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If the rest of us are going to pay for their health care through insurance, we deserve the right to shut them off from their carcinogenic cigarettes.

There is a bit of a slippery slope here. If diet soft drinks cause cancer, we should have the right to shut those off, too. At some point, we're going to find certain genes are responsible for susceptibility to cancer too (well beyond the 17% of smokers who get lung cancer). We should have the right to shut them out, too.

Right?

At the moment most (if not all) DNA profiling is done by examining STRs. STRs are specific spots in your DNA where a certain pattern of DNA is repeated a number of times. And the number of times it's repeated might be different for you from the STR at that spot from someone else.

So if you check many of these spots, you can make it extremely unlikely that someone else has all of these spots with the same number of repeats as you do. In the US they check 13 loci. And this fake DNA (the stuff they advertise as being possible to make just by looking in the database, with no original genetic material) is just a load of these loci, with the correct number of repeats in there.

The reason it isn't much of a problem is that the technological bottlenecks that made the human genome project such a money pit are close to gone now. Taking a genetic sample and fully sequencing it shouldn't be that much of a problem in the next few years (I mean you can already do it for the price of a coat. To proof against fake evidence, many other SNPs or STRs can be checked instead, as a confirmation. Keeping a list of another 13 STRs to be used as confirmation would be a good start, having the loci known but not recording the results in databases to prevent this kind of counterfeiting.

It may of course very well be that they have developed an even better indicator of the risk you have of getting prostate cancer... but the article made it sound like this was a completely new thing.

It may of course very well be that they have developed an even better indicator of the risk you have of getting prostate cancer... but the article made it sound like this was a completely new thing.

If you were to edit that segment of code, you cannot be certain (with today's knowledge) what impact that will have. The retrovirus method of inserting DNA caused a rare form of leukaemia in some people as I recall. It is possible that unfortunate side-effect was due to accidentally altering the metadata or some other aspect of the coding in unexpected ways, or perhaps having the defective (but switched-off) gene still present caused problems as its own metadata would also still be present but would likely still have been active.

Therefore, altering DNA to remove the gene for one form of cancer (which can be treated) may increase your chances of getting a much less treatable cancer, or one that can't be treated at all. It might have all kinds of other nasty effects that we've yet to discover. Genetic science is still very much in its infancy. Bear in mind that if you start counting from when DNA was first discovered, about as much time has passed as had when the Apple IIe and Commodore PET were the latest in home computing. If you start counting from when the human genome was first transcribed, we're closer to the era of Colossus and ENIAC.

That's not an unfair comparison - look at deCODEme's lists of identifiable genetic diseases and genetic traits. Not very long, are they? And they don't require much in the way of hard evidence to add something to those lists, either - two studies will do it. We can assume anything not on those lists has evidence too weak even to pass such minimal muster, which is just about everything, and they don't even get into such things as DNA metadata and other coding abnormalities. That isn't too distant from the best knowledge the top-of-their-field experts had in computer science at Bletchley Park and certainly sounds very much like the state of homebrew computing in the late 70s - bits and pieces of wisdom with an awareness of lots of blank spots.

(Science moves a lot faster these days, but genetics is a lot more complex, so it all balances out. Twenty, maybe thirty, years down the road, genetic editing might be as safe and reliable as Open Source is today. Mind you, Firefox keeps crashing on me and I can never keep Bygfoot going past three seasons. Hmmm. Better make that forty from now, then, to be on the safe side.)

If you were to edit that segment of code, you cannot be certain (with today's knowledge) what impact that will have. The retrovirus method of inserting DNA caused a rare form of leukaemia in some people as I recall. It is possible that unfortunate side-effect was due to accidentally altering the metadata or some other aspect of the coding in unexpected ways, or perhaps having the defective (but switched-off) gene still present caused problems as its own metadata would also still be present but would likely still have been active.

Therefore, altering DNA to remove the gene for one form of cancer (which can be treated) may increase your chances of getting a much less treatable cancer, or one that can't be treated at all. It might have all kinds of other nasty effects that we've yet to discover. Genetic science is still very much in its infancy. Bear in mind that if you start counting from when DNA was first discovered, about as much time has passed as had when the Apple IIe and Commodore PET were the latest in home computing. If you start counting from when the human genome was first transcribed, we're closer to the era of Colossus and ENIAC.

That's not an unfair comparison - look at deCODEme's lists of identifiable genetic diseases and genetic traits. Not very long, are they? And they don't require much in the way of hard evidence to add something to those lists, either - two studies will do it. We can assume anything not on those lists has evidence too weak even to pass such minimal muster, which is just about everything, and they don't even get into such things as DNA metadata and other coding abnormalities. That isn't too distant from the best knowledge the top-of-their-field experts had in computer science at Bletchley Park and certainly sounds very much like the state of homebrew computing in the late 70s - bits and pieces of wisdom with an awareness of lots of blank spots.

(Science moves a lot faster these days, but genetics is a lot more complex, so it all balances out. Twenty, maybe thirty, years down the road, genetic editing might be as safe and reliable as Open Source is today. Mind you, Firefox keeps crashing on me and I can never keep Bygfoot going past three seasons. Hmmm. Better make that forty from now, then, to be on the safe side.)

Not sure it is a scam, but it is expensive:
https://www.23andme.com/store/ ($999)
http://www.decodeme.com/index/about_order ($985)

Anyone reading up on the progress in genomics over the last decade has seen the huge leaps in speed and accuracy and the insane cuts in cost to work with nucleic acids.

From a lab level where what used to be a weeks work with lots of chemicals and processing is now usually a 20 minute protocol with a kit from Quagen. what used to be massive amounts of work with hundreds of gels and digestions and labeling steps to analyse nucleic acid sequences is now a few days with an affymetrix kit, giving far more accurate and useable results. Across every step this progress has been rapid.

And in the future, near-term like within a decade, all these methods will become outdated and replaced with near-realtime analysis and diagnosis. The best point in all of this is that no matter how advanced medical tech has become, the limiting factor has been that it's necessary to actually BRING your disease ridden body to the hospital or doctor. The rise of companies like www.decodeme.com is what i expect DNA assesment to be like in the future. You send off some samples you scrape off your cheek yourself, and within a few days you get a full diagnosis on any known predisposition to disease or genetic problems.

Which is why a lot more attention should be put into the debate on morality and genetic profiling. It's going to be here before you can blink, it might be nice to know what you think about using embryo selection to wipe out CF before it becomes a possibility.

For genetic genealogy purposes, the Genographic Project provides only the minimal information to identify your ultimate ethnic origins (12 markers for the paternal line and the HVR1 region for the maternal line). Family Tree DNA, which is in partnership with the Genographic Project, will expand the testing to 67 markers for the paternal line and the HVR2 region for the maternal line. All told, it's easily several hundred dollars to fully probe the markers commonly thought to be useful for genealogical purposes (like comparing DNA with someone who may share a common ancestor with you).

Now that at least two companies (23andme and decodeme) are offering much more extensive genome scans for $1k, these genetic genealogy companies are going to have to drop their prices to remain competitive. This could be a boon for genealogy geeks!

This has already been mentioned, except last time the spotlight was on deCODEme by deCODE genetics which offers more details (1m vs. 600k "sites" of the genome) for less ($985 vs. $999).

I'd love to hear about the results, though.

Very much worth it if one is interested in learning about and working to minimize one's genetic risks.

Billing information and shipping information must be provided by deCODEme users in order to buy a Genetic Scan. Both of these information are collected by PayPal ; however only the shipping information is stored in the deCODEme database. Once the buccal swab kit has been sent to users, they are free to delete their shipping information from their profile (my settings).

deCODE may disclose your personal information only if we believe such action is necessary to: comply with the law or legal process served up on deCODE or to protect and defend the rights or property of deCODE in relation to your agreement with deCODEme. Except for the above, deCODE will under no circumstances provide any 3'rd party, including insurance companies, health management organizations, hospitals, and government agencies, access to any of your personal data or data derived from your samples unless you grant us an explicit authorization in your privacy settings.