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Steven Pete can put his hand on a hot stove or step on a piece of glass and not feel a thing, all because of a quirk in his genes. Only a few dozen people in the world share Pete's congenital insensitivity to pain. Drug companies see riches in his rare mutation. They also have their eye on people like Timothy Dreyer, 25, who has bones so dense he could walk away from accidents that would leave others with broken limbs. About 100 people have sclerosteosis, Dreyer's condition.
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Drugmakers are also investing in acquisitions and partnerships to get their hands on genetic information that could lead to more drugs. Amgen bought an Icelandic biotechnology company, DeCode Genetics, for $415 million in 2012, to acquire its massive database on more than half of Iceland's adult population. Genentech is collaborating with Silicon Valley startup 23andMe, which has sold its $99 DNA spit kits to 1 million consumers who want to find out more about their health and family history—more than 80 percent have agreed to have their data used for research. The Genentech partnership will study the genetic underpinnings of Parkinson's disease. And Regeneron has signed a deal with Pennsylvania's Geisinger Health System to sequence the genes of more than 100,000 volunteers.
Tough luck for the Icelanders who submitted their DNA altruistically.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @09:26PM
Well, I for one, have an account and and sometimes too lazy to log in or reveal who I am because I don't really feel the need to make it known who I am for idle commentary that I don't expect to go beyond a 2, irrelevant.
In any event -- I had a friend that got mugged, and he lost his sense of smell due to a head injury resulting from it. He found that strongly flavored foods were really the only ones he enjoyed eating, and gained a great deal of weight trying to find foods that worked. Then he had to eat a lot of those foods to get the same taste, leading to additional weight gain.
It seems counter-intuitive to lose interest in most foods but gain weight anyway, but he had liked eating before (whereas I am one that eats to live; he lived to eat). He didn't want to give it up as a pleasure he had that otherwise was permanently lost due to a crime. How many people can claim their sense of smell was stolen in a mugging? And if it wasn't stolen, it was at least taken away even if no one ended up with it.