Mythbusting Personalized Genomics

It’s the year 2009, and I’m wondering: where is my flying car? After all, Hollywood reels from the 60’s and 70’s all predicted that flying cars are what I’d be using to get around town these days. Of course, automotive technology isn’t the only victim of Hollywood hype. The potential impact of personalized genomics has been greatly overstated in movies like GATTACA. This has lead to the pervasive myth that your genome is like a crystal ball, and somehow your fate is predestined by your genetic programming. Recently, my perlfriend co-authored a paper in Nature (“A Personalized Medicine Research Agenda”, Nature Vol 461, October 8 2009), comparing Navigenics’ and 23andMe’s “Direct to Consumer” (DTC) personal genomics offerings. She’s qualified to offer deep insight into personal genomics, since she designed the original Illumina bead chip used by leading companies to generate their DTC genetic data, and she is also the person who made sense of the first complete diploid human genome sequence (1 2). She’s sort of the biology equivalent of the reverse engineer who takes binary sequences and annotates meaning into the disassembled binary sequences. So, let the mythbusting begin.

[From Mythbusting Personalized Genomics « bunnie's blog]

This is pretty interesting. Having your genome read is more like doing 'diff -Nru' on only the kernel, instead of the userland.