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As a Personal Genome Project participant, I have a cell line at Coriell that anyone with $80 to spare can order. These days, they just infect your cells with Epstein-Barr, and instant immortality.

George Church's "Personal Genome Project" has, from it's very beginning, acknowledged the possibility of this kind of exposure. In fact, you can't participate in the project without signing a consent form that makes this explicit. From their website:

http://blog.personalgenomes.org/2013/01/17/genome-re-identification-in-the-news/

"Since its founding, the Personal Genome Project has only accepted participants who understand and acknowledge re-identification as a potential risk. This “open consent” approach arose from our argument that privacy may be over-promised and that re-identification is increasingly possible as technology advances."

I also like to donate my blood (or just DNA if it is a nice looking nurse) for the same research, but I am afraid it might end up with some sort of Monsanto. Scary that I am afraid of a company stealing my DNA when I want to give it to science.

You could sign up for the Personal Genome Project.

PGP did it first.

George Church, one of the Professors interviewed in the article is doing just that: http://www.personalgenomes.org/

To their credit, the participation page is reasonably forthright about what will be disclosed, and I'm sure that if you dig a few links deeper, you'll find more. If you really want the gory details, I'm sure that the IRB has a thick pile of documents somewhere.

Nothing they say, though, suggests any comfort with respect to denied coverage. They can't protect you and it isn't their problem. I'm predicting that the volunteer rolls will be heavy on a) wealthy futurists/futurist-wannabes, b)young techy futurist types who still feel immortal, and c) European socialist communists who don't have to worry about it.

Doesn't the NIH already do this with Entrez ? Plus there are plenty of data generating institutions that actually chave such infastructure such as Connectivity Map, Chembank and the personal genome project to name a few. From the article I'm having trouble seeing how "Sage" will offer anything unique.

Go check out their home page http://www.personalgenomes.org/

Click on the signup buttons and whatnot and you'll get much more data than some lame article. I did this a few months ago after seeing something about it here or on DIGG and there appeared to be adequate protections in place. Unfortunately there was the small issue of sign up fees too.

Interestingly - going to the page myself I see no mention of specific fees but instead they ask you to "pledge". Seems to me that this ios now going to be a case of high "bidders" go first - a shame :-( I'm pretty sure that this is not what I saw previously but I'm not willing to dig through wayback to be sure....

The Personal Genome Project is a similar effort except the volunteers get access to their genomes. There are a few levels of sharing for who gets your personal and genetic information. At the default it is just a supposedly select group of Personal Genome approved researchers. The next level up includes a larger set of the research community via some other authorization mechanism. And finally there is full open, all information totally available for all to see. I know, "what could possibly go wrong?"

Anyway, it's kind of cool to donate to science. And it might be nice to get a free sequencing if you think that kind of knowledge may help extend and enhance your life.

NB: This is a Harvard University sponsored research project.

Neither of those companies in the parent are doing _anything_ even slightly different from 23andMe. Still a small sampling of SNP's.

The company that is doing something different is Knome. Complete genome sequence for $350,000.

A publicly driven effort can be found in the Personal Genome Project.