Ethics in clinical proteomics!

Whoa! Almost 2 months without a blog post?  That might be the longest space in a decade, but we started a new project this year and he's kind of time consuming. (Thanks, Dr. Rinas for the great books!) 

If I'm writing the first post of the year, I figured it should be a really awful one. 

Let's talk about ethical principles and constraints in proteomics. Ugh. 

(Yes, I deliberately used the page that would have the Elfseverer logo on it, because that is the global stamp of ethical behavior.) 

This study is mostly a literature search about the stuff that we've gotten away without thinking about (ethics stuff) that the genetics people have to worry about. Wait. Why do we have to think about this all of a sudden? 

(Paper here)

This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, right? If you've got access to a mass spec and you haven't ran your own blood and some dog poo that looked funny through it, you're the weirdo, not me. Somewhere I've got slides from a lecture where I show that it looks like I'm lacking some important protein in my blood. In reality (from my whole genome sequencing data) I know I've got several single amino acid substitutions in that protein that subs in some Rs and the alternative cleavage events make them look downregulated since those variants aren't in uniprot. Impute the missing peptide and whoa, super downregulated. In this study they show how they can tell participants from past studies apart, and what info they can also extract on them. Fun! 

And...I guess if you're in a group where you've published more than one method section over the years with a statement like this....

....leading the charge on the ethical use of that information is a great idea! 

See...everyone does it! 

(Side note: This paper is quite old and I doubt with the coverage at the time that this is nearly as big of a deal, but I really thought that this was funny)