Imagine having a child and knowing at birth what diseases he or she will face in life.
Today, parents can receive newborn screens that check for diseases that need to be treated in infancy as well as genetic testing during early pregnancy that identify possible abnormalities.
But having access to a child’s sequence today doesn’t mean much. In fact, scientist Jeffrey Kahn likens it to having all of the telephone numbers in the white pages without the names. The sequence would have to be run through software that could pick out certain gene mutations to determine predispositions.
“The question then is: who should access this data, and for what purposes?” he says.
Read the full, original story: Genome Sequencing: Who Gets to Use the Data?
