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Two Companies Now Offering Personal Gene Sequencing
corded writes "Yesterday, deCODE genetics announced the launch of their $985 personal genotyping product, deCODEme (video), beating their competitors to market. Perhaps not coincidentally, 23andMe's website is suddenly much more informative today, and the New York Times features a preview of 23andMe's $999 offering. deCODEme and 23andMe will scan about a million and 600,000 sites across the genome, respectively and assess your risk for common diseases, along with providing information about ancestry, physical traits, and the ability to compare genes with friends and family."
I wouldn't do this until some law is passed saying that if a test shows I am prone to some genetic condition that the insurance companies can't refuse me service because it is a pre-existing condition. Ignorance is financial bliss.
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Is this anonymous? Namely so that if it turns out I have some risk factor for a genetic condition, that my health insurance can't find out about it and raise my premiums.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
Lol, it is so funny to read the comments from this story. I found amusing how there are already various comments wondering how would that affect negatively to their health insurance... whereas this would be *great* for say, someone under the NHS as it would allow the doctors to focus on monitoring those specific genetic conditions.
It just show how screwed up the paradigm of insured medicine is... It is a good thing that this sort of genetic monitoring is becoming available for everybody. However, I find it unfortunate to see that it can be used against those people by the same corporations who are supposed to look for your health... go capitalism!
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Very true, which IMO is an object lesson in why we shouldn't allow gene patents. But that's beside the point. The type of SNP mapping these companies are offering is all based on work that's well in the public domain.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
How do we expect insurance companies to handle this? What about the "two publics"?
On one hand, doomsayers here are saying insurance companies can choose to not insure someone with certain genes or charge them insane amounts.
Scary, but the solution is obvious -
[1] force insurance companies to ensure ANYONE
[2] legally define and enforce a ceiling rate they can charge, regardless of how bad your genes look.
I can already hear privacy advocates screaming and yelling "why give them our genes in the first place"? That's a moot point for two reasons -
1. It's a losing battle. Eventually, our genes (or those of our relatives) will be accessible.
2. Hiding our genes in general os shooting ourselves in the foot. Some (and I belong to this group, hence will use "we") may WANT their genes to be publicly available, much like I want source to be available. So products, offerings, solutions to problems and industry can spring due to their availability.
The most obvious reason not to hide our genes, however, is simple: people who have non-fucked genes will want to, they will pay a lower premium. Money talks.
Here is how it will most likely evolve from what we have today:
We pay today default premium X. I will assume charging >X is not financially feasible due to competition, and that X is the sweet spot.
Insurance companies will offer a genetic evaluation kit. It allows one to PRIVATELY evaluate himself, and submit the results to the insurance companies if his genes are ok, thereby halving his premium to 0.5X.
After a period of adoption, let's say several years, The percentage of "fucked genes" individuals in the default pool will be much higher, as many of the "ok genes" individuals have opted to pay less by letting their genes be known to the insurance company. The insurance expenses associated with maintaining the default pool will go up, causing X to go up to 2X, causing more and more people to abandon that pool.
At some point government regulation kicks in, and sets a government-controlled ceiling rate for the default rate (much like they control minimum wage).
Since the default rate is now at 2X, the insurance companies set the "ok genes" rate back from 0.5X to X, as it allows them to both maintain their incentive for people to abandon the default-paying group and share their genes, as well as allowing them to charge as much as the market allows - X.
It may be 0.9X (as the minority that costs the most is covering its expenses through a higher rate and possible government subsidation, hence making the competition-induced sweet-spot lower than when this included many expensive cases to treat).
I predict this will happen, as this is where the incentives are today. Note that the primary driving force here is consumer "greed", not insurance companies. People will want to pay that lower premium, even if crappy prophets such as myself predict that once the "fucked genes" people were isolated in the default group, everyone's rates will go back to what they were before (except the defaulters that will pay more). People will FLOCK once lower rates are offered, because people are damn well motivated by paying less.
Insurance companies WILL know our genes and it's a losing battle.
Think it through. Share your opinion.
It's something that requires thought and debate NOW.
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And yet in most US states there is a irrebuttable presumption that a husband is the father of his wife's child if the child was born during the marriage.
So, even if you can prove (DNA testing) that she had an affair and "your child" isn't your child, the courts, in the divorce, will still treat the child as yours and force you to pay support etc. This. of course, is all done in the interest of the child.
Also, paternity fraud (lying about the father of the child) is not considered domestic abuse. It is A-OK as far as the courts are concerned.
Welcome to equality
Someone please mod the parent higher. It's good to see someone who seems to know what's going on.
The grandparent message is correct that the $1000 genome will not tell you about BRCA 1/2 or other "patented" genes. In fact, I'd have a hard time believing this tells users much about many diseases. The truth of the matter is that most genetic disease are caused by several mutations which may elevate risk. Mendelian traits -- those caused by a single mutation -- are quite rare and you're likely to know if you have one. Conditions like lupus, diabetes, heart disease, and numerous others are caused by a combination of LOTS of genes and unknown environmental factors. To give you an idea of the relative importance of the two, the identical twin of someone with lupus has something like a 25% risk of developing the disease (don't impale me if I got the number wrong, 25% is in the neighborhood). To confound matters, mutations outside of genes in parts of the genome formerly referred to as junk DNA play an ill-defined, yet important role in many (or perhaps most) complex genetic diseases. Discovering you have a rare mutation in some seemingly random spot isn't all that helpful, even if it's going to cause you to drop dead some day.
Mapping disease risk mutations is a very rich area of research. Here's a taste: some people suspect that mutations operating in pairs or general n-tuples may cause disease in specific combinations. The drag here is that when these mutations are tested individually, they may show little or no statistical association. To test even all pairs is intractable (NP complete for you CS types) and doing so introduces a statistical nightmare with lots of semi-independent tests inflating the false positive rate.
I'd suggest you save your money for a few years unless you just really want to know about ancestry, which is relatively easy to determine from many fewer SNPs than these companies are offering. I don't recall the details, but I suspect something like this plus freely available software should do the trick. You just need to find a lab with a hyb oven and a microarray scanner and a statistician to do the analysis.
No thank you. Having everybody's genome in a database someplace is a monumentally BAD idea. What's to stop some unscrupulous person deciding they don't like, for instance, people with blonde hair and brown eyes? They can dig through the genome records to find what gene sequences selects for both of these traits, then cobble together a virus that targets these sequences. Impossible? Now, mebbe, but I wouldn't hold my breath that it'll be impossible forever.
Besides, our government gets all kind of info without a warrant these days. Want to give them more? Not me, unless it'll bury them in paperwork til they can't do anything else but the paperwork...
And let's look at health insurance, since you brought it up. Give them this information, and they can start dropping coverage on people at risk. People like me. Last place I worked decided to change coverage to get a 'better rate'. First thing the salesman asked when he came in was, "Who here is diabetic?" Three hands went up, mine being one of them. Second question was, "Anybody here have heart problems?" I raised my hand. He then said, "Sorry, we can't cover diabetics or people with heart problems." And since my coverage dropped with the old company when they switched over, I became uninsurable because the old insurance company wasn't going to carry me unless my premiums went from 200/month to 1500/month. And that's just for me.
And besides, private databases are under no obligation to demand to see a warrant. They can be shared for 'legitimate business reasons'. How much you wanna bet that these databases won't be sold to insurance companies, security companies, credit card companies, anybody with a vested interest in seeing that they keep somebody alive to get money out of them? Never saw a privacy agreement that didn't state that conditions of use are subject to change without notice?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Yeah, this is actually a significant issue in the genetics field. Depending on the population, you can have upwards of 10% non-paternity, which can really screw things up when you are trying to trace the inheritance of disease-causing mutations as they are passed through a family. With all the HIPAA regulations you could obviously never disclose any of that, but we had a medical student once take it on themselves to call a family and basically say "hey we did these genetic tests and they aren't coming out correctly, are you sure that so-and-so is the father?". I'm sure it was a quiet dinner that night.