Scentists will begin sequencing Latino DNA – it’s serious, but there’s a punchline in there, somewhere
By Victor Landa, NewsTaco (1.5 minute read) 
The image at the top is of the end result of a DNA sequencing process. According to an Associated Press report “Sanford Health, one of the largest health systems in the country, is partnering with the flagship hospital of the Miami Children’s Health System to sequence the genes of nearly 1,000 Latinos and Hispanics in order to better understand the health needs of the populations.”
That settles it!
I had to get past some pot-holes in the sentence to get to the gist – “1,000 Latinos and Hispanics?” So maybe there’s a genetic difference between the two? That would put an end a lot of semantic and rhetorical bickering among Latinos and Hispanics. I’d personally like to be tested for a Chicano gene, and we might as well look for a Latinx gene while we’re at it (although chromosomal counts in this case would be counterproductive).
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More importantly, maybe they’ll discover a genetic reason for the Latino health paradox, where Latinos live longer than others despite poverty, pollution, poor working conditions, etc.
Or what about a political paradox gene? The one that makes Latinos, who are just, if not more, as economically sunk and stuck and forgotten than the recently discovered middle America Trump voter, but have a much more optimistic view of their future, open more businesses and are looking to buy more houses than others.
You think they’ll find that gene?
Seriously, though . . .
That’s not what they’re looking for:
“The sequencing project will make it easier to determine whether a person is predisposed to a certain disease, or how he or she might respond to a particular medicine. The initiative will help build a database of common genomes and identify genetic patterns among Hispanic and Latino populations.”
We’ll leave the discussion about how that will affect the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries for later.
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[Photo courtesy of NIST]
