Asking hard questions about personal genome

  Now that accessing your genetic information is cheaper than buying a Google Smartphone, now what? What can you get from it? How can you use it? Just as important, but less asked – how do you protect it?

The journal "Nature" joins the debate with a full online issue devoted to the personal genome revolution and its implications. For a fee or for free, you can squeeze more information out of the SNP data or full sequence you got from the commercial genome services you paid for initially. For example, you can get an idea of your risk for a certain disease. With so much information at your fingertips, is everything believable? Should you change your lifestyle because you have one variant for some disease risk? How many "risky" variants does one need anyway? Should you stop running because a variant reveals an increased risk for exercise induced ischemia? Should your doctor change medications because of information on one SNP? One of the Nature articles tackles the issue of how genetic-susceptibility information affects medical practices and lifestyle choices.

However, what personal genome, and the genome-wide association scans in particular, failed to accomplish is to discover the heritability of certain disease risks. Despite the promise and hype, GWAS only revealed small effects of common alleles and nothing that explains estimates of heritability. Are those estimates wrong, or are we looking at the wrong places?

Nature also takes on the issue of mandating consent. On one side there is informed consent and protecting the privacy of the individual, and on the opposing end is global justice and the advancement of "global, collaborative biomedical research". Can we have protect the individual without impeding science, or is there no other way but to choose one or the other?

The Nature editorial began with "research is needed into the way individuals use their genomic information, and into protection from its abuse by others."

Well, then, we certainly have our work cut out for us.

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