Medal

• --(May 2, 2023) - P2Earn Inc (CSE:PXE) (FSE:WH4)  is very pleased to announce that Jeff Burton, Co-founder of Electronic Arts Computer Games ( www.ea.com ), has joined the Company’s advisory board as Chairman.
• Jeff Burton stated, “I am delighted to join the advisory board of P2Earn, as Play-2-Earn gaming prepares to go mainstream.
• I believe that P2Earn is the future of online gaming.”
  Alex Lineton, CEO of P2Earn, added, “We are excited that Jeff has joined the Company as we prepare for our full public launch of the P2Earn Gaming Guild.
• We look forward to expanding the advisory board under Jeff’s leadership as we bring on additional experts in the gaming space.”

• This year, a total of 94 Americans will be honored for their contributions in philanthropy, humanitarian advocacy, technological and medical innovation, and professional achievements.
• EIHS is a 501(c)3 non-profit, which, in addition to presenting the Ellis Island Medals of Honor, is a humanitarian organization supporting educational opportunities for students with immigrant heritage and preserving the Ellis Island National Monument.
• The Ellis Island Medals of Honor ranks among the nation's most renowned awards.
• The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have officially recognized the Ellis Island Medals of Honor, and each year the recipients are listed in the Congressional Record.

• Las Vegas, NV, United States, April 26, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kelvin Watson, executive director of the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District , has been awarded the American Library Association (ALA) Medal of Excellence Award.
• This annual award, presented by the ALA and sponsored by OCLC, recognizes creative leadership in library management, library training, cataloging and classification, and the tools and techniques of librarianship.
• “The jury for the 2023 Medal of Excellence award is delighted to honor Kelvin Watson for his many accomplishments during a long, pioneering, and accomplished career as a leader in public library management,” according to a statement from the ALA.
• The 2023 Medal of Excellence will be presented on June 25 at the ALA President’s Program during the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago.

• In a recent article from Nature Genetics_, scientists raise concerns over the social impacts of recent advances in genomics - i.e.
• the study of genomes, or in other words, the genetic material of an individual or species.
• In passages bringing to mind the dystopian sci-fi film Gattaca, they describe a near future in which one’s DNA could foretell one’s physical and intellectual abilities and near-perfect children be conceived in vitro.

What is a GWAS?

• The markers can be considered as small flags planted along the genome, each flag having two possible colours (the alleles).
• The idea behind GWAS is that an association between a marker and a trait allows for the detection of genetic factors independently of environmental factors.

A new market

• 23andMe managed to keep its doors open by changing its approach and collecting DNA to map out the geographical origins of people’s ancestors.
• An important part of these DNAs has been made available to scientific teams, allowing them to perform and publish GWAS on huge samples.
• Four years later, a study based on 3 million individuals found the number of genetic factors multiplied by 4.

The mistaken assumptions behind Polygenic Risk Scores

• The problem is that these conclusions are based on erroneous assumptions and misinterpretation of associations between the traits to be predicted and genetic markers.
• Indeed, Polygenic Risk Scores are specifically based on assumptions put forward in 1965 by Douglas Scott Falconer.

Misinterpretations of the GWAS studies

• Another problem is that Polygenic Risk Scores are based on a flawed interpretation of the GWAS studies.
• For if the link between a trait and genetic marker could indeed indicate a genetic factor, this remains to be confirmed by subsequent family and functional studies.
• For example, a GWAS study comparing people in France who consume salted butter with those who consume unsalted butter would show a large number of genetic markers associated with this trait.

Sociological consequences

• The IQ variable was originally thought out as a tool to measure the adequacy of a child to a given school programme.
• It is not a universal and timeless measure of cognitive abilities, or even of intelligence.

Ethical implications

• In his presidential address to the American Society of Human Genetics in 2015 [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26942276/ref], geneticist Neil Risch mischievously commented the approach and conclusions.
• He calculated the scores of Craig Venter (pioneer of human genome sequencing) and James Watson (co-discoverer of the DNA structure).
• Risch humorously concluded that a below-average score was enough to land a Nobel Prize or the Medal of Science.

A flawed genetic model

• But they merely raise ethical issues, failing to stress, in the process, that the root of the problem remains an inappropriate genetic model and the misinterpretation of associations with genetic markers.
• Yet to deny the validity of genetic predictions of complex traits is not to deny the effect of genetic factors on these traits.