The Food & Drug Administration provoked a furious controversy when it recently ordered the personal genetics company 23andMe to stop selling its popular, direct-to-consumer genetic testing service.
Critics complained that a heavy-handed government agency was trying to put a barrier between you and your own genome, and driving the nascent, game-changing, personalized genetics industry toward extinction. The FDA argued that its action was motivated by concerns about the dangers of offering, directly to consumers, a diagnostic test that had not met the safety and clinical validity standards expected of other medical tests, because giving people potentially unreliable information about their DNA could lead them to make harmful decisions about their health care.
Do you really need to be protected from information about your DNA? The truth is, nobody knows.
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Read the full, original story: Do We Need to Be Protected From Our Genomes?
