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In mid-May 2010, just as the spring semester was winding to a close, I opened an email from the Executive Dean of the College of Letters and Science addressed to all University of California Berkeley faculty that I initially thought was a clever hoax. It announced that, instead of the usual welcoming gift of a new and exciting book to read over the summer (in 2009 it was Michael Pollen’s The omnivore’s dilemma), this year’s class of 5500 incoming students would receive a package containing a cotton swab and an invitation to participate in a ‘grand experiment’ to ‘bring your genes’ to Berkeley. Always on the cutting edge, Berkeley was poised to be the first university to welcome its entire entering student body by making them into research subjects.
Most middle-class Californians leave home for the first time upon entering college. Their dreams are a mix of escape, social (and intellectual) networking,1 and exploring the Berkeley variants of ‘know thyself’. It would be hard to imagine a better ‘hook’ than personalized medicine and genomics to engage a large...
Most middle-class Californians leave home for the first time upon entering college. Their dreams are a mix of escape, social (and intellectual) networking,1 and exploring the Berkeley variants of ‘know thyself’. It would be hard to imagine a better ‘hook’ than personalized medicine and genomics to engage a large...