or egg donor, they can predict, with what they claim is 99% sensitivity, the risk of having a baby with a rare genetic disease. (Sensitivity refers to the percentage of babies with a disorder that the test detects.)

Fertility clinics already test donors for many well-known diseases. But these tests don't assess the combined risk of a specific egg and sperm match — like the one that resulted in Morriss's son's deficiency. Instead, they simply look at whether one parent is a carrier for a disorder (a carrier has a genetic predisposition for a disease, but not the disease itself).

By contrast, the new test looks for mutations in the entire genetic sequences of a prospective parent and potential donor, which, when paired together, could result in a child with a rare disease.

Unbenownst to Morriss, she'd been a "silent carrier" for a rare genetic metabolic disease called MCADD in which the body doesn't produce an enzyme that converts fats to energy. She had one copy of the disease gene, but it was masked by a healthy copy — and she happened to chose a sperm donor who was also a silent carrier. She had no idea that together, they were at risk of making a baby who had the disease. 

"We did everything to protect this young life we were bringing into the world," Morriss told Business Insider. "But the biggest threat to my son’s life was embedded in my own genome."

Morriss partnered with Lee Silver, a molecular biologist at Princeton University, who had been developing methods to bring together the genetic information from two individuals. His research was all in mice, but, according to Silver, "the basic algorithm works for any species, including humans," he told Business Insider.

Now, the company has developed a test that it claims can detect about 500 genetic disorders caused by tweaks in a single gene, such as cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease, and Bloom syndrome. The company plans to expand the results to 1,000 conditions by the end of the year, Silver said.

How the test works

First, the company takes saliva samples from both the parent-to-be and from the potential sperm or egg donor, and look at all of their DNA, a process known as sequencing. Then, the genetic information from the potential mother and potential father are combined to form hypothetical genomes Silver calls "virtual progeny."

By analyzing these virtual baby genomes, the company determines the risk that a child from those parents will have one of those 500 genetic diseases.

Unlike most traditional genetic tests, which look at just one parent's risk of carrying a disorder, the GenePeeks test looks at the combined DNA of two potential parents. And whereas most other tests look for known genetic mutations associated with disease, the GenePeeks test sequences an entire gene, so it can find mutations never been seen before.

Another problem GenePeeks seeks to address is the fact that most of the current research on genetic diseases is done on people of northern European descent. The GenePeeks technique is more sensitive at identifying mutations that cause disease in other populations, Silver said. For example, a recent study published by Silver and colleagues showed that their genetic test was 10 times more sensitive than other companies' tests at detecting mutations that cause cystic fibrosis in East Asian populations.

Still, the new test doesn't eliminate all risk of disease. For example, it can't detect the genetic condition that causes Down Syndrome, which only occurs after the egg is fertilized.

It's still unclear how informative the findings of the new genetic test will be, because the genetic mutations it detects may not all lead to disease.

In addition, the test is only really valuable for families using a sperm or egg donor, emphasizes Robert Green, a medical geneticist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who is not affiliated with GenePeeks.

"I think [the new test] is a very interesting and creative idea in a scenario where you have multiple donors to choose from," said Green. But "this same strategy would be much harder to apply to a couple who has already decided to have children together."

Designer babies?

GenePeeks recently partnered with the Pacific Northwest Fertility Clinic in Seattle to screen egg donors for their combined potential to pass on millions of genetic changes in nearly 450 disease genes. Some experts warn that this could be the start of a trend that could lead to what people call "designer babies," children who've been genetically engineered to have specific traits.

There's no denying the new tests give prospective parents more knowledge, Naomi Cahn, a law professor at George Washington University, told BuzzFeed News. " ... there’s this quest to search for the perfect baby," said Cahn, "and there’s no such thing as a perfect baby."

Morriss disagrees. She doesn't see the work leading to designer babies, but instead as helping realize every parent's dream of having healthy children."We will continue to focus on conditions the mainstream medical community agrees are serious and heritable," she said, adding, "we have no interest in living in a world where parents are designing their children based on some notion of perfection."

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Mind-boggling advances in biology and medicine are being made everyday by brilliant scientists around the world.

From improving our understanding of everything from the human brain to the trillions of microbes that live on and within us, these researchers and physicians are revolutionizing the field.

These people were selected from a list we compiled of 50 scientists from across the globe. 

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Cori Bargmann is giving us new insights into the brain

Through her studies on roundworms, Cori Bargmann is uncovering how neurons and genes affect behavior. Because many of the gene mechanisms in roundworms mimic those of mammals, Bargmann is able to manipulate certain genes and observe how that affects changes in behavior.

For example, in one study she manipulated a gene that caused the male worms to bumble around while trying to mate, ultimately failing. Bargmann developed the Brain Research Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative, which researches the root causes of conditions such as Alzheimer's and autism by looking at connections between brain function and behavior.

Bargmann is the Torsten N. Wiesel Professor in the Lulu and Anthony Wang Laboratory of Neural Circuits and Behavior at Rockefeller University.

Craig Spencer fought Ebola — and survived it

As New York City's first Ebola patient, Craig Spencer became the target of media criticism. However, he wasn't just a patient — Spencer had spent five weeks in West Africa helping people fight the deadly virus, where it had become the largest epidemic in history, killing more than 6,300 people.

Though Spencer infected no one else and is now Ebola-free, his case brought to light several controversies surrounding Ebola treatment in the US, as well as raised awareness of the epidemic raging in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.

Spencer is a physician at New York Presbyterian-Columbia University Medical Center.

Cynthia Kenyon wants to make us live longer, healthier lives

Cynthia Kenyon joined Google's Calico venture last year, where she helps a team of scientists develop methods to slow aging and prevent age-related diseases.

The goal of Calico is to extend human lives by up to 100 years. Kenyon gained prominence in the science community in 1993 for her discovery that altering a single gene in roundworms could double their life span. Since then, Kenyon has pioneered many more breakthroughs in aging research, including pinpointing which genes help us live longer and determining that a common hormone-signaling pathway controls the rate of aging in several species, humans included.

Kenyon is the vice president of aging research at Calico.

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