DNAprint Genomics (DNAG)

[terry hallinan]

mingwan0,

>>You may be aware of the (linguistically somewhat controversial) view that languages like Finnish (and Hungarian) are similar to Korean and Mongolian; perhaps reflecting a common heritage or a reflection of prior diaspora.<<

Controversial indeed.

This is one classification of languages which I guess is about as good as any:

http://www.scholarly-societies.org/languages.html

Language has been used as a racial classification but has obvious problems.

When Ireland gained its freedom from Great Britain, except for the 6 counties of Northern Ireland, Gaelic was made the official language. There was one small problem. Few of the Irish could read, write or speak the old Celtic language and most of those who could were probably in the North. Not only couldn't most people pronounce the name of the street they now resided on but few had the foggiest notion what the laws were. Kind of an advantage to that.

While the Hungarian language is distantly related to Finnish, the Magyars, a minority in Hungary who imprinted their language on the populace, have a quite different origin.

The Ainu of Japan have reservations in Japan much like our Native American population. The Ainu are now nearly extinct. I have read that you can count the number of those who still speak the language and know the customs on one hand. They seem to be the original inhabitants of both Korea and Japan as such things are reckoned with the current majority populations invading from further inland.

All this is just a sideshow but DNAP purports to be able classify races according to continent by DNA.

The Ainu wouldn't seem to fit well in such a scheme since they were a blue-eyed, blonde-haired, light-skinned people that are thought to have the same ancestors as the Scandinavians.

As perhaps you might grasp, I am more than a little confused as to how DNAP classifies people by continent.

Indevus has rights to a coronary{?) drug that will probably never be developed. Seemed it was contraindicated for African-Americans. But what the hell is an African-American? It surely isn't someone who has ancestors that came from Africa. That would make all of us African-Americans according to the most popular theories.

I like very much what DNAP is doing. An appropriate DNA test might have provided a way for a drug, such as the above that might have helped many, to be appropriately prescribed rather than on the basis of prejudicial classification.

But there seem to be a few wrinkles that may never be ironed out.

Best, Terry