Be careful who you give your DNA to

In a recent Scientific American article, they warn that giving your genome to 23andme may not be quite as safe as they’d like you to believe.

23andme wants to be the Google of personalized health care. They want to use your genome to sell advertising to you. They also want to be able to use your genetic information to sell to pharmaceuticals and insurance companies. I can easily see companies using this information to deny people service based on genetic potential. They feel that sifting through a database of your genes “does not constitute research on human subjects”. If it did (which it certainly looks like to me), then they would be subject to lots of rules and regulations.

Anyone who’s seen the movie GATTACA will recognize where this is going, and it isn’t pretty. Discrimination based on genetics is not a world I want to live in. Watch the movie, it’s good.