Two Companies Now Offering Personal Gene Sequencing 146
corded writes "Yesterday, deCODE genetics announced the launch of their $985 personal genotyping product, deCODEme (video), beating their competitors to market. Perhaps not coincidentally, 23andMe's website is suddenly much more informative today, and the New York Times features a preview of 23andMe's $999 offering. deCODEme and 23andMe will scan about a million and 600,000 sites across the genome, respectively and assess your risk for common diseases, along with providing information about ancestry, physical traits, and the ability to compare genes with friends and family."
Guarentees ? (Score:2, Interesting)
What about privacy ? How could one be sure that they don't keep the records in some kind of database ? The possibility to make comparisons with friends/family seems like a pretext to keep that kind of data.
What about the genetic information that cannot be interpreted as of today ? Will it get stored anyways, leaving future analysis possible ? (Is there a subscription for updates ??
What kind of questions these sort of tests can answer that you can't answer ? Besides disease detection (I thought there were people specialized in such matters ... like ... doctors ...), what purpose serve the answers ?
Sure You Know Who Your Father Is? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is great! (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, who owns your genetic code in a larger sense?
I remember a funny science fiction story, which maybe isn't so funny anymore.
A football team attempted to patent the genetic code for one of it's star running backs, so they could clone him and assure the success of the franchise forever. When he complained, he was told he should have read the fine print of the contract better...
The football team's legal team were trumped, when his parents stepped up and proclaimed thier rights as the original creators of this particular bit of intellectual property...
(i feel inspired to sign up, this is my first post to slashdot, posting is fun!)
Re:Not yet (Score:1, Interesting)
People with lower risk pay lower premiums, people with higher risk pay higher premiums.
This is what the insurance business is all about.
Insurance companies now have to charge high premiums because they're having a hard time assessing the individual risk levels. When more tools are available to help measure this risk, they'll be able to charge the right premiums, which will be on average lower than what they are now.
Re:One step furhter (Score:3, Interesting)
The movie Gattaca comes to mind.
Re:Not yet (Score:3, Interesting)
The insurance business.... (Score:2, Interesting)
People with lower risk pay lower premiums, people with higher risk pay higher premiums.
This is what the insurance business is all about.
Insurance companies now have to charge high premiums because they're having a hard time assessing the individual risk levels. When more tools are available to help measure this risk, they'll be able to charge the right premiums, which will be on average lower than what they are now.
Third that (Score:3, Interesting)
I do too think it's cool, and the search for genes that might pose a health risk sounds like something great for public health. I don't know what it would implicate, but I suppose it might tell you how likely you are to have a certain type of cancer/cardiovascular disease/alzheimer and allow you to stay on the look-out for what you're the most likely to have.
Actually I hope one day (within the next 20 years) gene sequencing for health purposes will be made systematically for health purposes and stored in a super-high security database that other branches of the government/law enforcement couldn't get to, except of course via a special warrant emitted by a judge. If you think about it, it's not that unfeasible, even now. If there are about 4 million new-borns every year in the USA, and that performing sequencing really costs $1000 (but we can safely assume it actually costs less), then it would cost $4 billion a year, which makes it almost affordable (although probably not worth it, and surely not going to happen anytime soon).
Tres Huevos (Score:2, Interesting)