Uncategorized

"My DNA is my data"

Posted by:

WIRED‘s Thomas Goetz fumes about a development in the world of genetic testing: California health regulators have demanded that several genetic testing start-ups halt operations until they prove they meet quality and reliability standards. Goetz writes,

To my mind, genetic information is a new sort of personal information that the state and even the physician community are terribly slow and old-fashioned in reckoning with. […] This is not a dark art, province of the select few, as many physicians would have it. This is data. This is who I am. Frankly, it’s insulting and a curtailment of my rights to put a gatekeeper between me and my DNA.

What does the TED community think? Discuss in the blog comment section on this blog, below, and on the forums on talks by Craig Venter and Juan Enriquez.