Genetic Alliance is a nonprofit health advocacy organization that improves health through the authentic engagement of communities and individuals. This year, they are celebrating their 25th anniversary, and they're hosting a variety of events throughout the year, including monthly salons around the country and the 25th Anniversary Annual Conference in June.

Lucila Ohno-Machado, Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Division of Biomedical Informatics at UC-San Diego, will be giving a talk on "Accuracy of Individualized Risk Estimates for Personalized Medicine" next week, August 18, noon-1pm in 202 Light Hall. This should be an interesting perspective from a scientist with medical training on the utility of personal genomics tools in making healthcare decisions.

A live webcast of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing on “Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing and the Consequences to the Public Health" is available at this link. I had trouble viewing the webcast in firefox - had to save the link and open it with VLC media player to get it working. You can also follow the #HouseDTC hastag on Twitter.

You can find two nice recaps of last week's personalized medicine policy forum on Genomics Law Report and 23andMe's blog, The Spittoon.

For those of you not following GGD on Twitter you may not have seen this - California State Senator Alex Padilla and 23andMe are hosting a policy forum entitled "Genomics and the Consumer: The Present and Future of Personalized Medicine" today in San Francisco.

A District Court handed down a summary judgment invalidating most of Myriad's claims to both the BRCA1 DNA sequence and the method of testing for early-onset familial breast and ovarian cancer. See Genetic Future and Genomics Law Report for analysis.Getting Genetics Done by Stephen Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License.

The Pharmacology department's student invited seminar is coming up next week. Last time the students invited an excellent speaker from Washington to talk about AAAS fellowships. This year's student invited speaker is James S. Bernstein, Director, Government and Public Affairs for the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.

Thanks to Kylee for pointing out this frightening trend from the U.K. Border Agency. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/326/5949/30Essentially, the United Kingdom is experimenting with using mitochondrial and Y-chromosome markers to determine if asylum-seekers that flee persecution are actually from the nation in question. Advocates of this policy don't seem to understand that genetic variation is not nation-specific.