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The Future of Medicine Is Now (wsj.com)
13 points by tarunmitra on Dec 29, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment



Routine gene sequencing sounds like a nightmare to me, more on the level of some dystopian Gattaca than a medical miracle. If those devices are not open to scrutiny, if independent reviewers cannot guarantee that genomic information will remain secure and will never leave the device, then they should not be trusted and patients should refuse to be sequenced. Even then, we would have questions -- could a school sequence every student's DNA, and have these devices check for markers associated with "undesirable" ethnic groups (perhaps by claiming that those markers are correlated with poor academic performance, just so they can pretend to be a meritocratic system)?

We have already had a glimpse of the darker side of gene sequencing:

http://www.nature.com/news/genome-test-slammed-for-assessing...




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