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Genetics has advanced to the point that we can sequence a person’s genome, outlining their entire genetic blueprint, for a couple thousand dollars — perhaps even less — in approximately a day (provided you already have the million-dollar machine on hand).
That’s far less than than the $3 billion it cost to first sequence a human genome, and many researchers agree that we’re heading towards a time where we’ll all have our genomes sequenced.
But there’s one big problem with that: Once we’re good enough at reading a DNA sequence to really interpret all the results — rather than just glean a few hints here and there — we may not want to know the answers.
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The problem is that knowing the answers doesn’t mean we’ll know how to solve anything. There would be a high likelihood of identifying many ticking time-bombs or risks that we would still have no way of addressing. That could mean living an entire life knowing that you are, in a way, “sick.”
For now, we only know that a few specific genes are uniquely responsible for certain diseases or traits and that many more genes are broadly associated with certain characteristics, though not uniquely responsible for them. But we’re rapidly learning more about how genes interact to code for different behaviors, and as we do, we gain a more precise understanding of how genes can make a person susceptible to a host of diseases.
Read full, original post: We might not want to know the dark secrets lurking in our genes
