Brave New Worlds (Findings, Spring/Summer 2005) IF WE DON'T WANT the revolution in life sciences to turn into the snake oil of the 21st century, argues geneticist Sharon Kardia, we need to act now to address the social and ethical implications of what we’re doing...

Quantifying Danger (Findings, Spring 2004) SHARON KARDIA IS OFTEN discontented with today’s popular science books. In the best-seller Genome, for instance, author Matt Ridley describes how the genome affects human biology and raises questions about free will, destiny, and ethics. Kardia, a human geneticist, finds Ridley misleading. Like most science books written for readers who have little or no science background, Genome simplifies its highly complex subject...

Healthily Ever After (Findings, Fall 2003) HYPERTENSION SEEMS TO BE the gateway to heart attacks and strokes, so physicians measure it nearly every office visit. But there is a difference between knowing about the condition and treating it effectively, according to Sharon Kardia, associate professor of epidemiology. Kardia, who also heads up the school’s Interdepartmental Concentration in Public Health Genetics, is studying the genetics of drug response in hypertensives—a field known as pharmacogenetics—that will lead to matching a patient’s genetic profile with the right drug....

A World Imagined New (Findings, Spring/Summer 2001) IMAGINE THE HEADY atmosphere of Florence at the height of the Renaissance, and you get some sense of what’s happening today in the life sciences. At least that’s how it strikes Sharon Kardia, a human geneticist by trade who lately finds herself immersed in the statistical analysis of high-dimensional genetic data—work traditionally carried out by biostatisticians. For Kardia, who admits that her “first love” is biology, it’s a necessary, even thrilling, part of today’s whirlwind research game, a game made possible chiefly by advances in information technology and the human genome project...