Dear Biotech Hobbyist Magazine Reader,
Biotech Hobbyist Magazine is a magazine tailored specifically for the biotech enthusiast. We recognise that some of the greatest cultural and technological advances have emerged from peoples bedrooms and are therefore committed to transferring the hitech life sciences to the bedroom biotechnician.

We are looking forward to offering a range of exciting projects, informative product reviews and fun competitions.

Hope you enjoy our magazine.
Natalie Jeremijenko and Heath Bunting.

As a service to readers, Biotech Hobbyist Magazine publishes available plans or information realting to newsworthy products, techniques and scientific and technological
developments. Because of possible variances in the quality and condition of materials and workmanship used by readers, Biotech Hobbyist Magazine disclaims any responsibility for the sale and proper functioning of read-built plans or information published in this magazine.

Since some of the equipment or organisms in Biotech Hobbyist Magazine may relate to or be covered by patents, Biotech Hobbyist Magazine disclaims any liability for the infringement of such patents by the making, using or selling of any such equipment or
organism, and suggests that anyone interested in such projects consult a patent attorney.

Bud, Robert. The Uses of Life: A History
of Biotechnology. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1993.

Clarke, Adele, and Teresa Montini. "The
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Fujimura, Joan. Crafting Science: A Sociohistory
of the quest for Genetics of Cancer.
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Fukuyama, Francis. Our Posthuman Future:
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(1993): 27-41.

Holland, Suzanne, Karen Lebacqz, and Laurie Zoloth, eds.
The Human Embryonic Stem
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Jordan, Kathleen and Michael Lynch. "The
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Fujimura, Joan. Crafting Science: A Sociohistory
of the quest for Genetics of Cancer.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Fukuyama, Francis. Our Posthuman Future:
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Genome Project." Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 17
(1993): 27-41.

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Mass.: MIT Press,
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Stanford University Press, 1999.

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Caltech, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise
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In 1902, German botanist Gottlieb Haberlandt proposed that it was feasible to create artificial embryos from cultured vegetative cells. Although Haberlandt did not successfully develop a technique to do so, his landmark paper sparked decades of research into plant cloning. In 1938-39, three biologists independently reported successful plant tissue cultures. All three researchers had developed a totipotent mass of undifferentiated plant cells, now known as a callus, and sustained it for several months. The culture is still maintained. However, plant tissue culture did not become a viable commercial industry until 1957-8, when researchers discovered the growth regulators of plants and used them to direct the growth of different plant morphologies and to regulate the growth rate in vitro. In 1983, Belgian scientists created the first transgenic plant, a tobacco plant resistant to the antibiotic kanamycin. In 1994, Calgene became the first company to market a transgenic plant. The Flavr Savr tomato was genetically modified to increase its shelf life. However, the tomato exhibited increased disease sensitivity and decreased productivity, and was soon removed from the market. Despite this setback, genetically modified foods are now prevalent in the food industry.

Plant tissue culture makes it possible to quickly grow large amounts of uniform, disease-free plant tissue. G.M. Morel rapidly propagated orchids in 1960, creating a multi-million dollar market for micropropagated ornamental plants. Tissue culture also makes possible the commercial production of plant-derived pharmaceuticals, flavorings, and colorants. The most widely recognized benefit of tissue culture is the perceived uniformity of the resultant clones. Thus, tissue culture is recommended as a method for increasing the stock of elite clones�a clone can be micropropagated to produce over a million genetically identical plants.

As of 1991, laboratories around the world were culturing over 1,000 different plant species. However, plant tissue culture is still not a perfect science. Microbial contamination is a common problem in commercial laboratories today. Furthermore, while many plant biotechnologists tout the myriad commercial applications of plant tissue culture, it is still significantly more expensive to micropropagate clones than to grow seedlings. Furthermore, the capacity for a cloned plant line to successfully produce new clonal embryos decreases with each successive generation.

One of the clearest commercial advantages of plant tissue culture is the production of uniform plants in a species that has not been bred to uniformity. While the main industrial application of tissue culture is the elimination of variation, any home tissue culturist possessing a keen eye will notice how different each plant is from its fellow clones. Scientists have noted that despite the fact that micropropagated plants should produce clones, �genetic instability� often leads to new morphological variations in resultant plants (Litz et al, 1993).
Biotech Hobbyist Micropropagation Kit

1. A sterile still air cabinet (fish tank on its side works well)
2. A pressure cooker, for sterilizing tools and materials
3. Glass jars with lids (such as baby food jars)
4. Scalpel and forceps
5. Paper towels
6. Disinfectant, preferably 70% alcohol solution in a spray bottle
7. Bleach, diluted to 25%
8. Skin disinfectant (such as hibitane)
9. pH indicator strips
10. Basic media
o 2 c. rain water
o � c. sugar
o 1 c. fertilizer stock (1/2 T 10:10:10 (NPK) water soluble fertilizer in 1 L water)
o � inositol tablet (500 mg)
o � multivitamin tablet (must contain thiamine)
o 4 T agar flakes
(Recipe adapted from �Plant Tissue Culture for Home Gardeners�, by Dr. Acram Taji)

The media can be easily modified for different purposes. To make multiplication and rooting media, add � tsp. malt and � c. of either coconut milk, orange juice, or green tomato puree. Media should always be between pH 5 and 6.

The Biotech Hobbyist Micropropagation Kit will contain everything needed (including further instructions!) except the still air cabinet, pressure cooker, and glass jars. The cabinet may be purchased at a pet store. Pressure cookers are available commercially through cooking supply stores, as are glass jars. The biotech hobbyist can also buy baby food at her supermarket and save the jars, or ask her reproductively-minded friends for leftover jars.

The word �database� is a fairly recent addition to the English language, its roots extending only so far as the birth of computer science. However, as an ontological category, the database is an old concept referring to any collection of information which has been organized to facilitate quick retrieval or comparison. Victoria Vesna, a media artist and professor at UCLA, recognizes the Library of Alexandria (circa 100 B.C.) as an early incarnation of the modern digital database. In the same essay, Vesna writes that digital databases collapse the space that traditionally separates word from image, encompassing both under the inclusive rubric of �data.� The photographic database, then, is neither a collection of images nor of data, but a set of images meant to impart information about all of the images as a unique set. The way in which visual databases are organized reveals much about the way we classify knowledge, how we define entities, and how we interpret difference between them.
Because an integral aspect of the database as a medium is the comparison and analysis of its components, the database necessarily assumes an intelligent viewer who can navigate its infrastructure and synthesize its data to draw meaningful conclusions. Vesna�s �aesthetic of navigation� is both a structural and temporal aspect of photographic databases such as the Great LadyBug Animation and the Visible Human Project�both projects animate their collection of images to create the appearance of travel between and through bodies, respectively. This sense of movement draws the viewer�s attention to the fact that he is actively engaged in experiencing the database, and that it is the viewer�s consciousness which animates the database, transforming it from a jumble of data into a structurally coherent tool for information-gathering. In order to gain a better sense of how these visual databases alternately draw attention to and obscure diversity, even how they contribute to the very definition of what �diversity� is, it is necessary to look more closely at the databases and their history.

The Great LadyBug Animation is a database of photographs of ladybugs that have been ordered in quick succession to create a short animation that reveals the intrapopulational variation in the patterns of spots on the insects� wing covers. Natalie Jeremijenko, a design engineer and technoartist at Yale, photographed 200 ladybugs out of a total population of 4,000 insects. She then scaled and color-corrected the images before ordering them by similarity using computational algorithms normally used in face recognition software. The result is a fluid animation of the ladybugs� spots�while the bodies of the ladybugs remain uniform, the spots on the wing covers alternately grow larger and smaller, increase and decrease in number, and migrate across the ladybugs� thoraces. There is no definite beginning or end to the animation. Each image constitutes one short moment in the overall representation of population diversity, which can be viewed as a continuous loop. Having compiled the foundation of her LadyBug database, Jeremijenko is now creating a flipbook using the animated photographic database. The flipbook will demonstrate the diversity exhibited within the ladybug population as a function of time which can be manipulated by the individual operating the flipbook.

The LadyBug Animation does not present its viewer with an archetypal image representative of the �ideal� wing cover pattern. Rather, the animation is a technology for seeing that which is normally invisible: that each population exhibits a profusion of diversity. This fact is often obscured by technologies which use visual archetypes as a tool for identifying whole populations. An example of such a technology is the Audubon Guide, which shows photographs of archetypal entities to aid in the easy identification of birds, trees, insects, or minerals in the field.

The photographic database originated at the end of the 19th century as a disciplinary technology designed to assist criminologists and eugenicists in positively identifying individuals predisposed to a life of crime. Francis Galton, a British gentleman and science enthusiast best known for coining the term �eugenics� in 1883 and founding the forensic study of fingerprints, published �Composite Portraits, Made by Combining Those of Many Different Persons Into a Single Resultant Figure� in 1879, in which he details the process of creating composite portraits and posits that composite portraiture is capable of �extracting the typical characteristics� of a group of individuals to create a realistic �portrait of a type� (Galton 132-3). To create his composites, Galton exposed between two and one hundred photographs on a single photographic frame, giving �each successive image�a fractional exposure based on the inverse of the total number of images in the sample� (Sekula 368). Galton claimed that these portraits were �generic images� which exposed the physical characteristics of the criminal, the Jew, and the consumptive. The resulting images were blurred photographs which revealed, upon careful investigation, that the photographic subject has two distinct hairlines, shirt collars, etc.
Galton�s composite portraiture was a surveillant technology meant to eclipse individual difference in favor of visualizing broad, archetypal characteristics. Galton assumed that the categories he was investigating were natural ones, and not determined by socio-economic status, racist thinking, or other culturally mediated constructions. Furthermore, he argued that individuals exhibited physical marks that betrayed their inner attributes. Whereas Galtonian composites collapse difference so as to emphasize a set of general signifiers, Jeremijenko�s Great LadyBug Animation is a method for visually expanding difference within a population.

In adopting the flipbook as the medium of the Great LadyBug animation, Jeremijenko combines the scientific, evidentiary purpose of the visual database with the mode of the flipbook, which is often associated with children�s entertainment. Historically, the boundary between scientific experimentation and entertainment has often been blurred, most famously in the history of the air pump, which was used variously in the experiments of Robert Boyle and in the parlors of the Enlightenment elite. The same tension between experiment and play is present in Galton�s composite portraiture. While Galton claimed his composite portraits were statistically legitimate and objective indices of population characteristics with potential scientific applications, Robert des Ruffieres points out in a response to Galton�s article in The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland that:
Mr. Galton�s discovery has been spoken of elsewhere as a toy, but the same was said at the time of the Kaleidoscope, which has done such good service in the Arts, and very recently of the Radiometer, which it has been shown can be successfully applied in Climatology for testing gas-light, and other purposes (Galton 144).

Both experiment and play are methods of knowledge-production carried out outside of �real-world� conditions, whether from the variable-controlled laboratory or the safe haven of childhood dissimulation. I point out these similarities between experiment and play in order to draw attention to the fact that visual databases tend to occupy the productive area in which the two overlap�the medium of animation exists comfortably in both realms.
Alphonse Bertillon, a Parisian criminologist, founded the first modern criminal identification database a year after Galton�s Composite Portraits. Bertillon�s database combined �photographic portraiture, anthropometric description and highly standardized and abbreviated written notes on a single fiche or card� (Sekula l8). Like Galton, Bertillon�s goal was to create a statistically quantifiable method for identifying those Parisians predisposed to criminal behavior. By collecting exhaustive data on the physical characteristics of Parisian criminals, Bertillon hoped to filter out idiosyncratic characteristics and determine which physical characteristics disclosed criminality.

While the examples of Galton and Bertillon emphasize the eugenic history of composite photography, the same theoretical assumptions of archetypal classificatory schemata are still embedded in recent databases which index human bodies. The founding supposition of the Human Genome Project was that the sequencing of one �generic� human genome created by combining sequences derived from numerous samples would lead to a profound understanding of and mastery over the genetic sequence found in every human (note that the project sequenced the archetypal �Human Genome�, singular). Similarly, the Visible Human Project compiled �complete, anatomically detailed, three-dimensional representations of the normal male and female human bodies� by combining cryosection images to create a fluid animation of the human body�s interior (emphasis added). This quote from the National Library of Medicine website betrays the normative assumptions of the Visible Human Project, which Lisa Cartwright characterizes as the exhibition of a �digital Adam and Eve� (Cartwright 33). The Human Genome and Visible Human Projects, the prime examples of modern bioinformatic mastery, are predicated on an archetypal classification of the human body which both projects suggest is not only accurate, but also medically salient.

Watching the quick procession of cryosection images of the Visible Human Project, one gets the uncanny feeling of traveling through the interior of the human body, speeding through tissue and bone in a disembodied realization of the science fiction film �Fantastic Voyage� (1966). By animating the photographic database of cryosection images, the Visible Human Project makes the invisible visible and the internal external. Revealing what the inside of our bodies looks like, the Visible Human Project draws attention to the invisible terrains that exist in us all, and engages the viewer in a pornographic aesthetic of alternate concealment and revelation, calling attention to the viewer�s voyeuristic role in this bioinformatic surgical theater.

So too, Galton�s composite portraits engage their audience in an act of voyeurism, albeit more demurely. Because Galton posits that an individual�s external features are signifiers of immutable internal characteristics, his portraits are not depictions of physical characteristics, but of external reflections of internal conditions. The tension in Galton�s portraits exists not only between the individual and the type, but also between that which is seen and that which remains invisible. Furthermore, Galton�s composites are not images of real individuals, but of �ideal types,� unrealized fantasies of the prototype standing in for an entire class of people.

The Great LadyBug Animation is singular in its representation of polymorphic diversity within populations. The theoretical difference between the Great LadyBug Animation and other photographic databases is best illuminated by John Taylor�s definition of Aristotelian vs. prototype classifications (Bowker and Star 61-64). Whereas Aristotelian classifications are organized according to a �set of binary characteristics that the object being classified either presents or does not present,� prototype classification operates by presenting us with a �broad picture�and we extend this picture by metaphor and analogy when trying to decide if any given thing�counts� (ibid 62). Databases ranging from Galton to the Visible Human Project are aligned with a prototypical classificatory schema which metaphorically expands upon the ideal to create an exclusive notion of the category �human�. In contrast, the Great LadyBug Animation is a technology for visualizing an Aristotelian, polythetic (i.e. having several classificatory criteria) classification of the category �population� by standardizing characteristics such as color and size to reveal those variations which span a single population.

It is not accidental that all of the visual databases examined here have living things as their subjects. The dialectics of individual and population, specific and general, visible and invisible are intrinsic to the very notion of �life� as a category of surveillance, investigation, and control. Foucault differentiates between the anatomo-politics of the individual body and the bio-politics whose site of application is the population in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction: �the great bipolar technology�anatomic and biological, individualizing and specifying, directed toward the performances of the body, with attention to the processes of life�characterized a power whose highest form was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through� (139). The digital database, then, can be understood as a technology which �invest[s] life through and through� by allowing for translation between surveillance at the level of the individual body and at the level of whole populations.

Current technologies for visualizing and classifying populations render differences invisible while highlighting the archetypal features that characterize the population. Such technologies abound, and are so embedded in the way we classify objects and organisms, that they are not readily apparent. A cursory glance at a biology textbook, an Audubon field guide, or a trip to a natural history museum reveals the prototype classification schema used to catalog plants and animals into family, genus, and species according to their visual archetypes. More importantly, humans continue to be slotted into racial categories despite the fact that �race� as a biological category has long been invalidated. Indeed, genetic research has shown that the fundamental site of human genetic variation is within populations, accounting for 90% of all human genetic variation. The amount of genetic variation between human populations, in contrast, represents a negligible amount of total human variation (Chakravarti).

However, because such information is in direct opposition to the classificatory infrastructures which undergird our society, it does not �count� as knowledge worthy of being known and disseminated. Thus, technologies for visualizing diversity are scarce. It is for this reason that the Great LadyBug Animation is both a novel and essential site with which to begin troubling the traditional definitions of difference, variation, and diversity. As a tangible representation of difference within the ladybug population, the Great LadyBug Animation forces its audience to recognize the incredible amount of physical variation that exists within a population and refutes the notion of prototypical population classification.

Interested in growing skin? You are not alone.
Interested in artificially growing human tissue? Then you are in the right place!

Hey, no questions asked�it is at least as much fun as having a pet hamster or a virtual kitten screen saver. The following article is the first installment in a series that will show you how to grow your own skin culture and suggest some very cool projects you can do with it.
A brief history of tissue cult(ure)
Ross Harrison is generally accepted as the founder of the technique of tissue culture. In 1907, he adapted the �hanging-drop� method previously used by bacteriologists to culture bacteria, using it to grow a nerve cell from embryonic frog tissue. Alexis Carrel and Montrose Burrows soon modified Harrison�s technique and used it to grow adult mammalian tissue and malignant tissue in vitro. The discovery of tissue culture did not lead inevitably to its widespread adoption by research scientists�tissue culture did not begin to proliferate as a research tool until after World War II. When Julian Huxley, an eminent biologist and vocal proponent of biological engineering, published �The Tissue-Culture King: A Parable of Modern Science� in the Yale Review in 1926, tissue culture still seemed fantastic, having not yet been assimilated into the mundanity of bench science. In Huxley�s cautionary tale of biotech falling into the �wrong� hands, an African tribe employs a British scientist to produce cell cultures in the service of the tribal king, with monstrous repercussions. Huxley describes tissue culture as �a technique of great power� and lends the tissue an aura of religious significance. Sven Gard also invokes the sanctity of tissue culture in his presentation speech for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1954: �Tissue culture developed almost into a tissue cult, a mystery the secret rites of which were revealed only to a narrow circle of inaugurates with [Alexis] Carrel as their high priest.�

The American Tissue Culture Association was founded at a conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania in 1947. Two years later, Dr. G.W. Hyatt created the US Navy Tissue Bank to store bone tissue collected during orthopedic surgery. Over the course of the next decade, the tissue bank expanded to become a full-scale human tissue facility, the first of its kind. By the 1950s, tissue culture had been transformed into a tool for biological investigation and was a functional unit of analysis for diverse research experiments. In 1951, the first human tumor cell line, �HeLa� was established from the cancerous cervical cells of Henrietta Lacks. The HeLa cell line continues to flourish today, and is one of the most commonly used cell lines in biological research. Leonard Hayflick, a microbiologist at Stanford University, created the first normal human diploid cell line in 1962. When he began to market his cell line to other scientists, the NIH claimed that the cells were the property of the federal government, since Hayflick had been conducting his research under a federal grant when he developed the cell line. Hayflick brought suit against the U.S. government, and reached an out-of-court settlement with the NIH in 1981 whereby Hayflick was recognized as the owner of both the cell line and all proceeds from sale of the cell line. The Hayflick settlement effectively established biotechnology as a federally funded, privatized industry.

By mid-century, mass production techniques and standardized nutrient media began to emerge, and the use of penicillin helped tissue to survive longer in vitro. A series of legal cases in the 1980s and 90s privatized and commercialized human tissue. While at General Electric, Ananda Chakrabarty genetically engineered a strain of bacteria that could digest crude oil. When the patent application for his invention was rejected, Chakrabarty brought his case before the Supreme Court. In 1980, the Supreme Court sided with Chakrabarty, creating a precedent for the proprietary protection of genetically engineered biological materials, including whole organisms. In 1990, the California Supreme Court ruled that John Moore, a leukemia patient, did not have ownership rights to a cell line that his physician had created (without Moore�s knowledge or consent) using tissue from Moore�s spleen. In 1993, the US Secretary of Commerce filed a patent application for the immortal cell line of a young Panamanian Guaymi woman whose cells were believed to have antiviral properties. When the Guaymi tribe and several activist organizations voiced their opposition, the US government quickly dropped the application. Nonetheless, the US government has filed several new patent applications for the biological materials of indigenous peoples within the last decade.

Just as the current technique of tissue culture bears little resemblance to Harrison�s initial experiments with frog neurons, the status of tissue culture outside of the lab evolved dramatically over the course of the twentieth century. Cellular material is transformed in several fundamental ways by growing and reproducing outside of the body. Scientists who culture cells decontextualize tissue both materially and rhetorically: in order to visualize dynamic processes which naturally occur within the body, these very processes must be removed from the body. Because tissue culture was developed as a technique for overcoming the obstacles which the body poses to scientific experimentation, it is often described in terms which are diametrically opposed to any classical definition of the body: where the body is whole, tissue culture is fragmented; where the body is opaque, tissue culture is transparent; while the lifespan of any body is finite, cell lines can be �immortalized�. Since tissue culture was invented in 1907, tissue has been progressively redefined as exchange good, intellectual property, and commercial product.

The bulk of tissue culture experimentation undoubtedly takes place in the service of the biotechnological industry. While there are a few tissue culturing kits that biological supply companies sell to high schools and universities for use in advanced biology curricula, the biotechnological experiments performed at the high school and undergraduate level are carefully scripted and allow for a minimum of creativity. There is nothing particularly exciting about amplifying fruit fly DNA using PCR, isolating the DNA of an onion, or DNA fingerprinting. Rather than allowing students to cultivate a creative experimental approach to the manipulation of living materials, educational biotech kits teach students the skills they will need to become docile lab technicians. This, of course, is no surprise. At a very early age, our mothers admonished us not to play with our food. If we are conditioned to believe that we should not play with the food on our plate, what chance is there of trying to play with the tissue on our Petri dish?
Biotech Hobbyist Starter Skin Kit

It is time to wrest tissue culture from the privileged hegemony of the lab and relocate it to your kitchen. The recipe for cultivating tissue culture is simple, but just like a Tamagotchi it takes a bit of tending. The game is to see how long you can keep your culture alive. In order to grow skin you need three essential ingredients:

1. A Cell Line (preferably immortal)
o Cambrex–Human endothelial cells
o American Type Culture Collection�cell line catalog
2. Growth Medium
o Cambrex–Endothelial cell medium
o Clonetics–Endothelial cell medium
3. A Body Temperature Growth Environment
o Economy Incubator–$325.85
o KwikCulture Incubator–$80.00
o Brinsea Avian Incubator–$93.50
o Hova-Bator Incubator–$59.50
o Incubators Value Line
o www.scientific-surplus.com often has cheap used incubators for sale

The Biotech Hobbyist SK-A1 Starter Skin kit includes a cell line and growth medium (and lots of other good stuff too), but the last item is up to you. You have a few options: you can keep the culture on you�your body is (not-so-) coincidentally the perfect temperature for growing human tissue. There are also a few home incubator kits that you can use. One kit adapts the waste heat from the back of your refrigerator, another repurposes your oven. At pet supply stores you can buy a whole range of inexpensive precision control incubators, brooders, hatcheries and other heating elements designed to keep living things warm.
What to do with your living skin?
What to do? There are endless things to do with skin�do you want to make it glow in the dark? Do you want it to talk directly to your computer by interfacing it with silicon? Of course you do! The next project installments will explain how to splice in an amplified Great Star coral gene that will make your tissue glow cyan under UV light.

African American
The genetic dice have not fallen in your favor. Your risk for developing Alzheimer’s is 14-100% higher than that of the general American population. While several genes for Alzheimer’s have been identified, the illness is significantly more common among individuals who never received a high school diploma. Beware: you also have a 33.5% chance of developing hypertension (35.8% among women) (Hajjar and Kotchen). Suicides (which are now believed to be genetically influenced) among African American youth increased 233% between 1980 and 1995, compared to 120% among non-Hispanic whites (Surgeon General). Chances are good that you will become a heavy smoker, especially if you carry a gene prevalent in the African American population which predisposes you to nicotine addiction.

Native American
A piece of advice: now is the time to pay attention to your health and to start thinking positively. Your suicide rate is currently 50% higher than the national average. Furthermore, you have a 60% lifetime risk of alcohol dependence, and are twice as likely to be alcohol dependent under the influence of the ADH2*1 allele (Wall et al. 2003). You are almost three times as likely as the general US population to contract Type 2 Diabetes, even higher if you are an Arizona American Indian (65% prevalence in men, 72% in women) (Gohdes 1995; Lee et al. 1995).

Homosexual
Stop beating yourself up! You are not at fault for your sexual orientation—it was preordained by your genes. Studies of identical twins show that if one twin is gay, there is a 48% chance that the other twin is, too (Bailey 1993). Scientists have also shown that lesbianism is a genetic trait with 50% heritability (Hershberger). And if that isn’t enough to convince you, consider this: experts who have measured the physical characteristics of gay men say that homosexual men weigh less, have lower spatial ability, and larger genitals than their heterosexual counterparts. Also, you are more likely to be left-handed than the general population (Hershberger 1999).

School Children
News flash: there has been a 900% increase in diagnoses of autism since 1992 (U.S. Department of Education). If your parents don’t have you diagnosed as autistic, perhaps you could still be “autism-lite”: in a group of 10,000 school children, between 23 and 36 students have Asperger’s Syndrome. If you are a boy, the prevalence jumps to 60 in 10,000. You are much more likely to be diagnosed with Asperger’s if you are the child of Caucasian, upper-middle-class professionals. But even more certain in your near future is a diagnosis of ADHD, a disorder that might be associated with mutations of dopamine receptor and transporter genes. You have a 7.5% chance of being diagnosed ADHD, and if you are an American child, you are 20 times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than a Western European schoolchild (Barbaresi et al. 2002; Osborne 2002).

Intelligence
Do you think you’re brainy? Here are a few ways to find out for sure: If you wear glasses, you are genetically more likely to be an intelligent person. While only approximately 15% of the general student population is myopic, at least 44% of students with an IQ higher than 135 are near-sighted. However, myopia also increases with academic status: while only 4% of Taiwanese 6-year olds are myopic, 70% of Taiwanese 15-year olds and 95.5% of Taiwanese medical students are near-sighted. It now appears that intelligence is 80% heritable, and has a 40% correlation with brain volume, which is 85% heritable (Posthuma et al. 2002). A recent study shows that Caucasian brains are 4% larger than Black ones (Rushton 1995). Also, if you are intelligent, you are more likely to give birth to an autistic child than a parent of average intelligence (Eldridge 1971).