01 June 2007

Maybe Genomics is Getting a Little Too Personal

So Jim Watson's genome will soon be made public. But not all of it:

the only deliberate omission from Watson's sequence is that of a gene linked to Alzheimer's disease, which Watson, who is now 79, asked not to know about because it is incurable and claimed one of his grandmothers.

The trouble is, the better our bioinformatics gets, the more genes we will be able to analyse usefully, and the better our ability to make statistical predictions from them. Which means that more and more people will be snipping bits out of their public genomes in this way. And which also means that many of us will never put any of our genome online.

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