champagne

Keeping track….

LA Times Editor’s Picks, March 14, 2007:

Blog of the day: www.aheartylife.com: Interesting and helpful news/trivia focused on heart health.

California Healthcare Foundation’s iHealthBeat, March 14, 2007:

Dr. Hsien Hsien Lei, a genetics blogger, said, “The line is very fuzzy” when it comes to maintaining patient privacy. Lei started a site, www.geneticsandhealth.com, that lists blogs that successfully abide by privacy regulations and disclose their biases. “I just felt sites were not upfront about their affiliations,” he said.

Still, Lei said that while medical blogs touch on a grey area, they do provide benefits. Blogs can disseminate research and opinions quickly and provide patients with access to physicians.

Duke GenomeLIFE, March/April 2007:

The Professional

One believer in the power of blogs to enlighten the public about genetics and genomics is Hsien Hsien Lei, a genetic epidemiologist by training with a PhD from Johns Hopkins, who blogs at Genetics and Health (www.geneticsandhealth.com/). Recent posts at the site have touched on the uncertainty of African ancestry testing, new developments in cardiovascular genomics, and the tenth anniversary of the film Gattaca. In her online bio, Lei writes that her blogging goals are to “to share information and knowledge, encourage conversation, and make the world a better place. Not too ambitious, is it?” Beyond changing the world, what drives her to post twice a day or more to Genetics and Health? “Genetics is going to be the driving force of the 21st century,” she says. “And I still don’t feel that many people truly understand its power and potential.”

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When asked whether rapidly evolving fields like genetics and genomics are ideally suited to the instantaneous quality of blogging, Lei says that sometimes it’s actually the lack of movement in the field that makes blogging useful. “While genetics develops quickly, most of its impact on public health is slow in coming: genetic engineering, gene therapy, and genetic testing, for example. Blogging can keep people’s interest alive.” But can blogging about genetics and genomics really make the world a better place, as Lei aspires to do? “Certainly it might sound cheesy and far-reaching to say that,” she says, “but if I can get someone to chuckle at a silly use of DNA [in our culture] or to understand his or her medical condition just a little bit more, then I think I am making a difference.”