Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Have diseases shaped the course of history? Most of us know that the Spaniards brought small-pox and measles to the Americas with them, diseases that the natives had never experienced. The death toll of the diseases played a major role in what followed: the Spaniards wiped out the ancient civilizations of the Americas. In addition, as Michael Oldstone writes in Viruses, Plagues and History , since the diseases seemed to selectively kill the natives but not the Spaniards (who had experienced and survived it in Spain), the natives came to accept that the Spanish gods must be superior than theirs: why else were they dieing while nothing seemed to happen to the Spaniards? This accelerated the conversion of millions of survivors to Christianity.   Another disease, yellow fever, brought to the Americas by the white man, killed both the natives and the Caucasians . This one came via blacks who had come trading or as slaves. It turned out the blacks were far more resilient to yellow fe...

There used to be a company 23andMe that sequenced your genome using your saliva sample and then sent you back a list of diseases you might get in the future. The intention was that people start taking preventive steps early in life for specific possibilities. In 2013, Tyler Cowen wrote a blog explaining why he decided against getting such a test done. Even though he knew the risk of not getting himself tested: “An absence of negative information might have encouraged me to slack on exercise, to the detriment of my eventual health outcomes.” But, on the other hand:  “I thought the “worry cost” of negative information would exceed the benefit of whatever specific preventive measures I might take.” But 23andMe was shut down. Why? As more and more people started using its services to make medical choices, the US government was forced to step in to check the accuracy of these tests. One finding : “The interpretation of 23andme results involves examining a large numb...