The cost sometime next year though may go down with Complete Genomics and their upcoming offer of $5000.00 to sequence a complete individual DNA. There are some that don’t share the same interest in view of privacy issues, but in my small opinion, privacy is pretty much only existing in the shadows any more. Yes we still have to be aware and keep our eyes open as there is really nobody in control when it comes to privacy any more, there are rules and laws, but sometimes it is hard to keep up with technology to keep current rules and laws on the books to protect privacy before the data is already mined and utilized.
The big fear of course is insurance coverage and claim denial, and that is all over healthcare today with risk management. It is a split world with research and development making big strides with their efforts creating cures with clinical trial information using genomics as well to get better drugs to market faster and shorten the time frame to get FDA approval if the trials can be focused to gather information while in process.
The problem lies with Research and Development and Risk Management not living in the same house; however both have one thing in common and that is profit, and how much and how the profits are derived is one of the baffling and frustrating issues we all live with today, as R and D should be compensated, but to what degree and to what degree should risk management be able to capitalize on the other side of this coin to refine their business intelligence algorithms to cherry pick only the healthiest consumers. Some of us are lucky while others are not, so to judge and deny healthcare to those with health issues is purely not moral, but it is the system we live with today unfortunately. Personalized medicine is still a science and not near maturity at any state and how to best utilize the vast amounts of vital information being derived is very much work in progress, but will continue to grow and is the key to fighting and curing disease and hopefully interference from risk management for sheer profit in the process can be kept to a minimum. BD
BOSTON -- George Church wants to put his personal genetic blueprint online for all to see -- the sequence of chemical bases that make him who he is, a lanky scientist of Scottish ancestry who has dyslexia, narcolepsy and motion sickness.
The Harvard genetics professor's Personal Genome Project is an attempt to build the only public genomic database that connects genes with diseases. With it, he believes, scientists could correlate more easily many millions of genetic variants with medical and other traits, from asthma to acne, eye color to perfect pitch.
But other people consider Church's vision the darker side of genetic knowledge. Such a database could be used against the participants. Insurance companies might refuse to sell them life, disability or long-term care coverage. A child could learn she faces a terrible disease. In a more far-fetched but still possible scenario, a criminal could craft synthetic DNA using someone's genetic code in the database and place it at a crime scene to frame that person. In a broader context, people might draw spurious links between genes and criminal behavior.
In Church's lab at Harvard Medical School in Boston, a contraption resembling a front-loading washing machine sits on a table. The Polonator, which Church developed, can analyze DNA from eight tissue samples at a time, sending to a computer billions of combinations of A's, C's, T's and G's that denote a person's genetic makeup.
Related Reading:
Is a complete personal genome sequence worth $350,000?
The Future of Personal Genomics
BT and the X PRIZE Foundation Team Up to Inspire World Changing Innovations – Personalized Medicine Sequencing
Those Incredible Men and their Gene Machines..Personalized Medicine in the making…
The Polonator - the DNA Machine for $150,000
Genome Database Will Link Genes, Traits in Public View - washingtonpost.com
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